September, 2013

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The 7th DO for SaaS startups – Build a repeatable, profitable sales process

The Angel VC

The last post in my series on DOs and DON'Ts for early-stage startups was about lead generation. The next logical step is sales, and so I want to write about what you can do to convert as many of those leads into paying customers. 7th DO for SaaS startups Build a repeatable, profitable sales process Sales is a very different animal depending on the stage of your company, the market segment you're going after and on whether we're talking about inbound sales or outbound sales.

Scale 153
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Not Sharing the Opportunity to Learn is a Cardinal Sin

Tom Tunguz

I have never worked for a company that was dogmatic about project postmortems but I have always wished I had. After all, project postmortems teach us so much. Learning from the mistakes and experiences of others constitutes the better part of our business education. It’s why we ask successful entrepreneurs to coffee and hang on every word when they speak at conferences.

Education 150
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Turning SaaS Buyers into Satisfied Users

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

If you subscribe to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, in most cases you can quit whenever you want.* That's great for SaaS customers, but not so great for SaaS providers. It puts a special burden on providers: They need to be sure that the folks buying their solution are actually using their solution. If buyers don't become satisfied users, they'll eventually leave.

SaaS 100
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SaaS Contract Negotiations Are Not All About the Software!

Aber Law Firm

Yea I know the $ and the functionality of the SaaS offering are important in any SaaS contract negotiations, but there is a lot more going in the mind of your buyers. I think the best metaphor for this, is from the book “Switch. How to Change Things, When Things are Hard.” Imagine a rider on an elephant. How do you get the elephant to go where you want it to go?

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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Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business.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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Customer case study: Krossover

CloseSaaS

[link] What did you use before Close? Why did you decide to switch? We used Capsule CRM prior to Close. Capsule is a nice lean CRM, but there is no way to properly track or integrate call/email activity within it.

Sales 52

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Six Key Benchmarks for Your SaaS Startup

Tom Tunguz

One of the most frequent questions entrepreneurs ask me is how does their business compare to others? Benchmarking is a great tool, if you can get access to representative data. Pacific Crest and David Skok have released a fantastic survey benchmarking SaaS metrics for early and growth stage companies. The entire report is well worth reading. Below is my list of the six most important benchmarks and observations from that report.

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The 3 Competitive Defenses of Enduring SaaS Companies

Tom Tunguz

A technology advantage isn’t enough to build an enduring enterprise SaaS company because at the core, all SaaS software share the same architecture. A relational database stores data and a web site presents the data. This is true for CRM (Salesforce), marketing automation (Marketo), email (Exchange), content management systems (Sharepoint) and so on.

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The Single Best Content Marketing Channel for Your Startup

Tom Tunguz

The single best content marketing channel is email subscriptions powered by Twitter/social media distribution. Thirty days ago, I began an experiment with this blog to determine whether email, Twitter or RSS would be the better content marketing channel. My goals with RSS, Twitter and email are two: first to maintain a relationship with a reader longer than a single website visit by creating a communication channel and second to use that marketing channel to drive re-engagement.

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What Your Startup’s MRR Figure Is Hiding

Tom Tunguz

The three words roll off the tongue: monthly recurring revenue (MRR). What’s not to love about subscription models? Negative working capital, predictable revenue growth and an average of 13x market cap to annual revenue in the public markets, with some darlings reaching 50x multiples. The list goes on. But the words recurring revenue belies one small detail.

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6 Reasons Why Your Integrated Payments Strategy Could Fail

If you're in the software industry grappling with integrating payments into your business model, understanding where others have stumbled can be a game-changer for your revenue goals. Discover 6 key reasons behind the struggles many face. The challenge goes beyond the technicalities of integrating a payment system; it delves into the strategic oversight of revenue shares, negotiations with payment providers, and the full exploitation of potential revenue streams.

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The Developer Economy: Power to the Coders

Tom Tunguz

During the past week, I’ve been tapping out letters on a 1921 Underwood portable typewriter that my wife gave me as a present. Sitting in front of it and watching the letter hammers pound ink onto paper reminded me that computer programming is still a very new field. Not 50 years ago, prehistoric programmers punched FORTRAN code on punch cards in this way.

