The Angel VC

MAY 8, 2015

Since last week's post about 6-7 things to pre-empt 90% of Due Diligence was liked/shared/retweeted quite a bit, I'd like to follow up with some additional details on what exactly SaaS Series A/B investors will look for when you supply them with the data and material that I've mentioned. In my post I suggested that you should prepare a key metrics spreadsheet, a chart with your MRR movements, a cohort analysis, a financial plan, an analysis of your customer acquisition channels and, if you're se

Development Team Review 252

Development Team Review Software Review Scale Acquisition 252

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

MAY 2, 2015

It’s common for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies to offer free trials. That’s because a lot of times they work. Done well, free trials can be a very effective way to attract new customers. But done poorly, they can be an expensive failure. I’ve seen SaaS companies make several common mistakes with their free trials. 1. “Free” isn’t really “free” Sure, it’s called a “free trial.

Enterprise 113

Enterprise SaaS Investment Software 113

Tom Tunguz

MAY 13, 2015

Ariba went public in 1999 three years after having been founded. In its first year of selling, the company generated $800,000 in revenue. Then it ramped. $8 million, then $45 million, then $274M. In a three-year period, the company had grown 33x and achieved an astounding CAGR of 224% over the same period. Ariba shares increased 300% on its first day of trading at IPO, valuing the company at $6 billion.

Outsourced Development 108

Outsourced Development Software Review Technical Review compliance 108

CloseSaaS

MAY 21, 2015

We've already covered how to schedule more demo appointments with qualified prospects. Today we're going to talk about the probably most unglamorous part of giving demos: the nuts and bolts of preparing demos that turn into sales.

Sales 59

Sales 59

Advertisement

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.

Payments

ReSci

MAY 1, 2015

Learn how instilling a great company culture is key to keeping employees happy and engaged. The post Happiness Update: How Culture Shapes Your Business appeared first on ReSci.

Business 40

Business Company Culture Engagement 40

Tom Tunguz

MAY 30, 2015

As the next generation of SaaS companies achieve maturity, they have begun to serve larger and larger customers, who in addition to demanding a great product, often request services. Professional services, as they are often called, entail training and customization. For product driven startups, the decision to offer professional services is a tricky one.

Startup 101

Startup SaaS Pricing Acquisition 101

Tom Tunguz

MAY 27, 2015

Of the 43 SaaS companies to have gone public in the time period between 2006 and 2014, 60% are trading above their IPO pop price – the price at the end of their first day of trading. The median company has appreciated 69% since its IPO. The chart above shows the trends for each of the companies in this data set. Xero tops the list that more than 17x appreciation.

Marketing 100

Marketing SaaS Trends Pricing 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 26, 2015

In 2000, the majority of tech acquisitions were primarily stock. One company would buy another using its own shares, instead of paying for the target business in cash. But since then, there’s been a secular trend to cash deals. In 2014, 90% of the tech M&A transactions consummated by companies, and excluding private equity firms, in the US with disclosed deal values were cash deals.

Startup 100

Startup Acquisition Pricing Trends 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 25, 2015

Creating a sense of urgency is one of the most powerful sales tools available to SaaS companies. There are many different ways of accomplishing this, but one of the most common ways is to offer discounts that expire. Discounts are powerful incentives to increase sales. But, they have to be crafted correctly, or they can have dramatic impact on a startup’s cash position.

Startup 100

Startup Sales Outsourced Development Payment Solutions 100

Speaker: Margaret-Ann Seger, Head of Product, Statsig

Experimentation is often seen as an aspirational practice, especially at smaller, fast-moving companies who are strapped for time and resources. So, how can you get your team making decisions in a more data-driven way while continuing to remain lean and maintaining ship velocity? In this webinar, Margaret-Ann Seger, Head of Product at Statsig, will teach you how to build an experimentation culture from the ground-up, graduating from just getting started with data-driven development to operating

Development

Tom Tunguz

MAY 20, 2015

Traditional software was initially sold by perpetual license. Then in the mid-00s with the advent of SaaS, the market shifted to per seat per year pricing. And simultaneously, freemium marketing strategies blossomed. Freemium companies provide software for free temporarily to entice users to try and use the product. Eventually, these users cross a threshold and convert to a paid subscriber.

Software 100

Software Marketing SaaS Startup 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 19, 2015

Orbiting the Giant Hairball is one of the most unusual business books I’ve read. It’s irreverent, full of drawings, and completely chaotic in the most wonderful way. Gordon MacKenzie, the author of the book, worked at Hallmark cards for 30 years to the day. He started initially in the creative department imagining greeting cards and ultimately found himself with the title Creative Paradox.

Startup 100

Startup Development Management Business 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 18, 2015

In the late 1990s, two of the dominant talent management platforms were founded. Taleo and SuccessFactors grew very quickly after they entered the market, bringing novel delivery to the human capital market. Both companies eventually offered talent acquisition, performance management, and learning tools for human resources teams. But they started in different places.

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting Scale Software Acquisition 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 14, 2015

At Gainsight’s Pulse Conference on Customer Success, Mike McKee of Rapid7 spoke about the structure of his customer success team. He projected a slide, which I’ve copied in the image above, that depicts the way Rapid7 sells a contract, deploys its software, engenders adoption and expands accounts. It’s the best visualization I’ve seen to describe the sales and customer success process and the inter-team collaboration required to be successful.

