The Angel VC
APRIL 10, 2013
[Update 12/20/2013: I have extended the dashboard to include multiple pricing tiers and annual subscription plans. Check it out here.] [Update 01/17/2015: There's a new company called ChartMogul ( which we invested in ) which makes it easy to get a real-time dashboard similar to the template below. Check it out! ] Over the last few years I've helped quite a lot of SaaS startups to create or fine-tune their KPI dashboards.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 11, 2013
Sitting on a bench overlooking the South Beach marina, I asked an entrepreneur how he had been since he founded his company. He replied with a conundrum: Looking back I can’t believe it’s only been a year but if I think about every day, it’s taken forever. That’s a really succinct way of communicating how it feels to grind. Cementing each brick, each hire, each line of code, each product feature seems like just an incremental step, just another day.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
APRIL 5, 2013
A company I'll call "NotAGreatIdea.com" is spying on me. They know I've wandered onto their website and watched a video demo of their product. I didn't provide my name or email address. But somehow they think they have permission to contact harass me. Perhaps "harass" isn't exactly the right word to describe the email that arrived a few minutes after my visit to their site.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 9, 2013
One of the most powerful parts of the Close sales platform is the ability to search all your leads/contacts to find ones that matter to you right now.
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Chaotic Flow
APRIL 23, 2013
What is SaaS? We seem to need to ask this question every couple of years, because the answer is a bit of a moving target. It was simple enough when SaaS was merely software applications pushed through a Web browser, but now we have to contend with the cloud, mobile and even social. Recently, Scott Maxwell of OpenView partners sparked an interesting debate on the topic on LinkedIn that got me pondering it again.
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The Angel VC
APRIL 14, 2013
Following my post about electronic signing I'd like to describe another area that we'd like to invest in. It's not a specific idea this time, rather a category of startups that we're very interested in: Industry-specific SaaS solutions I talked about the topic before when I wrote about "The land of a thousand niches" and touched on it in my "1st DO for SaaS startups".
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 10, 2013
Every SaaS business must decide how to charge for the service. Pricing plans are some of the most difficult decisions to make. Equally important to the price is determining the point at which the customer pays - the conversion point. There are four different models that I’ve experienced: up front payment, freemium, limited free trials, money back guarantee.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 10, 2013
In his Stanford GSB lectures, Peter Thiel spoke about secrets. But he defined secrets for startups in a different way than one might expect. A secret is not an unknown. Rather, it’s something just not widely believed to be achievable or feasible. In other words, it’s an insight, a thesis that isn’t widely held. Exploiting that secret should be the aim of every entrepreneur.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 1, 2013
Below is my general outline for a typical diligence process. First meeting. When I’m meeting a startup for the first time, my goal is to understand as much about the business and team as I can. Founders/Team: How do the founders know each other? How do they interact with each other? Are they passionate? How qualified are they? What would it be like to work with them?
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Tom Tunguz
APRIL 28, 2013
To answer that question, you have to look for examples of the best storytellers. The best storytellers are the television studios. They divide the day into different segments to reach different audiences. Morning: news. Midday: soap operas. Evening: Nightly news segues into primetime sitcom. Late night: news segues into comedy. An entrepreneur told me a few weeks ago, when we where talking about how to build a blog audience and I had asked him how he thought about content strategy.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 8, 2013
There are three types of vision that a successful startup needs: product vision, business vision and team vision. Product vision is the dream. It’s how your company changes the world. It’s the problem that you’re solving and the solution to that problem. Product visions don’t end on launch day. They extend for years through the company’s growth. A product vision isn’t a certain feature or even a completed product.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 30, 2013
There’s something beautiful about handwriting that we’ve never been able to capture on the Web. Handwriting has style, a uniqueness to each writer and also an ability to capture the evolution of thought with crossed out words, carats and interjected clauses and margins full of edits. The image above is my favorite from Emily Temple’s curation effort of a series of famous authors' manuscripts on a Tumblog.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 29, 2013
Andrew Dumont wrote about his grueling schedule at a startup and the lessons on “Avoiding Burnout” which spurred a torrent of comments on HackerNews. For me, the most interesting comment is this one by Daniel Ribeiro who quotes Isaac Yonemoto : Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail…You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure… The best way to prevent burnout is to follow up a serious failure wi
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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.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 24, 2013