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A Five Year Android User Switches To iOS

Tom Tunguz

On the day of Android’s five year launch anniversary and my fifth consecutive year of using exclusively Android devices, I switched to a yellow iPhone 5c. Like a well worn pair of jeans, it’s easy to grow accustomed to a mobile phone OS. Changing into a new pair is always a little uncomfortable at first. In that same way, migrating from Android to I iOS, I discovered the quirks and kinks of each OS: The iOS keyboard always shows uppercase letters, no matter if the letter being typed is upper or

Mobile 100
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Using The Friend Paradox to Maximize Your Effectiveness at Startup Networking Events

Tom Tunguz

I’ll never forget the first large tech conference I attended after joining Redpoint. Held in the movie theater in downtown Redwood City, the TechCrunch conference attracted several hundred entrepreneurs, investors and journalists. Not one of whom I knew. After a handful of conferences and a few awkward quick-name-badge-glance-then-say-hello conversations, I started to recognize faces and became friendly with the conference regulars.

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Which Half of Your Startup’s Emails Are Wasted?

Tom Tunguz

We know by heart that half of our marketing dollars are spent improperly. But what’s worse is most products waste half of their chances to deepen a relationship with their customers. There are two different kinds of email within products: product marketing emails and transactional emails. The first of these marketers optimize continuously and the other is oft forgotten.

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People, Passion & Perfection: The Key Ingredients for an Awesome Product

Need help launching innovative software quickly? Dive into "People, Passion, and Perfection" and unlock the secrets to building excellent products in the digital age. Fast-track your journey with Tech Accelerator: Agile and Cloud-Native for flexibility & scalability AI-powered innovation for faster results Quality at every step for a flawless user experience See real impact across industries: Healthcare: Empower patients and medical professionals with intuitive solutions Education: Transform cla

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How To Take Exceptional Notes and Be Productive with Paper

Tom Tunguz

As a PM at Google, I carried a laptop to every meeting I went to. I typed notes, jotted down action items, and distributed the minutes of almost each one of my meetings. I stayed organized and tracked my teams’ progress this way. But, as I learned when I starting working at Redpoint, outside the rainbow bubble of the Googleplex very few people take notes on laptops during meetings.

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Interpreting Cohort Data: The 3 Key Analyses for Measuring Your Startup’s Product Performance

Tom Tunguz

After I wrote a post on six important cohort reports , I received a handful of questions about how to interpret cohort charts effectively. When I review cohort data from companies I work with, I look into three different trends to evaluate a product’s performance. This is a cohort chart of hypothetical product indicating percentage of monthly active users each week for 12 weeks.

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How Wordpress Used VideoConferencing and IRC to Change the World

Tom Tunguz

I’ve been reading Scott Berkun’s book The Year Without Pants which details his working life at Wordpress. The book reveals a thought-provoking collection of lore behind Wordpress and in particular, the day-to-day operations of a distributed volunteer team who built a technology that powers about 20% of the internet. Scott embeds insightful gems about daily startup work life into his stories.

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Google F1 and The Cascade of Innovation New Databases Create

Tom Tunguz

The NoSQL movement launched officially in 1999 but rose to prominence much later perhaps closer to 2008 when Hadoop and other key value pair technologies became en vogue. Today, it’s hard to argue with the success of the movement. Large banks, insurance companies, biotech companies and dotcoms rely on NoSQL to power their services and inform their most important decisions.

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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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Crossing the People Management Chasm - A Necessity of Startup Growth

Tom Tunguz

One of the hardest but least spoken about transitions in a startup’s life is crossing people management chasm. At the outset of the startup, there might be three people, then eight, then fifteen. As they grow, startups often create ad hoc managers I call team leads. Team leads manage 3 to 5 people. They work alongside their team, whether engineering, sales or marketing and contribute actively to achieving the goals of that team team.

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The VC Firm of the Future

Tom Tunguz

The venture capital fund of the future will perform the same tasks as the venture funds of today: help portfolio companies, evaluate new investment opportunities and build networks of other investors, potential hires, and founders. But to succeed over the next 25 years, venture capital firms must increase the scale and sophistication of each of these duties by order of magnitude through technology.

