The Angel VC
APRIL 10, 2013
[Update 12/20/2013: I have extended the dashboard to include multiple pricing tiers and annual subscription plans. Check it out here.] [Update 01/17/2015: There's a new company called ChartMogul ( which we invested in ) which makes it easy to get a real-time dashboard similar to the template below. Check it out! ] Over the last few years I've helped quite a lot of SaaS startups to create or fine-tune their KPI dashboards.
Chaotic Flow
OCTOBER 8, 2013
SaaS product management professionals should always remember that there are four P’s in marketing , one being product. Unfortunately, software companies have a bad habit of thinking about product in isolation from the rest of the marketing mix. This is a particularly costly mistake in SaaS and is the root cause of many a SaaS Don’t. Unlike other businesses, SaaS creates a real-time, always-on connection between the customer and the company through the SaaS product.
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Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 13, 2013
Earlier this week, I chatted with a friend of mine who has founded an incredibly successful business, which he and his co-founder have been scaling impressively. I asked him about his biggest learning over the past few years. He said before having started his company and having built the team, he perceived management as a Band-Aid, as a fix for something wrong in the organizational design, communication or day-to-day operations of the company.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JUNE 3, 2013
Sorry to break this news to you, but customers don't really care about you. Even when they ask about you , it's really about them : "What problems can you solve for me?" "What experience do you have with companies like mine?" "What do you know about my business, my market, my product?" "How can you help me?" You may have a broad range of expertise. You might have solved problems for all kinds of different companies in all kinds of different industries.
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Incredo
DECEMBER 30, 2013
There are too many mobile applications now, but in this article we’ve narrowed them down for you to a list of 5 must-have apps. We want you to enjoy your business, without the hassle of going to look for apps in your time, so here they are. 1. Track your calls with LogMyCalls. This mobile marketing app is not only a call tracking web application, it’s so much more.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
The Angel VC
DECEMBER 20, 2013
[Update 01/17/2015: There's a new company called ChartMogul ( which we invested in ) which makes it easy to get a real-time dashboard similar to the template below. Check it out! ] [Note: This post first appeared as a guest post on the blog of Totango. In case you don't know Totango, it is a powerful analytics product which gives online services the information they need to increase user engagement, conversion and retention.
The Angel VC
NOVEMBER 29, 2013
“What gets measured gets done” – it seems like the source of this quote, often attributed to management expert Peter Drucker, isn’t certain, but its meaning is clear and very relevant for every SaaS founder. If you want to make sure that you make best use of your scarce resources, you need to have a clear understanding of your objectives and the KPIs that measure your progress towards those objectives.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 27, 2013
Though the industry is called venture capital, the goal of a VC isn’t to maximize every risk. Instead, we try to understand all the risks a business might face and weigh those risks with the reward - the exit. Here are the major risks that I typically review when a startup pitches. Market timing risk - Is now the right time for the business? It’s often hard to evaluate this risk, but nevertheless, it’s an important consideration.
Chaotic Flow
JULY 9, 2013
SaaS marketing professionals know that customer acquisition is the name of the game. What they generally don’t know is that sustainable SaaS growth requires accelerating customer acquisition. In the long run, acquiring more customers is not enough. Your SaaS marketing strategy must aim to acquire more customers, faster. Otherwise, churn wins and you stop growing.
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Chaotic Flow
JUNE 11, 2013
SaaS growth isn’t a goal; it’s an obsession. The good news is that SaaS growth can be very smooth and predictable, because of the SaaS recurring revenue subscription model. The bad news is that SaaS growth can also be predictably slow the bigger you get. After a few years of rapid SaaS startup growth, it’s easy to find yourself on the short end of the hockey stick if you don’t know the right levers to push.
Chaotic Flow
OCTOBER 29, 2013
Driving sustainable growth is a challenge for every SaaS business from startups to public companies. In the beginning, the SaaS recurring revenue model seems like a dream compared to the revenue fits and starts of licensed enterprise software. But within one short customer lifetime, every SaaS CEO startles awake to the fact that the churn monster is always looking over your shoulder.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 10, 2013
Constrained by a limited budget while seeking to grow as quickly as possible, startup founders must decide how to balance growing their engineering teams with their sales & marketing teams. To help inform those decisions, I’ve benchmarked the relative sizes of the sales and engineering teams of the 36 publicly-traded SaaS companies from founding to IPO, typically 7 years later.
The Angel VC
JUNE 9, 2013
Example for a Geckoboard KPI dashboard Last week I spent a day in Stockholm to attend a metrics seminar organized by our friends at Creandum. It was a great event with talks from people of some of the best Internet companies from the Nordic region such as Spotify or Wrapp. Thanks Johan , Joel , Daniel , Frederic and everyone at Creandum for setting it up and inviting me!
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
Tom Tunguz
DECEMBER 5, 2013
Bitcoin has captivated the imaginations of many with its quasi-anonymous, hyper cost-efficient payment network. The potential for Bitcoin to change foreign exchange is hard to overstate. In the same vein, the technologies that enable the internet of things (IoT) like Bluetooth Low Energy and Apple’s Beacons and Electric Imp’s infrastructure will transform the way we interact with the physical world to something akin to the mall in Minority Report.
