Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 28, 2014
Aside from a startup’s internal considerations about the right time to raise money, founders should weigh the seasonality of the fund raising market when planning their raise. There’s a rule of thumb batted around the valley that the worst times to raise capital are in the dog-days of summer and after Thanksgiving. As it turns out, this aphorism is only a half-truth.
The Angel VC
JANUARY 17, 2014
Who ever said only startups love vanity metrics? Here's our revenge for all those misleading stats that we have to muddle through almost on a daily basis when startups pitch us! Yesterday I saw this post on the blog of Karlin Ventures. In response to a tweet by Paul Graham which was highlighted in Danielle Morrill's excellent Mattermark Daily newsletter, the guys at Karlin Ventures revealed the "days since last contact" numbers for their portfolio.
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Incredo
JANUARY 9, 2014
ROI is an accounting tool that is used to show actual or perceived future value of an investment or expense. In economic terms, some say that it is a way of considering profits in relation to capital invested. The purpose of ROI is to measure, per period, rates of return on money invested in an economic entity in order to decide whether or to undertake an investment.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JANUARY 5, 2014
Remember all those concerns about the security of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions? When SaaS was still a new idea, at some point in the sales process you'd get the same questions: Who's got my data? Who can see it? Is it safe? As SaaS has matured, maybe you thought those concerns were dead and gone. You'd be wrong. SaaS security is still an issue Yes, SaaS solutions have been widely adopted by enterprises, and in many cases they're preferred over on-premises applications.
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CloseSaaS
JANUARY 30, 2014
Want to get better results from your cold calling efforts? Here’s a simple step-by-step guide on how to strategically improve your outbound phone sales approach. If you are a startup that’s doing cold calling, you're always trying to improve your results.
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Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 1, 2014
Like many others, during my work day I fall into the firefighting trap, a time mis-allocation problem that leaves me focusing on urgent, but not necessarily important tasks. Firefighting is addictive because it’s fast-paced, nonstop and fun. But firefighting is exhausting and leaves me feeling as if I haven’t made progress toward my goals.
The Angel VC
JANUARY 3, 2014
First of all, a Happy New Year to all readers of this blog. I hope you've had a great start into the new year, and I wish you a happy, healthy and prosperous (and of course SaaSy ) 2014. I've done a bit of reflection on what I've learned in the last couple of months. Here are six things that I think SaaS founders should keep in mind in 2014. This is obviously not meant as a definite or comprehensive list by any means.
Incredo
JANUARY 9, 2014
Vine is a mobile app that is a must for any small business that’s in social media marketing. Vine is owned by Twitter and it lets users generate and post petite video clips with the max length of 6 seconds. Not only can videos be shared, but they can also be embedded on socia l networking services like Facebook. 1. Reveal your products —Vine can be used to reveal anything and everything about your product or service to your customers.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 14, 2014
Churn is one of the most important metrics for businesses. Churn dictates customer lifetime, lifetime value (CLV), customer acquisition spend and customer success spending. In short, churn is pivotal number to evaluate a startup’s business, both for founders/management teams and investors. Unfortunately, accurately measuring churn rates/lifetime value is more complex than I initially thought.
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Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 30, 2014
OODA was a technique coined by John Boyd, one of the leading military thinkers of the last 100 years, based on the German’s Blitzkrieg-style warfare which prioritized speed and surprise over the traditional win, hold and grind attrition techniques of trench warfare. After @pmarca tweeted about the concept, I read one of the books on the topic called Certain to Win.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 5, 2014
In the last 35 years, the tech industry has exploded in size from $62B in total market cap to more than $9.7T today, as the chart above shows. In that time, the tech industry has birthed some behemoths. In 2013, Apple became the largest publicly traded company, the first time a technology company held that distinction. Despite the number of massive companies built over the past three decades, these tech giants represent an increasingly small amount of the total value in the technology sector.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 26, 2014
Last week, I spent some time at HeavyBit , the community for developer focused companies in SoMa, chatting with a few companies reaching scale. Across a handful of meetings, a recurring theme surfaced for these B2D (business-to-developer companies). How should their sales and marketing apparatuses be built? Do the field sales models of infrastructure companies or the inside sales models of software companies apply when the initial user is a developer?
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 13, 2014
In “Why Winning Streaks End” , Rosabeth Kantar, a professor at HBS, explains the key to maintaining momentum in any company is maintaining the discipline of every day processes. Similarly, Atul Gawande’s book Better echoes this idea. For surgeons, the best way to keep patients safe and healthy is ticking through a checklist before each surgery.
