The Angel VC
APRIL 24, 2015
Thanks to Nick Franklin for reviewing a draft of this post! When I talk to SaaS startups and take a look at their metrics, it still happens quite often that some of the numbers aren’t quite clear to me and it takes some time to clarify things. I’m not referring to sophisticated reports or analyses but to the much more mundane question of what exactly people mean when they use a term like “revenues”.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 8, 2015
See also: Innovator’s Solution for SaaS Startups. There’s a familiar path now to SaaS companies that start in the SMB (small-to-medium business) part of the market. Over time, they seem to inevitably begin serving larger customers. Box, Hubspot, Zendesk and among many others have exhibited this pattern. Why does this happen? I believe we’re seeing Clay Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma at play.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
APRIL 4, 2015
If you’re a software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketer and you think you’re marketing a product, think again. What you’re really marketing are promises. You’re promising to customers that you’ll deliver value over the life of the subscription. Though part of that value includes making available a certain set of functionality on day one - features to track a sales pipeline, manage inventory, handle HR, etc. - it goes way beyond that.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 27, 2015
Hardly a week goes by where I don't receive an invitation to join some startup's advisory board. Often from founders with whom I've never had a meaningful interaction. Sometimes they offer me equity, include confidential information in their proposal or send over signed paperwork. Great!
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ReSci
APRIL 28, 2015
See why millennials have become expert marketers and how you can apply their knowledge to your brand. The post From Outliers to Experts: Millennial Marketers appeared first on ReSci.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
The Angel VC
APRIL 30, 2015
The founder of a portfolio company recently asked me what kind of numbers and other material he'll need when he goes into his next round of fundraising. He wanted to make sure that when he starts talking to new potential investors, he'll have answers ready to most of the questions he'll be asked. That was a great question. By putting together a comprehensive set of data you can pre-empt 90% of the questions which investors will ask you when they assess a potential investment.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 15, 2015
Sales cycles, the time from acquiring a lead to closing an account, vary quite a bit by industry, product type, and price point. But universally speaking for startups, shorter sales cycles are better. Maintaining a short sales cycle is a competitive advantage for several important reasons. First, faster sales cycles accelerate the discovery of a repeatable sales process.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 27, 2015
The first SaaS startup started as a packaged software company. After selling floppy disks and CD-ROMs of expense software in computer software stores, the company changed models for the first time, and sold software licenses directly to enterprises. The company went public on this model in 1998. But soon after the crash of 2001, the startup’s market cap totaled only $8M.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 29, 2015
Rumors swirled yesterday that Salesforce, the $40B SaaS behemoth, had been approached by an acquirer. Dan Primack speculated this morning that Oracle and Microsoft are the likely candidates. If Salesforce were to be acquired, the SaaS ecosystem would change substantially. Looking at the market caps and the balance sheets of the major enterprise acquirers, Microsoft could certainly acquire Salesforce outright in cash.
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Tom Tunguz
APRIL 29, 2015
When I first started writing, I wondered how I could make charts like those in the Economist or in the New York Times, the beautifully formatted ones. After some research, I figured out how. And this post explains how you can do it, too. Many data scientists use a free open-source language called R. It’s a great tool for processing data and I use R to process all the data for this blog.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 26, 2015
The Information reported last week that in 2014, only 11% of tech IPOs in 2014 were profitable when they became publicly traded companies, an all time low stretching back to 1980, when the figure was 88%. This raises the seemingly absurd question, how important is it to be profitable for a startup? After all, growth is the largest determinant of valuation at IPO , not profitability.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 22, 2015
Yesterday, I met with a bright, young SaaS entrepreneur who asked me to clarify four key numbers for SaaS companies: bookings, monthly recurring revenue, recognized revenue and cash collections. These four numbers are critical to understanding the health of a SaaS startup, and they can be quite different, so it’s important to have a strong grasp on the distinctions between them.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 20, 2015
“Is there a bubble?” is a question that seems to be asked every day. But it’s the wrong question - in fact, it’s an unimportant question. Maybe there is a bubble. Maybe there isn’t. Instead of asking the question, let’s just presume we are in a bubble. Then, the far more important debate surfaces: given the bubble, how should a team manage a startup differently?
