The Angel VC

MAY 31, 2016

So what does it take to raise money for a SaaS company in 2016? When we invest in a SaaS startup, which almost always happens at the seed stage, the next big milestone on the company’s roadmap is usually a Series A. If you carry this thought further and assume that the biggest goal after the Series A is to get to the Series B (and so on, you get the idea) it sounds like turtles all the way down. But financing rounds are obviously not a goal in itself. They are a means to a bigger goal.

SaaS 160

SaaS Finance Mobile Enterprise 160

Hitenism

DECEMBER 25, 2016

2016 has been a year where knowledge has become freely available for anyone interested in knowing about all things SaaS. This slide deck comes from Brian’s brilliant SaaSFest 2016 presentation. Thomas Smale , How to Value a SaaS Business in 2016. How does my list of favorite articles in 2016 compare with yours?

SMB 130

SMB SaaS Metrics Revenue 130

wepay

DECEMBER 9, 2016

million donations across 98 countries made, resulting in a total of $168 million raised on November 29 th , 2016. On Tuesday November 29 th , 2016, WePay processed $20.2 Throughout the week our Crowdfunding partners saw 139% more donation volume than the average week in 2016. The post Giving Tuesday 2016 Round Up appeared first on WePay Blog.

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Hitenism

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

In 2006, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped pioneer what we now call the cloud, product development changed forever. What once took millions of dollars and a team of engineers to create, a lone developer could suddenly hack together in half an hour. Today, one-third of daily internet users visit websites built on top of AWS. AWS is now an $11.5B run rate business and has made up for an incredible 67% of Amazon’s operating revenue last quarter.

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Cloud Development Engineering Company Culture 162

wepay

DECEMBER 19, 2016

As the year draws to an end, we asked WePay team leaders to reflect upon the past 12 months and share thoughts on what 2016 meant for payments. Payments in 2016 was the year of digital wallet proliferation. 2016 wasn’t the year of any single revolutionary development in payments. I see a few key themes in payments in 2016. 2016 saw some of the recent payment innovations blend together to provide tangible value to merchants and consumers.

Banking 40

Banking Consulting Mobile Innovation 40

Tomasz Tunguz

MARCH 31, 2016

2016 is off to a slower start than 2015. billion in Q1 2016, a decline of about 17%. Nevertheless, Q1 2016 activity exceeded Q1 2014. The first quarter in 2016 has been the hardest quarter to raise a seed round in the past five years. Q1 venture capital investment remains steady relative to Q4 2015 at about $15 billion, but down from the near records attained in 2015.

Trends 40

Trends Investment Venture Capital Startup 40

Tomasz Tunguz

DECEMBER 20, 2016

2016 was a year of change for SaaS, and most of the story was the public market. The Hottest Startup Sectors In 2016 - published on January 3rd, this post reviewed the patterns of investment in startups, and in particular, the sectors where investors were increasing their investment the fastest. It’s been a wonderful 2016 and I’m looking forward to another exciting year in 2017 The end of the year is fast approaching.

Pricing 40

Pricing Startup SaaS Innovation 40

ReSci

MAY 26, 2016

The post Our Top Picks for IRCE 2016 appeared first on ReSci The Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition (IRCE) is upon us yet again with another exciting year of industry experts covering the latest topics and trends on digital commerce, online retail strategies, and the best solutions for e-commerce technologies. The event is right around the corner.

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Trends Technology Strategy 40

Hitenism

OCTOBER 17, 2016

When raising money, most founders start by creating a pitch deck. Investors see countless versions of these pitch decks every day. Between cold emails, warm introductions, founders I know and incubators I help, I personally get ten to twenty a day. Every single one of these businesses is unique. Yet most of their decks look and sound the same. With titles like “The Problem” “The Opportunity” “Market Size” and “Team” these decks aren’t differentiated.

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Venture Capital Forecasting Startup Investment 134

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 2, 2016

Which of the 16 major start of categories in information technology will reap disproportionate share of investment dollars in 2016? This may be a breakout category in 2016 for Series A investments. Given the amount of seed investor interest, I expect many of these marketplaces to raise series A dollars in 2016. In conclusion, big data, education, marketplaces, and SaaS should see strong investment activity in 2016.

