Chaotic Flow

JANUARY 15, 2013

Since publishing the original SaaS metics blog series and subsequent SaaS Metrics Guide to SaaS Financial Performance , I’ve received numerous inquiries on various details and hidden gotchas in SaaS metrics implementation. This new series of SaaS Metrics FAQs explores some of these finer SaaS metrics points in a simple Q&A format. In this second post, I examine SaaS MRR churn, a SaaS metric that extends from SaaS customer churn which was covered in the first installment.

Churn 142

Churn Metrics SaaS B2C 142

The Angel VC

JANUARY 11, 2013

Recently I stumbled on the term "unscalable hack", in a blog post by Chris Dixon. This really struck a chord with me because it's a very important concept for many startups but I didn't have a term for it until I read Chris' post. What exactly is an "unscalable hack"? Google doesn't return a lot of useful results and neither does Quora , so let me try to explain it.

PayPal 119

PayPal Payment Solutions Scale Payment Methods 119

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 22, 2013

To be truly successful, I believe startups should determine which of the four core disciplines is their strength: product, engineering, marketing and sales - and focus, focus, focus on leveraging that advantage in the market. Product driven startups - At their outset Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram were exploratory products driven by their respective creators, Jack Dorsey Ben Silbermann, and Kevin Systrom, who were each product managers building a product of their own vision.

Innovation 109

Innovation Acquisition Engineering Startup 109

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

JANUARY 4, 2013

When it comes to putting together a marketing plan, there are lots of reasons to spend first and think later. The "spending" I'm talking about is spending on marketing programs like PR, events or collateral. And the "thinking" is about developing a compelling value proposition and messages. One reason why marketers spend first and think later… it's more fun.

Acquisition 100

Acquisition Engineering SaaS Marketing 100

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.

Innovation

Aber Law Firm

JANUARY 21, 2013

Microsoft Finally got it Right. They Created a Plain English EULA! Microsoft drafted their new Windows 8 EULA in plain English and in a way that has never been done before (at least based on what I have read … and I read lots of EULAs). The New EULA Structure. It has 3 sections: (1) FAQ, (2) Additional Terms and (3) Limited Warranty. Now you may say that is not a big deal, well actually it is a big deal.

Software Review 52

Software Review Education Software 52

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2013

Many of the SaaS companies I work with are buzzing about a new concept: product qualified leads (PQL). It’s typical to see outbound sales teams create new leads by cold-calling - think Glengarry. And marketing also qualifies leads (MQL) using online advertising, branding, content, email and other channels. But the PQL concept is novel. PQLs are potential customers who have used a product and reached pre-defined triggers that signify a strong likelihood to become a paying customer.

Outbound Sales Team 108

Outbound Sales Team Benchmarks Advertising Engineering 108

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 13, 2013

Photo: flickr/nemabix. I don’t remember much of junior year chemistry class except the lab experiment in which we made fireworks. My lab partner and I doubled and tripled the amounts of strontium, potassium, calcium and other explosives specified in the instructions. Our firecracker dwarfed our classmates' in size and when we lit them after two unbearable weeks of baking, there was no question we misunderstood chemistry.

Startup 108

Startup Sales Hiring Customer Support Engineering 108

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 31, 2013

The most important principle of start up fund raising is: Raise enough money to achieve a set of milestones that will attract a subsequent round of investment from new investors. Last week, a founder of a seed stage company came to pitch. When I told him the opportunity wasn’t a fit for us, he asked me what milestones he would need to achieve to raise a Series A - as he was raising a seed round!

Scale 100

Scale Finance Engineering Investment 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 30, 2013

Brokers serve two key roles within ecosystems. First, they introduce buyers and sellers. Second, they lend their expertise to help buyers and sellers make the right decisions in the market. The internet neutralizes the first value proposition of brokers by leveling the information asymmetry between buyers and sellers at a far greater scale with much better data than any broker ever could.

