Tom Tunguz
APRIL 24, 2017
There are approximately 22 million trucks in the US. Many of these trucks run software to track the location of the vehicle, manage inventory, and comply with regulation. There are two SaaS companies operating at greater than $100M in ARR in the space and they illustrate one of the mantras on this blog: there are many different ways to build a SaaS company.
The Angel VC
APRIL 1, 2017
At the excellent SaaStr Annual 2016 conference about a year ago, a very experienced SaaS CEO said on stage that an internal recruiter can be a startup CEO’s secret superpower. I couldn’t agree more, and I think startups should make that hire sooner rather than later. If you can hire only one or two handful of people with your seed round, hiring anybody who doesn’t either code or sell is hard to justify.
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Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth
APRIL 10, 2017
Sales enablement is a rapidly emerging, but immature function. Many companies are investing in the creation of sales enablement teams, but as they’re so new, there’s a distinct lack of thought leadership, standardised measurement and best practices available. Subsequently, people often (and understandably) struggle to fully grasp the function. This fuels ambiguity about what sales enablement is and the value it creates for a business.
Entrepreneur - SaaS
APRIL 21, 2017
How hiring our first salesperson led me to recognize that cluelessness is at the heart of entrepreneurship.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
APRIL 8, 2017
I’ll admit it. Over my long career marketing all kinds of technology solutions, I’ve run a few marketing campaigns that flopped: events that attracted no real prospects, email campaigns that generated no serious leads, promotions that drew no response from prospective customers. It happens. And I’m pretty sure that I’m not alone among my marketing brethren.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 8, 2017
At a recent board meeting, a CEO said, “This experiment will cost $250,000 to run. After three months, we will know whether our new go-to-market strategy is viable.” There’s a brilliance this type of framing. By quantifying the cost of the experiment, the CEO frames company prioritization as asset allocation. What is asset allocation?
Sujan Patel
APRIL 3, 2017
Selling a SaaS product is HARD. I know – I’ve been there – both as a buyer and a seller. Consumers are spoiled by having so many choices, and getting noticed among the competition is really tough. Even if you get someone to visit your site and try out your product, the battle has only […]. The post Why Every Saas Company Should Try Concierge Onboarding appeared first on Sujan Patel.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 26, 2017
The follow-up bible has arrived! Grab your free copy of The Follow-up Formula: How to Get Everything You Want by Doing What Nobody Else Does.
Rakam
APRIL 28, 2017
We were aware the spend hours for a single acquisition or advertising report sort of a waste time, instead you might use that time for different purposes. That’s why now you can create any kind of advertising report based on your needs. Therefore you are able to create your own dashboards based on your KPI’s as well. Monitor performance of campaigns in a single dashboard, and any data can be layered with other sources like Stripe, Intercom and Google Analytics for a deeper understanding of campa
Speaker: Tamara Fingerlin, Developer Advocate
Apache Airflow® 3.0, the most anticipated Airflow release yet, officially launched this April. As the de facto standard for data orchestration, Airflow is trusted by over 77,000 organizations to power everything from advanced analytics to production AI and MLOps. With the 3.0 release, the top-requested features from the community were delivered, including a revamped UI for easier navigation, stronger security, and greater flexibility to run tasks anywhere at any time.
Network World
APRIL 25, 2017
Earlier this month Ixia announced an update to its CloudLens product where it could now provide visibility into public clouds. Ixia wasn’t the first packet broker vendors to roll out a solution that extends the visibility infrastructure to the cloud. That honor goes to Gigamon, which announced the general availability of its visibility platform for Amazon Web Services.
ReSci
APRIL 6, 2017
Several recommendation algorithms power email-marketing campaigns as well as on-site product recommendations. With Amazon’s success in driving revenue and engagement from product recommendations, several companies leverage these algorithms to cross-sell/up-sell products to users. The data science team at Retention Science has helped power onsite/app and.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 6, 2017
Intel’s Business Plan. Every once in a while, I receive a FedEx from an entrepreneur I haven’t met. Inevitably, this mail contains a modern rarity - a business plan. Ten to twenty pages describing the idea, the genesis, the business model, the team and its structure, customer acquisition strategy, sales model and other key details of the business.
Hitenism
APRIL 24, 2017
Back in 2010, on a Monday at 5 PM, I found myself at a bar called Memphis in Southern California in a heated discussion with two close friends. Patrick Vlaskovits was cheerfully drinking a mint julep while Sean Ellis and I were each enjoying a cold beer. At the time, Patrick was working on a startup and a book. Sean was advising a handful of high-growth tech startups including Dropbox, Eventbrite and my own company, KISSmetrics.
