The Angel VC

MAY 8, 2015

Since last week's post about 6-7 things to pre-empt 90% of Due Diligence was liked/shared/retweeted quite a bit, I'd like to follow up with some additional details on what exactly SaaS Series A/B investors will look for when you supply them with the data and material that I've mentioned. In my post I suggested that you should prepare a key metrics spreadsheet, a chart with your MRR movements, a cohort analysis, a financial plan, an analysis of your customer acquisition channels and, if you're se

Development Team Review 252

Development Team Review Software Review Scale Acquisition 252

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 27, 2015

Quota attainment is an incredibly powerful diagnostic tool when understanding your SaaS startup’s go-to-market health. Quota attainment measures both the success of individual account executives and the performance of the team. To achieve best-in-class quota attainment, a startup must execute the go-to-market strategy well across five dimensions.

Sales Hiring 185

Sales Hiring Startup Scale Marketing 185

Chaotic Flow

APRIL 14, 2015

When I’m not completely absorbed with my agile marketing software startup , I do a bit of SaaS consulting on the side. SaaS colleagues come to me with a wide variety of problems from positioning to sales compensation to churn analysis, but lately I’ve noticed a common theme: poor SaaS customer alignment. SaaS businesses develop intimate, long term relationships with their customers that are enabled by the always-on connection between the SaaS customer and the SaaS business through the SaaS produ

Scale 156

Scale SaaS Compensation Churn 156

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

SEPTEMBER 5, 2015

I'm guessing that at some point before you built your software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, you thought about who might need this kind of product. Maybe you figured it out through market research, your own personal experience and frustration, or a flash of inspiration. Whatever the methodology, either consciously or unconsciously you somehow answered a critical question: Who would need a solution like this?

Market Research 140

Market Research Marketing SaaS Software 140

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Payment Solutions

CloseSaaS

FEBRUARY 23, 2015

It's common advice that you should keep your emails short, and in most cases, I agree with it. For example, if you're sending out cold emails, be concise and have a clear call to action.

Marketing 72

Marketing 72

ReSci

MARCH 31, 2015

Whether or not you're a fan of sugary pop princess Taylor Swift's music, one thing can't be denied: the woman is a pro at retaining her customers. Did I say customers? I meant fans. Or Swifties, as they prefer to be called. Swift has always been canny about building her brand, and…. The post Retention Marketing Tips from Taylor Swift appeared first on ReSci.

Retention 59

Retention Marketing Branding Social Media 59

Aber Law Firm

OCTOBER 7, 2015

Let met explain. Some SaaS companies add all kinds of things into their SaaS agreements, and when you are finished reading the agreement you understand everything possible about their offering. While this kind of makes sense at first blush, when you unpack this a little and deal with these types of agreements on a regular basis (which I do), you will soon see that this is not that efficient or effective.

Communication 52

Communication Rapid Release Cycles SaaS Cloud 52

The Angel VC

NOVEMBER 30, 2015

Most fundraising decks contain a slide with a chart that looks roughly like this: Chart #1 Or this: Chart #2 I’ve also seen charts that look like this: Chart #3 Or this: Chart #4 Chart #3 and #4 are good for a LOL (or a “WTF!”, depending on your sense of humour), and fortunately we’re not getting too many of these (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, take another look at the charts).

Startup 192

Startup Communication Engineering Revenue 192

The Angel VC

APRIL 24, 2015

Thanks to Nick Franklin for reviewing a draft of this post! When I talk to SaaS startups and take a look at their metrics, it still happens quite often that some of the numbers aren’t quite clear to me and it takes some time to clarify things. I’m not referring to sophisticated reports or analyses but to the much more mundane question of what exactly people mean when they use a term like “revenues”.

