The Angel VC

MAY 15, 2014

Today is a very special day for me as as an entrepreneur and investor. About an hour ago, Zendesk went public on the New York Stock Exchange. The last time I watched an IPO so carefully was when Shopping.com, the company that had bought my price comparison startup, went public – almost ten years ago. Here are a few visual impressions of my love affair with Zendesk, which began six years ago: Huge congrats and thanks to the entire Zendesk team – I couldn't be more proud of you guys!

Startup 189

Startup Pricing SaaS 189

Tom Tunguz

MAY 7, 2014

Some of the best content to be found about startups is locked in books. Thomas Kjemperud asked me yesterday for a 140 character recommendation of one book for founders. Reducing my list to just one and condensing an argument for why founders ought to read it in just 117 characters was just too great a challenge for me. Instead I’ve written a blog post about the nine favorite books I’ve read over the last five years have helped me understand startups and the processes that make them s

Underperforming Technical Team 147

Underperforming Technical Team New CTO CTO Government 147

Chaotic Flow

MAY 13, 2014

Becoming a Metrics-driven SaaS Business is no easy task. It takes time, commitment and plenty of customers. However, the financial rewards of moving beyond standard SaaS financial metrics to SaaS customer success metrics and ultimately to sophisticated predictive analytics are significant. Each step toward SaaS metrics greatness builds upon the last.

Metrics 135

Metrics SaaS Compensation Benchmarks 135

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

MAY 5, 2014

The junk email I get about replacement windows, oil change coupons, and life insurance doesn’t really bother me. Somehow I got on a list of millions of people who own a house, own a car, and can still fog a mirror. These emails go out in bulk and luckily my spam filter traps most of them. Are you talking to me? Really? What does bother me though is the inappropriate email I get that isn't sent out by the millions.

Acquisition 100

Acquisition Business Model SaaS Subscription 100

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

Aaron Beashel

MAY 5, 2014

These days we have more access to great information on marketing our SaaS products than ever before. People like Sean Ellis , Neil Patel , Chris Hexton , Peep Laja and many others choose to share their knowledge of online marketing via blog posts and eBooks and it is all available for us to learn completely free as long as we have the desire. But do you get the feeling that there is just so much you could be doing it’s hard to know how it all fits together to achieve that illusive ‘Growth’?

Engineering 100

Engineering Scale SaaS Acquisition 100

The Angel VC

MAY 6, 2014

I've just added three new charts to my Excel template for cohort analysis. The first one shows the MRR development of several customer cohorts over the cohorts' lifetime: Each of the green lines represents a customer cohort. The x-axis shows the "lifetime month", so the dot at the end of the line at the bottom right, for example, represents the MRR of the January 2013 customer cohort (all customers who converted in January 2013) in their 9th month after converting.

Data 157

Data Metrics Revenue Pricing 157

Tom Tunguz

MAY 11, 2014

Predictability is sexy. Startups that have tuned their growth engines well enough to accurately forecast their growth, presuming these growth rates are attractive, will command much higher valuations in the market, simply because there is less risk in the company. As a result, investors prize these companies disproportionately. The challenge with predictability is predictability isn’t an end state.

VP of Engineering 129

VP of Engineering Startup Sales Hiring Forecasting 129

Chaotic Flow

MAY 6, 2014

As a SaaS business matures, the importance and value of SaaS metrics increase. Most SaaS businesses begin their journey down the SaaS metrics path by tracking recurring revenue in relation to customer acquisition costs. After building a solid customer base, churn becomes a priority. These fundamental SaaS metrics are all apparent in the standard SaaS profit equation below.

Acquisition 149

Acquisition Metrics SaaS Customer Success 149

Tom Tunguz

MAY 4, 2014

At a board meeting last week, one of the VPs of Marketing I’m lucky to work with presented a brilliantly simple way of explaining the evolution of a startup’s marketing tactics. I’ve drawn a diagram of the idea above, which borrows heavily from McKinsey’s 3 horizons. Startups have many different marketing options at their disposal: SEO/SEM, print, radio, TV, mail, affiliate, content marketing…The list goes on and on.

Startup 122

Startup Marketing Scale Advertising 122

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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.

Payments

Tom Tunguz

MAY 12, 2014

Startups are in a state of perpetual change. During a startup’s first few years of establishing product market and winning the first set of customers, this state of change is obvious. But as a startup scales, the company must adapt by learning and reinventing. Whether it’s building the processes to grow the team, creating new sales and marketing initiatives to pursue adjacent customers, developing customer success teams or handling an unforseen crisis, this process of reacting to the

Startup 108

Startup Scale Customer Success Scaling 108

Tom Tunguz

MAY 27, 2014

What are the tradeoffs when considering different sales hiring plans and which is the right one for your startup? There are many different considerations in creating a sales hiring plan. Balancing them all can be tricky, but thinking through the trade-offs is important to scaling the business well. First, let’s compare the financial impact of three different sales hiring strategies: six sales people hired at once, two sales people hired for each of three quarters and one sales person hired

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Strategy 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 26, 2014

Last week, Redpoint held our annual Founder Day gathering. At the event, I listened to the stories of Felix Baumgartner’s record breaking jump from 120,000 feet, heard about the astonishing comeback of the US America’s Cup team and took part in a creativity workshop led by a Stanford Design School professor. In short, the event revolved around doubt.

