Chaotic Flow

JUNE 17, 2014

The SaaS community has gained a solid understanding of SaaS financial metrics, as well as many of the operational principles required to achieve them. However, there has always been an obvious gap between what happens on the top line and what happens on the ground. This is about to change! The SaaS industry is maturing beyond simple, historical SaaS financial measures toward sophisticated operational measures in the form of new SaaS customer success metrics and predictive analytics.

Metrics 138

Metrics SaaS Business Customer Success 138

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 30, 2014

A terrific SaaS VP of Marketing once told me, “If the sales team is focused on hitting this quarter’s revenue target, then the marketing team ought to be focused on next quarter and the following quarter.” In SaaS companies, one of the marketing department’s primary responsibilities is generating sufficient customer interest to enable the company to achieve their revenue targets.

Scale 148

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Marketing 148

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

JUNE 3, 2014

Inbound marketing can be very cost-effective, but it can also be slow. Inbound marketing relies on prospective customers making contact with vendors. That's the other way around from traditional marketing, where vendors try to make contact with potential customers. What that means is that by the time the vendor engages with a prospective customer, that prospect is already fairly far along in the evaluation process.

SaaS 124

SaaS Innovation Business Model Technology 124

The Angel VC

JUNE 4, 2014

Note: This article first appeared as a guest post on the popular KISSmetrics blog. Thanks to Hiten Shah and Sean Work at KISSmetrics for publishing it. I'm republishing the post here as a series of two shorter posts, with a few small edits. Anyone who has ever worked in marketing or advertising has heard the quote, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.

Advertising 113

Advertising Customer Lifetime Value Outsourced Development Churn 113

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Payments

Aaron Beashel

JUNE 1, 2014

I am a big fan of the Content Marketing being done by the guys over at Buffer. I think they create some great content and I have personally learnt a lot from them about happiness, productivity and other topics. Recently however, I was looking at their Open Blog and in particular the Content Marketing Report for April and found some of the statistics quite interesting.

Content Marketing 100

Content Marketing Marketing Scale Social Media 100

CloseSaaS

JUNE 26, 2014

"Your software really looks like the best solution, but we will go with Salesforce, simply because they're the standard in this field. We know their software can scale and grow with our company, it integrates with everything we need.

Scale 59

Scale Startup Sales Scaling 59

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 11, 2014

image credit: Svjetlana Tepavcevic. Is it better to raise your startup’s seed round from only angel investors, or is it better to include a VC or two? Several founders on the precipice of launching their seed fundraising processes have asked me this question. It’s a very difficult one to answer hypothetically because there are many different variables to balance.

Construction 124

Construction Finance Startup Investment 124

Aber Law Firm

JUNE 30, 2014

These Words are ‘Dangerous’ in Any SaaS or Software Agreement. I have seen wording like this in SaaS or software agreement orders or templates, and it has always bothered me. A case from 2014 addressed this issue head on, so I thought I would share the outcome of the case with you (and some suggestions to avoid this messy legal issue). Summary of the Facts: The following language was included in a software agreement.

Software Review 52

Software Review Software SaaS Sales Hiring 52

The Angel VC

JUNE 13, 2014

Uber's uber large funding round has been the talk of the day in the tech community in the last week. And it should be, since it doesn't happen very often that a four year old company raises $1.2B at a $17B valuation. In fact, according to this Bloomberg story , Uber's new valuation sets a record for investments into privately-held tech startups. When I first heard about Uber a few years ago, I didn't quite get it in the beginning.

Payment Solutions 104

Payment Solutions Marketplace as a Service Payment Services Payment Methods 104

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Innovation

OpenView Labs

JUNE 11, 2014

Four ways to help make your Scrum Meetings more effective (and, yes, more fun). To many who are new to Scrum, the strangely named and the rigidly enforced “rituals” such as daily standups , sprint planning , and retrospectives can be perplexing at best and a distraction at worst. The short daily stand-ups aside, the longer meetings such as the sprint planning and retrospective meetings can turn into mentally and physically exhausting “free for all” debates without exp

Management 40

Management Metrics Engineering Development 40

Neil Patel

JUNE 11, 2014

One thing that never changes is our desire to keep up with the news. These days, most people prefer to read their news online. According to Pew Research, 89% of Americans get at least some of their local news online. And, it’s not just consumers who are reading the news online. It’s just about everyone. While some SEOs assume press releases are merely an SEO tool, such couldn’t be further from the truth.

Social Media 73

Social Media Branding Engineering Engagement 73

CloseSaaS

JUNE 6, 2014

We wanted to share a video and slides from a recent talk at a Sales4Startups event in Palo Alto. Inside Sales 101: Sales Hiring, Cold Calling & Cold Emailing. Hope you enjoy!

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring Sales Startup 52

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 30, 2014

I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand. Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man. I’d sit on his lap in that big old Buick and steer as we drove through town. He’d tousle my hair and say son take a good look around. This is your hometown. My Hometown by Bruce Springsteen. Hometown investors, the local group of angels and VCs within a startup community, are an essential part of startup ecosystems.

Startup 100

Startup Venture Capital Travel Investment 100

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Revenue

Aber Law Firm

JUNE 30, 2014

These Words are ‘Dangerous’ in Any SaaS or Software Agreement. I have seen wording like this in SaaS or software agreement orders or templates, and it has always bothered me. A case from 2014 addressed this issue head on, so I thought I would share the outcome of the case with you (and some suggestions to avoid this messy legal issue). Summary of the Facts: The following language was included in a software agreement.

