Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

MAY 7, 2013

Like most conventional wisdom, ideas about the "best" way to market software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions make sense for some companies. But for other companies, those same ideas don't work at all. Take free trials, for example. For applications and markets where the prospective customer can actually get a good sense of how the solution works over the course of a short trial, where the company has the resources to support the trial, and there's an effective process in place to move prospects fr

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Marketing Social Media SaaS Entertainment 124

The Angel VC

MAY 17, 2013

Following my posts about electronic signing and vertical SaaS , here's another area that we're very interested in: SaaS solutions with a mobile-first approach While my first two posts of this series were fairly specific, this one is pretty fuzzy as I don't have a good sense for what I'm looking for. I just have a feeling that there are huge opportunities ahead for startups which rethink how people will use business applications in the future.

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Mobile Investment SaaS Construction 117

Tom Tunguz

MAY 23, 2013

About a year ago, Peter Thiel spoke at a PandoDaily event where he extolled the last mover advantage : “First mover isn’t what’s important — it’s the last mover. Like Microsoft was the last operating system, and Google was the last search engine.”. I hear this refrain more and more in pitches. The thinking goes the last entrant to the market benefit from mistakes made by earlier entrants.

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CloseSaaS

MAY 22, 2013

Contrary to popular belief, sales is not about convincing someone to buy a product, or about explaining why a product is amazing. Any person that advises otherwise shouldn’t be offering advice. Sales is about offering solutions to problems.

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Sales 52

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Generative AI is upending the way product developers & end-users alike are interacting with data. Despite the potential of AI, many are left with questions about the future of product development: How will AI impact my business and contribute to its success? What can product managers and developers expect in the future with the widespread adoption of AI?

Generative AI

Tom Tunguz

MAY 2, 2013

To many entrepreneurs, hiring the first salesperson is a mystery. When should I do it? How much should I pay this person? How do I structure the work? The great part about sales teams and sales departments is that they quantitative - sales teams thrive on numbers. At the most fundamental level, sales productivity has to exceed costs. So let’s answer the question of when to hire a salesperson by understanding the financial mechanics of a sales team.

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Tom Tunguz

MAY 29, 2013

Last night, Elon Musk inspired the audience at D. It is hard to overstate the scope and breadth of his ambitions or the impact of his start ups PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX on payments, automobiles and space. Behind the desire to listen to great men like Musk speak about their perspectives is a hope to receive some insight, some pearl of wisdom. Last night, I came away with two of those both about startups.

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Payment Solutions PayPal Innovation Startup 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 27, 2013

You have just launched your new software start up. The last webpage to go up on the website is the pricing page. Like many other SaaS startups, you decide to employ some version the three pane pricing plan: first the free version, second a paid upgrade costing between $5-$40 per month, and third an enterprise tier with a “Call for Quote” in place of the price.

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Pricing Startup Management Enterprise 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 22, 2013

At today’s Under the Radar Consumerization of IT (CoIT) , the predominant theme will be antagonism. Friction, dislike, resentment within organizations marks opportunity for consumerization of IT startups. Taking advantage of this sentiment, Expensify employs a very deliberate marketing tactic: “Expense reports that don’t suck.” Talk to anyone who uses antiquated expense report systems and they are bound to sigh and complain, frustrated by the experience but resigned to the fact they can’t do muc

Startup 100

Startup Development Marketing 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 21, 2013

Reading through the tech press since the Facebook IPO, you might get the impression venture capitalists are still reeling from that apocalyptic offering, believe no further successes can be had in the consumer web, and so are fleeing the consumer web in droves to pursue enterprise investments. That’s because in the past year or so most major tech publications have swung from focusing on consumer products to enterprise companies.

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Payments

Tom Tunguz

MAY 19, 2013

I started working in ad tech in 2005 and during the past eight years, the ad tech ecosystem has progressively become more sophisticated, competitive and oligopolistic. It’s hard to innovate in ad tech. But if you’re looking to start a company in the sector, you’ll need to amass proprietary data or develop a market place with unassailable liquidity to vie successfully in the market.

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Advertising Mobile Startup Innovation 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 16, 2013

On the day of Tableau’s IPO, a company known for innovating in data visualization, I thought I would share the most impressive HCI concept I’ve seen in a long time. In my view, Bret Victor is on the forefront of human computer interaction design. In the first two or three minutes of this video at Stanford, he demonstrates his home-built software that combines data analysis with visualization.

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Data Data Analysis Innovation Software 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 15, 2013

When I was a little boy, I watched a cooking show on Sundays called “Jacques Pépin.” Over the course of 30 minutes, Jacques would orchestrate a symphony of raw ingredients into a dish that I yearned to smell and taste. That chicken paillard looked sumptuous. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been coding in Rails 3 quite a bit, building a collection of tools to be more effective as a VC.

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Identity management Education Scaling Management 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 14, 2013

Derek Powazek questions the intrinsic economic viability social networks in his post “What If Social Networks Just Aren’t Profitable?”. It’s a logical question to pose in the aftermath of the Digg sale and the wobbly Facebook IPO. There is one clear lesson from Digg’s sale: the technology that powered a once-massive social network is worth about $500,000.

