The Angel VC
MARCH 22, 2012
[Update 03/23/16: I've created an improved version of the template - check it out! ] A few people who read my recent post about financial planning asked if I could provide an example for a good financial plan, so I'd like to post one here. The plan is very similar to the one that I created in the very early days at Zendesk and re-used a few times in the meantime, but I had to make a few adjustments to make it more generic.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
SEPTEMBER 5, 2012
According to a business adage, you need to spend money to make money. According to a SaaS business adage, you need to spend a lot of money to make money. Workday recently made public its S-1 filing in advance of an initial public offering. The document reveals what it takes to succeed in a market dominated by Oracle and SAP. Specifically, it illustrates the need for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies to spend money - lots of it - on customer acquisition.
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Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 22, 2012
Examining a user’s motivations at the entry point of every major feature in a product and matching the product to this motivation is key to building a great product users love. BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model Theory is a succinct summary of this idea in a formula: Motivation + Trigger + Ability = Behavior. This model says that a user will perform a behavior when given the means, the motive, and the opportunity.
Chaotic Flow
OCTOBER 9, 2012
Which is more important in B2B social media, social or media? For way too many B2B marketers, the answer is media. In the B2B marketing community, content marketing has eclipsed blogging, engagement is measured in click-throughs, and gamification is sexier than conversation. Too many B2B professionals see social media as just another marketing communication channel.
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Neil Patel
MAY 30, 2012
Facebook Insights is a powerful tool for those wanting to track user interaction on their Facebook business page. Facebook Insights can be seen by all the admins of your page, and it can provide a wealth of information about your content and audience. By using Facebook Insights, you’ll be able to determine the best time of day to post , the best day of the week to post, and what type of content is most popular.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Sixteen Ventures
SEPTEMBER 18, 2012
Using Microsoft Chart Controls to Report on vCenter Statistics « vscsiStats into the third dimension: Surface charts!
The Angel VC
DECEMBER 16, 2012
If you're building a modern SaaS solution for the Fortune 5,000,000 , the importance of your marketing website cannot be overstated. In the old world of enterprise software, most software vendors used to have pretty lame websites. Most of them were poorly designed and looked very technical and uninspiring, and the only images they contained were the seemingly obligatory stock photos (suit-wearing business people trying to out-smile each other, handshake close-ups and of course an attractive head
The Angel VC
NOVEMBER 8, 2012
Point Nine not only loves animals , we also love dog food. After all, some months ago we invested in ePetWorld , which runs hundeland.de , a fast-growing online shop for dog food and supplies. Today I'm going to talk about a different type of dog food though. If you know us a bit you'll know that we talk a lot about the Cloud. In our opinion, the move of software from the desktop or local servers to the Cloud, along with the consumerization of enterprise software and other developments that go h
The Angel VC
NOVEMBER 24, 2012
With some delay I'd like to continue my little series: 3rd DO for SaaS startups Create an awesome product This one is a little tricky. Firstly because it feels like I'm just stating the obvious – who doesn't want to create an awesome product? Secondly because it's hard to offer a lot of useful advice in a blog post on a topic which shelves of books have been written about.
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.
The Angel VC
DECEMBER 6, 2012
Last August, Marc Andreessen wrote a great essay titled "Why software is eating the world". In his article, which got a lot of attention in the tech world, Marc explains why and how a variety of industries have been and continue to be disrupted by software. Read it if you haven't read it yet, it's a well-written and inspiring post by one of the most successful and knowledgable people in the Internet industry.
The Angel VC
MARCH 4, 2012
In the last few years I've seen a lot of financial plans, and since we started Point Nine in the middle of last year that volume has been skyrocketing. I've seen everything from just a few numbers in an email to extremely sophisticated Excel spreadsheets with dozens of tabs and tens of thousands of cells, and I thought I'd offer some advice on what I think a good financial plan looks like.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
NOVEMBER 8, 2012
Most companies offering a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution can't afford to sell it. I'm talking here about "selling" in the traditional sense: finding prospects and convincing them to buy a product or service. In some cases that's done with experienced sales executives working their Rolodex (or its electronic equivalent). Or it might be sold by a team of inside sales reps making cold calls from a purchased list.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
OCTOBER 9, 2012
If you manage a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, at some point you'll be forced to make a tough decision about your customer acquisition process: Feed it or starve it? Should you pony up the money to feed a full-blown sales and marketing effort? Or should you starve the process and keep the cash in your piggy bank? Because of the way the SaaS business model works, if you feed the customer acquisition process, you hurt profits and burn cash.
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
The Angel VC
OCTOBER 18, 2012
Continuing my little series using the "minimum viable" approach , here is my 2nd DO for SaaS startups: Build the right team I've written about the topic before, so if you've read this post from early this year most of what I'm going to write now won't be new for you and you may want to skip this article. I'm going to assume that you want to build a modern SaaS solution for the "Fortune 5,000,000" – a great product that's easy to understand and so useful that it will almost sell itself.
