July, 2016

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How Fast Does a SaaS Startup Have to Grow to Survive?

Tom Tunguz

McKinsey released a study of high growth software companies entitled Grow Fast or Die Slow. One salient conclusion: If a software company grows at 20% annually, it has a 92 percent chance of ceasing to exist within a few years. In other words, software companies must grow quickly to survive. Slow growing businesses suffer from the lack of oxygen that fuels growth.

Startup 142
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From "A as in Amiga" to "Z as in Zendesk"

The Angel VC

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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Setting Up Analytics for Your Tech Startup to Scale

Sylvia Ng

I’m a huge fan of Brian Balfour (ex-VP of Growth at Hubspot), who maintains that growth is about process first and tactics second. Tactics change and tactics fail. But if you have a process, a “machine” that lets you test and evaluate tactics to reach specific goals, then you’re paving the way to success, and ensuring that the team learns. What many neglect to realize is that this approach of focusing on process applies entirely to building out analytics as well (and by extension, company growth

Scale 67
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Stay calm and close deals: How to effectively deal with stress in your sales team

CloseSaaS

Commissions. Quotas. Competition. There are plenty of stress triggering factors in the daily life of a salesperson. By nature, salespeople are put in situations that create a high-stress environment.

Sales 52
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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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How to increase customer success with third-party integrations

Saasler

Have you ever wondered how websites are able to capture share price from NYSE? Or how Dropbox is able to feed your files to another service? The answer can only be found in third-party integrations. So, what are some solid advantages of third-party integrations for a customer? Third-party integrations take user experience to the next level and help boost app loyalty and decrease churn rates.

More Trending

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A Structural Pricing Competitive Advantage in SaaS - The Three Part Tariff

Tom Tunguz

There are three pricing strategies for startups. Maximization dominates SaaS products in the mid-market and enterprise markets; penetration is synonymous with freemium in the SMB market. Once you’ve decided on the right strategy for your company, what is the best way to price? By seat? By minute? With or without a platform fee? Modern behavioral economics study three different pricing structures.

Pricing 129
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Thoughts from IRCE: The Shift to AI

ReSci

A month ago, we unveiled our rebrand, Cortex + ReSci; two weeks ago, we took our newly revamped show on the road to the Internet Retailer Conference + Exhibition (IRCE) in Chicago, welcoming conference attendees who came to our booth to learn about predictive marketing. The post Thoughts from IRCE: The Shift to AI appeared first on ReSci.

AI 40
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Measuring Your Analytics Team’s Success

Sylvia Ng

In my last article on how to set up analytics for your startup to scale, I left off on the topic of how important it is to measure your analytic team’s success. But measuring isn’t necessary an easy thing. Here’s a quick dive into some of the metrics that we’ve considered using at 500px: # Data Warehouse Queries: Easy to define and quantify, but queries aren’t necessarily correlated with insights being generated?

Metrics 40
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How our remote team works better together: Snapchat as an internal communications tool

CloseSaaS

About two months ago, we started getting really into Snapchat. Not in the Kardashian sense. But as an internal communications tool for our growing remote team. While the Close HQ remains in San Francisco, the majority of our team members are nomadically spread across North America, Europe and Asia.

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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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Nothing simple about SaaS benchmark metrics

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

There are lots of simple questions about SaaS that don’t have simple answers. Here are a few I hear all the time: How much should I spend on sales and marketing to acquire customers? How many leads do I need to attract? What’s the right leads-to-paying customer yield? What’s an acceptable level of attrition? There are certainly plenty of surveys and published benchmarks on SaaS metrics that try to provide guidance.

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Why This New Chatbot Is More Likely To Get You Promoted Than Fired

OnStartups

Confession: For the past several months I've been furiously coding away on a new project as part of HubSpot Labs. It's called GrowthBot. It's a chatbot for marketing and sales people -- and anyone looking to grow a company (like startup folks). The launch has gone well, and my bot is currently happily handling thousands of messages. Things like "show me companies in california that use HubSpot" and "who are the top influencers about landing pages".

Startup 40
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The Quirky M&A Environment for SaaS Companies in 2016

Tom Tunguz

Through the end of July in 2016, $70B worth of SaaS companies sold. Their size follows a power law with LinkedIn at $26B and Netsuite at $9.3B. The more than $600B in cash on the balance sheets of large public tech companies combined with a recent pricing correction in SaaS companies presaged a flurry of acquisition activity. But it hasn’t unfolded as expected in three different ways.