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Speaker: Timothy Chan, PhD., Head of Data Science

Are you ready to move beyond the basics and take a deep dive into the cutting-edge techniques that are reshaping the landscape of experimentation? 🌐 From Sequential Testing to Multi-Armed Bandits, Switchback Experiments to Stratified Sampling, Timothy Chan, Data Science Lead, is here to unravel the mysteries of these powerful methodologies that are revolutionizing how we approach testing.

Innovation

Tom Tunguz

MAY 13, 2013

How deeply do you consider the impacts of building a public API for your startup? It’s no small decision: you could be enabling your disruptor. APIs are incredibly powerful tools for enabling partners, building ecosystems and engendering success among customers. For example, Salesforce’s Force ecosystem , which enables developers to build products atop customer Salesforce installations and increases the value customers derive from Salesforce selling more seats and retaining customers longer.

Startup 100

Startup Development Data Branding 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 12, 2013

We’re looking for an analyst to join the early stage consumer investment team at Redpoint. This person will help us find and evaluate investments and work closely with the early stage team. If you know anyone who is a recent grad, is passionate about technology and is looking to work hard and learn a ton, please send them our way. Details are below: Job Specification: Redpoint Ventures is looking for a full-time analyst to join our investment team.

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Entrepreneurship Mobile Technology Startup 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 9, 2013

In the summer of 2008, a crisis evolved on my team at Google: social networks had grown exponentially. The AdSense network was flooded with social network page impressions whose poor performance challenged advertisers and Google alike. During that summer, we formed a tiger team of about four or five key people. We shed our daily responsibilities, relocated our desks to a conference room in a deserted building on the edge of campus where we brainstormed and debated and wrote patents and developed

Underperforming Technical Team 100

Underperforming Technical Team Advertising Development 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 5, 2013

Kenny van Zant drew this diagram for me on white board and I think it’s the best visualization of how SMB SaaS freemium business grow. The diagram highlights a few important mechanics of the SMB SaaS business model. In any given freemium user base, small-office/home-office (1 to 20 employee shops) users tend to be a few times larger in size than true SMB customer (20 to 500 employees).

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SMB Scale SaaS Mobile 100

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Payments

Tom Tunguz

MAY 1, 2013

Could you grow your users at 5% for 15 months? Or at 7% for 12 months? Or at 10% for 9 months? That’s how long it would take to double your user base at those growth rates. Though there is some science to growth developed by the technology-fluent marketer, aka growth hacker, growth remains a confounding art because there isn’t one feature - like implementing FB Connect or promoting Tweets or having a big red button on a home page.

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Growth Hacking Startup Technology Development 100

CloseSaaS

MAY 15, 2013

You can now create a new lead from your email client by simply forwarding or BCCing an email to Close. If a matching lead already exists, the email will be attached to the existing lead. Otherwise, the email addresses will be added as contacts and the email contents will be attached to a new lead.

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CloseSaaS

MAY 6, 2013

In part 1 of this series, we built a search query parser using pyparsing which generates an abstract syntax tree (AST) that represents the structure of a search query. In this part, we will cover how to generate an Elasticsearch query by extending the code of the first part.

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Data Sales 40

CloseSaaS

MAY 23, 2013

We’ve got keyboard shortcuts scattered throughout Close to help save you time. Typically those keyboard shortcuts are visible by hovering over various buttons on the site.

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As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.

Pricing

CloseSaaS

MAY 2, 2013

We like to think of our sales software, Close, as having a lot of magic under the hood.

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Software Sales 52

CloseSaaS

MAY 21, 2013

We’re happy to announce a super simple way for you to get your data into Close from a bunch of the various “old school” CRMs.

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Data 52

CloseSaaS

MAY 21, 2013

You can now customize your voicemail greeting message in Close!

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Tom Tunguz

MAY 8, 2013

Craigslist’s generic market place gave rise to fifty or more single-purpose alternatives some of which are quite valuable companies: AirBnB, Care.com, 99Designs, oDesk, CustomMade, Gazelle. Each of these startups operates verticalized market places that solve customer problems better than Craigslist’s generic platform. In so doing, these startups have grown their observed markets.

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Mobile Acquisition Startup Trends 120

Advertiser: Data Robot

The buzz around generative AI shows no sign of abating in the foreseeable future. Enterprise interest in the technology is high, and the market is expected to gain momentum as organizations move from prototypes to actual project deployments. Ultimately, the market will demand an extensive ecosystem, and tools will need to streamline data and model utilization and management across multiple environments.

Generative AI

Tom Tunguz

MAY 6, 2013

Who can forget gems like these word problems from 3rd grade math class? Q: Jack walked from Santa Clara to Palo Alto. It took 1 hour 25 minutes to walk from Santa Clara to Los Altos. Then it took 25 minutes to walk from Los Altos to Palo Alto. He arrived in Palo Alto at 2:45 P.M. At what time did he leave Santa Clara? It was during those classes that our mathematics teachers taught us how to work backwards through the problem.

Engineering 100

Engineering Sales Hiring Growth Hacking Startup 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 28, 2013

At the D conference yesterday, Tim Cook said many things without saying much. But one story did strike me. Cook described the product management and strategy process at Apple. Walt Mossberg asked Cook why the iPhone has only one flavor when the iPod had so many including the shuffle, the nano, the mini, and the classic. Even though both products originally launched as a single model, the iPod flourished into a family of products while the iPhone has remained a single SKU.

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Product Marketing Marketing Market Segmentation Startup 100