Tom Tunguz
JULY 23, 2014
How much is my business worth? It’s a question every entrepreneur, founder and business owner asks themselves. This is particularly true during acquisition conversations with a prospective buyer. Because most companies are privately held, the acquisition details of the roughly 10,000 businesses who sell themselves for less than $500M each year in the US remain hidden.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JULY 6, 2014
"If we just dump enough names in the top of the funnel, some paying customers are bound to come out at the bottom of the funnel!" Wrong. This approach to customer acquisition - sucking in as many suspects as possible - is costly and inefficient. In other words, it's a very bad fit for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. For one thing, collecting all those names isn't free.
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Aaron Beashel
JULY 9, 2014
You’ve worked so hard. You’ve written an incredible post. You know your audience will be delighted, as your post has heaps of actionable ideas on how they can make their lives better. You’ve even tweaked the headline to perfection. It grabs attention. It arouses curiosity. It’s got it all. You publish the post and get some good sharing activity and attention, but then you noticed in your analytics tool that nothing good actually happened.
CloseSaaS
JULY 24, 2014
Customer success is one of the most essential ingredients for sustainable growth in SaaS. Having a dedicated customer success manager (CSM) is great—but it's just as important that sales owns customer success too.
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Underinvesting in software testing costs more than you think, and now you can prove it. This guide helps you quantify hidden costs like developer time, support overhead, tech debt, and lost revenue. Use the companion calculator to model your own data, and present your findings with a ready-to-edit presentation template. Whether you're making the case to leadership or validating outsourcing, this toolkit gives you the numbers and tools you need.
The Angel VC
JULY 26, 2014
A few days ago I went on record saying that A/B testing is like sex at high school. Everyone talks about it, not very many do it in earnest. I want to follow up on the topic with some additional thoughts (don't worry, I won't stretch the high school analogy any further). When talking to people about A/B testing I've noticed that there are four (stereo) types of mindsets which prevent companies from successfully using split tests as a tool to improve their conversion funnel. 1) Procrastinative Th
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 6, 2014
According to the WSJ, GoPro is the largest consumer hardware IPO in 23 years , though like most entrepreneurs, I don’t remember the Duracell IPO. The last consumer hardware company IPO I remember is Tivo, which was in 1999. Because GoPro is the first sizable consumer hardware IPO in eons and because the startup world has a blossoming hardware segment, I thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast a top consumer hardware startup with the benchmarks of public SaaS companies using
Tom Tunguz
JULY 31, 2014
I’ve listened to thousands of fundraising pitches in my six years so far at Redpoint. Some with demos, some without. Some with hockey-stick charts, and others just an idea. I’ll never forget one meeting when the founders presented an entirely hand-drawn deck on 12 pieces of paper. The extent of founders’ creativity is hard to over-state.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 30, 2014
Customer Success is a relatively new discipline in the Software-as-a-Service world. Consequently, there are many unanswered questions about how best to build and manage great Customer Success teams for SaaS companies. Because the financial impact of a great CS team is compounded monthly and can meaningfully increase the growth and decrease the cash needs of SaaS startups, it’s critical for CS leaders to get it right.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 28, 2014
One of the most important changes is the workplace in the last 20 years is the notion that most employees are free agents. We are hired and fired and resign at will. It’s a markedly different era than the career salarymen of IBM’s heyday who remained with the company for decades from college graduation through retirement. In this highly-competitive talent market, where every employee is a free agent, hiring and retaining talent has become a key strategic advantage.
Speaker: Pete Uselman, Director of Partner Experience at Wind River Payments
White label payments enable software providers to earn more revenue and gain control over the customer experience. But with white label payments comes a great deal of responsibility and ownership. Check out this webinar on-demand to see if you are ready to make the transition to white label payments. You'll learn important information, including: How responsibilities are split in a white label environment Reasons why software providers adopt white label payments How to know if you are ready for
Tom Tunguz
JULY 27, 2014
I’ve never paid much attention to earnings reports in the past. But as I’ve been analyzing the tech industry more and more, and the stock market has begun to surpass record highs , I’ve been wondering whether the persistent bull market in tech is healthy. Or at the very least, whether the companies pushing the industry forward are able to understand the environment and their businesses well enough to meet the commitments they make to public market investors.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 24, 2014
“Advice is one person’s experience generalized”, an entrepreneur told me once. “It’s a single point of view with all kinds of survivorship and attribution bias. Advice can be a terribly dangerous thing, because it can be used as a shortcut for thinking.” When I asked how he responded to requests for advice, because as a successful entrepreneur he was often solicited for it, he replied that he first shared the structure and the framework he used to look at the
Tom Tunguz
JULY 22, 2014
Through the first six months of 2014, VCs have raised about as much as all of 2013. If this pace of fund raising continues, 2014 would mark the biggest year for VCs since 2001, when the industry raised about $38B. This new money hasn’t yet hit the startup fundraising market in earnest, as the chart above shows. The second quarter of 2014 is the sixteenth largest by capital deployed sinced 1995, making it a top quartile quarter, but to break into the top five, that figure would need to trip