Chaotic Flow
APRIL 23, 2013
What is SaaS? We seem to need to ask this question every couple of years, because the answer is a bit of a moving target. It was simple enough when SaaS was merely software applications pushed through a Web browser, but now we have to contend with the cloud, mobile and even social. Recently, Scott Maxwell of OpenView partners sparked an interesting debate on the topic on LinkedIn that got me pondering it again.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 4, 2013
I have never worked for a company that was dogmatic about project postmortems but I have always wished I had. After all, project postmortems teach us so much. Learning from the mistakes and experiences of others constitutes the better part of our business education. It’s why we ask successful entrepreneurs to coffee and hang on every word when they speak at conferences.
The Angel VC
SEPTEMBER 16, 2013
The last post in my series on DOs and DON'Ts for early-stage startups was about lead generation. The next logical step is sales, and so I want to write about what you can do to convert as many of those leads into paying customers. 7th DO for SaaS startups Build a repeatable, profitable sales process Sales is a very different animal depending on the stage of your company, the market segment you're going after and on whether we're talking about inbound sales or outbound sales.
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Tom Tunguz
MARCH 26, 2013
With the analytics tools today, it’s easy to measure hundreds if not thousands of different metrics for your business. Cutting through all the chaff to determine the most important or insightful metrics can be quite a challenge. Below are the ten metrics I’ve found to be most useful in board meetings. They answer the questions of how should a startup founder might measure the business at the highest level.
Tom Tunguz
DECEMBER 15, 2013
Financial statements are a Rosetta Stone for startups. They reveal the strategies and the tactics of how to bring a product to market. These are the ten metrics I look at when sifting through a startup’s operational model, whether when considering an investment or in a board meeting. Revenue growth indicates how quickly a company can grow under the current way of doing business.
The Angel VC
MARCH 18, 2013
Here's another post in my series on DOs and DON'Ts for early-stage SaaS startups : 6th DO for SaaS startups Fill the funnel Or: Focus on inbound marketing, but try lots of things and double-down on what works In this post I'm going to write about lead generation for SaaS startups. When I edit the series later on I might merge it into my 4th DO ( Make your website your best marketing person ) to have one post on marketing.
Chaotic Flow
JANUARY 15, 2013
Since publishing the original SaaS metics blog series and subsequent SaaS Metrics Guide to SaaS Financial Performance , I’ve received numerous inquiries on various details and hidden gotchas in SaaS metrics implementation. This new series of SaaS Metrics FAQs explores some of these finer SaaS metrics points in a simple Q&A format. In this second post, I examine SaaS MRR churn, a SaaS metric that extends from SaaS customer churn which was covered in the first installment.
Speaker: Jay Allardyce, Deepak Vittal, Terrence Sheflin, and Mahyar Ghasemali
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.
The Angel VC
DECEMBER 14, 2013
Last night I returned from a 2-day offsite with the Point Nine team (in Schlepzig, of all places). Our (small) full-time team more than doubled in the last six months, and this was the first time for all of us to spend some time together away from the daily bustle. We had a long list of topics that we wanted to discuss, ranging from investment theses to portfolio companies and to a number of projects that we're working on.
Chaotic Flow
MARCH 4, 2013
A few months back, Gartner placed big data at the peak of its hype cycle for cloud computing , meaning most big data products are solutions looking for a problem. I always find this bad entrepreneurial habit to be one of the most frustrating of our industry. Having recently joined Meltwater as head of marketing and product (BTW Meltwater is hiring marketing and product managers!
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 11, 2013
Sitting on a bench overlooking the South Beach marina, I asked an entrepreneur how he had been since he founded his company. He replied with a conundrum: Looking back I can’t believe it’s only been a year but if I think about every day, it’s taken forever. That’s a really succinct way of communicating how it feels to grind. Cementing each brick, each hire, each line of code, each product feature seems like just an incremental step, just another day.
The Angel VC
FEBRUARY 20, 2013
Last week we announced the closing of our new fund, Point Nine Capital II. The most important information about the new fund is included in our official press release , but I wanted to write a brief blog post to give you some additional background and share some personal thoughts. When we set out to create the new fund last year, the goal was to raise €30 million.
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.
The Angel VC
APRIL 4, 2013
Inspired by Paul Graham’s “Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund” post of a few years ago I’d like to start a series of posts about ideas that I find exciting and that we at Point Nine would be very interested in investing in. Here's the first one. Electronic signing I’m a huge, huge fan of electronic signing. Whenever I have to sign a document and I’m getting a “Please eSign.” email I rejoice because it saves me the hassle of printing, completing, signing, scanning and emailing the signature pages (d
Chaotic Flow
JULY 30, 2013
Most of us were taught at an early age that double negatives are a bad thing, because they are unnecessarily complicated and increase the chances of miscommunication. It is with this principle in mind, that I propose that we permanently ban the ridiculous term “negative churn” from the SaaS metrics vocabulary. Churn is negative growth. Negative churn is simply growth.
The Angel VC
APRIL 14, 2013
Following my post about electronic signing I'd like to describe another area that we'd like to invest in. It's not a specific idea this time, rather a category of startups that we're very interested in: Industry-specific SaaS solutions I talked about the topic before when I wrote about "The land of a thousand niches" and touched on it in my "1st DO for SaaS startups".
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