Customer Success 100

Customer Success Outsourced Development Compensation Engineering 100

Advertisement

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.

Revenue

Tom Tunguz

MAY 12, 2015

At the Gainsight Pulse conference yesterday, I moderated a panel with Boaz Maor, VP of customer success at Mashery and Mike McKee, SVP of customer success and services at Rapid7. During the panel, both men described their path to building substantial customer success organizations at their respective companies. Boaz’s team numbers 60 people, and Mike’s exceeds 160.

Compensation 100

Compensation Customer Success Sales Recruiting Churn 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 10, 2015

The rate at which startups are raising follow-on rounds is decreasing, and has decreased steadily from 2003 through 2013. Between 2003 and 2006, post-Series A startups raised series Bs about 57% of the time. However from 2011-2014, that figure fell to 28%. The same trend is true in series C rounds, where success rates fell from 43% to 35%. This decline in startup follow-on fundraising success is the result of an increased number of series A, which have been growing at a rate of 18% per year sinc

Finance 100

Finance Startup Trends Data 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 7, 2015

Mobile visits account for more than 50% of all e-commerce. During the holiday season in 2014, that figure exceeded 70% for Walmart. In India, mobile usage dominates traffic to such an extent that Myntra, the largest retailer, is shutting down their web application to focus exclusively on their mobile apps. Instagram launched a website only after the mobile app reached more than 100M users.

Mobile 100

Mobile SaaS Construction Engineering 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 6, 2015

In the late 90s, one company changed its name five times before they settled on one which today is a well-known brand. The business started as Silver Computing in 1995, then Stellar Computing in June 1997. Six months later, the company would rebrand as next ActiveTouch Systems, then six months later to ActiveTouch Inc., and finally, six months before IPO to WebEx.

Startup 100

Startup Scale Systems Review Retention 100

Advertisement

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

User Experience

Tom Tunguz

MAY 4, 2015

My first major negotiation was a potential advertising agreement between Google and Facebook. I was PM on the social advertising team at the time. There was a call scheduled at 2pm one afternoon, and I had been told that morning about it. I’m wasn’t an experienced negotiator, so I panicked. I didn’t know how these conversations worked.

Startup 100

Startup Advertising Finance Investment 100

CloseSaaS

MAY 11, 2015

There are hundreds of books on how to negotiate. You can spend a year reading them all to become a great negotiator. Or you can do the one thing that will give you the upper hand in every negotiation: be willing to walk away.

Sales 59

Sales 59

CloseSaaS

MAY 28, 2015

Want to give awesome product demos? Want to present your software in a way that makes your audience want to buy it? Learn from these seven demo masterpieces and see how you can bring their ideas and techniques into your own repertoire.

Software 52

Software Sales 52

CloseSaaS

MAY 15, 2015

The Close engineering team has been hard at work on some coming-soon email, task, and workflow features. In the meantime, we also took care of some miscelleneous improvements in the past 6 weeks that we wanted to let you know about.

Engineering 52

Engineering 52

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

Pricing

CloseSaaS

MAY 8, 2015

Most startup founders don’t think of themselves as master negotiators and struggle to come up with the right things to say in crucial moments. These moments are the perfect time to exercise one of sales’ most valuable tricks: silence.

Startup 52

Startup Sales 52

CloseSaaS

MAY 5, 2015

Product demos are a great way to convert qualified prospects into paying customers. But getting a prospect to attend a demo can be hard. Most prospects would rather tinker around with your software on their own than schedule an appointment with a sales rep to walk them through a presentation.

Software 52

Software Sales 52

CloseSaaS

MAY 25, 2015

We've covered how to qualify prospects in general in the past, but qualifying for a demo is unique in some ways and crucial for improving your demo-win rates.

Sales 52

Sales 52

CloseSaaS

MAY 19, 2015

We're looking for a few beta testers for a set of new features in Close we're really excited about, called "Inbox".

52

52

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

Product Marketing

ReSci

MAY 22, 2015

In the past few months, we at Retention Science have been cooking up some exciting initiatives to help jumpstart meaningful conversations about marketing and technology in eCommerce. One of our newest and favorite initiatives is RetailPlus, a thought leader event series that connects…. The post RetailPlus NY: eCommerce Insights from Deena Bahri, Birchbox CMO appeared first on ReSci.

Retention 40

Retention Technology Marketing 40

ReSci

MAY 19, 2015

ad:tech in San Francisco is always an exciting conference, but this year is going to be even better than ever. The agenda is crafted specifically to meet the needs of the marketing, technology, and media communities, focusing…. The post Don’t miss these three sessions at ad:tech San Francisco appeared first on ReSci.

Technology 40

Technology Marketing 40

ReSci

MAY 15, 2015

One of the most beneficial shifts about moving from 'old school' marketing to digital marketing is the ability to actually track your marketing efforts with key metrics. It's no longer the Wild West where you shoot from the hip and hope your message hits the target. You can now track how your messages…. The post 4 Key Metrics for the Data-Driven Email Marketer appeared first on ReSci.

Metrics 40

Metrics Data Marketing 40