Social Media 40

Social Media Advertising Investment Startup 40

ReSci

SEPTEMBER 15, 2016

The post Pro Tips: Lunch Spots & Sights Near Shop.org 2016 appeared first on ReSci As every savvy conference-goer knows, it’s important to maximize your experience when attending great events like Shop.org. We’ve already covered our list of can’t-miss sessions to get the most of what the Summit has to offer — now, here are our pro tips on getting.

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Hitenism

NOVEMBER 14, 2016

Most people approach content marketing like a black box. Ideas go in one end. Hours and days are spent doing something creative. And content comes out the other end. In a survey I ran of 2,203 companies, I was shocked to find that only 35% had a documented content marketing strategy. People measure and analyze all other aspects of marketing, but they don’t take that mindset and apply it to the actual practice of content creation.

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Content Marketing Marketing Consulting Interviewing 122

Tomasz Tunguz

NOVEMBER 6, 2016

Artificial intelligence is to be a big trend in the SaaS world, a theme that matured in 2016 but will very much continue through 2017. 17% of SaaS companies who have raised so far in 2016 employ machine learning. About $1B has been invested in early stage SaaS startups as of November 1. Over the last nine months, marketing startups have raised more dollars in aggregate than any other segment. The chart above shows the early-stage investment dollars by buyer within the organization.

Trends 40

Trends Startup Machine Learning Investment 40

Tomasz Tunguz

JULY 28, 2016

Through the end of July in 2016, $70B worth of SaaS companies sold. In 2016, these PE firms aren’t following that playbook. The 2016 software buying spree hasn’t benefitted private startups or unicorns yet, and that reflects the different strategies of the buyers. Their size follows a power law with LinkedIn at $26B and Netsuite at $9.3B.

Acquisition 40

Acquisition Software Pricing Revenue 40

Tomasz Tunguz

AUGUST 7, 2016

Average Series A valuations have hovered around $15M for the last 9 quarters. Series B rounds have settled into $50M, while Series C rounds have rebounded to $100M. Later stage rounds, however, have fallen by 50% from their high of $400M to just under $200M. However, in the early stages the frequency of down rounds (e.g., a Series D with a smaller valuation than a Series C) aren’t at historic or even six year highs. Series A down rounds constituted 40% of all rounds in Q1 2009.

Venture Capital 40

Venture Capital Finance Consulting Investment 40

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 27, 2016

As the year is coming to an end I’d like to share a few thoughts on what we’ll be looking for in the SaaS world in 2017. This is not meant to be an exhaustive enumeration but rather a brief outline of a few big themes that I feel particularly strongly about.

Churn 155

Churn SaaS User Experience Enterprise 155

The Angel VC

MARCH 11, 2016

Some people thought it was provocative though, and some chimed in with good feedback: @hunterwalk building ANY business is hard — Jonathan Abrams (@abrams) March 5, 2016 Therefore I thought it would be worth following up on the topic to make sure that my message is clear. Judging from the number of Facebook likes and retweets, as well as comments on Twitter and elsewhere, my last post resonated with quite a lot of people.

Business 160

Business Venture Capital Startup Scaling 160

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 25, 2016

As the cost of capital increases in 2016, these winner take all rounds will become less and less common. It’s not that fundraising will not remain a critical skill in 2016. My father keeps a copy of Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy on his bookshelf. An imposing dark gray tome, Competitive Strategy is a business classic. I remember reading it sometime in high school, and not understanding very much of it.

Startup 40

Startup Investment Strategy Technology 40

The Angel VC

MARCH 23, 2016

Almost exactly four years ago I published a financial plan template for SaaS startups based on a model that I had created for Zendesk a few years earlier. I received a lot of great feedback on the template and the original post remains one of the most viewed posts on this blog up to this day. In the last few weeks I've finally found some time to create a "v2" of the template.

SaaS 169

SaaS Headcount Enterprise Finance 169

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2016

In 2016, the question that will immediately follow, “What is your annual growth rate?” When seed and Series A investors consider an investment in 2016, they will be asking themselves, “How much capital will this company need to raise before an exit?” 2015 is the end of an era, the era of startup growth at any cost. ” will be “What are your unit economics?”

