Tom Tunguz
APRIL 21, 2016
Pricing. Is there any word that confers some whisper of dark arts than pricing? Or any question that instills less confidence than, “How did you derive your pricing strategy?” Many times, startups replicate and tune competitors’ pricing strategies. If everyone else prices per seat, then so should we… Is this the right thought process?
The Angel VC
MARCH 23, 2016
Almost exactly four years ago I published a financial plan template for SaaS startups based on a model that I had created for Zendesk a few years earlier. I received a lot of great feedback on the template and the original post remains one of the most viewed posts on this blog up to this day. In the last few weeks I've finally found some time to create a "v2" of the template. just in time for a little Easter gift to the SaaS community. ;-) I'd recommend that you read this post first since it inc
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Hitenism
NOVEMBER 7, 2016
In 2006, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped pioneer what we now call the cloud, product development changed forever. What once took millions of dollars and a team of engineers to create, a lone developer could suddenly hack together in half an hour. Today, one-third of daily internet users visit websites built on top of AWS. AWS is now an $11.5B run rate business and has made up for an incredible 67% of Amazon’s operating revenue last quarter.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JUNE 4, 2016
When it comes to content marketing, more isn’t necessarily better. If one blog post per month is good, it doesn’t always follow that two posts will be really good. In fact, it might be worse. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen content marketing work. It can be especially effective for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies that need to keep customer acquisition costs under control.
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Aaron Beashel
OCTOBER 31, 2016
Just a few months into my stint at Campaign Monitor, a new CEO joined to lead the company. That CEO was a guy named Alex Bard. Alex co-founded the well-known SaaS company Desk.com before selling it to Salesforce and becoming the VP of Service Cloud (their second largest business unit, behind Sales Cloud). During his time at Salesforce, Alex was fortunate enough to work directly with Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff, and together they utilised a framework Benioff himself devised called
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
OnStartups
MARCH 21, 2016
Late last year, I combed through the Montclare SaaS 250 — a directory of the biggest SaaS companies in the world — to find common trends in what I thought would be a significant dataset. As it turned out, 80% of the 250 biggest SaaS companies didn’t have a pricing page at all. Expecting to find a set of data more representative of what I’m used to seeing around (essentially startups), I turned to a bigger sample, scraping information from the first 400 startups in AngelList’s ‘Trending’ category
Pierre Lechelle
OCTOBER 18, 2016
Are you a CMO? When was the last time you invested money into Customer Acquisition? Today? When was the last time you felt confident spending one dollar because you’d get back 10 dollars? And I’m not speaking about extrapolating LTV. I’m speaking about real LTV on a specific customer. Tracking Customer Acquisition can solve all […].
Hacking Revenue
AUGUST 4, 2016
We don’t know how to code, yet we built and sold online businesses. We’re a business person and a product person who always wanted to learn how to program, but just never gave it enough effort (that’s what we like to think). We can put together a WordPress website and we have some fancy badges in CodeAcademy, but no CTO in his right mind will let either of us touch their production environment and/or keyboard.
Sylvia Ng
FEBRUARY 17, 2016
Putting together a job description for a Growth Engineer? Wondering what others are doing? Save time with this cheat sheet! The below tidbits are taken from 30+ job descriptions for Growth Engineers, all from tech companies such as Asana, Airbnb, AdRoll, Cybercoders, Mircosoft, UXPin, and Zenefits, to name a few. Copy and paste what’s relevant to you to build your job description, or just scroll through to get some inspiration.
Speaker: Pete Uselman, Director of Partner Experience at Wind River Payments
Most integrated payments providers share a percent of the payment revenue with their software partners. But, oftentimes, that revenue share is only a fraction of the true income potential software providers can realize. If you want to maximize income opportunities from your payments program, check out Wind River Payments’ webinar-on-demand.
CloseSaaS
DECEMBER 5, 2016
So you’ve hit the 1,000 customer mark: Congratulations! You’ve made it further than many startups ever dream of going. But you and I both know you’re not done yet, so what’s next?
Tom Tunguz
DECEMBER 8, 2016
When I say bubble, you likely conjure images of people speculating on real estate or stocks or tulips in your imagination. Like me, you might dismiss the folly of these bubbles as the collective action of a multitude of people who lose all rationality when bidding on these assets. But, as I learned from a recent interview with Brian Christian , bubbles can be created even when everyone acts rationally.
The Angel VC
MAY 31, 2016
When we invest in a SaaS startup, which almost always happens at the seed stage, the next big milestone on the company’s roadmap is usually a Series A. If you carry this thought further and assume that the biggest goal after the Series A is to get to the Series B (and so on, you get the idea) it sounds like turtles all the way down. But financing rounds are obviously not a goal in itself.
Hitenism
OCTOBER 17, 2016
When raising money, most founders start by creating a pitch deck. Investors see countless versions of these pitch decks every day. Between cold emails, warm introductions, founders I know and incubators I help, I personally get ten to twenty a day. Every single one of these businesses is unique. Yet most of their decks look and sound the same. With titles like “The Problem” “The Opportunity” “Market Size” and “Team” these decks aren’t differentiated.
Speaker: Ben Epstein, Stealth Founder & CTO | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO, Aggregage
When tasked with building a fundamentally new product line with deeper insights than previously achievable for a high-value client, Ben Epstein and his team faced a significant challenge: how to harness LLMs to produce consistent, high-accuracy outputs at scale. In this new session, Ben will share how he and his team engineered a system (based on proven software engineering approaches) that employs reproducible test variations (via temperature 0 and fixed seeds), and enables non-LLM evaluation m
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
MAY 7, 2016
When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton explained “because that’s where the money is.” Not that marketers are bank robbers, but the same idea applies to finding prospective customers. If you want to get their attention, you need to go where they are. If you’re at they'll never look, it’s unlikely prospects will see you. This idea certainly sounds logical.
