For Entrepreneurs with David Skok
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
There are seven key stages in a startup’s evolution from $0m to $50m in revenue. Understanding where you are in that evolution, and how to act at each stage is critical for success, as what is appropriate at one stage is not appropriate at another stage. In my talk at SaaStr 2018, I will lay.
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 7, 2018
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.
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Intercom, Inc.
FEBRUARY 26, 2018
by Rich Archbold, Senior Director of Engineering at Intercom. It’s hard to win a battle you don’t realise you’re in. It’s even harder if you don’t know all of the armies on the field, their strategies and weapons, or even who’s a friend and who’s a foe. The same is true in software. We are all in a battle, multiple battles in fact, with a lot at stake: whether it’s the fate of the company we work for or for the product that we build.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
FEBRUARY 3, 2018
Lots of people who you think should be interested in your software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, couldn’t care less. It doesn’t matter that they perfectly fit your “ideal customer” persona. It doesn’t matter that your solution is full of features built especially for them. It doesn’t even matter that you’re sure it’ll be a huge help to their business.
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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?
Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
To me, there’s never been a better time to be a sales enablement professional. It’s a rapidly growing area and while there’s a lack of publicly available sales enablement statistics or indeed, widely adopted best practices and standards, this is due, largely to the fact, that many of us are figuring out exactly what sales enablement is, means and does.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Think Strategies
FEBRUARY 12, 2018
All you have to do to recognize the changing face of the consumer retail market is pay attention to the growing number of packages piling up on your neighbor’s front step. The explosive growth of the home delivery business also has been influencing the industrial, business-to-business world. As Amazon sets consumer expectations for rapid delivery to the home, companies in nearly every industry have been recognizing that they must move to the Cloud to keep pace.
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 23, 2018
Founded in 2007, Dropbox epitomizes the freemium go-to-market. Dropbox has grown from 0 to 500 million users over that time period. 2% of those users convert to paid and pay an average of $9.33 per month. 90% of revenue originates through self serve channels - an astounding figure for company that generated more than $1B in revenue last year. Dropbox’s revenue grew from $604M to $1.1B from 2015 to 2017, a compound annual growth rate of 35%.
Intercom, Inc.
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
A few years ago I came out of a meeting with my product manager where we talked about the next feature we should build. At the time there was a lot of hype around Foursquare-like location sharing apps. We worked for a social network so we had to build something like that as well. Needless to say, we didn’t have a clear product strategy. To take my mind off things I opened my RSS reader and a post called “ Product strategy means saying no ” caught my eye.
Sales Hacker
FEBRUARY 27, 2018
As a VP of Sales, you’re probably not too familiar with SaaS metrics or costs — that’s the CFO’s job, right? Well today, we’ll breakdown how to understand SaaS costs basics, and then explain how to accurately set sales goals and metrics that drive success. We’ll also review how to determine if your team structure is working or not, as this is a crucial factor that impacts revenue goals.
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InsightSquared
FEBRUARY 22, 2018
Boston’s Trident Booksellers and Cafe thrums on a Saturday morning. The place is packed — Busboys bustle past waiting patrons to drop off clean glasses for the bartenders, only to be coaxed out of the way by a waiter looking for their next order, or a host seating a table. The kitchen rages, tossed about under the weight of tickets from the two dining rooms.
FastSpring
FEBRUARY 26, 2018
You did it! You designed the perfect digital software, built a beautiful website, and have plans for marketing your new business. You even set up your social media profiles to build a loyal following. You’re ready to take the digital world by storm.
Adhere Creative
FEBRUARY 21, 2018
W hen your company is on the market for a new website, one of the first things you’ll have to decide is whether or not to build a custom site, or use a premade template. Both choices rely on a CMS (Content Management System) to get the job done. Companies like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and Joomla, facilitate website building by offering powerful website construction platforms.
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 1, 2018
This is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve collected about writing. Put each sentence on a separate line when you write. When we read, we hear a rhythm. There is a rhythm to the words. And when we read, we look to find that rhythm, which pushes us through the end of a sentence, so if I write a really long sentence, and the reader isn’t expecting it – like this one – the reader will find it really hard to follow and understand where I am going.
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.
Intercom, Inc.
FEBRUARY 19, 2018
As a student of engineering you’re incentivised to write a lot and to read a lot. You’re expected to solve many well understood, discreet, simple problems, on paper, on sunny afternoons in late May and early June. This kind of learning has its place – it encourages discipline of thought and allows you to develop certain important muscles that will be useful for later – but to be successful as product engineer , you’ll also need to master a bunch of different skills.
Sales Hacker
FEBRUARY 13, 2018
In this article, you’ll learn how to structure your sales development (SDR) team for maximum efficiency and scalability. Sales leaders, read on! “The only easy day was yesterday.”. -U.S. Navy SEALs. This is one of the most famous principles of the U.S. Navy SEALs. From a business perspective, to me, this means you have to constantly improve your game.
