The Angel VC
JANUARY 15, 2015
The big guy who's lifting Nick is Michael Hansen, Zendesk's first employee and a co-investor in ChartMogul As reported by TechCrunch, we’ve led a seed round in ChartMogul. We’re thrilled about the investment. The decision to invest in ChartMogul , which has developed an analytics solution for subscription businesses, was a very easy one. Here’s why: 1) ChartMogul was founded by Nick Franklin, an early Zendesk employee.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 18, 2015
SaaS startups are growing faster than ever before. Publicly-traded SaaS companies founded from 2008 through 2014 needed 50% less time to reach $50M than their counterparts founded between 1998 and 2005. I stumbled across this trend when looking at a different chart used in my S-1 analyses that compares the time to $50M for each of the 51 or so publicly traded SaaS companies.
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CloseSaaS
JANUARY 30, 2015
If you're the founder of an incipient startup, it's tempting to offer your product or service for free to get to initial traction. That's mostly a bad idea though - which is why I advise founders to focus on getting paying customers as soon as possible.
ReSci
JANUARY 30, 2015
Super Bowl Sunday is almost here, which means for most Americans, it's time to break out the bean dip and settle on the couch. Corporations spend around $4.5 million on a television spot during the game - Super Bowl Sunday is now considered. The post Supersize customer engagement this Super Bowl Sunday appeared first on ReSci.
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.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JANUARY 10, 2015
If you're marketing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, where should you start? It's obviously something SaaS companies about to bring their solution to market for the first time should be thinking about. But established SaaS companies should be asking a similar question: Do we have the basics in place? Most companies should have two essential items in place as the foundation for their customer acquisition efforts: a value proposition & messages document a customer acquisition plan.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
The Angel VC
JANUARY 15, 2015
Yesterday I shot off a Tweetstorm about some important developments that I'm observing in the SaaS world as we're entering 2015. While a Tweetstorm is a nice way of gently breaking the 140 character limit, I thought it would make sense to follow-up with a blog post. The point that I made was that most of the tactics which smart SaaS entrepreneurs developed around 2007-2009 – inbound marketing, conversion optimization, lifecycle marketing, etc. – and which gave them a competitive edge at that tim
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 29, 2015
Content marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools startups can employ. Blogs are powerful drivers of awareness and creators of purchasing intent which ultimately lead to new customers, new employees or other new opportunities. This is doubly true as buyers are educating themselves before contacting sales teams to a far greater extent than ever.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 22, 2015
In 2015, SaaS companies trade at a 30% lower multiple of revenue than last year. In early 2014, the typical SaaS company traded at about 9.2x their next-twelve-months of revenue. Since August 2014, that figure has dropped by about 30% to about 6.0x. Almost every public SaaS company has seen multiple compression. Only RealPage, Qualys, NewRelic, ConstantContact and Hortonworks are at highs in 2015 compared to 2014.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 21, 2015
Figuring out how much capital your startup may need to raise will inform lots of different strategic decisions. A startup’s growth rate is often highly correlated with the amount of capital it can invest in sales and marketing. More customers means more bookings, which means more capital and so on. The chart above shows the cumulative dollars raised across a basket of more than 50 enterprise software companies.
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Explore how integrated payment strategies impact investor and buyer evaluations. Payments are more than a feature — they’re a key to long-term success and market differentiation. They help SaaS companies offer seamless user experiences and efficient operations. Investors and strategic buyers assess these integrated payment strategies as a measure of a company's growth potential and sustainability.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 15, 2015
We’ve seen a sudden decline in SaaS pricing. In the past 3 years, the median Average Revenue by Customer of SaaS companies going public has dropped by about 70%. But has the shift towards smaller customers, shorter and faster sales cycles created less profitable businesses? Not at all. The chart above shows the gross margin trends of public SaaS companies broken down by their ACV (average customer value).
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 14, 2015
This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. There’s a SaaS company on the other side of the world founded nine years ago that is worth $2B, generates $100M in annual revenue and growing 80% year over year.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 13, 2015
Christoph Janz , one of the best seed stage SaaS investors, published a great tweetstorm on the state of the SaaS ecosystem yesterday. I’ve copied it below. There’s no excuse for not understanding your metrics, for not providing great customer service, for not understanding the role of customer success, for not doing intelligent lifecycle marketing, for not doing great content marketing…What was hard and innovative 5 years ago is #tablestakes now.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 12, 2015
These are my two favorite devices from 2014. I use each one on a daily basis and both have changed my life in a meaningful way. Amazon Kindle. In 2014, I slept really poorly. I had trouble falling asleep and when I did, I had chaotic dreams and I was tired when I woke. I thought it was stress. But it turned out to be my Nexus 7 tablet. Before going to sleep, I read for 45 minutes or so each night.