Software Review 52

Software Review Software SaaS Sales Hiring 52

The Angel VC

JUNE 5, 2014

Note: This is the second part of a post which first appeared on KISSmetrics' blog. The first part is here , and here is the original guest post on the KISSmetrics blog. Thanks go to Bill Macaitis , CMO at Zendesk , for providing extremely valuable input on multi-attribution analysis. Multi-touch Attribution Analysis – Giving Some Credit to the “Assist” Multi-touch attribution, as defined in this good and detailed post , is “the process of understanding and assigning credit to marketing channels

Advertising 129

Advertising B2B SaaS Marketing 129

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 26, 2014

Earlier this week, the Commerce Department announced US GDP in Q1 2014 fell by 3% , the most in a quarter since the recession. I’ve linked to the WSJ’s chart depicting the trend above. The decline was 3x greater than forecasted. Silicon Valley seems unfazed. As I wrote about earlier this year, we’ve seen a decline in the public markets of about 25% in consumer stocks and 45% in enterprise stocks.

Forecasting 100

Forecasting Enterprise Pricing Trends 100

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 24, 2014

Last week, the team at Wharton in San Francisco invited me to speak at the Entrepreneurs Workshop. I chose the topic of the “Five Forces Shaping the Fundraising Market” and prepared a Mary Meeker style presentation, with a chart and a bullet point on each slide, to illustrate the forces in tension. It was great fun. I’ve embedded the slides from the presentation above and will link to the video once it’s live.

Marketing 100

Marketing Venture Capital Acquisition Startup 100

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Payments

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 23, 2014

There’s a cyclicality to fundraising. Certain sectors rise quickly and become competitive while others decline. I’ve been wondering about the state of the market. First, which sectors are in vogue now in Seed investing and Series A investing? Second, is there a delay between the sectors attracting seed capital and Series A capital? In other words, do seed investors see trends before VCs do?

Automotive 100

Automotive Startup Trends Advertising 100

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 22, 2014

Jill LePore’s New Yorker polemic “ The Disruption Machine ” attempts to debunk the incredibly popular Innovator’s Dilemma, a theory written by HBS professor Clayton Christensen. I’ve been reading the debate around it with some interest. It’s becoming a really interesting conversation but I think the debate is focused on the wrong thing - whether or not these ideas are absolutely correct, even axiomatic.

Innovation 100

Innovation Technology Acquisition Enterprise 100

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 16, 2014

Recently I met a startup founder who explained a technique for building his product roadmap in a novel way. “We research what our users are doing three minutes before they start using our product and the three minutes after.” I like the idea because it is a simple and ingenious mechanism for brainstorming product ideas, and this type of product development exploration evokes empathy from a product team, which is a the first step of the Stanford d.School and IDEO’s Design Thinki

Startup 100

Startup Retention Development Engagement 100

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 15, 2014

Since it was first written in 1982, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol , the mechanism for sending emails, has remained largely remained unchanged. Today SMTP delivers 70 trillion emails to 5B inboxes each year. Overwhelmed by tens of thousands of emails, most of us can sympathize with Nick Bilton, who said: There is no escape: Email is probably most invasive form of communication yet devised.

Machine Learning 100

Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Trends Mobile 100

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User Experience

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 12, 2014

Several weeks ago, I wrote a post about the Optimal Contract Value for a SaaS company. I wondered whether startups serving enterprises might be more or less valuable than those serving small-to-medium businesses (SMBs). Interestingly, the data showed there was no optimal customer value to build a publicly traded SaaS company. Having written that post, I began to wonder about other differences between different types of SaaS companies.

Startup 100

Startup SMB Sales Hiring Acquisition 100

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 8, 2014

For the past several years, early stage VCs have entered the seed market with vigor. VC’s entry has resulted five different important trends in the past five years: The total dollars entering the seed market has increased by 132%. The mean seed round size has increased by 114% to $1.4M. VCs’ typical seed investment has grown by 50%. Mega-seeds, those seed investments over $2M, have reached historic highs exceeding 80 instances in 2013.

Trends 100

Trends Finance Investment Data 100

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 5, 2014

Marketing investments are unlike any other investment a startup. They are the least-tangible, least-measurable investments and that’s why they are perceived as the riskiest investments. After raising a round of capital, a startup’s management team has a pool of capital to invest. They can choose from different projects: growing the engineering team to build products faster, spending more on infrastructure to speed page load times, moving to a bigger office, adding salespeople to pros

Investment 100

Investment Startup Sales Hiring Advertising 100

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 3, 2014

HBS Professor Michael Porter created the Five Forces Framework in 1979 in a landmark book called Competitive Strategy. One of those forces, the threat of substitutes has intrigued me for quite a while because in the world of the Internet, the prevailing wisdom on switching costs argues they are trivial on the web. After all, how difficult is it to change from Google search to Bing search?

Investment 100

Investment Software Pricing Strategy 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

JUNE 1, 2014

In his book Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce went from Idea to Billion Dollar Company and Revolutionized an Industry , Marc Benioff shares the 111 plays he learned through Salesforce triumphant rise to the most valuable SaaS company in the world. Play 15 is my favorite from the book. Benioff writes “position yourself either as the leader or against the leader in your industry.

Marketing 100

Marketing Sales Hiring Mobile Cloud 100

CloseSaaS

JUNE 19, 2014

Close has always supported leads that represented only a contact/person—that is, leads that did not contain a company name. Previously you could create leads like this only from CSV imports or if you manually removed the company name from an existing lead.

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CloseSaaS

JUNE 9, 2014

We're happy to announce that we launched some additional reporting capabilities in Close. We replaced the old "Pipeline Report" (which simply broke down all your leads & opportunities by current status), with something much richer.

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