Stack Commerce
OCTOBER 19, 2016
The holiday season is approaching quickly, and having a strong digital commerce strategy is essential. At StackCommerce, we’ve helped hundreds of publisher-owned online shops flourish during the holiday season through our native commerce platform. From preparing unique and exciting inventory to organizing specialized gift shops, we’ve had our hands in it all.
Brian Balfour
DECEMBER 19, 2016
(You can download my Yearly Growth Goals Template that I used on our team at HubSpot at the bottom of this post.) We are nearing the year end and that probably means many teams are finalizing their growth goals for next year. Just the thought of the planning process is probably jacking up your stress levels. After all, setting yearly growth goals in fast-changing environments feels like shooting darts blindfolded.
OnStartups
FEBRUARY 19, 2016
HubSpot has had a pretty good run. Went from zero to IPO. What's not known is how unlikely the story of our success is. II gave a talk at the 2016 SaaStr Conference hosted by Jason Lemkin. The slides and full video from the talk are included below, with some quick notes on a few of the topics covered. Here's me presenting what turned out to be the most popular slide (more on this idea at the end of the article).
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Aber Law Firm
SEPTEMBER 18, 2016
The VSA is a super new group called the Vendor Security Alliance. As soon as I read this article about it Link , I realized it was a great idea for all Software as a Service (SaaS companies) and will help get cloud service contracts signed. And hey, as attorneys that help SaaS companies get SaaS contracts signed, we were very excited. So here is our thinking: What is the VSA?
Hacking Revenue
OCTOBER 27, 2016
There is a tectonic change in the retail and services industry. The Direct-To-Consumer movement. While it already began a few years back, these brands and entrepreneurs are now in every industry, changing the habits, preferences and share of wallet of the most desirable consumers. Direct-To-Consumer brands are products or services that are financed, designed, produced, marketed, distributed and sold by the same company.
Sylvia Ng
JULY 30, 2016
I’m a huge fan of Brian Balfour (ex-VP of Growth at Hubspot), who maintains that growth is about process first and tactics second. Tactics change and tactics fail. But if you have a process, a “machine” that lets you test and evaluate tactics to reach specific goals, then you’re paving the way to success, and ensuring that the team learns. What many neglect to realize is that this approach of focusing on process applies entirely to building out analytics as well (and by extension, company growth
CloseSaaS
DECEMBER 14, 2016
Unlimited Furniture, a luxury furniture and interior design company, had built a large audience on Instagram but was looking for ways to engage their followers in sales conversations.
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Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 15, 2016
Imagine you’ve just been named the head of a bustling New York City restaurant challenged by one issue - customers complain about the customer service. A data-driven person, you search for a metric to evaluate the current customer service to validate the complaint and then track as you experiment with the restaurant’s operations. What metrics would you employ?
The Angel VC
FEBRUARY 20, 2016
About two years ago, Josh Hannah of Matrix Partners wrote an excellent article titled “That's a nice little $40M eCommerce company you have there. Call me when it scales.” In it he argues that an eCommerce business with $10 to $20 million in revenues is not that hard to build and also not very valuable. I would recommend that you read the full article, but one of the key points of the article was that if you fill a niche and have distinctive product/market fit with a set of customers, you can ac
Hitenism
OCTOBER 3, 2016
Two tweets about raising money was all it took to get 81 email responses and 53 customer development calls with founders. I haven’t had this big of a reaction to an idea and I’ve done this type of research on product ideas for the last 13 years! That’s when I realized that fundraising may be startup founders’ biggest pain point.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
APRIL 2, 2016
So you’ve just shipped your new software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, and for sure you’re eager to tell the world: get out a press announcement, roll-out a search engine marketing campaign, sign-up for industry events, and whatever else you can think of. Here’s some advice: Slow down. As tough as it is to resist the urge to do something , hold off a bit before going full blast with all this marketing activity.
Speaker: David Warren and Kevin O'Neill Stoll
Transitioning to a usage-based business model offers powerful growth opportunities but comes with unique challenges. How do you validate strategies, reduce risks, and ensure alignment with customer value? Join us for a deep dive into designing effective pilots that test the waters and drive success in usage-based revenue. Discover how to develop a pilot that captures real customer feedback, aligns internal teams with usage metrics, and rethinks sales incentives to prioritize lasting customer eng
The Angel VC
MARCH 11, 2016
Judging from the number of Facebook likes and retweets, as well as comments on Twitter and elsewhere, my last post resonated with quite a lot of people. Some people thought it was provocative though, and some chimed in with good feedback: @hunterwalk building ANY business is hard — Jonathan Abrams (@abrams) March 5, 2016 Therefore I thought it would be worth following up on the topic to make sure that my message is clear.
The Angel VC
DECEMBER 27, 2016
As the year is coming to an end I’d like to share a few thoughts on what we’ll be looking for in the SaaS world in 2017. This is not meant to be an exhaustive enumeration but rather a brief outline of a few big themes that I feel particularly strongly about. 1) Viral growth and/or negative churn In the last couple of years I’ve come to the opinion that in order to build a SaaS unicorn you need to have either (a) a highly viral customer acquisition engine or (b) significant negative net churn (th
The Angel VC
SEPTEMBER 18, 2016
So you’ve recently started a company, you’ve started to talk to angel investors and seed funds about your seed round, and suddenly a large VC appears on the scene and wants to invest. What should you do? First of all, congrats. If a large fund wants to invest in your startup, that’s a great validation. Second, if you can get the brand, credibility, network and support of a Tier 1 VC into your startup early on, that can be extremely beneficial.
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