Payments 193

Payments SaaS Payments Metrics Revenue 193

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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

The Angel VC

JULY 17, 2015

When you look at the landing pages (or homepages or marketing sites, however you want to call them) of today's SaaS companies, they usually look quite beautiful. They typically have a clean, simple and friendly look, with very little text and a lot of images or videos. In many cases, these websites could just as well advertise a consumer product. This doesn't come as a surprise, since the consumerizaton of enterprise software has been one of the most important driving forces in the software worl

SaaS 188

SaaS Software Review B2B Trends 188

The Angel VC

APRIL 30, 2015

The founder of a portfolio company recently asked me what kind of numbers and other material he'll need when he goes into his next round of fundraising. He wanted to make sure that when he starts talking to new potential investors, he'll have answers ready to most of the questions he'll be asked. That was a great question. By putting together a comprehensive set of data you can pre-empt 90% of the questions which investors will ask you when they assess a potential investment.

Software Review 186

Software Review Outsourced Development SMB Acquisition 186

The Angel VC

JUNE 16, 2015

When founders reach out to us to pitch us for an investment, they usually have a fundraising deck which they’re happy to send over. But every so often it also happens that a founder wants to set up a call or a meeting before sending over any material. In these cases I usually ask the founder if he or she could send us a deck first, with a view to have a call or meeting as a potential second step.

Startup 186

Startup Investment Management Business 186

The Angel VC

JUNE 25, 2015

For most SaaS startups, the VP of Sales (along with the VP of Marketing) is one of the most crucial hires they need to make. Unless you have a no/low touch sales model and you're growing virally (a.k.a. you're successfully hunting flies or mice ), someone needs to build a scalable sales organization, whether it's an inside sales team (a.k.a. hunting rabbits or deer ) or a field sales team (a.k.a. hunting elephants ).

Sales Hiring 185

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 185

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

The Angel VC

MARCH 3, 2015

Growth is the single biggest determinant of startup valuations at IPO , as my fellow SaaS investor Tomasz Tunguz concluded based on an analysis of 25 IPOs in 2013. Growth (a.k.a. traction) is also the most important factor that attracts VCs and drives valuations in private financing rounds. Of course your team, product, technology, business model and market matter too, but when you’re past the seed stage the expectation is that these factors will have resulted in excellent growth.

Compensation 185

Compensation Business Model Startup Benchmarks 185

The Angel VC

SEPTEMBER 30, 2015

Once a startup has released the first version of its product, raised some funding, started to get the word out and is getting some traction, the biggest challenge almost always becomes hiring. No matter how great the founders are and how much good advice they get from investors and advisors: You need people to get s**t things done. And before long, you need more people (AKA managers) to help other people get s**t things done, too.

Management 184

Management Leadership Startup Investment 184

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 16, 2015

Mark Roberge, the Chief Revenue Officer at Hubspot, has spent 20 years in startups. As he told me a few days ago, he has observed the lack of sales management and sales execution skills as one of the most consistent deficiencies limiting the potential of early stage SaaS companies. Sales execution deficiency manifests itself at roughly the same time as product market fit.

Sales Hiring 184

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Startup Compensation 184

The Angel VC

AUGUST 26, 2015

Yesterday I argued that SaaS founders and investors shouldn’t worry about short-term movements of SaaS stocks and said that there are a lot of reasons to be bullish about the Cloud. Here are some of them. 1) SaaS is quickly becoming the norm In the last years there’s been a dramatic shift in deployment preferences of software buyers. According to a survey by technology evaluation business Software Advice , 88% of buyers with a deployment preference preferred on-premise solutions in 2008.

SaaS 173

SaaS Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Construction 173

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Enterprise

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2015

In my last post I wrote about the problem with month-over-month growth rates. One of the issues I talked about was that when your revenue plan numbers are based on a constant m/m percentage growth figure (i.e. you're projecting to grow exponentially), your short-term objectives are likely too low relative to your longer-term goals. As an example, I showed a (fictional) SaaS startup that wants to grow from $1,000 in MRR to ~ $85,000 in MRR within one year.

Startup 173

Startup SaaS Revenue Business 173

The Angel VC

JANUARY 15, 2015

The big guy who's lifting Nick is Michael Hansen, Zendesk's first employee and a co-investor in ChartMogul As reported by TechCrunch, we’ve led a seed round in ChartMogul. We’re thrilled about the investment. The decision to invest in ChartMogul , which has developed an analytics solution for subscription businesses, was a very easy one. Here’s why: 1) ChartMogul was founded by Nick Franklin, an early Zendesk employee.