Tom Tunguz
JULY 20, 2014
In 2008, when I started working at Redpoint I knew very little about how the venture business worked, and before I started at the firm, I wanted to prepare by learning as much as I could about the industry. Unfortunately, not much was written about venture capital at the time. In fact, I found only two books: a textbook on private equity and venture capital by HBS professor Joshua Lerner, and an out-of-print collection of 32 VC interviews called “ Done Deals ,” published in September
Speaker: Tamara Fingerlin, Developer Advocate
Apache Airflow® 3.0, the most anticipated Airflow release yet, officially launched this April. As the de facto standard for data orchestration, Airflow is trusted by over 77,000 organizations to power everything from advanced analytics to production AI and MLOps. With the 3.0 release, the top-requested features from the community were delivered, including a revamped UI for easier navigation, stronger security, and greater flexibility to run tasks anywhere at any time.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 14, 2014
Last week, Twitter released a feature enabling users to download organic tweet data. Naturally, I put my data through its paces to see if I could find any best practices for this blog. Below are the conclusions, which are tested to 95% confidence. I’ve also linked below to the code for recreating this analysis for your audience. Engagement rate, defined by Twitter as clicks, highlights, and favorites of a tweet is relatively constant throughout the day.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 13, 2014
Vik Singh wrote a great post in VentureBeat last week titled “ Why Salesforce Needed to Buy RelateIQ ” in which he talks about a new era in SaaS, the Predictive Era, the era of intelligent software. We’ve just seen one of the first acquisitions in the category with RelateIQ*, but I believe we will see many, many more for a few reasons.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 10, 2014
Listening is hard, as my friend once said, because you run the risk of having to change the way you see the world. That line stopped me cold when I was reading In the Light of What We Know because it’s so true. To set aside the way we’ve thought about an idea in the past and consider it as if it were a totally new concept is what a Buddhist might call Beginner’s Mind.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 9, 2014
See an updated version of this post: Trends in the Startup Acquisition Market in 2015. The venture-backed startup IPO market has remained strong over the past five quarters, with 20 or more IPOs in each of those quarters. I was curious how the strength of the IPO market has impacted the acquisition market. In particular, how the number and value of startup acquisitions has changed, and more specifically, whether there are any trends in the sizes of acquisitions.
Speaker: Alex Salazar, CEO & Co-Founder @ Arcade | Nate Barbettini, Founding Engineer @ Arcade | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO @ Aggregage
There’s a lot of noise surrounding the ability of AI agents to connect to your tools, systems and data. But building an AI application into a reliable, secure workflow agent isn’t as simple as plugging in an API. As an engineering leader, it can be challenging to make sense of this evolving landscape, but agent tooling provides such high value that it’s critical we figure out how to move forward.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 1, 2014
Benjamin Morris, a writer for arguably the best computational journalism publication, fivethirtyeight , published “Lionel Messi is Impossible” which describes in words, statistics and charts why Lionel Messi is one of the greatest players in the world. Even if you’re not a soccer/football fan, the article is worth reading because it’s one of the finest examples of synthesizing data and a story to convey a point I’ve read in a very long time.
CloseSaaS
JULY 1, 2014
A lot of startups are hesitant to make their users pay early. After all, it’s the internet, right?
CloseSaaS
JULY 31, 2014
If you're a CEO or founder and want to get a quick introduction to essential sales skills for your startup, this webinar is a good place to start. 34 minutes (or 17 minutes if you watch at double speed) and you'll know the most important fundamentals of sales that truly matter.
CloseSaaS
JULY 28, 2014
When we were running ElasticSales (outsourced sales on demand for startups), we had a certain kind of prospect that scared the living hell out of us—just by wanting to work with us.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.
CloseSaaS
JULY 23, 2014
How much should founders and CEOs participate in developing an outbound sales process for their companies? Better to get their hands dirty and immerse themselves in the nitty gritty of sales, or to delegate it to someone else so they can make the big strategic decisions and work on other things?
CloseSaaS
JULY 21, 2014
If you’re part of an inside sales team, this scenario is probably familiar to you:
CloseSaaS
JULY 16, 2014
When you're trying to get a prospect to drop their existing software vendor, and switch to your software instead, you'll almost always encounter resistance. How do you manage—and overcome—that resistance to switching software?
CloseSaaS
JULY 15, 2014
We're excited to announce the launch of call transferring which is available right now for both inbound and outbound calls for those on our Business and Enterprise offering.
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For SaaS businesses, improving retention is one of the easiest and most effective ways to drive revenue and profits. With a clear link between failed payments and customer churn, having a robust failed payment recovery solution isn’t optional—it’s essential. Achieving your retention goals starts with the right solution.
CloseSaaS
JULY 14, 2014
One of the most precious resources for you as an entrepreneur is your time. What’s one of the biggest time-suckers in business? "Partnerships.
CloseSaaS
JULY 10, 2014
The biggest challenge for people working in inside sales? It's what I call the inside sales distraction trap.
CloseSaaS
JULY 8, 2014
I'm super-excited to announce the launch of our first book:
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