The Angel VC
JUNE 16, 2015
When founders reach out to us to pitch us for an investment, they usually have a fundraising deck which they’re happy to send over. But every so often it also happens that a founder wants to set up a call or a meeting before sending over any material. In these cases I usually ask the founder if he or she could send us a deck first, with a view to have a call or meeting as a potential second step.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 18, 2015
When deciding to open source software, one of the key questions teams must answer is the license under which they will distribute their software. There are a wide variety of different alternatives. But, the three most common are GPL, Apache and MIT. I was curious if there was any relationship between type of license used by startup commercializing open source software, and their ability to raise capital, and exit.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JUNE 13, 2015
Up-selling can be a very good thing for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. It’s a winner on two counts: It boosts revenue per customer It usually lowers the cost of customer acquisition. According to one critical SaaS metric - Customer Lifetime Value/Cost of Customer Acquisition - up-selling is a formula for success. But selling to existing customers isn’t always easy and there are few ways it could go wrong.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 10, 2015
Join our upcoming webinar with Steli Efti on how to give effective product demos that win more new customers: -registration closed- Thursday, June 11, 2015 10 am PDT / 1 pm EDT
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.
Aber Law Firm
JUNE 9, 2015
Building trust as a concept A while back I wrote a blog post about Trust Sites , and why, if you are a SaaS company, you should have one (outside of your SaaS agreement). Well, since them a lot has happened so I wanted to provide you with an update. What is New 1). Salesforce.com has updated their Trust Site. – Take a look at their new site. [link] – They have taken it to a new level with a cleaner and simpler layout, with Trust, Status, Performance, Security and Learn links. –
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
The Angel VC
JUNE 25, 2015
For most SaaS startups, the VP of Sales (along with the VP of Marketing) is one of the most crucial hires they need to make. Unless you have a no/low touch sales model and you're growing virally (a.k.a. you're successfully hunting flies or mice ), someone needs to build a scalable sales organization, whether it's an inside sales team (a.k.a. hunting rabbits or deer ) or a field sales team (a.k.a. hunting elephants ).
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 8, 2015
Worth $11.5B, ServiceNow is the third public SaaS company, after Salesforce and LinkedIn. Based in San Diego, ServiceNow employs roughly 3000 people, and sells a system of record for IT operations teams to manage IT assets, facilities, and human resources. ServiceNow’s software allows clients to develop custom applications for their own needs, often with the help of the company’s professional services team.
OnStartups
JUNE 9, 2015
9 years ago today, on June 9th 2006, HubSpot was officially started. I remember the day, because it was also the day I graduated. (I had promised myself I'd enjoy my 2 years in grad school without too much distraction, so deliberately picked graduation day as the official start-date for HubSpot.). So far, we've had a pretty good run. HubSpot is now public [NYSE:HUBS] and still growing fast.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 23, 2015
Ever had a sales conversation with prospects who seemed like a good fit and were really engaged with you? Then their 'engagement' goes over the top and they just keep asking questions, and more questions, and even more questions.
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Aber Law Firm
JUNE 9, 2015
Building trust as a concept. A while back I wrote a blog post about Trust Sites , and why, if you are a SaaS company, you should have one (outside of your SaaS agreement). Well, since them a lot has happened so I wanted to provide you with an update. What is New. 1). Salesforce.com has updated their Trust Site. – Take a look at their new site.
ReSci
JUNE 25, 2015
Subscription eCommerce has recently hit its stride. From organic diapers to men's razors to nail polish, innovative subscription companies are popping up everywhere ' and they're taking the eCommerce industry by storm. One reason for such success? Subscription companies have customer retention…. The post Subscription eCommerce Marketing: Understanding (& Retaining) Your Customers appeared first on ReSci.
The Angel VC
JUNE 3, 2015
Today we’ve announced Point Nine Capital III, our new €55M fund. Investors in PNC III include institutional investors like Horsley Bridge Partners , Sapphire Ventures , Flossbach von Storch and Vintage Investment Partners as well as a number of highly successful Internet entrepreneurs. To our existing LPs: Thank you for your continued trust! To the new ones: Welcome on board!
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 2, 2015
In a recent podcast , Ron Gill, the CFO of Netsuite - a $7B+ market cap company with about $600M in 2014 revenue, which provides ERP software to mid-market companies - articulated the importance of the Lifetime Value / Cost of Customer Acquisition (LTV/CAC) ratio for his company. LTV/CAC is often used to justify marketing and sales investment to acquire customers.
