The Angel VC

MARCH 23, 2016

Almost exactly four years ago I published a financial plan template for SaaS startups based on a model that I had created for Zendesk a few years earlier. I received a lot of great feedback on the template and the original post remains one of the most viewed posts on this blog up to this day. In the last few weeks I've finally found some time to create a "v2" of the template. just in time for a little Easter gift to the SaaS community. ;-) I'd recommend that you read this post first since it inc

SaaS Payments 217

SaaS Payments Headcount SaaS Payment Methods 217

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 23, 2016

A user has maximum intent. She has watched the humorous demo video, chuckled when reading through the clever marketing copy, and filled out the abbreviated, optimized user registration form. She wants to give the product a spin. How long does the account verification link take to appear in her email box? Is it long enough for her to switch tabs, change contexts and lose interest?

Acquisition 115

Acquisition User Experience Engineering Software 115

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

MARCH 5, 2016

First a confession. Every once in awhile I get a call from a SaaS company looking for help with their customer acquisition plan, and my first thought is "Are you kidding? The company tells me that they've developed a wonderful solution with a boatload of impressive features. But they're selling into a market that's already crowded with other vendors.

Marketing 113

Marketing Acquisition Pricing Education 113

CloseSaaS

MARCH 30, 2016

Cold calling is a powerful tool to grow your business. Done correctly, cold calling will allow you to build rapport and trust, to display authority, and to increase the desire for your product or service.

B2B 52

B2B Business 52

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

ReSci

MARCH 23, 2016

Customers are looking for companies they can keep purchasing from and brands they can become advocates of. In other words, while you are searching for customers to love your brand, customers are also looking for companies and brands to love. Think about it: with all the choice in the market…. The post 6 ways to attract more customer love to your brand appeared first on ReSci.

Branding 40

Branding Marketing 40

The Angel VC

MARCH 11, 2016

Judging from the number of Facebook likes and retweets, as well as comments on Twitter and elsewhere, my last post resonated with quite a lot of people. Some people thought it was provocative though, and some chimed in with good feedback: @hunterwalk building ANY business is hard — Jonathan Abrams (@abrams) March 5, 2016 Therefore I thought it would be worth following up on the topic to make sure that my message is clear.

Venture Capital 190

Venture Capital Business Scale Startup 190

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2016

As a SaaS startup grows, recurring revenue begins to fuel the company. Not too far into the future, the existing customer base begins to contribute more of the startup’s revenue than new customers and bookings. Each startup will observe this revenue composition transition at a different point in its evolution because it’s a function of growth rate and churn rate.

Scale 104

Scale Startup Revenue Sales Hiring 104

OnStartups

MARCH 21, 2016

Late last year, I combed through the Montclare SaaS 250 — a directory of the biggest SaaS companies in the world — to find common trends in what I thought would be a significant dataset. As it turned out, 80% of the 250 biggest SaaS companies didn’t have a pricing page at all. Expecting to find a set of data more representative of what I’m used to seeing around (essentially startups), I turned to a bigger sample, scraping information from the first 400 startups in AngelList’s ‘Trending’ category

Pricing 76

Pricing Startup Scale SaaS 76

CloseSaaS

MARCH 29, 2016

Wonder how you can make 300+ calls per day per sales rep without a power dialer? It's not rocket science, it’s all about having the right CRM and workflow. One of our customers wanted to increase his calls per day from 30 to 60—but we helped him increase it to 152, a 406% increase in calls!

Sales 52

Sales 52

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Payments

ReSci

MARCH 18, 2016

Amazon's product recommendation feature is the gold standard in eCommerce and continues to be the leader in the market to this day. Product recommendations can boost average order…. The post How Amazon Set The Standard for Product Recommendations appeared first on ReSci.

Marketing 40

Marketing 40

Software Platform Consulting

MARCH 7, 2016

For those of us who follow pricing strategy in two-sided markets, last week was a milestone. Angie’s List, which invented the home services marketplace (in 1995) announced it would drop its “paywall” The paywall charged buyers to search its directory and reviews before communicating with contractors. Angie’s List will now offer a freemium model for homeowners (buyers) and will continue to offer a freemium model to contractors/service providers.

Pricing 40

Pricing Marketplace as a Service Marketing Software Review 40

The Angel VC

MARCH 29, 2016

Since I published v2 of my SaaS Financial Plan a few days ago, two alert readers have kindly pointed out two formula errors in the Excel sheet. Sorry about that. Here's a corrected version. The Excel sheet that was linked from the original post has been corrected as well. In case you've started to modify the template already and want to keep working with the previous version, here are the two bugs that you need to correct: 1) Cell U124 on the Costs tab, i.e. the costs for external recruiters in

SaaS 101

SaaS Software Revenue 101

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 31, 2016

Q1 venture capital investment remains steady relative to Q4 2015 at about $15 billion, but down from the near records attained in 2015. Over the last five years, seven of the twenty-nine quarters have reached or exceeded the $15 billion mark, all of them within the last two years. So, on a historical basis, venture capitalists are still investing at rates substantially above average. 2016 is off to a slower start than 2015.

