The Angel VC

NOVEMBER 18, 2017

Founder salaries are not a topic I’ve had to spend a lot of time with so far. I usually just “OK” them, since the founders we are working with are all super reasonable people who carefully weigh how much they need against the interests of the company – their company. But sometimes founders ask me for a suggestion or some guidance because they are uncertain as to what is fair, and so I thought it might be useful to create a simple model.

Technical Review 279

Technical Review Compensation Company Culture Benchmarks 279

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

DECEMBER 6, 2017

I’ve seen hundreds of startup pitch decks in my time at Matrix, and have found total addressable market (TAM) slides to be among the most frequently mis-executed. I get the sense they are often included as a formality in an attempt to get VCs to check a mental box and continue on hearing about other.

Marketing 279

Marketing Startup Venture Capital Business Model 279

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 16, 2017

How much should a SaaS startup invest in sales and marketing at different stages of the business? This is a very nuanced question, but benchmarks do provide some guidance for what is reasonable. Sales and marketing investment depends on many different factors including establishing product market fit, the business’s sales model (inside, field, freemium), and not least, cash balance and fundraising capacity.

Investment 274

Investment Startup Marketing Sales 274

Hitenism

JANUARY 20, 2017

In online marketing today, you have hundreds of channels to choose from. Within each, there are thousands of tactics that you could use. If you’re like most marketers, you’re trying to tackle a dozen or more of these channels and tactics at any given time. If you try to do too much with your marketing strategy, it quickly becomes difficult to keep the clarity and conviction you need to simplify, focus, and drive key results.

Marketing 237

Marketing Content Marketing Startup Acquisition 237

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Payment Solutions

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

SEPTEMBER 25, 2017

Over the past 12 months I’ve invested considerable time thinking about, experimenting with and optimising my daily routine. I relish figuring out new ways to become more efficient and better at my work. There’s a limited number of hours in the working week, so the challenge is to use our time so that we not only produce our best work, but also clearly understand what’s going to have the biggest impact.

Underperforming Technical Team 138

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Communication Advertising 138

A Smart Bear

AUGUST 22, 2017

Product teams have been repeating the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) mantra for a decade now, without re-evaluating whether it’s the right way to maximize learning while pleasing the customer. Well, it’s not the best system. It’s selfish and it hurts customers. We don’t build MVPs at WP Engine. The motivation behind the MVP is still valid: Build something small, because small things are predictable and inexpensive to test.

Underperforming Technical Team 112

Underperforming Technical Team Transportation Investment Engineering 112

Brian Balfour

JUNE 28, 2017

This post is an introduction to a five part series where I explain for frameworks you need to align to grow to a $100M+ company. Subscribe to receive the rest of the series. I’ve been lucky to have been part of building, advising, or investing in 40+ tech companies in the past 10 years. Some $100M+ wins. Some, complete losses. Most end up in the middle.

Product Marketing 111

Product Marketing Growth Hacking Marketing Construction 111

Entrepreneur - SaaS

APRIL 21, 2017

How hiring our first salesperson led me to recognize that cluelessness is at the heart of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship 111

Entrepreneurship 111

InsightSquared

DECEMBER 29, 2017

There are different uses of cement such as to make cement mortar, cement concrete which are used in various types of masonry and concrete structures.

Technology 110

Technology 110

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Payment Solutions

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 18, 2017

Selling to c-level executives is a different ball game. You have to be concise, respectful of their time, and really think about how to differentiate yourself in order to break through the clutter and earn the right to ask for something. Here is a message to sellers from a real c-level buyer: Outbound tactics without strategy are sheer lunacy. We must lead with an insight-driven value narrative (‘hypothesis of value’), otherwise hammering away in blended channels is worthless.

Interviewing 108

Interviewing Leadership Branding Engagement 108

The Angel VC

JANUARY 10, 2017

Today is January 10, 2017. That means that in ten days, this jerk will become the leader of the free world. Ugh. It still feels surreal to me. In less earth shattering news, the fact that it's 2017 also means that my "SaaS Funding in 2016" napkin needs an update. As a reminder, in the original post I tried to give a "back of a napkin" answer to this question: What does it take to raise capital, in SaaS, in 2016?

SaaS 262

SaaS Marketplace as a Service Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 262

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

DECEMBER 13, 2017

Intro Many potentially great companies fail each year because, while they have an incredible product, they don’t figure out how to get it to market fast enough. Figuring out how to reach customers and break through to Product-Market-Fit remains one of the hardest parts of building a successful startup. This post introduces a four stage.

Product Marketing 263

Product Marketing Marketing Startup Sales 263

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 10, 2017

Disagree and commit. I first read about this idea in the 2016 Amazon Shareholders letter. But the idea can be traced back to Andy Grove at Intel. Grove wrote about this topic in High Output Management. Disagree and commit is a management technique for handling conflict. There are two parts to it. First, expecting and demanding teammates to voice their disgreement.

Management 230

Management Leadership Engineering Startup 230

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

Hitenism

JANUARY 6, 2017

It was 2008, and I was having a classic founder moment. I had no idea what I was doing. But at least I was doing! I was founding a SaaS business, KISSmetrics. Like any startup, we were flailing, failing, and on fire, all at the same time. It was a wild, insane, and ridiculously exhausting experience. I was in charge of product development, operations, finance, funding, and probably 44 other things.