The Angel VC
SEPTEMBER 29, 2012
I've been thinking about a "DOs and DON'Ts" article geared towards early-stage SaaS founders and upcoming SaaS founders for a little while now. I thought it would be a good idea to summarize what I've learned about SaaS in the last few years and put it into a format like this. Problem is, it's a very large topic, and if I try to make it as broad, deep and well-written as I'd like it to be I'll never do it.
The Angel VC
MAY 3, 2012
One of the most important tools to better understand the usage of a web application – or a service, a game or a mobile app, it doesn't matter – is a cohort analysis. In fact, it's almost impossible to get a really good understanding of a service's usage without looking at activity and retention numbers on a cohort-by-cohort basis. And yet, most startups that we're talking to haven't looked into cohort analyses yet.
The Angel VC
JUNE 20, 2012
One of the most important questions which every SaaS company has to solve is to find the right pricing – the right pricing model as well as the right price levels. It’s obvious that getting pricing right is extremely important: If you’re too cheap you will leave money on the table and reduce your ability to invest in customer acquisition. You may also hinder adoption especially from bigger customers who think that your product can’t be good because it’s so cheap.
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The Angel VC
APRIL 21, 2012
About one and a half years ago I became a vegetarian, after coming to the conclusion that it's impossible to ethically justify to kill – and in almost all case inflict enormous suffering on – living creatures that are capable of experiencing pain, just for the pleasure of eating meat (which, make no mistake about it, is a huge pleasure). Maybe I'll write more about that topic in another post.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 19, 2012
When building a freemium SaaS company or an ecommerce company or any product that requires users to move through a funnel towards an objective, it’s important to track this funnel to understand where the funnel can be improved. But tracking one funnel may not be enough. The aggregated funnel may be masking conversion differences across customers segments.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 30, 2012
In 2010, Gaia Online started a user acquisition campaign to grow their user base. To simplify the on boarding process, they launched the Big Red Button home page below. It worked. Conversion rates from the home page spiked. Simple user experiences, like this big red button, are effective because users understand what is expected of them. There is just one flow.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 26, 2012
Two weeks ago, James Reinhart, founder and CEO of ThredUp , led his company through a branding exercise. The team spent an afternoon comparing and contrasting the brand attributes of Starbucks and Peets, Whole Foods and Safeway and a few other competitive pairs. The team quickly distilled each company’s brand into one word. Long ago, each of these brand selected the value that would define their brand.
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The Angel VC
JANUARY 2, 2012
It's that time of the year – you're looking back to the old year and you're reviewing your plans for the new one. The last year was very busy for me, both privately and professionally. I became a dad for the third time, and I teamed up with Team Europe to create Point Nine Capital. Two startups, so to speak. It's also a good time to take a look at my angel investments because from now on I'm going to make all new investments via Point Nine Capital.
The Angel VC
SEPTEMBER 3, 2012
If you're running a SaaS startup it's likely that sooner or later you'll want to increase your prices. The reason is simple: It's impossible to find the perfect pricing right off the bat, so most startups launch with a pricing scheme that's on the low end to make sure that they don't scare away potential customers. "In the beginning, err on the side of being too cheap", was also one of the tips that I gave in my previous blog post about SaaS pricing.
The Angel VC
MARCH 21, 2012
I just created a slide about the development of Point Nine Capital for a little company presentation and thought it might be useful if I posted it here as well to give everyone some information on where we're at and how we got there: In 2008, Lukasz Gadowski – who almost everyone in the German Web startup scene knows because he built or helped build some of Europe's biggest Internet success stories, e.g.
The Angel VC
OCTOBER 3, 2012
Further to my post about my "1st DO for SaaS startups" (and again, in the spirit of releasing early and iterating fast) I'd like to touch on a few additional points with respect to the right market. Market size If you want to go big and build a large, successful company it's obviously important that your market is big enough. How big is big enough? Most large VCs would answer that the TAM of a SaaS company should be at least $1B.
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
The Angel VC
FEBRUARY 29, 2012
Last night I read this question on Quora : In general terms, what is the ideal size and make-up of a team for a pre-revenue SaaS startup? It's a question I've been pondering about a lot already, and seeing it posted on Quora prompted me to try an answer. I think the second part of the question is more important. I do have a slight preference with respect to the team size as well, but it's light because I've seen and worked with very successful SaaS startups with different team sizes.
Tom Tunguz
DECEMBER 20, 2012
About three years ago, I started journaling my startup education by blogging. In retrospect, blogging has been one of the most rewarding activities for me as an investor. Blogging helps me some observe changes in the start-up ecosystem, communicate trends primarily through data while strengthening and building relationships. It’s been more gratifying than I could have hoped.
Tom Tunguz
DECEMBER 19, 2012
It’s easy to call a tablet a larger a mobile phone. Or a replacement for a notebook or ultrabook. But to dismiss tablets as scaled clones of their bigger and smaller brothers is a mistake. Tablets are the third type of device: the one with the most revenue potential for ecommerce and developers alike. Tablets drive greater volumes of traffic, that convert to paid at better rates, and drive better qualified and less expensive leads through advertising.
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