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Which of the Three Software Budgets Does Your SaaS Startup Target?

Tom Tunguz

Where is the budget to pay for your SaaS startup’s software coming from? There are three possible pockets. First, they are dollars the competitor you displaced used to collect. Second, the company enlarges the current budget to finance the purchase. Third, the company creates a new budget. Which budget is an important question. The answer informs product, marketing and sales strategy.

Software 100
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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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The Smallest ACV to Justify an Inside Sales Team at a SaaS Startup

Tom Tunguz

What is the smallest price point at which a SaaS startup can justify building an inside sales team? This is a natural question that many SaaS startups raise as they begin to complement bottoms-up, product-led adoption with assisting customers through the sales process. There are publicly traded SaaS companies at nearly every price point - even very small ones.

Startup 100
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Learning to Code in a Whole New Way

Tom Tunguz

The last time I learned a new programming language was 2004. I had been writing in Java for about four years, and then I heard whispers of a new framework called Rails that allowed engineers to write web applications in one-tenth the time of a Java web application. Over the course of a few weeks, I bought an armful of paper books, read them, and worked through the examples.

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The Increasing Costs of Real Estate for Startups in San Francisco

Tom Tunguz

In addition to increasing labor costs, startups in San Francisco are facing monotonically increasing real estate prices. JLL the real estate broker shared their data on the average asking rent in San Francisco from 2007 two 2016, year to date. In 2009, the average asking rent was $31.37. In 2016 that number has more than doubled to $73.05, for an average annual increase of just about 13%.

Startup 100
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Clouded judgement: Convince your sales team to move from on-premise software to SaaS

CloseSaaS

By 2018, the enterprise SaaS market is expected to increase five times over and be worth a whopping $50.8 billion in revenue, representing over a quarter of the entire worldwide enterprise application market. There’s no doubt about it: SaaS is the future of the software industry.

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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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Crush your goals with this 5-task to-do list

CloseSaaS

When was the last time you completed your daily to-do list? A mere 11% of professionals worldwide say they accomplish everything on their to-do list by the end of the workday. Not a great looking number.

Sales 52
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How to onboard a sales team in 4 weeks

CloseSaaS

So you’ve just hired your first group of salespeople. Their first day is coming up, and you need to turn them into selling machines as soon as possible.

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Entrepreneurship: Why you should make the jump

CloseSaaS

When was the last time you felt excited about a Monday? Or any workday for that matter?Can’t remember? Then perhaps it’s time for a change.

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Integration: Size your eCommerce market and find your future customers with SalesOptimize

CloseSaaS

We are happy to introduce a new integration for our sales CRM with SalesOptimize, a B2B ecommerce lead generation platform.

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Software Composition Analysis: The New Armor for Your Cybersecurity

Speaker: Blackberry, OSS Consultants, & Revenera

Software is complex, which makes threats to the software supply chain more real every day. 64% of organizations have been impacted by a software supply chain attack and 60% of data breaches are due to unpatched software vulnerabilities. In the U.S. alone, cyber losses totaled $10.3 billion in 2022. All of these stats beg the question, “Do you know what’s in your software?

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Upcoming webinar: B2B sales hiring with Steli Efti

CloseSaaS

Hiring is hard. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in the game. Choosing the right candidate will always be difficult.

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The secret to successful and lasting co-founder relationships

CloseSaaS

Building a business is hard as hell. Keeping it afloat is even harder.

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Flux in the Fundraising Market

Tom Tunguz

Over the last year, the amount of series A investment in US startups has fallen by nearly 33% from a high of $6 billion to about $4 billion in Q2 2016. Later stage investments have followed a similar path. Curiously, the series B/Expansion stage market has witnessed remarkable resilience, continuing to increase despite volatility. The series a market is also seen a similar drop in the total number of investments, indicating a slower investment pace.

Marketing 100
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The Next Big Shift in SaaS

Tom Tunguz

The next big shift in SaaS is an evolution from software as a service as a displacer to a disruptor. Displacement technologies compete with incumbents on the same buying parameters. Disruptive companies change the way a buyer thinks about solving their need. Most SaaS products today are displacers. SaaS products initially were viewed as a cheaper, often inferior product to their client/server peers.

SaaS 100
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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.