Transportation 40

Transportation Metrics Pricing Acquisition 40

Tomasz Tunguz

MAY 1, 2016

It is an election year. The Federal Reserve has changed its interest rate hike plan. Venture financing has slowed by upwards of 15% in the first quarter. Q1 GDP growth fell to 0.5% from 1.4% in Q4. How much have all these factors impacted SaaS companies? Are buyers purchasing less software? Each quarter, publicly traded companies release two key figures: revenue per share and earnings-per-share. Wall Street analysts forecast these figures based upon company plans and their own research.

Forecasting 40

Forecasting Compensation Revenue Finance 40

Aaron Beashel

OCTOBER 31, 2016

For instance, here’s what the measures might look like for the ‘Grow social traffic’ method in the section above: By end of December 2016, be posting 300 times per month to our social channels, and have completed experiments in 3 new channels (Medium, SlideShare, Quora). Just a few months into my stint at Campaign Monitor, a new CEO joined to lead the company. That CEO was a guy named Alex Bard.

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B2B Social Media SaaS Onboarding 100

The Angel VC

SEPTEMBER 18, 2016

So you’ve recently started a company, you’ve started to talk to angel investors and seed funds about your seed round, and suddenly a large VC appears on the scene and wants to invest. What should you do? First of all, congrats. If a large fund wants to invest in your startup, that’s a great validation. Second, if you can get the brand, credibility, network and support of a Tier 1 VC into your startup early on, that can be extremely beneficial. So you should definitely consider it.

Venture Capital 151

Venture Capital Investment Finance Startup 151

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 10, 2016

For all the talk about late stage rounds, megarounds and unicorns, early stage startups are benefitting disproportionately from near-record years of venture capital investment. Of the $42B invested in startups in 2015, 34% or about $14B was raised in series A and seed rounds. That figure is up from 18% in 2005. The 35% attained in 2013 share for early investment ties the 1996 record.

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Venture Capital B2C Investment Enterprise 40

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

About two years ago, Josh Hannah of Matrix Partners wrote an excellent article titled “That's a nice little $40M eCommerce company you have there. Call me when it scales.” In it he argues that an eCommerce business with $10 to $20 million in revenues is not that hard to build and also not very valuable.

Scaling 161

Scaling SaaS Revenue Acquisition 161

Tomasz Tunguz

APRIL 25, 2016

As the overall venture market environment evolves in 2016, so too does the SaaS and Software segment. In Q1 2016, SaaS rounds increased a modest 10%. But early 2016 pace still exceeds the best quarters of 2010-2012. The number of Series A, B, C, and D investments in software companies stabilized at roughly 170 per quarter from mid-2013 through mid-2015, before falling 17% in Q4 2015 to a two year low. The SaaS fundraising has slowed in parallel to the rest of the market.

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The Angel VC

NOVEMBER 23, 2016

Growth Calculator This little tool allows you to enter your MRR as of the end of 2016 and a target growth factor for 2017. (As you can see, I really like placeit.net :) ) In case you haven't started to think about your plan for 2017 yet, now's the time. To help you a little bit with your planning, here are three little tools that you might find useful. If you're a long-time reader of this blog, you may have seen them before.

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Headcount Churn SaaS Sales 127

The Angel VC

JUNE 25, 2016

When founders show me their sales pipeline, the data is typically visualized in some variations of one of these formats: When I see charts like this, I often find it hard to quickly wrap my head around the data and draw meaningful conclusions. Sometimes, important numbers are missing altogether. In other cases, they are there but are shown on another page or in another report.

Development 144

Development Metrics Startup Data 144

The Angel VC

JUNE 2, 2016

My "SaaS Funding Napkin" , published a few days ago , got lots of love on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Thanks everybody! Some people (rightfully) mentioned, though, that the image is hard to read on mobile devices. So if a napkin has a good format for a desktop or laptop screen, which real-world-analogy could be a fit for mobile screens? You guessed right. Here you go (please scroll down or click here ). funding saas

Mobile 143

Mobile SaaS 143

Tomasz Tunguz

MARCH 6, 2016

The startup fundraising market in 2016 has been difficult to characterize. VCs invested about $2B in January and February 2016. Punctuated by a concentrated decline in public tech stocks, the sentiment in Startupland has changed from resolute ebullience to a calmness approaching caution. Two months in, we can analyze January and February data.