Scale 100

Scale Marketing Construction Travel 100

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Payments

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 29, 2013

Once each month I met Peter at Café Habana in Nolita for huevos rancheros drenched in tomato sauce and a glass of fresh orange juice. Mopping up yolks with tortillas, Peter and I chatted about his business: the techniques of scalable customer acquisition, the priorities of the product and engineering team, the structure of sales quotas and the ebbing and flowing dynamics of the market place he and his team were building.

Interviewing 100

Interviewing Acquisition Investment Engineering 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 28, 2013

Each time I open Salesforce in my browser, I think of Stephen Hawking. It’s because of an aphorism an entrepreneur shared with me a few weeks ago. He said: The cost to fix a data error at the time of entry is $1. The cost to fix it an hour after it’s been entered is $10. And the cost to fix it several months later is $100+. Take for example a venture capitalist’s CRM tool.

Data 100

Data Startup Business 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 27, 2013

The valley and startup-land does not fetishize failure despite the increasing reports to the contrary. FailCon is not the Darwin Awards for startups. Founders do not start businesses with the express interest to fail. Instead, the valley is infatuated with the post-mortem of failures and successes alike because within every venture are pearls of wisdom - a subtle but important difference.

Startup 100

Startup Business 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 24, 2013

“It’s something I thought I’d never do,” one founder told me yesterday. He had hired a recruiter to help him grow his team. But at some point in time, most quickly growing startups will need help forming their teams. We kicked off searches at two Redpoint companies in earlier this year in addition to several last year and I’ve been taking notes on each of the processes.

Part-Time VPE 100

Part-Time VPE Interviewing Startup Communication 100

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Revenue

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 23, 2013

I see a recurring three step pattern with data waves: First data collected. Then it’s presented. Last it is made actionable. In every data wave, the companies that transform data into actionable insights are the most valuable because their products not only identify but solve problems. Knowing about an issue without understanding the mechanics required to fix it causes paralysis.

Data 100

Data Social Media Engineering User Experience 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 21, 2013

Four and a half years ago, I left my role at Google as a product manager to join the team at Redpoint. The transition became the biggest professional challenge of my career up to that point. Suddenly, I was working with a smaller team, managing massive ambiguity in job definition, time allocation and decision-making, and giving up the adrenaline of launch day.

Communication 100

Communication Consulting Construction Leadership 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 16, 2013

Products aren’t sold in isolation - they exist within ecosystems. Great product market fit and sales pitches hinge on understanding and serving all the members of an ecosystem. Should a product fail to meet the needs of any one member, company success and sales velocity will falter. One tool I use with portfolio companies is the Value Proposition Diagram (VPD) which shows why a product is compelling to every customer - and most products are sold to more than one customer at the same time.

Product Marketing 100

Product Marketing Marketing Advertising Sales 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 15, 2013

If you’re like me, you switch task managers every six months at the point that you have added a bunch of items in your list that you’ll never get around to and can’t bear to be reminded of them again. At which point, you conclude that the app has failed you. It must have because you haven’t completed any of these tasks! Task management tools fail users because they operate without context.

Technology 100

Technology Management Data 100

As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.

Pricing

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 10, 2013

Startups are discovery teams - they venture into the abyss, like Shackleton, aspiring to cross the Antarctic, plant a flag and live to tell the tale. Because every expedition is unique, no one knows what will work: product features, marketing tactics, sales pitches, fundraising stories. Nor can the team fully anticipate the precipices and risks: competitive, legal, hiring, market timing and management risks.

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Innovation Startup Communication 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 9, 2013

Hardware competition is cut-throat. Walking through the halls of CES, every Android phone is identical. LG has copied each Samsung model. Because of the competition, tablet prices are plummeting - I saw a $49 7inch tablet ( and some were giving Nexus 7s away for free with subscription. Not constrained to large competitors, startups like FitBit and Jawbone launched competing (and nearly identical) products within weeks of each other: the FitBit Flex and the Jawbone Up Even newer segments like ges

Startup 100

Startup Outsourced Development AWS Marketing 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 8, 2013