Startup 182

Startup Marketing Engagement Content Marketing 182

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

DECEMBER 4, 2017

Without doubt, one of the most exciting parts of being a marketer today is the perpetual challenge of finding new channels and tactics to leverage. There’s a whole host of marketing arbitrage opportunities out there - if you know where to look and spend your time. Identifying opportunities that we think will create business value is not only a lot of fun, it's key to driving future growth.

Marketing 131

Marketing Outsourcing Services Social Media Technical Review 131

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

OCTOBER 7, 2017

If you think your customers subscribe to your software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution only because they love the features or the price, think again. Of course, customers look at the solution’s features, the fact that it’s easy to use, or the attractive price… but that’s not all they look at. They’re also figuring out if they can trust you. The fact is that if they don’t trust you and they don’t believe they can rely on you to deliver your service as promised, none of that other stuff really matter

Acquisition 130

Acquisition Advertising Pricing Payment Features 130

Totango

OCTOBER 14, 2017

Customer Health Score takes multiple dimensions of customer data metrics and classifies them into a single representation of green, yellow or red. It is a consolidation of all the information the company has about the customer, from all probes, people and systems, past and current. Companies use customer health to speed up and scale communication, prioritization, decision making and forecasting of their customer success operations.

Forecasting 103

Forecasting Customer Success Engagement Communication 103

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Enterprise

Brian Balfour

OCTOBER 13, 2017

This post is the HubSpot Sales case study that illustrates the concepts of the 4-Fits Framework, a 5 post series in which I explain the four frameworks you need to align to grow to a $100M+ company. Subscribe to receive the rest of the series. When I joined HubSpot in January 2014 the mission was clear. One, help build the foundation for a new $100M line of business.

Sales Recruiting 111

Sales Recruiting Software Review Growth Hacking Retention 111

A Smart Bear

OCTOBER 17, 2017

Forget work/life integration for a minute. How much time do you have, regardless of partitioning? From your 24-hour daily allotment, the 1950s-style break-down is 8 hours for work, 8 for home and commute, and 8 for sleep and ablutions. So, “work” and “home” are the two things in which you can spend 40+ hours per week. This is the amount of time it takes to tackle something huge.

Startup 102

Startup Investment 102

Think Strategies

NOVEMBER 11, 2017

Corporate executives know that if they don’t transform their companies into digital enterprises they are going to be at a significant competitive disadvantage going forward. Yet, many corporate leaders have been unable to make significant progress transforming their organizations. These executives have found that changing their corporate cultures is a lot harder than adopting the new generation of cloud-based applications and services that make the digital enterprise possible.

Development 100

Development Cloud Enterprise Sales 100

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 7, 2017

I run a European based sales agency for software and technology companies. In this article, I will summarize what I’ve learned about the most important ingredients for a successful outbound sales process. 1. The Key to Outbound Sales Success – Understand the Problems & Pain You Are Solving With Your Product. Sounds basic and redundant, I know.

Sales 108

Sales B2B Education Strategy 108

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.

Trends

The Angel VC

JULY 5, 2017

In the first part of this post , I looked at what some of the most knowledgeable people in the industry said about Product/Market Fit (PMF) and how they try to define and measure it. While everybody seems to agree on the broad concept of PMF there is (unsurprisingly) no consensus on how exactly it can be defined and measured, and some people set the bar much higher than others.

Venture Capital 252

Venture Capital Product Marketing Startup SaaS 252

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

NOVEMBER 28, 2017

I gave a talk this year at the 2017 SaaS North conference in Ottawa, where I discuss the fundamentals of building a repeatable, scalable, & profitable growth process for a startup. Building a Repeatable, Scalable & Profitable Growth Process [View on Slideshare].

Startup 189

Startup SaaS Business Model Business 189

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 28, 2017

Starting in January, public software companies will report their financials using ASC 606. Normally, accounting changes are not that interesting, but ASC 606 will change several of the key attributes and benchmarks SaaS startups use. The two most important changes are changes to revenue and profitability. Today, all software revenue is recognized ratably over the contract period.

Revenue 223

Revenue Benchmarks SaaS Finance 223

Hitenism

APRIL 24, 2017

Back in 2010, on a Monday at 5 PM, I found myself at a bar called Memphis in Southern California in a heated discussion with two close friends. Patrick Vlaskovits was cheerfully drinking a mint julep while Sean Ellis and I were each enjoying a cold beer. At the time, Patrick was working on a startup and a book. Sean was advising a handful of high-growth tech startups including Dropbox, Eventbrite and my own company, KISSmetrics.

Growth Hacking 177

Growth Hacking Artificial Intelligence Technical Review Systems Review 177

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

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

NOVEMBER 28, 2017

The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes - strategic communication is an integral part of successful sales enablement. Communication matters in business. And the success (or failure) of a sales enablement function is intertwined with its ability to influence a sales organisation and change behaviour. While it may not be immediately apparent, communicating well with and managing stakeholders is a prerequisite for successful sales enablement.

Sales Enablement 112

Sales Enablement Sales Business Consulting 112

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

FEBRUARY 4, 2017

If your software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution is relatively new to the market and you’ve already managed to bring on a group of early customers, congratulations. That’s usually solid proof that your product works, somebody’s getting value from it, and people will pay for it. No small feat. But before you go overboard celebrating, I’ve got a bit of bad news: It gets more difficult from here.

Acquisition 124

Acquisition Advertising Customer Support Technology 124

Entrepreneur - SaaS

AUGUST 25, 2017

Adjusting to the unexpected is good. Winging it from beginning to end is not.

Management 98

Management Business 98