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Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 11, 2015
After writing about B2C2B companies last week , I received a lot of great comments about the differences between the B2C2B models, particularly the sales models after a company has acquired the initial Consumers. These are three sales models I’ve observed B2C2B companies use to convert the initial momentum with consumers into dollars. The first sales model is the 2 Phase Sell.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 6, 2015
This week, an entrepreneur told me his startup is a B2C2B business. It was the first time I’d heard this acronym, and I thought it was a genius moniker. B2C2B (business-to-consumer-to-business) succinctly captures the critical part of the new customer acquisition model powering many enterprise startups: winning hearts and minds of the intermediate consumer, the employees of a company.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 5, 2015
What percentage of SaaS IPOs in the last four years have the founding CEOs of the business been CEO at the time of IPO? 62.5%. In about two thirds of SaaS IPOs from 2011-2014, the founding CEO is the current CEO. Is there a meaningful difference between the equity stake of a founder who is CEO at IPO, and a founder who is no longer CEO? About 1.1 percentage points.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 4, 2015
One of the most important forces in SaaS today is the Consumerization of IT. Instead of a centralized IT organization deciding which products to buy, product managers and marketers and engineers and data scientists determine which products they think would serve them best and buy them directly, often using a credit card. This movement is transformative and its impact is immediate.
As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.
CloseSaaS
JANUARY 29, 2015
Ever since we introduced the Explorer's beta, we've been gathering a lot of feedback from the community. The vast majority of you enjoyed it and found it insightful, but you also pointed out some errors.
CloseSaaS
JANUARY 28, 2015
I preach the gospel of the follow-up almost every day of my life. I've written an entire book about it. And if you're in sales, you've probably come across these follow-up emails that employ humor to elicit a response. Do they work?
CloseSaaS
JANUARY 26, 2015
I had the honor to speak at last years Marketing Rockstars Festival in Austria and talk about my favorite subject: The Entrepreneurial Hustle :) Below the description and video of the talk. Looking forward to speaking at this years Marketing Rockstars Festival again in May!
CloseSaaS
JANUARY 23, 2015
This is a guest post by Shannon Byrne, Content & PR Manager for Mention where she crafts words, creates strategies, and recruits loyal brand advocates. She also really likes live music, craft beer, and laughing at her own jokes. She's based in New York. Say hi @ShannnonB.
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.
CloseSaaS
JANUARY 22, 2015
We've already established that in the long run, sales teams working with scripts outperform those working without scripts. What we haven't covered is how to actually create sales documentation.
CloseSaaS
JANUARY 20, 2015
The quality of the relationships among co-founders is one of the most important elements of successful startups. That’s why so many VCs and investors care not only about your pitch, your idea and your numbers but also about the interactions within your team.
CloseSaaS
JANUARY 16, 2015
We already posted the recording of my Lean Startup Conference keynote, so here's my LSC14 Ingnite talk. Brutally abbreviated because of technical issues that affected their scheduling, but this means you'll get the essence of lean sales, highly condensed, in just 4 minutes and 44 seconds.
CloseSaaS
JANUARY 5, 2015
“Hey, can you help me? Can you tell me how to get to Silicon Valley?” Standing in the middle of the bustling San Francisco airport, I picked a friendly-looking stranger to help me find my way. He gave me a puzzled look, but San Franciscans are used to weird people asking weird questions.
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.
CloseSaaS
JANUARY 12, 2015
You’ll believe this salesperson to be your startup’s savior. He’s got an incredible Rolodex and 30 years of relevant industry experience. Let’s call him Charlie Charlatan.
CloseSaaS
JANUARY 9, 2015
We originally published this as a guestpost on the awesome blog of our friends at mention, but wanted to share it with you too, so here's our social sales success story:
CloseSaaS
JANUARY 15, 2015
Tell us a little bit about your business? We make Countfire, an app that automates the counting of symbols from PDF construction drawings/blueprints.
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