November, 2016

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How Amazon Web Services (AWS) Achieved an $11.5B Run Rate by Working Backwards

Hitenism

In 2006, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped pioneer what we now call the cloud, product development changed forever. What once took millions of dollars and a team of engineers to create, a lone developer could suddenly hack together in half an hour. Today, one-third of daily internet users visit websites built on top of AWS. AWS is now an $11.5B run rate business and has made up for an incredible 67% of Amazon’s operating revenue last quarter.

AWS 189
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How to Create Competitive Advantage for Your Startup with Proxy Metrics

Tom Tunguz

Imagine you’ve just been named the head of a bustling New York City restaurant challenged by one issue - customers complain about the customer service. A data-driven person, you search for a metric to evaluate the current customer service to validate the complaint and then track as you experiment with the restaurant’s operations. What metrics would you employ?

Metrics 176
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3 (free) tools to help SaaS founders with their 2017 planning

The Angel VC

(As you can see, I really like placeit.net :) ) In case you haven't started to think about your plan for 2017 yet, now's the time. To help you a little bit with your planning, here are three little tools that you might find useful. If you're a long-time reader of this blog, you may have seen them before. 1. Growth Calculator This little tool allows you to enter your MRR as of the end of 2016 and a target growth factor for 2017.

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Don’t talk techie to SaaS buyers

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

No matter how wonderful your proprietary algorithms, the priceless virtues of your state-of-the-art platform, or the brilliance of whatever other sophisticated technologies you’ve got under the hood of your software-as-a service (SaaS) solution, here’s an unpleasant truth: Lots of your customers don’t really care. Most of your them only want to know what your solution does, not how it works.

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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Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business.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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Get 457% More Replies to Sales Emails With the 1, 2, 3 Email Hack

CloseSaaS

Any great salesperson knows that you want to make it as simple as possible for your prospect to take the next step. Yet, so many reps send out sales emails that make their prospects do all the heavy lifting. (Most of the time, prospects won’t. They just delete the email. Opportunity lost.

Sales 52

More Trending

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Don’t make these mistakes when promoting your startup

Hacking Revenue

Far too many founders fall into the trap of thinking their products are too good to not be noticed. Here’s a fair warning for you: Your product will not be noticed. This optimistic misconception is likely a large contributing factor to the 14% startup failure rate, due to poor marketing. That myth isn’t alone. There are plenty of other misconceptions founders make and end up regretting.

Startup 43
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Winning with Data Available on Audible

Tom Tunguz

In June, Frank Bien and I published our book, Winning with Data. It describes through case studies how some of the most successful startups use data to create sustainable competitive advantage. Since then, we’ve sold thousands of copies. Today, we’re releasing an Audible version of the book. I have 8 free copies to give away to readers. If you’d like to throw your hat in the ring for one of the codes, please answer a one question survey about SaaS startups.

Data 100
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Customer Segmentation Strategy: The Importance of The Right Message

ReSci

As marketers, you know that personalization and relevancy are crucial to reaching today’s audience. There’s a lot of emphasis on 1-to-1 personalization, and it’s a concept everyone seems to understand. But what does the concept really mean when it’s time to deliver…. The post Customer Segmentation Strategy: The Importance of The Right Message appeared first on ReSci.

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SaaSOptics Seals Deals with New CEO and Funding

SaaSOptics

SaaSOptics, a cloud-based subscription platform, steps into the limelight as they announce a newly closed $1.8 million funding round, prepare to present at Venture Atlanta, and add new executive leadership. Tim McCormick, a B2B software industry veteran, will now serve as the company’s new CEO. Read more.

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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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How to manage your sales qualification process in Close with Process Street

CloseSaaS

Getting an entire sales team to follow a consistent process is always a challenge. So, to make things easier, we've devised a clever way to integrate Process Street with Close using Process Street's new Run Link feature, Close's Integration Links feature and Zapier.

Sales 52
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…and then Something Great Happened!!

yoursales

A NUDGE TO SaaS COMPANIES’ GENUINE SOCIAL SELLING A NUDGE TO SaaS COMPANIES’ GENUINE SOCIAL SELLING A NUDGE TO SaaS COMPANIES’ GENUINE SOCIAL SELLING W e’re consuming all this content that talks about how SaaS companies’ genuine social selling is the future of selling, and how nobody ever has to do any cold calls anymore. Because we know we should find time in busy schedules – in-between making and keeping stakeholders happy – to educate ourselves and redefine our sales process

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11 Simple Questions to Improve Your SaaS Onboarding

Ramp Ventures

“The reality is, you’ll never retain all of your customers, and some of those reasons you can’t control.” That solid advice comes from former ConversionXL editor Tommy Walker. Even if you improve free trial signups , you won’t save them all — and you will waste a lot of time trying. Because the fact is, some things are simply out of your hands, like budgetary issues, or the possibility that your solution doesn’t quite fit the customer’s needs.

