SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What Are The Biggest Problems You Face as a Startup Founder? Later, once you have a brand, you’ll be competing with Hot Startups nipping at your heals for top VPs. Many functions simply need more bodies to keep up with larger bookings goals, and inefficiencies come from that, especially in sales-driven models.

Sales Recruiting 246

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup Scale 246

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 30, 2023

In the late 90s, startups in Silicon Valley eschewed the grown-up Legos for more frugal & more dynamic tables. Startups’ desire for speed sounded the death knell for the cubicle. Within a decade, the Action Office evolved into the cubicle, wrapping white-collars in a warren of workspaces.

Startup 193

Startup Trends Management Sales 193

SaaStr

OCTOBER 6, 2023

If you’re a seed-stage startup, Michael shares the best ways for you to present your company to startup investors. They collect the payment online and take a 15% fee for every booking. Every hotel room is fully booked. They could talk about how they were starving startup founders who couldn’t pay their rent.

Payment Methods 213

Payment Methods Startup Payment Solutions Sales Hiring 213

User Pilot

JANUARY 16, 2024

Looking for UX design books that offer practical wisdom and show you how to get better? Whether you're a complete novice out for beginner lessons or a veteran in search of expert-level knowledge, you'll find the right books for you. We covered: A general overview of the books.

User Experience 100

User Experience Systems Review Consulting Strategy 100

Cobloom

JULY 8, 2019

When faced with a challenge, it's so easy to consult the wisdom of Q&A's and startup blogs , that we're often guilty of neglecting the humble book.

Startup 97

Startup SaaS Consulting Business Model 97

Tom Tunguz

MAY 28, 2018

I’ve just read Why We Sleep , a book by Professor Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Berkeley. Despite the fact that’s we’ve not yet finished May, I’m convinced Why We Sleep is the most important book I’ll have read this year. He outlines the research supporting these claims.

Sales Hiring 222

Sales Hiring Software Engineering Investment Engineering 222

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 31, 2021

It’s February 1st and many software startups herald the new fiscal year with Sales Kick Off (SKO). The key number is the new bookings which implies the growth rate for next year. Now let’s change the individual attainment around, while keeping the company’s bookings performance last year the same. Remember 79%.

Forecasting 157

Forecasting Sales Hiring Headcount Finance 157

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 27, 2018

We’ve just launched our latest book, The Growth Handbook. Whether you’re at an early stage startup contemplating life after the TechCrunch bump, or a more mature business with many millions in ARR, your company’s survival depends on finding a sustainable answer.

Acquisition 157

Acquisition Retention Metrics User Experience 157

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 29, 2023

This showcases a narrow segment of a niche market, and it’s missing a lot of startups. Any startup in any reasonable category likely has dozens of competitors, and Altman believes the best strategy to compete in 2023 and beyond is multi-product. Startups are no longer fringe. How can a startup compete with a big company?

Scale 222

Scale Scaling Startup Sales Hiring 222

Kellblog

MAY 30, 2022

So this is where John McMahon, the author of The Qualified Sales Leader , comes from and in this post I’ll do a brief review of his book. I’ll start with the conclusion: this is a must-read book for the product-oriented founder of any enterprise software startup. Why do I say this? It’s an easy read.

Forecasting 86

Forecasting Sales Software Review Startup 86

Tom Tunguz

JULY 18, 2018

High Growth Handbook shines as a straightforward manual for startup founders. There are a few passages from the book that struck me. ” The longer I’m involved in the world of startups, the more firmly I believe this. ” In the book, Elad reprints Claire’s document.

Startup 223

Startup Management 223

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 8, 2021

A common topic today in software startup board rooms is: should the company price by seat or by usage? It’s the canonical book on modern pricing. Pricing is one of the questions that persist through the evolution of a company. He has advised more than 20 unicorns including Uber, Asana, and Stripe.

Pricing 244

Pricing Startup Strategy Innovation 244

Crafty CTO

OCTOBER 17, 2023

A Book Encounter While browsing the lake house bookshelves, John stumbled across Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices and was immediately hooked. I can recall my father’s enthusiasm for the book, along with its author George Leonard Herter and his catalog business Herter’s. Disruptive?

