March, 2014

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Cohort Analysis: A (practical) Q&A [Guest Post]

The Angel VC

My colleague Nicolas wrote a great guide with tips and tricks on how to do cohort analyses which I'd like to share with the readers of this blog. Thanks, Nicolas, for allowing me to guest publish it here. Without further ado, here it is! - - - - - - - - - - At Point Nine we believe that the only way to get a real sense of user retention and customer lifetime is doing a proper cohort analysis.

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The Metrics-driven SaaS Business

Chaotic Flow

My first serious lesson in the criticality of SaaS metrics was about six years ago when I was unexpectedly stumped in a board of directors meeting. I had just presented the booking plan for the year and one of the Director’s in the meeting said that the plan was good, but we really needed to increase our booking rate. My first reaction was something like: “Well our current booking rate is pretty strong and we’re a SaaS business, so even with no immediate improvement to bookings we’ll continue to

Metrics 156
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How Fast Must a SaaS Startup Grow to Raise a Series A?

Tom Tunguz

Last week, Sean Ellis made an interesting comment in response to this post on public SaaS companies’ growth rates : I’m guilty of giving the same advice to startup founders without providing a transparent rationale. This post is my explanation of why the 15-20% MRR growth number is a reasonably good target for post-Seed/pre-Series A SaaS startups to aim for.

Startup 105
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How to give references that sell: Startup sales negotiations 101

CloseSaaS

When you're talking with prospective clients, they'll sometimes ask you for references. They want to talk with someone other than you to get a real customer's perspective on your product and service.References of happy customers are one of the most powerful sales tools you have.

Startup 52
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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Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business.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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Creating your Enterprise SaaS Agreement

Aber Law Firm

3 Things to Consider When Creating your Enterprise SaaS Agreement Lots of clients ask me to help them with their enterprise SaaS agreement models. The discussion always starts with; well tell me about your ‘enterprise’ SaaS offering. Too often the clients don’t have it all mapped out, so we then talk about the following 3 issues. Its About Price and When Your Customer Pays.

More Trending

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A framework for optimising your Growth Engine

Aaron Beashel

In a recent post on my blog titled 4 stages of growth hacking , I make the point that optimising your Growth Engine is often an overlooked step of the Growth process. Without having an optimised growth engine (particularly an optimised acquisition funnel & a low churn rate ) you will have a very difficult time scaling your growth either because you cannot find profitable channels or your high churn rate means you’ll hit a growth ceiling.

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Subscriber Cannibalization and Other Mysteries in Content Marketing

Tom Tunguz

As I’ve described in a previous post , this blog’s goal is to create and sustain relationships with readers across the startup landscape. Tuning the engine is proving much harder than I expected and I suspect that content marketers are facing similar issues. For example, over the past 18 months I’ve witnessed a halving of RSS subscribers to this blog.

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My Surreal UberX Experience

Tom Tunguz

Last week, I had a surreal experience with Uber. It was mid-morning on Friday and I pushed a button to request an UberX as I walked out of Sightglass, the coffee shop deep in the South of Market district. When the car arrived a few minutes later, I got in. Without saying a word, the driver passed me his iPhone. Confused, I looked up from my emails and he mouthed to me, “I am deaf.

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Reflections on YCombinator Demo Day: How the Seed Market Has Changed

Tom Tunguz

Earlier this week, I attended the Spring YCombinator Demo Day. I’ve been attending for six years now. Each time, I’m impressed by the intelligence, ambition and the polish of the founders presenting companies only a few weeks or months old. As I listened to the pitches, I wondered if the types of startups founders decide to build at YC has changed over time and whether those trends are lagging or leading indicators of the market as a whole.

Scale 100
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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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Benchmarking Box's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up

Tom Tunguz

Yesterday, Box filed for its IPO and released its S-1. I enjoy going through S-1s because quite a bit about a private company is revealed and though only a subset of information is released, the S-1 discloses some very important details about the business operations. Over the past several months, I’ve analyzed the basket of the roughly 40 public SaaS companies many different ways.

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Startup Best Practices 6 - Avoiding the Bike Rack Effect

Tom Tunguz

Imagine a city council meeting with three agenda items: a $100M power plant zoning approval, a request to build a $10,000 bike rack for city sidewalks and and a $100 proposal to buy refreshments for the annual picnic. The power plant discussion takes all of 3 minutes to reach approval, as does the refreshment budget. But the $1000 bike rack debate drags on for hours as council members debate the right materials, the best color scheme and the right way to announce the project.

Startup 100
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The Hardest Round to Raise for Startups

Tom Tunguz

Over the past few years, I’ve debated the existence of a Series A crunch and found in that analysis that the volume of Series As was increasing. This trend hasn’t abated. The number of Series As has grown by 31% annually for the past 5 years, reaching more than 831 Series As in 2013, up from 284 in 2009. In short, no founder should be concerned about the Series A market.

Startup 100
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The Machinery of Blogging

Tom Tunguz

I’ve been getting a few questions about the tools I use to publish this blog, so I figured I’d write about it and reveal the machinery behind the curtain. I use four main tools Jekyll, Github Mou, and RStudio. Jekyll is the blogging engine; Github is the hosting provider; Mou is the app I use to write these posts; and RStudio is the place I analyze data and make charts.

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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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Are VC Mega-Rounds the New Normal?

