Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 26, 2012
Two weeks ago, James Reinhart, founder and CEO of ThredUp , led his company through a branding exercise. The team spent an afternoon comparing and contrasting the brand attributes of Starbucks and Peets, Whole Foods and Safeway and a few other competitive pairs. The team quickly distilled each company’s brand into one word. Long ago, each of these brand selected the value that would define their brand.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
AUGUST 11, 2012
Here's an inquiry from the SaaS Marketing mailbox: Dear SaaS Marketing guy, Do software-as-a- service (SaaS) solutions with a high subscription price per customer have a better chance of success than solutions with a low subscription price? Sincerely, Earnest, but Confused SaaS Solution Developer Dear EbCSSD, Here's the good news: Whether your solution carries a high subscription price or a low subscription price, either one can succeed.
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Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 29, 2012
In every one of my conversations with Peter Lehrman, founder of AxialMarket, he always speaks about AxialMarket as “the business.” Never the company, the startup or any other word. At first blush I thought it was a trivial semantic difference, a New York-ism, but over time I’ve come to realize this word choice marks a significant difference that manifests itself in culture, product and go to market.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 28, 2012
Many of the promising marketing and media innovations of the past six years, daily deals, subscription ecommerce, social gaming and social media, have been struggling. This trend is plain to see from IPO performance and negative press cycles. I’ve been asked a few times whether there is consumer investment fatigue as a result. Fatigue is too strong a characterization.
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Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 25, 2012
Must content distribution platforms be reinvented every few years? Left to its own devices, the mob will augment, accessorize, spam, degrade and noisify whatever they have access to, until it loses beauty and function and becomes something else. Seth Godin. Given the noise and misinformation disseminated on Twitter both during the election and the Sandy disaster , I’ve been wondering how Godin’s thoughts apply to new information networks: blogs and feeds.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 22, 2012
How much is a social media click worth compared to a email click or a search click for an eCommerce site? Monetate, makers of optimization software for eCommerce landing pages released data answering this question. Channel. Conversion Rates. AOV. CPC Relative Worth. Email. 4.25%. 90.4. $1.000. Search. 2.49%. 82.72. $0.536. Social. 0.59%. 64.19. $0.0986.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 21, 2012
At the center of every startup is a secret. 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. Exploiting that secret should be the aim of every entrepreneur. Leveraging the secret means disruption and ultimately success. The genesis of every secret is the word why.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 19, 2012
Developing a sales strategy is critical for software-as-a-service (SaaS) startups. The first step in developing a sales strategy is to build a robust market segmentation. I’ve used data from the US Census to develop a segmentation that reveals some surprising facts about the SMB market and may help inform your startup’s sales strategy. Chart 1: 98% of businesses in the US employ fewer than 100 people. 98% of businesses in the US employ between 1 to 4 people.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 19, 2012
Developing a sales strategy is critical for software-as-a-service (SaaS) startups. The first step in developing a sales strategy is to build a robust market segmentation. I’ve used data from the US Census to develop a segmentation that reveals some surprising facts about the SMB market and may help inform your startup’s sales strategy. Chart 1: 98% of businesses in the US employ fewer than 100 people. 98% of businesses in the US employ between 1 to 4 people.
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.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 18, 2012
Hollywood and Silicon Valley often seems worlds apart. While movie making and startup building may always be very different endeavors, great managers use the same techniques in every discipline to empower their teams, hire the right people, and change the world. Over the weekend, I watched Woody Allen: A Documentary which profiles the great director through the words of his actors, editors and producers.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 18, 2012
Hollywood and Silicon Valley often seems worlds apart. While movie making and startup building may always be very different endeavors, great managers use the same techniques in every discipline to empower their teams, hire the right people, and change the world. Over the weekend, I watched Woody Allen: A Documentary which profiles the great director through the words of his actors, editors and producers.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 13, 2012
For years, a product can grow linearly before suddenly seeing compounding growth. Facebook is a great example. From 2004 to 2007, the company grew at a fairly linear rate. And then, the magic happened! The network effects kicked in and exponential growth ensued. Linear growth always precedes exponential growth. For market places, in social networks or in advertising exchanges, the story is always the same.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 20, 2012
I love freemium businesses. I have met with many of them, work with one and if I were to start one, this would be my game plan, the characteristics of the product, market, distribution channels, conversion point and team. Product Characteristics. The existing solutions are either email and spreadsheets or software architected before the turn of the century.
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.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 30, 2012
In 2010, Gaia Online started a user acquisition campaign to grow their user base. To simplify the on boarding process, they launched the Big Red Button home page below. It worked. Conversion rates from the home page spiked. Simple user experiences, like this big red button, are effective because users understand what is expected of them. There is just one flow.
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