InsightSquared
FEBRUARY 13, 2018
Guest blog by Ashley Coleman, Director of Marketing Operations at UserIQ. The concept of the customer journey is all the rage these days. It seems like every SaaS business wants to structure their sales, marketing and customer success team around a “customer journey framework” as the ultimate display of alignment. But for the most part, sales and marketing operations professionals have been busy working to unite sales and marketing around a spiraling technology stack, causing us to neglect a fu
FastSpring
FEBRUARY 7, 2018
Research shows that we judge websites just as we judge people: harshly and quickly. We all make snap judgments. It takes about 1/10th of a second to cobble together a first impression about a person, and home pages are no different. It takes 50 milliseconds for users to form an opinion of your site. That’s 0.05 seconds. The blink of an eye, a snap of the fingers.
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Explore how integrated payment strategies impact investor and buyer evaluations. Payments are more than a feature — they’re a key to long-term success and market differentiation. They help SaaS companies offer seamless user experiences and efficient operations. Investors and strategic buyers assess these integrated payment strategies as a measure of a company's growth potential and sustainability.
ITPro
FEBRUARY 12, 2018
In-depth. The way we work is changing, and the way we manage our IT tools needs to change with it.
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 10, 2018
Much of the conversation today about crypto is about Bitcoin and currency. But that’s myopic. Soon, we will be talking about how crypto will change the software world. In fact, many founders have already started that pursuit. More than 30% of the initial coin offerings (ICO) in 2017 target developers and businesspeople with their products. The numbers are still small.
Intercom, Inc.
FEBRUARY 6, 2018
Onboarding new employees is a hard process to do well. You might think of onboarding as something you just have to check off your list, but it’s easy to forget that things which are second nature to you are totally new and unknown to someone that’s just started. I joined Intercom a few months ago as an engineering manager and onboarding for the first time in a while made me realize some things I hadn’t before.
Sales Hacker
FEBRUARY 28, 2018
In January, we announced a new initiative called The Sales Hacker Top 50 Awards. The Sales Hacker Top 50 Awards are an effort to show some love to the actual reps and practitioners on the front lines. They don’t often get the widespread recognition they deserve, since most other online sales awards often become influencer popularity contests. During the 6 weeks of open voting, over 5000 votes were placed.
As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.
Casey Accidental
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
Andrew Chen recently wrote a blog post about how growth is getting harder. I invited Andrew to the Greymatter podcast to chat more about why growth is getting harder, and more importantly, what to do about it. We talk about how viral growth is on the decline in consumer, but not in B2B, and how to leverage paid referrals effectively. We also walk through trends in paid acquisition, how to find your first channel of growth, and much more.
FastSpring
FEBRUARY 6, 2018
If the traffic to your SaaS site is slow, it’s time to consider two time-tested routes to a bigger audience: affiliate marketing and paid media. Both require a bit of relationship-building, but it’s well worth the time. They help drive new traffic directly to your site.
Chart Mogul
FEBRUARY 27, 2018
Welcome back to this new season of SaaS Open Mic! In this first episode I'm talking to Claire Suellentrop and Georgiana Laudi of Forget The Funnel -- both strong proponents of a more holistic approach to modern SaaS marketing. According to Gia and Claire of Forget The Funnel : “The vast majority of early- and growth-stage tech companies undervalue marketing — that is, until marketing becomes an emergency.” Sound familiar?!
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 26, 2018
At Saastr, Jason and I discussed the role of private equity in SaaS on stage as a potential acquisition path for SaaS startups. Private equity hasn’t been a common exit route for venture backed startups in the past. But that’s changing. The chart above depicts the total disclosed value of US venture-backed SaaS startups which have been acquired by PE firms since 2010.
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.
Intercom, Inc.
FEBRUARY 21, 2018
In sales, we often talk about how to write great email subject lines or best times to cold call. This helps, but in the world of SaaS it’s more important to communicate with your prospects when the timing is right for them to engage. Case in point: product announcement day. Great companies will spend a lot of time crafting sophisticated product announcements with gorgeous design and content, attracting a windfall of traffic to your marketing site.
Sales Hacker
FEBRUARY 14, 2018
In this article, you’ll learn how to align your event sales strategy to your marketing team’s activities to maximize your event success. At Bizzabo we have a motto, sales is a team sport. Never is that more true than when attending a professional sales conference , trade show or networking event. And, if your team does not include the Marketing team, you’re likely making a huge mistake!
Casey Accidental
FEBRUARY 20, 2018
“We want to create more value than we capture.”*. Tim Kendall, the former President of Pinterest, repeated those words at an all hands to describe our strategy for monetization a few years ago. My role as an advisor to Greylock’s portfolio companies allows me to work with many different types of businesses: consumer social, marketplaces, SaaS, etc.
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