June, 2020

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What Is Good Retention: An Exhaustive Benchmark Study with Lenny Rachitsky

Casey Accidental

At the end of 2019, I presented Eventbrite’s product plans to the board for 2020. These plans included a lot of the goals you likely have in your company: improvements in acquisition, activation, and retention. One of our board members asked: “I understand these goals for the year. But long term, how high could we push this retention number? What would great retention be for Eventbrite?”.

Retention 145
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Congratulations, You’ve Created a Category. Now What?

Kellblog

I was talking to an old friend the other day who’s marketing chief at a successful infrastructure startup. “Congratulations,” I said, “I know it was a long slog, but after about a decade of groundwork it looks like things have really kicked in. I hear your company’s name all the time, I’m told business is doing great, and Gartner literally can’t stop talking about your technology and category.” “Yes, we’ve successfully created a categ

Scale 105
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We?re About To See a Lot More SaaS Debt

SaaStr

Debt for SaaS companies done right is a gift. Done wrong, it can weigh you down like an anchor. Few folks have more data than Nathan Latka and he offers up some insights on how to properly leverage up in SaaS. — ed. Good — and Bad — Types of Debt. Carlota Perez argues in her book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital that in the early days of a “golden age”, financial capital is necessary to fuel new technology innovation. .

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Product Judgment: How some people can repeatedly create product success

Intercom, Inc.

Let’s talk about that trickiest of subjects: Product Judgment. Also known as Product Intuition or Product Instinct or Product Taste, it is the idea that you can use your own judgment to (1) accurately predict what your customers need, want and value, and (2) design and ship the right solution for them. Here, I will tackle some of the common questions around it: Does it exist?

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Monetizing Analytics Features

Think your customers will pay more for data visualizations in your application? Five years ago, they may have. But today, dashboards and visualizations have become table stakes. Turning analytics into a source of revenue means integrating advanced features in unique, hard-to-steal ways. Download this white paper to discover which features will differentiate your application and maximize the ROI of your analytics.

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Return to the workplace strategy: How to still hit your 2020 sales plans

Predictable Revenue

It’s uncertain how long it will really take to get back into the workplace at this stage, the truth is that we have another disruption to face on the horizon. Sales leaders will need to ask themselves how they’re going to approach the return to the office in a way that’s safe and efficient. The post Return to the workplace strategy: How to still hit your 2020 sales plans appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

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How Important Are Happy Employees When VCs Invest?

SaaStr

Do startup investors care about how employees are treated where they invest? The reality is VCs for the most part sort of care. What I can tell you 100% for sure is one you have even a small team, VCs: Will all look at your Glassdoor ratings. This is so easy to research / see. Will all do due diligence at least on how CEO is perceived, internally and externally.

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Why You Should Consider Eliminating the Title “Implementation Consultant” from Your Startup

Kellblog

I’ve worked with several startups that fell into the following pattern: Selling a SaaS application at a healthy price (e.g., $100K to $200K ARR). With low, fixed-cost implementation packages (e.g., $25K). But a product that actually takes maybe $50K to $75K to successfully deploy. Resulting in an unprofitable professional services business (and wrecking the market for partner services).

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In SaaS, Your Burn Rate is Muchly a Function of Your DNA. And Your Chosen Competition.

SaaStr

There are some questions in SaaS that are, at some level, almost a mystery: Why was Veeva able to burn only ~$10m net on its way to an IPO? Yet Box needed $250m? Both sell to the Enterprise. So it’s not that. Yes, Veeva has a very high ACV, with prepaid contracts. That helps a ton. Yet … is that really the whole story? Why did Atlassian essentially need no capital to IPO, yet Slack raised epic amounts ?

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Building Blocks of an Efficient SaaS Finance Operations Team

Chargebee

Growth of any kind demands changes in the status quo. SaaS businesses are no exception. As your SaaS business scales, new processes and functions get added.

Finance 98
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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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What Is COVID-19’s Effect on Customer Churn—And What You Can Do About It in 5 Steps

Totango

The COVID-19 pandemic increased the risk of customer churn across almost every industry. Forrester predicts that software growth as a whole will slow down to two to four percent or may be flat if a recession occurs. However, you still have a say in how well your business makes it through this period. COVID-19’s effect on customer churn may have already begun, but there is still plenty you can do to increase customer engagement and retain the customers you have worked hard to win.

Churn 92
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How to Survive and Thrive in the post-Covid Era

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

Covid and the associated lockdowns are likely to be the biggest disruptive event to occur in most of our lifetimes. There are huge global changes coming as a result. The OECD is forecasting the worst recession in a century. But expect to see far more change than just a recession.

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As Long As You Are Growing 60% Or More — Your Competition Can’t Really Hurt You

SaaStr

(Note; an update of a classic SaaStr post, with 2020+ learnings.). A little while ago, I Zoomed with a good friend running a SaaS company doing about $4 million in ARR. A really good SaaS company. And he was beside himself. First, he was just plain exhausted. He was in that zone from $1 to $10m in ARR when it all just gets so hard. Too much to do with too few people.

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Top 10 Learnings from the Redpoint 2020 GTM Survey

Tom Tunguz

Yesterday, we shared the Top 10 Learnings from the 2020 Redpoint GTM Survey at SaaS Office Hours. The presentation is embedded below. It contains data on go to market team structure, performance by sales function, marketing spend benchmarks, and customer success priorities. I want to thank Nick Giometti who parsed and processed the data and taught me (an R user) a lot about python and pandas along the way.

