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

SaaS Payments 217

SaaS Payments Headcount SaaS Payment Methods 217

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.

AWS 189

AWS New CTO Scale CTO 189

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?

Pricing 193

Pricing Startup Strategy Consulting 193

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.

Content Marketing 157

Content Marketing Acquisition Finance Software 157

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Payment Solutions

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

Scale 100

Scale Underperforming Technical Team B2B Marketing 100

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?

Scale 72

Scale Startup Scaling B2B 72

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

Pricing 76

Pricing Startup Scale SaaS 76

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 […].

Acquisition 75

Acquisition SaaS Investment 75

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.

Software 75

Software CTO Hire Scale New CTO 75

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ClinicSense is a SaaS platform that supports over 7,000 massage therapists who use it for appointment management, payments, scheduling, marketing activities and more. Despite having a relatively low payment failure rate, the company discovered that the failures disrupted the customer experience. This often led to churn as customers decided to cancel or abandon their account, preventing ClinicSense from realizing the full lifetime value (LTV) of its users.

Payments

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.

Engineering 74

Engineering Growth Hacking Scale Social Media 74

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.

SaaS 193

SaaS Finance Mobile Enterprise 193

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.

Venture Capital 168

Venture Capital Software Review Forecasting Startup 168

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?

Metrics 176

Metrics Startup Customer Lifetime Value Finance 176

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

Revenue

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.

Social Media 113

Social Media Banking Acquisition Enterprise 113

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?

Systems Review 52

Systems Review Technical Review Software Review Outsourced Development 52

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.

Acquisition 61

Acquisition Strategy Retention Metrics 61

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.

Sales 59

Sales Engagement 59

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Enterprise

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).

Startup 76

Startup Strategy SaaS 76

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.

Revenue 57

Revenue Strategy Marketing 57

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.

Payment Methods 73

Payment Methods Branding Payments Payment Services 73

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

Scale 67

Scale Technical Review Scaling Startup 67

Speaker: Jay Allardyce, Deepak Vittal, and Terrence Sheflin

As we look ahead to 2025, business intelligence and data analytics are set to play pivotal roles in shaping success. Organizations are already starting to face a host of transformative trends as the year comes to a close, including the integration of AI in data analytics, an increased emphasis on real-time data insights, and the growing importance of user experience in BI solutions.

Trends

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

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

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.

Development Team Review 166

Development Team Review Software Review Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing 166

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.

Interviewing 165

Interviewing Startup Pricing Revenue 165

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.

Marketing 113

Marketing Acquisition Engineering SaaS 113

Speaker: Christophe Louvion, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NRC Health and Tony Karrer, CTO at Aggregage

Christophe Louvion, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NRC Health, is here to take us through how he guided his company's recent experience of getting from concept to launch and sales of products within 90 days. In this exclusive webinar, Christophe will cover key aspects of his journey, including: LLM Development & Quick Wins 🤖 Understand how LLMs differ from traditional software, identifying opportunities for rapid development and deployment.

Artificial Intelligence

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?

Systems Review 52

Systems Review Technical Review Software Review Outsourced Development 52

Brian Balfour

NOVEMBER 14, 2016

Part of every team’s identity is how they measure success, and each team measures their success in different ways. Product teams might be measured by NPS, feature output, or possibly by metrics. An engineering team’s success may be measured by uptime and reliability among other things, and a design team’s success could be measured on usability. But measuring the success of the growth team is a tougher question.

Technical Review 46

Technical Review Engineering Acquisition Retention 46

CloseSaaS

MAY 13, 2016

2015 proved that even unicorns aren’t invincible. Snapchat’s value took a 25% hit. Evernote went through a second round of layoffs. Optimizely had to let go of 10% of their workforce. (Let’s not even talk of Zenefits.) Good Technology sold for less than half of its top valuation.

Technology 59

Technology Startup Sales 59