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Tom Tunguz
APRIL 13, 2015
How many companies sell each year for $1B or more? In the last ten years, on average, 2.5 US venture backed IT companies are acquired for $1B+. In the last ten years, a total of 20 companies have sold themselves for greater than $1B. Over the past 20 years, that trend has been relatively constant, with the exception of the euphoria in 1999 and 2000.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 9, 2015
In a post earlier this week, Josh Kopelman coined the term Private IPO to describe patterns in the runaway late stage financing market. In addition to the points Josh makes about the dangers of stale valuations, there is another important and related implication for founders. When entrepreneurs pursue a Private IPO as the ultimate round before they go public, they make an implicit bet about the growth rate of their businesses: company revenues will more than double before a public IPO.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 6, 2015
Yesterday, Redpoint announced something amazing: Andy Rubin, the creator of Android is joining Redpoint. I remember reading about Google’s Android acquisition in 2005 and wondering what would become of the technology; and then later at Google seeing some of the first versions of the G1, the first Android phone. Since then, Android has become a standard, and powers 81% of phone shipped last year.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 4, 2015
In the Runaway Train of Late Stage Fundraising , I analyzed the growing disparity of the public and private markets. Ten years ago, we saw 2-10x as many IPOs as $40M+ rounds. Today, we see 16x as many $40M+ growth rounds as IPOs. There’s no question that companies are waiting longer to go public, fueled by late stage private investment. I was wondering if as a consequence, we might see bigger IPOs.
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Tom Tunguz
APRIL 1, 2015
In 2013 with 40 employees, Stripe adopted email transparency , a policy that makes most emails public to everyone in the company. They posted an update in late 2014 about the success of email transparency with 164 employees. At first blush, it may seem radical to funnel emails of 164 other people to everyone’s already overflowing inbox. But it works brilliantly because it creates a policy around Institutional Memory, something very few companies do well.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 20, 2015
Every sales rep has experienced this: You've got a deal in the pipeline, you're very confident that it'll close. The prospect and you have several positive sales conversations, he's qualified, has tried your product and expressed buying interest.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 13, 2015
Learn how to save time and get the most out of Close with Zapier. UPDATE: The webinar took place already. Click here to watch the recorded webinar + accompanying materials here. You're invited to join the Close Zapier webinar!
CloseSaaS
APRIL 13, 2015
Last year Steli joined Nick O'Neill's Salesconf SaaS sales panel with Hiten Shah, Heather Morgan, Josh Isaak and others. It was a great event with awesome attendees who asked some great questions on the topic of startup and SaaS sales. Here's the full recording (53 minutes) + transcript for you.
As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 10, 2015
Whenever you're selling to an enterprise, or any other large organization, there are many people involved in the deal. One of the most painful mistakes you can make is to assume you've won the deal just because the decision maker said yes.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 6, 2015
She had raised a seed round, put a great technical team together, and they developed a great enterprise product. Now she wanted to raise a Series A, and asked for my feedback on her investor pitch.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 2, 2015
In my recent post on how to ask powerful sales questions, I talked about the importance of listening and asking questions. But there's another way to utilize questions to close more deals: flip them.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 1, 2015
Our engineering team is hard at work on a big project that we look forward to showing off. But in the meantime, we also took care of a few miscellaneous product improvements in March.
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CloseSaaS
APRIL 22, 2015
Want to sharpen your sales pitch? Make your cold emails more effective? Create a more compelling value proposition? Perfect your sales script?
ReSci
APRIL 23, 2015
How to bring the appeal (and ROI) of experiential marketing to your eCommerce and digital sales. The post Experiential Marketing and Digital Sales: A New Frontier appeared first on ReSci.
ReSci
APRIL 20, 2015
Online advertising has changed a lot in the past few years, see how to keep your customers engaged with your online ads. The post 7 Ways to Increase Ad Engagement appeared first on ReSci.
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