This site uses cookies to improve your experience. To help us insure we adhere to various privacy regulations, please select your country/region of residence. If you do not select a country, we will assume you are from the United States. Select your Cookie Settings or view our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Used for the proper function of the website
Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Strictly Necessary: Used for the proper function of the website
Performance/Analytics: Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Salesforce is worth $113 billion. 1% of $113 billion is $1.13 billion. ServiceNow is worth $34B and Workday is worth $33B. 3% of $33-34B is $1B. Atlassian is worth $20.5B. 5% of $20.5B is $1B. Why am I doing all this simple math you might ask? We have reached a point in SaaS where a small fraction of an incumbent is a billion-dollar company. If you start a business tomorrow that is able to cleave 1% of revenue from Salesforce, you will have built a billion-dollar business. 1% is not that much.
Intercom’s mission is to make internet business personal – in an era of online interactions between businesses and customers, that sense of personal connection can be hard to forge and easily lost. That personal connection is most keenly felt when things go wrong and when customers need support. We have become synonymous with making personal and conversational interactions the bedrock of a great customer support experience.
If you’re past $4m-$5m or so in revenue, this post isn’t for you. You’ll have figured this out, at least mostly. But if you are on either side of $1m in ARR, there are 3 things you can almost always do from a pure process standpoint to squeeze materially more revenue out per lead. Do ’em now! ??. First, implement Lead Scoring.
I’ve been fortunate to work in a number of SaaS businesses in my career. Some of them, like InVision and SafetyCulture, seemed to just grow naturally without any help. Sure adding sales & marketing help fuel the growth, but these business were growing pretty rapidly before they injected the sales & marketing rocket fuel. In others however, growth has seem like a slog.
AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.
As technology progresses, it's unavoidable to face the tough turf that consists of your competition. For this reason, many company owners have taken measures to adopt strategies that will help them overcome the competition. Without a doubt, these mobile app marketing strategies are very well-documented. But while they are effective, you are not automatically assured of the success it delivered its original user.
In last week's post I shared some thoughts about Dropbox and why, although Dropbox is unquestionably one of the most amazing SaaS companies ever built, I am a tad less confident in the company's long-term future than I am in other SaaS leaders such as Salesforce.com, Zendesk, or Shopify. As mentioned in the first part of the post, I took a closer look at Dropbox’s recent IPO filing and would like to share some tidbits, along with a few observations. #1 – Dropbox on consumerization "Individual us
In last week's post I shared some thoughts about Dropbox and why, although Dropbox is unquestionably one of the most amazing SaaS companies ever built, I am a tad less confident in the company's long-term future than I am in other SaaS leaders such as Salesforce.com, Zendesk, or Shopify. As mentioned in the first part of the post, I took a closer look at Dropbox’s recent IPO filing and would like to share some tidbits, along with a few observations. #1 – Dropbox on consumerization "Individual us
If you’ve ever sat through a marketing agency’s pitch or seen an episode of Mad Men, you’d think that marketing is all about talking – pushing out clever messages so that people will buy whatever it is that you’re selling. Not exactly. You’re right that there’s plenty of delivering messages through email, blog posts, paid adwords, Twitter, TV, radio, or print ads or whatever media reaches the buyer.
Everybody likes to win. And while you undoubtedly learn much about your skills, attributes and character from losses, there’s nothing quite like that sense of satisfaction when your team secures a hard earned victory. I’ve been fortunate, both as an individual contributor and as part of a team to have racked up some important wins (jobs, promotions, new business and awards), but in truth, there’s only been three periods where I’ve been part of teams where there’s been an expectation of winning.
Startups are business machines engineered to grow quickly. The forces of hypergrowth exert enormous strain on every aspect of the company. Internal break all the time as the company moults into a new skin. This is one of the most important things to keep in mind when hiring. Every lead hired today, whether marketing , sales, engineering or product, will have a very different job nine months from now, much less two years from now.
When a startup takes form, the first weeks and months and years are spent furiously. The team assembles itself. The lightbulb illuminates. It is formed and reformed again and again as customers supply feedback. Eventually the team hews the right product. The startup raises capital. Then the team returns focus to hiring, evolving the product, and closing customers.
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.
I first met Elad Gil when I became an associate product manager at Google. Back then, he had an unusual habit I noticed right away. Most people carry their laptop in the same way. The laptop is closed, in hand, between the hand and the hip. Elad carries his laptop open, powered on and by the top or bottom corner. He’s so smart and has so much cognitive bandwidth, he simply doesn’t have time to wait for the computer to wake from sleep.
Technology innovations swing to a pendulum’s cadence. Sometimes innovations begin with infrastructure changes and reverberate up the stack. Other times, front-end engineers innovate at the application layer, which demand downstream changes in the infrastructure to scale. The last major epoch of front end evolution has celebrated its ten year anniversary.
You’ve just raised a round of financing. Your next step is to build your management team. There are several criteria for finding the right executive. Competency in the field, cultural fit, communication skills, management experience. All of those should be obvious. There is one that is often overlooked. Network. Recruiting is one of the most important responsibilities for a head of a department.
A great customer experience today is about meeting people where they already are. And today, there’s one channel where more potential customers are than any place else: messaging and live chat. Think about the way that you talk to people every day. If you’re anything like me, you use iMessage to talk to your family, WhatsApp for your close friends, and you probably spend your entire day on Slack talking to your teammates at work.