“What’s the difference between a string and a String?” I asked on the first day of my engineering internship at a startup. That comment drew some sighs from the other engineers in the cube. The pit in my stomach confirmed what I already knew - I was out of my depth. I had never programmed in Java before that day. And there I was, a Java engineering intern at this startup.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 23, 2013
When I started at Google, I began working in the AdSense Online Sales and Operations team. The demand for AdSense was overwhelming and we received tens of thousands of website applications each day asking to be granted permission to run Google’s ad product on their websites. Sometimes, automated approval systems would reject an application based upon strong spam or fraud signals.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 22, 2013
Pricing is taxation. A pricing plan taxes some element of a product’s use. For a startup, choosing what to tax and how to tax it can be one of the most perplexing decisions because the tradeoffs between usage and revenue aren’t always clear. Activity based pricing or usage based pricing is one of the more common pricing plans in utility computing and software these days.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 21, 2013
Do social networks have a killer distribution or engagement advantage on Android that cannot be replicated on iOS because of Android’s openness? Will we see an Android-first social network of real scale in the near future? I think it’s a real possibility. Open platforms enable faster experimentation and more innovation than closed ones. New engagement models can be created, tested and refined much more easily on Android than iOS and Facebook’s newest mobile product could be that first example, d
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Tom Tunguz
APRIL 17, 2013
Feedback loops are essential components of every person’s role within a startup. The most recent and celebrated feedback loop is the viral coefficient or k-factor which Facebook applications optimize to grow their user bases. The [k-factor]( [link] , a borrowed concept from the study of biological viruses, measures the rate at which an application spreads through the network.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 16, 2013
At first glance, SMB SaaS companies, those who sell Software-as-a-Service to small to medium businesses, may seem like any other software company. But they are quite a different breed. Successful SMB SaaS companies have reinvented their businesses eschewing the expensive enterprise sales model in favor of end-user centric marketing, support and product development.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 15, 2013
We’ve all had a great idea for a product that would solve a pain we feel directly. It used to be impossible to convey that insight to anyone who might be in a position to act upon it. But that’s all changing because of the Internet. Of late, it’s becoming increasingly easier for consumers to share their ideas for great products and bring them to market.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 14, 2013
As a founder, you’re always selling. You’re selling yourself, your team, your product, your company. But your pitch is likely missing one of two key components. A pitch needs to accomplish two goals to be effective. Most pitches solve the first, but omit the second. First, the pitch must convince the audience who might be investors, employees, recruits, or customers of some premise.
As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 3, 2013
Reference checks are part and parcel of the VC diligence process and most hiring processes. They are also one of the two most important analyses in hiring, next to the interview. Below, I’ve outlined my standard question set. I’m curious to hear feedback on what other questions or techniques might work. Types of References. I find it’s valuable to speak to references who have worked with the candidate in different roles.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 2, 2013
I have been writing for three years now and it’s been a ton of fun. I hope to continue to write for many more. Along the way so far, I’ve learned a few lessons on frequency, content type, idea generation, voice, titles and distribution. Frequency. There are two schools of thought on blogging frequency: high frequency vs high quality. At this point, it’s unclear to me which is better for building an audience because both work.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 17, 2013
For the Close sales software, we’ve built a powerful search engine which lets you find leads based on different criteria. For examples and insight on how our search works from a user’s perspective, check out our previous blog post about lead search.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 2, 2013
We’ve partnered with our friends at Zapier [[link] a service that allows you to integrate dozens of platforms together with absolutely zero code. Using Zapier, you can integrate Close with dozens of platforms, including Wufoo [[link] But Wofoo is just one example.
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Tom Tunguz
APRIL 25, 2013
When the neologism was popularized in 2004 by Tim O'Reilly, the words Web 2.0 captured a desire for the web to become interactive. It was a description of a movement towards social media and engaging users on the web. But more than an idea, it carried a design aesthetic which focused on the user, user experience and engagement. After all, users wouldn’t participate on a hostile site.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 6, 2013
When the core teams of a startup work in harmony, they create tremendous leverage for a business. I saw this last week with one startup I work with, Axial , a New York based company enabling private companies to access debt, equity capital and strategic acquirers. First, the marketing team created a powerful blog post and infographic, just top-notch content marketing.
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