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Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 29, 2014
Given all the momentum of the NoSQL movement, it would be easy to write off SQL-based technologies as forgotten, or simply standing still. But there’s a tremendous amount of innovation occurring in SQL databases. Amazon’s Redshift, an elastic data-warehousing solution launched in late 2012 is the most salient example. Redshift’s ability to process huge volumes of data is breathtaking.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 28, 2014
?. An entrepreneur asked me the question, what is the maximum viable churn for a startup? Within that question, a few others are embedded. How should a founder think about trading off efforts to grow revenue and mitigate churn? What is the impact of account growth on net churn? Startups must walk a tight-rope to balance growth, churn and cash. Below is the framework I use for working through maximum viable churn. ?.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 21, 2014
While the phrase data scientist may be growing exponentially in its usage , and the number of data scientists job requisitions following a similar trend , the definition of the term is hard to pin down precisely. I wasn’t sure I could define it well until I watched a talk by Hilary Mason , former chief scientist at Bitly, called Dirty Secrets of Data Science at a NYC meetup.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 21, 2014
When I worked as an engineer, I loved crafting code and feeling the satisfaction of having built something each day. But there was one thing about coding I never grew to love, despite its importance: forecasting my coding time. Every two weeks, I trudged into a planning meeting that exposed my incompetent forecasting. During these meetings, each person in turn would review their commitments for the last two weeks and provide an update.
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Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 20, 2014
As recently as six months ago, it was easy to disregard the Internet of Things (IoT) as just a theoretical market that Cisco measured in the trillions , but whose potential never seemed to materialize. That’s all changing. The past year ushered in a new era for the Internet of Things for three reasons. First, venture capitalists invested nearly $1B of capital in the IoT in 2013, more than 3% of all VC investments by dollars.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 19, 2014
Each year the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters release data characterizing the state of the startup market. I’ve analyzed the 2013 data and there are three important trends I observed. All in all, the startup exit market is quite healthy. Startup exit values are increasing more than 7% per year, on average. The number of exits is flat-to-down during the ten year period I studied.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 15, 2014
On the heels of last week’s post about the Health of the Public Technology Market , Felix Salmon asked the thought-provoking question above. Despite the 68x growth in the value of technology market caps since 1980, are newer average technology companies worth less? Surprisingly, yes. The average public tech company value has falled by more than 2/3rds from $4.3B in the early 80s to $1.4B today, as measured in 2014 dollars.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 12, 2014
I’ll never forget the first time I was assigned a sales quota. I was six months into a sales role at Google in which I on-boarded and managed the accounts of social networks running AdSense ads. Our key metric was customer satisfaction and retention. After a few months, I was starting to get into a groove. And then, our team was assigned a new manager who put the team on a quota, sending me into a tailspin.
As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 8, 2014
For Google, seasonality is an important factor in forecasting quarterly revenue growth. In the advertising business, Q4 is always the strongest, followed by Q1. Q2 is the weakest. In Google’s latest financial year, the difference between the weakest and strongest quarters was 22%: $14.4B in Q4 and $11.8B in Q2. I wondered if the same were true for SaaS companies.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 7, 2014
Yesterday, I walked the sprawling floor of the Consumer Electronics Show. These are the six key themes/trends I noted. The Coming of Era of Drones - I saw barrel-rolling quad-copters and parkouring wheeled robots dancing in synchrony to hiphop music. It was awe-inspiring and terrifying at the same time. If you watch the video, I think you’ll agree the mechanisms to control drones are rapidly becoming more sophisticated.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 6, 2014
Tien is the founder and CEO of Zuora [1], and was formerly CMO and CSO at Salesforce. He is a brilliant marketer and created the notion of the three doors to SaaS success. He spoke about this innovation at a recent CMO summit; the video is here. If you visit Zuora’s website, you’ll see Zuora’s three doors along the top of the page: Subscription Economy, Why Zuora & How It Works.
Incredo
JANUARY 3, 2014
Using videos to boost your social selling cycle is one marketing tip that is important for your business if you want to succeed. However, there are some myths about video use: Videos are just for kids. It’s way too expensive. Videos are very complicated and difficult. Videos are only used for entertainment. It’s too time consuming. These are all just myths about video marketing and if you believe in the above, you will be really surprised after reading this article.
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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.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 2, 2014
Earlier this week, Zappos declared they will abandon traditional management structure for holacracy , a management ethos that eschews pyramids and hierarchy in favor of self-organizing groups, called holons. It’s not a structure without management, but one of distributed authority and management. Below is a schematic describing holacracy at a high level.
CloseSaaS
JANUARY 22, 2014
Many sales managers train their sales teams in closing techniques, sales process and closing, but what about rejection? What can you do the prepare your team for the volume of rejection they will encounter in sales?
Aber Law Firm
JANUARY 12, 2014
SaaS Indemnity – What Types of Insurance should a SaaS Company Purchase? Every SaaS company should have insurance , as any typical business should and would. However, there are a few significant differences that every SaaS company should be aware of (by the way, insurance is a form of indemnity = way to shift/move liability by contract). 1) Commercial General Insurance.
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