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Investment Finance Data Technology 40

SaaS Growth Strategy

DECEMBER 1, 2016

I’d say that it’s the norm, rather than the exception, that start-up SaaS companies rely on agencies to help them execute on some aspect of their strategy as they seek initial traction, begin to grow, and scale their business. This is perhaps more true in marketing than within any other part of an organization.

Strategy 116

Strategy Finance Interviewing Mobile 116

Brian Balfour

OCTOBER 12, 2016

We have a big addiction problem in our industry. Hacktics, the tips, tricks, hacks, tools, and secrets that promise to solve our growth problems. A glance at the front page of GrowthHackers.com , Inbound.org, or any other growth hacking community is all it takes to understand the obsession. As a result, marketers now get the majority of their “learning” through this hack-tic based content.

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Growth Marketing Marketing Growth Hacking Social Media 78

The Angel VC

JULY 15, 2016

In the last few weeks I participated in a few interviews/discussions to talk about SaaS, entrepreneurship, venture capital and related topics that are near and dear to my heart. If you're interested in me rambling about some of my earliest entrepreneurial adventures (hint: C64, Amiga,) and how I found Zendesk (hint: luck), and if you don't mind listening to a heavy German accent and lots of "UMs" and "HMMs", here you go. :-) 1.

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Venture Capital Entrepreneurship Interviewing B2B 116

The Angel VC

APRIL 6, 2016

About three years ago, we were looking for an Associate to join Point Nine and put up this landing page : We called the position "truffle pig", because just like a truffle pig is digging up the best truffles from the ground, we as an early-stage VC try to find the best startups among a large number of potential investments. I have to give full credit for the truffle pig analogy to Mathias Schilling and Thomas Gieselmann of e.ventures, by the way.

Startup 118

Startup Investment 118

SaaS Growth Strategy

DECEMBER 15, 2016

Early in my career I began working with an early stage, SaaS start-up with only a handful on employees. With a relatively inexpensive product and a very small marketing budget, one of the company's Co-founders had been tasked with testing out some initial customer acquisition strategies. Bidding on highly targeted keywords in Google Adwords was one of the logical places to start.

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Forecasting Data Analysis Advertising Data 100

The Angel VC

MARCH 29, 2016

In case you've started to modify the template already and want to keep working with the previous version, here are the two bugs that you need to correct: 1) Cell U124 on the Costs tab, i.e. the costs for external recruiters in December 2016, contained: =(W87-U87)*$E$124+X96 The +X96 part has been added accidentally and needs to be removed. Since I published v2 of my SaaS Financial Plan a few days ago, two alert readers have kindly pointed out two formula errors in the Excel sheet.

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SaaS Software Revenue 100

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

MAY 7, 2016

When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton explained “because that’s where the money is.” Not that marketers are bank robbers, but the same idea applies to finding prospective customers. If you want to get their attention, you need to go where they are. If you’re at they'll never look, it’s unlikely prospects will see you. This idea certainly sounds logical. In fact, it may sound blatantly obvious. So why do so many companies ignore it?

Social Media 109

Social Media Banking Enterprise Engineering 109

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

DECEMBER 3, 2016

No matter how hard you’ve been working on your marketing plan, it still might go wrong. That’s usually not for lack of effort. It’s just that software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketing is hard. It’s different than marketing traditional on-premises software and it’s easy to make mistakes. I review the marketing programs of lots of SaaS companies and I see the same kind of mistakes over and over. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but here are 5 errors that are especially common.

Travel 100

Travel Marketing B2B SaaS 100

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

APRIL 2, 2016

So you’ve just shipped your new software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, and for sure you’re eager to tell the world: get out a press announcement, roll-out a search engine marketing campaign, sign-up for industry events, and whatever else you can think of. Here’s some advice: Slow down. As tough as it is to resist the urge to do something , hold off a bit before going full blast with all this marketing activity. And if you’ve already started, hang on and take a deep breath.

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Marketing Engineering Acquisition Software 109

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

NOVEMBER 5, 2016

No matter how wonderful your proprietary algorithms, the priceless virtues of your state-of-the-art platform, or the brilliance of whatever other sophisticated technologies you’ve got under the hood of your software-as-a service (SaaS) solution, here’s an unpleasant truth: Lots of your customers don’t really care. Most of your them only want to know what your solution does, not how it works. In fact, sometimes all that techie talk just goes right over their heads.

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Healthcare SaaS Technology Management 100