Tom Tunguz

Each morning’s news seems to bring another fund-raising announcement of ever larger scale. Just a few months ago, Pure Storage raised $150M in the largest ever venture investment in a storage company. These record financings certainly generate significant press interest. But how representative of the fund raising environment are these mega-rounds?

Finance 100
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How Quickly Does a SaaS Startup Have to Grow to Go Public?

Tom Tunguz

At the time of the IPO, the median Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company generates $100M in revenue, creates $2.6M in profit and holds $85M in cash on the balance sheet. A company in this position typically raises $107M in its IPO and trades at 11x revenue, for a $1.1B market cap. The path to getting there is revealing. Below is a chart showing the median revenue ramp of the 41 publicly traded SaaS companies by year since founding.

SaaS 100
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The New Market Places

Tom Tunguz

One of the most important trends in the Internet at the moment is unbundling. Entrepreneurs are picking apart Craigslist and eBay, vertical by vertical. At the same time, other entrepreneurs have replicated the core functions and features of Facebook and LinkedIn , creating hugely valuable companies. But simply calling this trend unbundling doesn’t do the movement justice, particularly in the transactional web.

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A Moore's Law for Data

Tom Tunguz

Since the first transistor, increasing speed has been at the core of much innovation in Silicon Valley. Over more than three decades, Moore’s Law has remained the engine of progress in chip technology. I’ve been wondering if a analogous productivity law will be written for data. One level up the stack from the chip, software has benefitted tremendously from chip speed.

Data 100
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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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Great SaaS Companies Focus on Behavior Change

Tom Tunguz

Most SaaS companies provide tools to help people accomplish a goal in a better way than they could before. A key part of a SaaS startup’s toolkit, then, is changing end user behavior. A startup that doesn’t change the behavior of a customer will see the customer churn in a few months or at the expiration of their contract. Customers don’t change their behavior for many reasons.

SaaS 100
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Do More Competitors in a Sector Decrease Fundraising Success?

Tom Tunguz

Over the last 12 years, the number of startups founded has grown each year by 25%, according to Crunchbase data. That’s quite an acceleration each year! See the chart here. As the number of companies in a sector grows, do the odds of successfully raising capital decrease? The chart above shows startup company formation rates, the number of new companies formed each year from 2004-2011 by Crunchbase sector.

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Misc bug fixes this week

CloseSaaS

In an effort to be more transparent about product improvements, here's a list of some things we launched this week (along with making Call Forwarding available on all calling-enabled plans).

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Call forwarding now offered on Pro plans

CloseSaaS

Call forwarding is now offered on all of our calling enabled plans (Pro/Business/Enterprise). We've also enabled call forwarding for our non-US customers who are on the Business and Enterprise offering. No matter where you are in the world, you'll always stay on top of your sales game.

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Innovation Systems: Advancing Practices to Create New Value

As technology transforms the global business landscape, companies need to examine and update their internal processes for innovation to keep pace. Ultimately, organizations will have to improve the velocity of innovation by creating repeatable processes that support ideation, exploration, and incubation, essential to capturing an idea’s full value.

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The 5 biggest risks when hiring salespeople for your startup!

CloseSaaS

When startup founders decide to hire their first salesperson, they try to assess the risks involved in changing their engineering-focused culture by bringing in someone for sales.They know what the upside could be, but wonder what the downside of making their first sales hire might look like.

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Introducing Smart Fields to add more context to your search results

CloseSaaS

One month ago, we launched customizable columns on the Leads search view, which let you add some extra basic fields (lead description, URL, custom field, creation user/date, or last updated user/date) to the table.

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3 outbound sales objections any inside sales team needs to learn to overcome!

CloseSaaS

If you're doing outbound sales, you'll need to anticipate objections and prepare for them. Part of your outbound sales preparation should be to create an effective outbound sales calling script as well as your sales objection management document.

Sales 52
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Launched: Even more powerful ways to search

CloseSaaS

Since the original launch of search filters on the Leads page, Close users can filter their leads by a huge number of criteria (literally thousands of options). But we've also heard requests for even more ways to search in order to build "The Perfect Smart View".

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Software Composition Analysis: The New Armor for Your Cybersecurity

Speaker: Blackberry, OSS Consultants, & Revenera

Software is complex, which makes threats to the software supply chain more real every day. 64% of organizations have been impacted by a software supply chain attack and 60% of data breaches are due to unpatched software vulnerabilities. In the U.S. alone, cyber losses totaled $10.3 billion in 2022. All of these stats beg the question, “Do you know what’s in your software?

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Creating your Enterprise SaaS Agreement

Aber Law Firm

3 Things to Consider When Creating your Enterprise SaaS Agreement. Lots of clients ask me to help them with their enterprise SaaS agreement models. The discussion always starts with; well tell me about your ‘enterprise’ SaaS offering. Too often the clients don’t have it all mapped out, so we then talk about the following 3 issues. Its About Price and When Your Customer Pays.

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The 7 essential rules for successful enterprise sales for startups!

CloseSaaS

Enterprise sales is a very unique territory with its own playbook, and it's really important to get to know the rules of the game. Here are the seven essential startup rules for successful enterprise sales.

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Get your startup hustle on!

CloseSaaS

Someone recently asked us "How should a startup hustler hustle?" We thought we would put together some resources to help you get your startup hustle on!

Startup 52