Trends 100

Trends Investment Startup Venture Capital 100

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Revenue

OnStartups

MARCH 21, 2016

Late last year, I combed through the Montclare SaaS 250 — a directory of the biggest SaaS companies in the world — to find common trends in what I thought would be a significant dataset. As it turned out, 80% of the 250 biggest SaaS companies didn’t have a pricing page at all. Expecting to find a set of data more representative of what I’m used to seeing around (essentially startups), I turned to a bigger sample, scraping information from the first 400 startups in AngelList’s ‘Trending’ category

Pricing 40

Pricing Startup Scale SaaS 40

CloseSaaS

MARCH 28, 2016

It happens all the time. You catch yourself listening to the tail end of a sales call between one of your sales reps and a potential customer. Everything sounds right—the right words, tone, and energy.

Sales 52

Sales Management 52

ReSci

MARCH 3, 2016

In our progress-obsessed world, online shopping was supposed to kill the retail store. But after years of buying badly-fitting shirts, touch screens with unexpected features, and didn't-know-they-were-that-color shoes online, consumers want to try something else. In response, eCommerce retailers that…. The post eCommerce Marketing goes retro: From clicks to bricks appeared first on ReSci.

Marketing 40

Marketing 40

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 30, 2016

There’s a new class of company that wield data to create long-term competitive advantage. TheRealReal uses this morning’s sales data to inform this afternoon’s marketing campaigns. Hubspot motivates its sales teams not just with a target quota, but a blend of key sales metrics that reflect the strategic priorities of the company. Zendesk’s data team educates and trains its employees to use data in meetings to prioritize key product management and marketing efforts.

Data 100

Data Data Analysis Interviewing Benchmarks 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

MARCH 21, 2016

There are two common ways to model the growth of a SaaS business I’ve seen in pitches. the first one helps founders develop a sense for the trajectory of the business, while the second one helps teams plan for different scenarios and model the trade-offs with each strategic decision. The Percent Growth technique averages the company’s growth rate over the last quarter or so and projects it forward.

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Engineering 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 20, 2016

What are your top three priorities in your job right now? If I asked you that question, I suspect within a minute or two you could articulate them. Is the software you are selling at your SaaS startup solving one of those three needs for your target customer? And, if it is, does your software meaningfully differentiate along one of the key competitive axes that your customer cares about?

Development Team Review 100

Development Team Review Technical Review Software Review Innovation 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 17, 2016

Clay Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, asserted in a recent interview that we understand only half of the marketing puzzle: the marketing science involved in a competitive ecosystem, when consumers are buying millions of products. In these markets, concepts like Westendorp Price Sensitivity and conjoint analyses work. But to incite disruption requires a different set of marketing skills.

Innovation 100

Innovation SaaS Payments Payment Solutions SaaS 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 16, 2016

Questions interlace conversations. Where is Priceline stock trading? Where do the San Francisco Giants stand in this year’s pennant race? When hiring a litigation attorney, what are the key questions to ask? Are there any grammatically sound sentences in English where every word starts with the same letter? All of these questions are instantly answerable.

Data 100

Data Mobile Startup Technology 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

MARCH 14, 2016

Numi is a little calculator with a twist. Unlike most calculators, it understands English and other languages. I’ve used many different types of calculators: from the Texas Instruments TI-89 graphing calculator to a HP 12C with its Polish notation, to software calculators Excel and R. All of them employ similar user interfaces. There’s a syntax to translate the user’s desires into something the calculator can understand.

Venture Capital 100

Venture Capital Technical Review Software Review Machine Learning 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 12, 2016

The value of all public technology companies exceeds $10.7T. At the beginning of 2016, that figure touched an all time high of $11T. It’s taken more than a decade for public technology companies to replicate/recreate the market cap observed in the dot-com era, even when adjusting for inflation. The preponderance of that increase has occurred in the last four years.

Marketing 100

Marketing Cloud Technology Innovation 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 10, 2016

What do you look for in SaaS companies? It’s hard to answer this question concisely because there are so many different ways of building a great software business. The best way I’ve found to describe it is a technology innovation leading to a go-to-market advantage. That’s how I answered the question in the 20Minute VC podcast with Harry Stebbings.

Scale 100

Scale Innovation Technology Marketplace as a Service 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 9, 2016

We all recognize great leadership when we see it. But what characterizes great leadership? Is it an inspirational speaker articulating a goosebump-inducing vision? Or an executive with the five universally praised characteristics Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeiffer identified: modesty, authenticity, truthfulness, trustworthiness and selflessness? Or is it a great manager of people, someone who understands the aspirations of each report, charts a career path, assigns meaningful work along that pa

Leadership 100

Leadership Management Business 100

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

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 6, 2016

The startup fundraising market in 2016 has been difficult to characterize. Punctuated by a concentrated decline in public tech stocks, the sentiment in Startupland has changed from resolute ebullience to a calmness approaching caution. Two months in, we can analyze January and February data. This posts analyses US headquartered information technology companies which VC-led investment rounds, except for the $793M Series C in Magic Leap , which I excluded as an outlier.

Marketing 100

Marketing Finance Investment Startup 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 3, 2016

In “ How People Learn to Become Resilient ” Maria Konnikova retells the story of Norman Garmezy and George Bonnano, the first developmental psychologists to study grit and resilience. It’s only when you’re faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?

Entrepreneurship 100

Entrepreneurship 100

CloseSaaS

MARCH 25, 2016

Ever wanted a celebrity to pitch your product? Exomatch makes that happen by connecting advertisers with influencers. Their platform allows companies to pitch their marketing campaigns to influential Youtube, Instagram, and Facebook personalities, who then bid on the campaigns.

Advertising 52

Advertising Sales Marketing 52