Consulting 100

Consulting Innovation Development 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 22, 2014

BYOBI is an acronym I first heard on a telephone call with a VP of Technology at a large corporation. The word is almost unknown today, but I think that it will be one of the largest trends to impact data in the next five years. BYOBI means Bring Your Own Business Intelligence. This VP of Technology was struggling to enable the sales people, marketers, engineers and others within his business to access the data they needed.

Data 100

Data Cloud Benchmarks Trends 100

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Revenue

Tom Tunguz

MAY 21, 2014

I’m a perpetual freeloader. Like a houseguest who has overstayed his welcome with hundreds of people, I depend upon the generosity of strangers - in particular, software teams. I’ve used HelloFax to sign documents for years, but I haven’t paid them a nickel. The same is true for GMail, Google Docs, TripIt, TypeKit, UberConference, LogMeIn, Evernote, the list goes on.

Engineering 100

Engineering Benchmarks B2B Startup 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 19, 2014

At an Internet of Things conference last week, I took part in a panel in which we discussed the future of connected devices. Will simple products win or will complex products dominate in the IoT?, we were asked. I think the question misses the point and raises another problem about the Internet of Things more broadly. It’s not about Things. It’s about Services.

Technology 100

Technology Data Software SaaS 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 18, 2014

Fenwick’s report on the state of the venture market and I came across these three data points that summarise one facet of the market in Silicon Valley succinctly: 11 venture backed companies raised funds at a valuation of over $1 billion in Q114, more than did so in all of 2013. Hedge and mutual funds participated in 23 venture deals through mid-April, compared to 41 in all of 2013.

Marketing 100

Marketing Investment Trends Enterprise 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 15, 2014

In this week’s New Yorker, Jill Lepore reviews Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace , a book whose author asks the question, what is the work place of the future? The information worker is a relatively new concept. Peter Drucker coined the term in the 50s. By then companies had already developed new ways of housing information workers. The very first information workers were accountants hunched over “Bob Crachit” desks in the back rooms of factories.

Construction 100

Construction Mobile Startup Development 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

MAY 14, 2014

Yesterday, I spoke on a panel at the Gainsight Pulse conference with Aaron Ross, the author of Predictable Revenue , Jason Lemkin of Storm Ventures who authors SaaStr , and Brian Stafford, a customer success expert from McKinsey. It was great fun to be on the panel and discuss how customer success is transforming SaaS companies by increasing revenue growth, decreasing capital needs, building better products and consequently retaining more customers.

Customer Success 100

Customer Success Startup Headcount Compensation 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 8, 2014

Has there been optimal time of year to raise a seed round? The chart above shows the number of seed rounds by quarter of the year from 2009-2013. At first blush, it would seem that the first quarter of the year is the most attractive period to raise a seed round. But that’s a faulty conclusion. First, there’s no statistical difference between the number of rounds raised in each quarter, according to a t-test on the four years of Crunchbase data I tested.

Investment 100

Investment Trends Startup Data 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 5, 2014

Last week, we reviewed the state of the public SaaS market and observed the average company had lost 33% of its value from their highs. How have newly public consumer companies fared in the same environment and what does that mean for the tech industry broadly? I created a basket of most of the venture-backed consumer IPOs since 2010 and added bellwethers Facebook and Google.

Technical Review 100

Technical Review Marketing Enterprise Mobile 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 1, 2014

Earlier this week, I wrote about the increase in cash compensation and decline in equity grants to VPs of Engineering and Product in startups. I received a lot of comments about the analysis, and in particular hypotheses to explain the data. I dug a bit deeper into the data set to find an explanation. Founding employees keep more equity today than ever through the Series A and Series B.

Trends 100

Trends Fractional VPE Startup Part-Time VPE 100

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Generative AI

CloseSaaS

MAY 29, 2014

More and more SaaS companies are implementing customer success strategies and hiring dedicated customer success managers (CSMs). We recently attended Gainsight Pulse, the preeminent gathering for customer success professionals. Here are some of our takeaways from Pulse 2014.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Sales Hiring SaaS Strategy 52

CloseSaaS

MAY 23, 2014

Conducting sales, like any business skill, requires practice and focus. So much focus that frequent distractions, interruptions or even a sub-optimal workflow can mean the difference between a successful salesperson or even that next, big deal.

Sales 52

Sales Business 52

CloseSaaS

MAY 13, 2014

Smart Views help you save common search queries that you and your team members are using to target specific leads. We created this feature to save your precious time and make searching for relevant lead groups faster.

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CloseSaaS

MAY 4, 2014

I had the pleasure of speaking to hustling superstar and entrepreneurial energizer bunny Gary Vee last week and I'm thrilled to share this video interview with you.

Interviewing 52

Interviewing Sales Startup 52

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

CloseSaaS

MAY 7, 2014

There's a reason why enterprise deals are big, and it's not just about how many users you sign up. Selling SaaS products to enterprise customers is arduous.

Enterprise 52

Enterprise SaaS Sales Startup 52

CloseSaaS

MAY 23, 2014

“Fights between founders are surprisingly common. About 20% of the startups we've funded have had a founder leave.

Startup 52

Startup Sales 52

CloseSaaS

MAY 23, 2014

Just wanted to share a few improvements we've launched over the last week or so:

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