Investment 169

Investment Payment Features Subscription Metrics 169

The Angel VC

MARCH 31, 2015

Following his well-received guest post about cohort analysis , here comes another guest post from my colleague Nicolas. Enjoy! Status Quo From an investor’s perspective, SaaS companies have a lot to love: High gross margins, predictable (recurring) revenues and capital efficient operations. On the flip side, most of them follow a common thread when it comes to growth.

Scale 168

Scale SaaS B2C Finance 168

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 13, 2015

In theory, raising venture capital could roughly look like this: You create an investor deck and send it to 5-10 VCs that you like (1 week) You meet the ones that are interested and quickly figure out the 3-4 that are really bullish (1-2 weeks) You have a few more meetings with those 3-4 VCs and answer their questions (2 weeks) You negotiate with 2-3 of them and sign a term sheet with your favorite one (a few days) You hand it over to your lawyer for the final due diligence and the legal paperwo

Venture Capital 167

Venture Capital Banking Startup Investment 167

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

OCTOBER 23, 2015

Last week I wrote a post titled “What makes fundraising so stressful?” and asked founders to tell me which parts of the fundraising process suck. As of this writing, about 110 founders have completed the Typeform survey. The results are very interesting, and in some cases shocking. More on that below, but let’s start with the responses to the first question: “Your optionality is an illusion” More than 60 founders took the time to answer the additional free-form question (“What else has stressed

Venture Capital 165

Venture Capital Investment Startup Data 165

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 6, 2015

This is a guest post by Jenny Buch, who recently joined us as a Talent Manager. It's the first in a series of two posts. The second one will appear here soon. To follow up on the recently posted interview with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings , I’d love to share my experience about reference checks with you. So, many of you probably made the experience of hiring someone that you would have stated as “a really promising candidate” upfront.

Sales Hiring 161

Sales Hiring Interviewing Startup Sales 161

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 22, 2015

If you've followed my blog for a while, you know that I have a bit of an obsession with churn. Having significant account churn doesn't necessarily have to be a big problem and can't be avoided completely anyway. MRR churn sucks the blood out of your business though. That's why I think that SaaS companies should work very hard to get MRR churn down, as close to zero as possible, or even better achieve negative MRR churn.

Churn 161

Churn Startup SaaS Software Review 161

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 8, 2015

See also: Innovator’s Solution for SaaS Startups. There’s a familiar path now to SaaS companies that start in the SMB (small-to-medium business) part of the market. Over time, they seem to inevitably begin serving larger customers. Box, Hubspot, Zendesk and among many others have exhibited this pattern. Why does this happen? I believe we’re seeing Clay Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma at play.

Innovation 164

Innovation Startup Scale SMB 164

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

The Angel VC

MARCH 14, 2015

In the last few weeks I talked to two entrepreneurs who both recently made a hire that didn't work out. In both cases I asked how the reference calls went, and in both cases the answer was that they hadn't done any before hiring the candidate. This made me almost angry, especially because the two entrepreneurs are fantastic founders who could have saved themselves from this costly mistake by following a simple rule: Don't hire people without taking references.

Interviewing 153

Interviewing Data 153

Chaotic Flow

OCTOBER 13, 2015

I’ve been thinking a lot about how my SaaS experiences have shaped my thinking on agile management , and visa versa. SaaS and agile present complementary aspects that enable a uniquely symbiotic relationship. Agile aims to help businesses increase responsiveness to customer needs, while laying a foundation for continuous improvement. SaaS opens up real-time customer communication and product delivery channels, while simultaneously establishing a long term customer relationship.

SaaS 149

SaaS Software Development Software Review Outsourced Development 149

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 2, 2015

A few weeks ago, I joined Mike Volpe, CMO of Hubspot, on the Growth Show where we had a great time talking about a few SaaS topics. A few listeners to the podcast picked a line from that podcast that I think is a really important point for content marketing. I said, “Content is one of the few forms of marketing that has a compounding return.” Like a bank account that starts out small and earns incremental gains, but over time becomes quite large, content marketing efforts require con

Content Marketing 152

Content Marketing Marketing Banking Investment 152