There is no prouder boast, but also no better prescription, for executive leadership than the words Andrew Carnegie, the father of the U.S. steel industry, chose for his own tombstone: “Here lies a man who knew how to bring into his service men better than he was himself.”. Amen. This epitaph captures succinctly so much of leadership: the ability to articulate a vision and convince others of the importance of that mission; the self awareness of knowing one’s strengths and weaknesses; the desire

Leadership 100

Leadership Management 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 6, 2013

In the last 12 years, marketing has been reinvented. No segment has benefitted more from this transformation than startups who have both created the new marketing and leveraged its skills to transform industries. These new marketers creating this wave have been so effective they can delay or even obviate the need for outside sales teams. Historically marketing has been pseudoscience - an undisciplined hand-wavy concoction of story telling and a “throw stuff on the wall and see what sticks” menta

Marketing 100

Marketing Social Media Advertising Mobile 100

Advertiser: Data Robot

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.

Generative AI

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 3, 2013

Daniel Pink, former speechwriter for Al Gore, has written an unconventional book on sales called To Sell is Human. In this well researched book, Pink observes a few surprising evolutions in society and their impact on sales. The hard sell is dead. Enabled by the internet, prospective buyers know more about a product than a salesperson. This is true for cars as much as enterprise software.

Transportation 100

Transportation Innovation Consulting Customer Support 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 2, 2013

We should be living in the future already. I should be controlling my home lights from my phone. My coffee machine should reorder coffee from Amazon automatically and my washing machine should schedule its own maintenance. This kind of future demands that machines act with human intelligence. I’m asking my coffee machine to think like me, so that I don’t have to.

Wireless 100

Wireless Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Consulting 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 1, 2013

Communication is essential to the success of every startup. Startup teams collaborate in product and engineering conversations, in general management, and in recruiting. Externally, startups sell customers using marketing and sales. Startups also pitch investors during fundraising conversations. Clearly, great communication makes demands of the audience.

Communication 100

Communication Sales Recruiting Market Research Startup 100

Aber Law Firm

JANUARY 21, 2013

Microsoft Finally got it Right. They Created a Plain English EULA! Microsoft drafted their new Windows 8 EULA in plain English and in a way that has never been done before (at least based on what I have read … and I read lots of EULAs). The New EULA Structure. It has 3 sections: (1) FAQ, (2) Additional Terms and (3) Limited Warranty. Now you may say that is not a big deal, well actually it is a big deal.

Software Review 52

Software Review Education Software 52

Speaker: John Mansour - President, Product Management University

You know that sinking feeling. You’ve come up with a winning product strategy, everyone’s on board and energized, and you’re halfway down the path to execution only to have it submarined by something someone convinced your leadership was more strategic! It’s a scenario that’s all too familiar, and it exemplifies one of the biggest struggles with individual product strategies.

Strategy

Aber Law Firm

JANUARY 21, 2013

Microsoft Finally got it Right. They Created a Plain English EULA! Microsoft drafted their new Windows 8 EULA in plain English and in a way that has never been done before (at least based on what I have read … and I read lots of EULAs). The New EULA Structure. It has 3 sections: (1) FAQ, (2) Additional Terms and (3) Limited Warranty. Now you may say that is not a big deal, well actually it is a big deal.

Software Review 40

Software Review Education Software 40

Aber Law Firm

JANUARY 21, 2013

Microsoft Finally got it Right. They Created a Plain English EULA! Microsoft drafted their new Windows 8 EULA in plain English and in a way that has never been done before (at least based on what I have read … and I read lots of EULAs). The New EULA Structure. It has 3 sections: (1) FAQ, (2) Additional Terms and (3) Limited Warranty. Now you may say that is not a big deal, well actually it is a big deal.

Software Review 40

Software Review Education Software 40

Aber Law Firm

JANUARY 21, 2013

Microsoft Finally got it Right. They Created a Plain English EULA! Microsoft drafted their new Windows 8 EULA in plain English and in a way that has never been done before (at least based on what I have read … and I read lots of EULAs). The New EULA Structure. It has 3 sections: (1) FAQ, (2) Additional Terms and (3) Limited Warranty. Now you may say that is not a big deal, well actually it is a big deal.

Software Review 40

Software Review Education Software 40