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The One Best Metric for Your Startup to Maximize

Tom Tunguz

It’s not engagement. Engagement, (time-on-site, page views, number of sessions per day) is the wrong concept because it doesn’t apply to most products. The best metric is share of habit. Engagement fails the majority of products as the best metric to optimize because maximizing engagement/time-on-site contradicts the product’s purpose. Google relentlessly whittles down the time it takes for users to complete a search.

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The Best Content Marketing Campaign in the Last Year: Do VC Blogs Actually Lead to Investments?

Tom Tunguz

In a very kind gesture, Ivan Kirigin submitted this blog (and Intercom.io’s blog) to answer the question posed by Disqus, What is the best content marketing campaign you have seen and why? I’m honored by his comment. In response, David Fleck, head of revenue at Disqus asked whether the blog has ever led to an investment and whether that’s the right KPI for it.

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How to Achieve Product-Market Fit

Speaker: Dan Olsen - Product Management Trainer and Consultant, Author, and Speaker

Everyone working on a product is trying to achieve the same goal: product-market fit. But most products fail to do so. In this webinar, product management expert Dan Olsen will share his simple but effective framework for achieving product-market fit from his book The Lean Product Playbook. He will explain his Product-Market Fit Pyramid and The Lean Product Process, a 6-step methodology that guides you through how to: Determine your target customer Identify underserved customer needs Define your

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You’re Not Finished Selling Until You Change Your Customers Habits

Tom Tunguz

It is easy to think the sales process ends once a customer has signed a contract or downloaded an app or created an account. But it’s a huge mistake. Great products have a point of view on the way things ought to work. GMail chose labels over folders for email categorization. Pandora chose recommendations over libraries for music libraries. Looker chose spreadsheets over an SQL prompts for data exploration.

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How Web Development Techniques Are Infiltrating Mobile Apps

Tom Tunguz

Mobile apps are like packaged software, a friend who is a head of product at a successful mobile first company told me over breakfast. On the web, you can launch a product that’s 80% functional to hit a promised launch date. Around 1 am that night, when most users are asleep, you can surreptitiously push an update with bug fixes and new features, reboot the servers, and no one is the wiser. iOS apps don’t work this way.

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SaaS Contract Negotiations Are Not All About the Software!

Aber Law Firm

Yea I know the $ and the functionality of the SaaS offering are important in any SaaS contract negotiations, but there is a lot more going in the mind of your buyers. I think the best metaphor for this, is from the book “Switch. How to Change Things, When Things are Hard.” Imagine a rider on an elephant. How do you get the elephant to go where you want it to go?

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SaaS Contract Negotiations Are Not All About the Software!

Aber Law Firm

Yea I know the $ and the functionality of the SaaS offering are important in any SaaS contract negotiations, but there is a lot more going in the mind of your buyers. I think the best metaphor for this, is from the book “Switch. How to Change Things, When Things are Hard.” Imagine a rider on an elephant. How do you get the elephant to go where you want it to go?

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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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SaaS Contract Negotiations Are Not All About the Software!

Aber Law Firm

Yea I know the $ and the functionality of the SaaS offering are important in any SaaS contract negotiations, but there is a lot more going in the mind of your buyers. I think the best metaphor for this, is from the book “Switch. How to Change Things, When Things are Hard.” Imagine a rider on an elephant. How do you get the elephant to go where you want it to go?

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SaaS Contract Negotiations Are Not All About the Software!

Aber Law Firm

Yea I know the $ and the functionality of the SaaS offering are important in any SaaS contract negotiations, but there is a lot more going in the mind of your buyers. I think the best metaphor for this, is from the book “Switch. How to Change Things, When Things are Hard.” Imagine a rider on an elephant. How do you get the elephant to go where you want it to go?

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SaaS Contract Negotiations Are Not All About the Software!

Aber Law Firm

Yea I know the $ and the functionality of the SaaS offering are important in any SaaS contract negotiations, but there is a lot more going in the mind of your buyers. I think the best metaphor for this, is from the book “Switch. How to Change Things, When Things are Hard.” Imagine a rider on an elephant. How do you get the elephant to go where you want it to go?