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
There are three types of product features, a seasoned head of product told me recently. MMRs, neutralizers, and differentiators. MMRs are minimum market requirements; basic features that every customer expects and demands. Neutralizers mitigate competitive threat. Differentiators are your startup’s competitive advantage. As a product manager, I’d never thought about this type of roadmap segmentation before.
Last week, I shared a presentation with an executive team at a large public SaaS company on everything I’ve learned about pricing. Here’s a summary of the frameworks and theory that I’ve aggregated over a decade of investing in startups. Why do we set prices? Setting aside the important reasons of generating revenue and maintaining solvency for a business, there are many other reasons to set price.
You have a good pipeline of prospective customers. You pitch them but things aren’t working out. You can see it in your low close rates. They are below 15-20% conversion from sales accepted lead to closed customer. You need to answer an important question: are you losing these opportunities because of sales execution or product insufficiency? Those are the two possibilities.
Customers will pay you to build your SaaS product. It’s one of the great advantages of a SaaS model. Annual prepay contracts - wherein customers pay for a year’s cost on day - is a free loan from customers. And every startup can benefit from this advance. There’s only one requirement: you must be able to sell your product while you’re building it.
For SaaS businesses, improving retention is one of the easiest and most effective ways to drive revenue and profits. With a clear link between failed payments and customer churn, having a robust failed payment recovery solution isn’t optional—it’s essential. Achieving your retention goals starts with the right solution.
You might be familiar with Scott Brinker’s famous martech landscape slide. Known as the Martech 5000 — nicknamed after the 5,000 companies that were competing in the global marketing technology space in 2017, it’s said to be the most frequently shared slide of all time. By early 2018, Brinker had updated it with almost 2,000 more vendors — that’s nearly 7,000 marketing software companies fighting for the same buyers’ attention.
It’s easy to believe that machine learning is hard. An arcane craft known only to a select few academics. After all, you’re teaching machines that work in ones and zeros to reach their own conclusions about the world. You’re teaching them how to think! Indeed, the majority of literature on machine learning is riddled with complex notation, formulae and superfluous language.
What do Dropbox, Uber, AngelList, Front, Gusto and Boba Guys have in common? All have benefited from the sage advice of growth expert and Andreessen Horowitz general partner Andrew Chen. Andrew’s been an angel investor and advisor for a slew of name-brand startups; however, he’s most widely known for his invaluable essays on growth. He’s written more than 650 of them over the past decade and has been featured and quoted in The New York Times, Fortune, Wired and Wall Street Journal.
Despite the mountain of evidence contradicting the mantra of “if you build it, they will come”, it’s still extremely prevalent among product-first companies. Why? First, most founders don’t have a background in either sales or marketing, and even though they’re told to “ start marketing the day you start coding ”, they just don’t know where to begin, or they’re incredibly overconfident.
Simplify omnichannel payments with a solution that unifies every channel through your platform. By integrating front-end systems like online, mobile, and in-store payments with robust back-end infrastructure, you can deliver a seamless payments experience without the need for heavy engineering. Omnitoken technology enhances security by tokenizing card transactions for reuse, enabling merchants to drive cross-selling opportunities.
Convincing potential users to sign up for your product isn’t easy. But what happens next is far more important. The latest batch of billion-dollar companies are built on high customer retention. They help their users be successful, and that means providing great onboarding. At Traction Conference, an event all about how to keep and grow customers and revenue at scale, I explained how to build onboarding based on your customers’ goals, and why when your product improves, your onboardi
Today is a big day for our customers. We’re releasing the biggest ever update to our Messenger. We’ve completely rethought how a messenger designed for business should work. And it goes way beyond chat. With over 500 million conversations every month, we’ve long known that our Messenger provides a personal, mutually beneficial experience for both our customers and their customers.
The nature of marketing at a software company is that it’s easy to have a highly data-driven view of everything you do, and overlook hard to measure things like building a brand. Brand is the emotional connection you establish with your customers and those whom you would like to become customers. This leads to a tunnel vision focus on optimizing funnels and growth hacking button colors, and ignores investing time in equally important tasks, like creating emotional connections with your customers
Great SaaS sales reps can change your entire business. The best ones are efficient, motivated, effective, and creative in how they operate on a day-to-day basis. They have a knack for identifying quality prospects, making strong impressions quickly, and closing deals that seem out of reach. So what is it about these SaaS sales reps that differentiates them from the rest?
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
There is an infinite amount of advice for startups, but if I had to boil it down to just 10 essentials, these are the most crucial principles for starting up that every founder needs to understand from an early stage. You need a vision. You need to run a good beta. You need world class onboarding. You need to know who your real competitors are. You need to understand the four forces.
We just raised $125M in a round led by Mary Meeker at Kleiner Perkins. Here’s what we’re going to do with it. 2018 is shaping up to be a massive year for the Intercom platform. Historically, we’ve spent proportionately way more on research and development than other software companies we track, and that won’t stop any time soon. This funding will go straight into building great new software at a pace you’ve yet to see from us.
The SEC announced last week that it wants to find ways to let Main Street investors access stage private venture companies. This news item underscores an important trend that is reshaping the industry. Today in Startupland, startup access is the scarcest commodity. Everybody wants an allocation, an opportunity to invest in the very best companies. The SEC story highlights how much has changed in Startupland.
We organize all of the trending information in your field so you don't have to. Join 80,000+ users and stay up to date on the latest articles your peers are reading.
You know about us, now we want to get to know you!
Let's personalize your content
Let's get even more personalized
We recognize your account from another site in our network, please click 'Send Email' below to continue with verifying your account and setting a password.
275 
Let's personalize your content