April, 2017

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A Tale of Two Go To Market Strategies

Tom Tunguz

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.

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Growth hacking was invented with a mint julep and two beers

Hitenism

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.

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Why startups should hire an HR person sooner rather than later

The Angel VC

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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The Five Phases of Sales Enablement Maturity

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

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.

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Beyond the Basics of A/B Tests: Highly Innovative Experimentation Tactics You Need to Know

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.

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3 Ways to Waste Your Marketing Budget

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

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.

Marketing 100

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Is There a No Man's Land in SaaS ACVs?

Tom Tunguz

A founder asked me recently if a dead zone in ACVs (average contract value) exist around the $10k price point. Yesterday, I listened to a podcast in which an executive asserted that infrastructure software priced lower than $250k in ACV threatens the viability of the company. What does the data show? I’ve plotted the distribution of ACV at IPO for all public software companies.

SaaS 133
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riskmethods Receives an Additional 13.5 Million Euro Growth Capital

The SaaS Garage

Positioned for Continued Growth and Market Leadership: riskmethods Receives an Additional 13.5 Million Euro Growth Capital. By Businesswire , April 26, 2017 08:00 AM. Digital+ Partners leads Series-B financing. Previous investors, EQT Ventures, Senovo and Bayern Kapital all co-funded the round. MUNICH & BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–riskmethods, the leading provider of solutions to identify, assess, and mitigate global supply chain risk, has successfully completed its Series-B financing

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Why Every Saas Company Should Try Concierge Onboarding

Sujan Patel

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.

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How You Battle the "Data Wheel of Death" in Growth

Brian Balfour

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.

Data 62
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How Investors & Strategic Buyers Evaluate Integrated Payment Strategies

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.

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10 bad habits that make sales reps less productive

CloseSaaS

“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?

Sales 52
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In 5 Min Combine all Advertising Reports

Rakam

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

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The Asset Allocator in Chief

Tom Tunguz

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?

Startup 116
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Loyalty Prime Amongst The Five Munich-based Startups Which “deutsche statups Will Definitely Keep An Eye On”

The SaaS Garage

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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The Big Payoff of Application Analytics

Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.

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Ixia goes native to build its cloud visibility solution

Network World

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.

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3 Major Recommendation Algorithm Mistakes Fortune 500 Companies Make

ReSci

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.

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NYC Enterprise Sales Forum: Fireside Chat with Steli Efti

CloseSaaS

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.

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Startup Best Practices 25 - Bounding the Unknown Unknowns

Tom Tunguz

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.

Startup 109
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Driving Growth, Customer Satisfaction, and Retention through Usage-Based Pricing

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

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A Spike of Venture Debt in Startups

Tom Tunguz

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.

Startup 108
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SMB or Enterprise - Which is the Better Go To Market in SaaS?

Tom Tunguz

A friend recently asked, “Which path is better for SaaS startups? SMB to mid-market to enterprise or straight to enterprise?” It’s a key strategic question for many founders building software companies. Startups that initially target small to medium businesses benefit from several key advantages. First, these businesses are faster to revenue.

SMB 102
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My Algorithm is Better than Yours

Tom Tunguz

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.

Scale 100
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When Machine Learning Just Isn't Enough

Tom Tunguz

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.

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Addressing Top Enterprise Challenges in Generative AI with DataRobot

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.

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The Four Dimensions of a Demand Generation Portfolio

Tom Tunguz

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.

Scale 100
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Managing a User's Trust with Machine Learning SaaS Software

Tom Tunguz

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.

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Benchmarking Cloudera's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up

Tom Tunguz

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.

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Price negotiations: How to respond when a competing vendor underbids you

CloseSaaS

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.

Pricing 52
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From Whims to Wins: How a Customer-Centric Portfolio Transforms Product Strategy

Speaker: John Mansour - President, Product Management University

You know that sinking feeling. You’ve come up with a winning product strategy, everyone’s on board and energized, and you’re halfway down the path to execution only to have it submarined by something someone convinced your leadership was more strategic! It’s a scenario that’s all too familiar, and it exemplifies one of the biggest struggles with individual product strategies.

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Sales leaders, here’s how to deliver bad news to your team (a no B.S. 5-step guide)

CloseSaaS

Another Monday morning: The sun’s shining, the investors are happy, and the entire office seems to be in an exceptionally good mood. You can just tell it’s gonna be a great week. Or so you thought, until you got that call.

Sales 52
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3 surprisingly easy inside sales methods used by the pros

CloseSaaS

“Sign this contract RIGHT now!” “You need this product more than you need AIR!” “Buy. Buy. Buy. Buy. Buy!!!!” That’s how many sales professionals come off when they’re talking to prospects.

Sales 52
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How the best sales software DOUBLES productivity instead of running it into the ground

CloseSaaS

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.