Scale 52

Scale Compensation Startup Mobile 52

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 18, 2019

The template is broken into six sections: People, Bookings & Revenue, Cash, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success. People is the first section because people are a startup’s most important element. Bookings and Revenue illuminates the company’s performance in closing new business (bookings) and recurring revenue.

Metrics 217

Metrics Sales Recruiting Startup SaaS 217

Tom Tunguz

MAY 15, 2017

How much revenue do you want to book for your SaaS startup next quarter? The bookings capacity of the business is the amount of business a sales team should book in a certain period. Bookings capacity is calculated as: Bookings_capacity = ? Bookings capacity is calculated as: Bookings_capacity = ?

Sales Hiring 124

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 124

Tom Tunguz

MAY 19, 2015

Orbiting the Giant Hairball is one of the most unusual business books I’ve read. Gordon MacKenzie, the author of the book, worked at Hallmark cards for 30 years to the day. In his book, he described the way he injected creativity into his working life. I thought it was a great book with three salient themes.

Startup 100

Startup Development Management Business 100

SaaStock

MARCH 26, 2019

We had a closer look at who the young upstarts of Latin America are in search of the most exciting Latin American SaaS startups. With them in mind, we have created our Startup Program , tailored especially for SaaS startups. Here are the most exciting Latin American SaaS startups that we cannot wait to meet in less than a month.

Startup 210

Startup Artificial Intelligence SaaS Construction 210

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 14, 2018

These are my ten favorite books from 2018. The (Mis)Behavior of Markets - Written by Benoit Mandelbrot, the Belgian mathematician who pioneered fractals, this book and theory inspired Naseem Taleb. It’s a powerful book on the uncertain nature of financial turbulence. This short book is laugh out loud funny.

Government 108

Government Interviewing Investment Engineering 108

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 22, 2015

Yesterday, I met with a bright, young SaaS entrepreneur who asked me to clarify four key numbers for SaaS companies: bookings, monthly recurring revenue, recognized revenue and cash collections. ACV Bookings 12,000. The startup doesn’t sell any more software for the next twelve months. The company books $12,000 in January.

Revenue 100

Revenue Startup SaaS Software Review 100

OpenView Labs

JULY 21, 2021

Summer is upon us, and so are the many recommendations of books that one should read. Many lists focus on recently or about-to-be published books. This is a list of books that describes my journey, post facto, of building online software and running a company that makes such software. Today the book is as relevant as ever.

Business 101

Business Artificial Intelligence Blockchain Software Engineering 101

SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2024

David Sacks classic post on Burn Rate Multiple is A+ and a key metric for every venture-backed startup. But the best burn less each month than they bring in in new bookings and revenue (a Burn Multiple of 1x or less). It simplifies a lot of complexity into one metric. Well, at a practical level, it assumes the next round is coming.

Startup 269

Startup Metrics Revenue 269

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 16, 2017

How much should a SaaS startup invest in sales and marketing at different stages of the business? Bookings triple, triple, double, double, and double over the first five years. Last, I estimated revenue from bookings, a calculatoin detailed in the Revenue Estimate tab of my spreadsheet. Bookings, $M. Year 1 2 3 4 5.

Investment 274

Investment Startup Marketing SaaS 274

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 2, 2018

There are five forces driving the startup ecosystem today. Private capital has become so abundant that it supplies hundreds of millions and billions to startups. We talk about valuation as a function of new quarterly bookings or revenue multiples/ARR multiples, even at the early stages. There are many reasons for this.

Startup 186

Startup Acquisition Pricing Metrics 186

Tom Tunguz

MAY 7, 2014

Some of the best content to be found about startups is locked in books. Thomas Kjemperud asked me yesterday for a 140 character recommendation of one book for founders. These are the books I go back to, time and again, when I have a question or I’m looking for an insight. and building a startup.

Underperforming Technical Team 157

Underperforming Technical Team New CTO CTO Government 157

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2022

For whatever reason, the company is ready to exit startup status and prepare to scale-up. Dave Kellogg, Executive-In-Residence at Balderton Capital, breaks down the most common mistakes companies make when going from startup to scale-up. To get a startup off the ground, company operators thrive with those who can figure anything out.