Headcount 364
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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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Best Cloud Storage Services

The Daily Egg

The best cloud storage service is Google Drive. For a more in-depth look at the best cloud storage services, check out reviews of our five favorites below. Looking for a way to save room in your office? Or maybe you want to be able to access files remotely? Or maybe you just need a place […]. The post Best Cloud Storage Services appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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5 Tips to Building Rapport on a Cold Call

Predictable Revenue

On the average cold call, you may have fewer than 30 seconds to give prospects a compelling enough reason to continue engaging with you. How can you even begin to forge a relationship in such a short period of time? The post 5 Tips to Building Rapport on a Cold Call appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

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Inside Intercom X Black Tech Unplugged

Intercom, Inc.

As we touched on in last week’s episode, the unjust killing of George Floyd has prompted many of us to look at our own relationship with perpetuating racial injustice and to look for ways we can participate in and reinforce racial equity. At Intercom, we have a lot of work to do in that regard but we feel that a small and organic way for us to start is by connecting the audience we’ve built for this podcast with voices that need to be heard but traditionally aren’t, particularly in t

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How to Build Links Using Google Alerts

Neil Patel

Link building is hard. But did you know that Google makes it easier for you? Seriously… they do make it easier because they provide you with free tools. No, I’m not talking about the ones you already use like Google Search Console and Google Analytics …. They actually have tons of other tools. Some you may have heard of, but I bet you don’t use them.

Branding 145
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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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15+ of The Top Sales & Marketing Mistakes SaaS Startups Make

SaaStr

A little while back we put together some of the top sales & marketing mistakes SaaS companies and founders make, especially in the early days. I thought it would be worth a quick update of the post. We’ve all made many of these mistakes ourselves, myself included ?? I’m even making a few myself again. But if you see yourself making any of the mistakes below, it’s fairly easy to make a course correction.

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What is the Structure of the Typical SaaS Company as it Scales?

Tom Tunguz

This post is part of a series leading up to SaaS Office GTM Edition on June 24 in which we’re reviewing the results of the 2020 Redpoint GTM survey. Today, we’re answering the question: how do teams grow as a startup scales? We can derive the table above if we look over the entire respondent base and bucket headcount by ARR. The median startup with between 1-5M in ARR will have 12 engineers, 6 in sales and 3 in marketing.

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Best POS Systems

The Daily Egg

The best POS system is Square. To find out why — or check out our other suggestions — read our reviews below. As a business owner, you need a good way to accept payments from your customers. That’s why you need a good POS system. These systems give your business flexibility when it comes to […]. The post Best POS Systems appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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How To Upscale Your Home Business With Little Investment

Predictable Revenue

The future looks uncertain, and many businesses are battening down the hatches in anticipation of a rocky few months.But for many, this disruption is temporary. Things will return at least to a new normal in which you can still thrive. It’s important to use this time wisely, spend some time adjusting and finessing your business so you can hit the ground running when they do.

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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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Customer Support is being turned upside down. Here’s what you need to do about it.

Intercom, Inc.

The internet is moving more businesses and people online, and driving a huge increase in inbound support volume. Meanwhile customer expectations are rising – they expect better experiences and immediate support resolutions. The internet is also driving an explosion in customer choice, allowing them to easily switch to businesses who provide better experiences.

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Artificial Intelligence Will Change How You Do Marketing in 2021

Unbounce

How often do you reflect on the ways technology changes your life as a marketer? I’m not talking full-on paradigm shifts here. (“We do our marketing… on the internet.”) I mean the sly, step-by-way manner in which new tech slides neatly into your existing stack and subtly reframes the game on you. These changes don’t always alter your job in dramatic ways, but they eliminate the hassles and headaches.

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Even With Just “Pretty Good Growth”, You Can Build a Unicorn After $10m ARR

SaaStr

One of the very firm SaaStr-isms what that while $0-$1m ARR is Impossible, and getting from $1m-$10m ARR is Unlikely … that getting from $10m to $100m ARR is Inevitable. Let’s take a look at a version of that basic math. Today, the very best SaaS companies are scaling faster than ever. Often 200% or even 300% at $10m ARR. Look at Zoom, Slack, Datadog, UiPath etc.

Scaling 362
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Two Charts that I've Been Wondering About

Tom Tunguz

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about the stock market, the economy, and geopolitics, always a dangerous combination. I’ve come across two charts that I have been wondering about. The first comes from Bloomberg via the BEA. It shows consumer savings rates have catapulted to the highest level ever measured. Meanwhile, consumer spending has fallen in parallel.

Cloud 331
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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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Best Marketing Automation Software

The Daily Egg

Marketing automation software is designed to simplify complex or tedious marketing tasks. In addition to automating marketing processes, the best marketing automation solutions pull information from multiple data sources to deliver data-driven insights for campaign management. Lead generation, customer relationship building, and driving conversions are three of the top benefits of leveraging automation software for […].

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How COVID-19 Impacts Your Sales Team

Predictable Revenue

COVID-19 established a new reality, forcing businesses to close their doors or adapt to new working conditions. Such drastic changes also had a negative impact on numerous workers who couldn’t handle working from home or felt pressured. Did you know that your sales team is the one that is affected the most by the new virus? The post How COVID-19 Impacts Your Sales Team appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

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The key to fierce customer loyalty? Your support team.

Intercom, Inc.

For nearly a century, companies held to the same principles for driving growth: deliver value to stakeholders and employees first, then to customers. Over the last 10 years, this thinking has come undone. Crowded markets mean companies can no longer assume they are the only, or best, choice. The rise of the subscription model challenges businesses to place equal emphasis on conversion and retention , or risk spending themselves into oblivion.

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