Speaker: Alex Salazar, CEO & Co-Founder @ Arcade | Nate Barbettini, Founding Engineer @ Arcade | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO @ Aggregage
There’s a lot of noise surrounding the ability of AI agents to connect to your tools, systems and data. But building an AI application into a reliable, secure workflow agent isn’t as simple as plugging in an API. As an engineering leader, it can be challenging to make sense of this evolving landscape, but agent tooling provides such high value that it’s critical we figure out how to move forward.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 25, 2017
Steli recently gave an interview at the NYC Enterprise Sales Forum, a community for B2B sales professionals involved in complex sales cycles. Whether you’re doing enterprise sales or not, you'll still get value out of listening.
Brian Balfour
APRIL 4, 2017
This is the Data Wheel of Death: Data Isn’t Constantly Maintained -> Data Becomes Irrelevant / Flawed -> People Lose Trust -> They Use Data Less If the above looks familiar, you’re not alone. I estimate that greater than ? of data efforts at companies fail. This is trouble because data plays a key horizontal role in the growth process and mindset.
Network World
APRIL 25, 2017
Earlier this month Ixia announced an update to its CloudLens product where it could now provide visibility into public clouds. Ixia wasn’t the first packet broker vendors to roll out a solution that extends the visibility infrastructure to the cloud. That honor goes to Gigamon, which announced the general availability of its visibility platform for Amazon Web Services.
The SaaS Garage
APRIL 27, 2017
5 Münchner Start-ups, die wir definitiv im Auge behalten. by Alexander Hüsing, Thuesday, 4. April 2017. München ist immer eine Start-up-Reise weit. In der Isar-Metropole tummeln sich einige große und bekannte junge Digitalunternehmen. Einige haben aber noch mehr Aufmerksamkeit verdienst. Hier deswegen einmal 5 junge und ältere Münchner Start-ups, die wir definitiv im Auge behalten. .
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Tom Tunguz
APRIL 29, 2017
Instead of raising an equity round, a startup might choose to borrow money - and for good reason. Venture debt dilutes founders much less than equity rounds. Low interest rates have increased the attractiveness of venture debt, because the cost to borrow is low. Venture debt is an attractive financial product. No wonder it has grown in popularity by 16x in the in the last six years.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 25, 2017
My algorithm is better than yours. My algorithm performs better on the precision/recall tradeoffs. It surfaces fewer false positives. It converges to an answer faster. Perhaps it requires a bit less data. Those statements might all be true. But none of these advantages confer a competitive sales advantage in the market. They aren’t technology innovations leading to a go-to-market advantage.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 18, 2017
At SaaStr earlier this year, I spoke about the huge potential of machine learning in SaaS. In that talk, I broke down some of the advances in ML that might be useful for software companies. In the discussion that ensued, I stressed the importance of not letting the technology obfuscate the value proposition of the software. Yes, ML is a huge step forward, but it’s not enough by itself.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 16, 2017
After a startup establishes product market fit, scaling demand generation becomes the the next major challenge. Doubling or tripling ARR each year for several consecutive years is not easy. The best marketers create a demand generation portfolio. There are four axes to measure this portfolio: scale of investment, sophistication, breadth and potential.
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.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 4, 2017
There’s no quicker way to lose a user or buyer of your software than to lose their trust. The software didn’t save my data. The database suffered corruption. The website is down frequently. Data integrity is a challenge every company storing data faces. Machine learning SaaS startups face another trust risk – one introduced by probability.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 2, 2017
Cloudera is the second of the Hadoop players to go public. Last week, the company filed their S-1 and revealed a massive business. Cloudera generated $261M in revenue, counts 500 clients and grows those accounts by 43% annually. 18% of their customers run Cloudera software in the cloud, a surprisingly large number. Hortonworks is Cloudera’s chief competitor.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 24, 2017
Here’s a simple truth: The world has too many mediocre salespeople, and not enough great ones. Which makes hiring the great ones really, really difficult.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 19, 2017
“One difference between the Top 10% and the Top 1% is the very top are extremely efficient with their time.” — Jason Lemkin, SaaStr Ever struggle to turn inspiration into action?
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CloseSaaS
APRIL 17, 2017
You’ve put yourself in an enviable position as a salesperson. Over the course of several weeks or months you’ve worked hard to qualify a prospect, familiarize him with your product and build a relationship.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 17, 2017
Spring has arrived, and so has a list of new features and improvements to Close.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 12, 2017
Companies purchase sales software primarily with strategy in mind. They want to collect data that will help inform the business’ evolving strategy and drive long-term growth.
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