Scale 185

Scale Technical Advisors Sales Hiring Technical Review 185

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 9, 2020

Linda’s professional journey has taken her across businesses of all sizes — from startups in hypergrowth mode to mature, multi-hundred million-dollar businesses. It was there that she felt inspired about the impact she could have on a startup, and from there she became a founding member at Tapjoy, and then, Nextbit. Creativity, Inc.:

Startup 258

Startup Management Systems Review Leadership 258

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 1, 2018

The most important tasks for any early stage startup are to write code and talk to users. Founding a startup is a lot like this. I didn’t have a perfectly mapped out startup marketing strategy. Our book, Intercom on Marketing, has many more of the lessons that helped us grow from zero customers to more than 20,000.

Startup 201

Startup Strategy Marketing Social Media 201

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Here’s an overview of the series: Part 1: How to Categorize Expenses in a SaaS Startup v2.0 As the last step of adding an account, make sure you select the checkbox to mark this account to be a sub-account of the larger category Customer Support, as using account -> subaccount structure will give your books a cleaner look.

Merchant Services 90

Merchant Services Startup DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

Kellblog

AUGUST 3, 2021

Startup boards typically have three types of directors : Founders, who represent the common stock [1]. So I naturally was eager to read Martin’s new book, Diary of a Novice NED , and put it on the top of my reading list once it came out. While I won’t dare to review a book written by a new colleague (and our board chair!),

Startup 114

Startup Venture Capital Consulting Management 114

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2024

It’s a common dream for founders to hope their startup be acquired one day, but what is a company, like Google, really looking for in their acquisitions? Google was acquiring 40-50 companies, while smaller startups will be acquiring on a much smaller scale, if at all. #3 Keep your books clean. Be financially viable.

Software Review 213

Software Review Technical Review Acquisition Scale 213

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 25, 2019

Since that trip, when I visited RenRen, Autonavi and a few other blossoming startups, the Chinese startup ecosystem has grown tremendously. Chinese startups raise nearly half of all venture capital dollars and nearly 100 are valued at $1B. There are two ideas in the book that will remain with me.

AI 156

AI Startup Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 156

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 3, 2021

I.e., it’s fair to expect a ramp in just a few months to say $10k-$50k a month in bookings. But give her breathing room to get to a $400k-$500k quota. A related post here: The post One Tough (But Rewarding) Job: Being the First Sales Rep at a SaaS Startup appeared first on SaaStr. It’s not easy.

Sales Hiring 265

Sales Hiring Startup Sales SaaS 265

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 30, 2020

I’ve been steadily progressing through the excellent books in the Stripe Press catalog. It’s the best book I’ve read on engineering management. The book abstracts out the wisdom of those times into theory abstracted from experience, not just hypothetical ideas. First, I read High Growth Handbook.

Engineering 363

Engineering Software Review Systems Review Technical Review 363

SaaStr

JUNE 5, 2023

ChartMogul’s data, which we covered in another recent post here , shows data from 1000+ SaaS startups from $1m-$30m ARR in essentially real-time, as they are doing real-time revenue analytics. He found new bookings in Q1’23 were down about 33% on average from Q4’22: Yes, these are slightly different time frames, but the same basic trends.

Cloud 277

Cloud Startup Trends SaaS 277

SaaStr

JANUARY 11, 2024

We often start speaking with a startup when they have GTM questions rather than seeking capital which then leads to an investment opportunity over time. We have had arguably the most macro disruptions to the startup ecosystem in the last 5 years than any other time in at least my lifetime. Our current fund, Fund III, is $150M. #3.

Technical Review 265

Technical Review Scale Management Sales Hiring 265

Kellblog

JUNE 27, 2022

Bernard , Suranga , Alice , Rob ) as well as my other European startup colleagues (e.g., The US poses numerous, often unique, challenges for a European technology startup. Dresner Advisory , Outsell ) to independent consultants promoting books and methodologies (e.g., This series was both a lot of work and a lot of fun.

Startup 118

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Compensation 118

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 8, 2017

To prove it to myself, I ran a Monte Carlo simulation for hypothetical startup. The inside team books $50,000 annual contracts and the outside team books $500,000 annual contracts. The inside team books $50,000 annual contracts and the outside team books $500,000 annual contracts. Both teams attain quota.

Scale 169

Scale Startup Sales SaaS 169