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Tom Tunguz
JUNE 22, 2015
One smart SaaS entrepreneur told me last week he prefers bottoms up businesses to top-down companies because bottoms up sales and marketing efforts enable startups to pursue hundreds of paths into a company. Unlike top down sales processes which offer a startup one shot at closing an account (a meeting with a CEO or VP), for bottoms up products, each employee is a credit-card-carrying-decision-maker.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 29, 2015
This time last year, I analyzed the state of the startup acquisition market. Two key trends surfaced. First, the larger acquisitions were becoming larger. Second, that the total number of acquisitions in 2014 would achieve a 5 year high. As of mid-2015, the first trend continues while the second seems to have faltered. The median acquisition price for technology companies in Crunchbase’s data set is plotted above, bucketed by size.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 28, 2015
Ultimately, the goal of most content marketing campaigns is email address capture. When a reader decides to receive content consistently via email, a content marketer knows they’re developing a deeper relationship with that person. Whether the marketers selling software or venture capital, retaining an email address is a victory. In the last 18 months, this blog has grown its email subscriber list from zero to roughly 8000 subscribers, and lost about 1000, meaning the current distribution
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 23, 2015
When startups achieve hyper-growth, many of the key internal processes begin to fail under the strain of a newer, larger organization. So they must be reinvented. One of the most important internal processes, but least considered, is scheduling meetings. As Anne Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Most of us spend our days in meetings.
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Tom Tunguz
JUNE 21, 2015
As Fred Wilson wrote over the weekend , Janet Yellen, the Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the Fed), indicated last week that the Fed would likely increase the federal funds rate , which has hovered around zero for the last seven years - since the collapse of Lehman. In the last 35 years, the federal funds rate has varied from as high as 16% in 1981 to as low as 0.09%. throughout those cycles, venture capital has flourished from a cottage industry into $100B per yea
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 17, 2015
There’s a “new” $4B startup today. A consumer hardware company called FitBit started trading on the Nasdaq this morning and it’s an impressive success story. We’ve examined the tremendous revenue growth GoPro experienced in a previous post. Impressively, FitBit is growing faster. As the chart above shows, FitBit grew from $14M to $76M to $271M to $745M in revenue in four years, generating astounding growth rate of 170% per year.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 15, 2015
Open Source Software started the movement in the late 1990s. Since then, open source software has transformed the software industry. Today, many infrastructure software startups employ open source strategies to market their software and win dominant market share. Open source is a disruptive distribution strategy. It allows potential users and buyers of a software to try it, evaluate it, and understand exactly how it works because the source code is freely available.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 13, 2015
Financial discipline is a hallmark of great companies. It’s what enables businesses to build exceptional go to market models, weather difficult times, and ultimately succeed. Sometimes, financial discipline in startups is imposed by financial markets, like in 2008 when the total amount of venture capital investment plummeted after Lehman imploded.
As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 10, 2015
Compensation structures are one of the most interesting questions facing customer success organizations in software startups. How should customer success leaders structure their team’s compensation in order to align the objectives of individual customer success managers with those of the larger business? At the Customer Success Summit, Boaz Maor, VP of Customer Success at Mashery presented his rubric for answering this question.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 9, 2015
As I prepared the S-1 analysis for ServiceNow, the third largest public SaaS company in the world , I came across a section in their latest annual report called Key Factors Affecting Our Performance in which the company describes the two ways they evaluate churn. One is common, but another is unusual. Below I’ve quoted their definitions. Upsell rate.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 7, 2015
The role of the marketing team within SaaS has stretched from simply engendering awareness and creating interest, to guiding customers much deeper into the funnel. Steve Patrizi created the schematic above that illustrates the idea beautifully. In traditional go-to-market models, marketing teams fill the very top part of the funnel. When a potential customer enters the consideration phase of the buyer journey, the marketing team transitions the lead to his sales account executive, who educates t
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 4, 2015
We may have been talking about SaaS companies for more than a decade, but we’re still just at the beginning. The legacy software companies including Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and and IBM control 83% of the market cap of software businesses, representing $830B in market cap. The largest SaaS company, Salesforce, is just about half the size of SAP, and Microsoft is 8x bigger.
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Tom Tunguz
JUNE 3, 2015
I’m thrilled to welcome Mina Radhakrishnan as an entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) to Redpoint. Mina, my partner Jamie, and I got to know each other about 10 years ago at Google, where we were associate product managers all working in Marissa Mayer’s APM program. Since Google, Mina has done some amazing things. In particular, Mina was Uber’s first PM.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 1, 2015
McKinsey developed the 9 Box Matrix in the 1970s to help GE prioritize investments across its 150 business units. Not all business units were equally attractive. Some should receive investments and others should be divested. The 9 Box Matrix evaluated business units on two dimensions: industry attractiveness and competitive strength of the business unit.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 23, 2015
We're excited to announce the official launch of a set of new features in Close called "Inbox". These features include significant workflow and UI improvements around email, followups, tasks, notifications, and more.
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