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The Important SaaS Accounting Changes Coming in 2017

Tom Tunguz

Bookings, MRR, Revenue. All these metrics form part of the financial statements of SaaS companies. For as long as SaaS companies have existed, we’ve used one way of counting revenue, called GAAP. Starting in 2017, revenue recognition for SaaS companies will change, and SaaS startups will have more flexibility in the way they record revenue than in the past.

SaaS 100
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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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Automating Machine Learning Monitoring [RS Labs]

ReSci

This blog takes a small dive into one of our internal monitoring tools that overlooks our entire ETL pipeline and helps us stay on top of our machine learning models. Background: Imagine if what viral polite grandma was thinking when she was typing in her. The post Automating Machine Learning Monitoring [RS Labs] appeared first on ReSci.

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Links for 2016-11-22 [del.icio.us]

Sixteen Ventures

Sponsored: 64% off Code Black Drone with HD Camera. Our #1 Best-Selling Drone--Meet the Dark Night of the Sky!

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Backchannel sales: How to close more deals with less effort by involving others

CloseSaaS

You’ve qualified a prospect and know they’re a good fit. It would be in their own interest to buy from you, because no other product or service will provide as much value to them as yours.

Sales 52
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Hello world!

Rakam

The story begins…

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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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Here’s The Content Marketing Assembly Line Based On a Survey of 2,203 Companies

Hitenism

Most people approach content marketing like a black box. Ideas go in one end. Hours and days are spent doing something creative. And content comes out the other end. In a survey I ran of 2,203 companies, I was shocked to find that only 35% had a documented content marketing strategy. People measure and analyze all other aspects of marketing, but they don’t take that mindset and apply it to the actual practice of content creation.

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How Much to Compensate SaaS Sales Teams for New Sales, Renewals and Expansions

Tom Tunguz

As a SaaS startup begins to reach critical mass, the business generates more of its revenue from upsells and expansions, reaching about 30% at between $40-75M in revenue, which is in line with some of the models we’ve created. Many times startup teams ask how to compensate a sales team for renewals and upsells. The 2016 PacCrest Survey contains a wealth of information about these types of go to market questions.

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How Should You Allocate Your Startup's OpEx between Sales and Engineering?

Tom Tunguz

Earlier this week, I published benchmarks on What Percentage Of Revenue Should SaaS Startups Spend On operating expense? Several founders asked to see this data broken down further. What fraction of operating expense is spent on sales & marketing, and what fraction of op is spent on engineering? Most businesses spend 2x more on sales & marketing than engineering.

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What Percentage of Revenue Should SaaS Startups Spend on Payroll?

Tom Tunguz

What percentage of revenue should be spent on payroll? In 2001, Salesforce spent $35.6M on payroll and generated $5.4M in revenue. NetSuite spent $38M on payroll generated $17M in 2004. as both of these companies scaled and approached IPO, the operating expense ratio (OER) or operating expense divided by revenue, asymptotes to 0.8. For every dollar of revenue, both of these companies spent $0.80 in payroll at scale.

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Addressing Top Enterprise Challenges in Generative AI with DataRobot

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.

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The Customer Support Experience of the Future

Tom Tunguz

A few weeks ago, I had my first customer support experience of the future. I was in a meeting when my Android’s caller ID told me American Express was calling. I stepped of the conference room and answered the call. A machine-generated woman’s voice identified itself as the American Express fraud department. “Do you have a bluetooth headset or headphones you can use with your phone?

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How to Build Auction Pressure in Acquisitions and Financings

Tom Tunguz

Public companies are often required to disclose the process of their acquisition. LinkedIn’s sale to Microsoft is described step by step in an SEC disclosure and it offers both a peek into how these massive acquisitions are consummated, and also illustrates the best practices for how to run a process, both acquisitions and fundraisings. The timeline above shows how the deal progressed.

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Trends in Early Stage SaaS Fundraising Market of 2016

Tom Tunguz

About $1B has been invested in early stage SaaS startups as of November 1. Over the last nine months, marketing startups have raised more dollars in aggregate than any other segment. The chart above shows the early-stage investment dollars by buyer within the organization. Operations teams following second, with human resources focused startups in third.

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Task List Zero - When Inbox Zero Isn't Enough

Tom Tunguz

At my first programming job, I met a colleague who took all his notes in XML. He liked the fact he could structure them well, create programs to search and process them, and display them in many different ways. Most importantly, he future-proofed his notes. Because they were structured, he could transform his notes into any new format. That was my first exposure into the world of productivity hacking.

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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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Product update: Schedule your emails to be sent later

CloseSaaS

We’re happy to announce that a much requested feature is now available to all Close users. Write your sales emails whenever you want, and schedule them to arrive in your prospect’s inbox at just the right time.

Sales 52
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The ultimate sales management toolkit (7 free templates to scale your sales team today)

CloseSaaS

Great sales managers leave nothing to chance. At least that is one of the key takeaways from the Harvard Business Review article, “The 7 Attributes of the Most Effective Sales Leaders”.

Scale 52
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5 metrics B2B startups need to focus on to scale from 100 to 1,000 customers

CloseSaaS

If you managed to land your first 100 customers, congratulations! You’ve already made it further than the majority of startups ever will.

Scale 52