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

Churn 175

Churn Data SaaS Marketing 175

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.

Marketing 140

Marketing SaaS Acquisition Business Model 140

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

Startup 122

Startup Sales Hiring Benchmarks Advertising 122

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.

Education 100

Education Branding Engineering Software 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

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.

Customer Success 59

Customer Success Sales SaaS Management 59

Tom Tunguz

JULY 7, 2014

It would seem hardware startups are booming. First, the amazing success of the GoPro business and IPO , which set a 23-year high-water mark for a consumer hardware company. Second, there seems to be a growing number of hardware startups bubbling in incubators like Lemnos Labs and Highway1. Third, Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites have enabled hardware startups to mitigate one of the biggest risks in starting out: obtaining a reliable proxy for consumer demand.

Startup 113

Startup Investment Trends Data 113

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.

Startup 100

Startup Scale Interviewing Scaling 100

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.

Customer Success 100

Customer Success Compensation Innovation Engagement 100

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.

Startup 100

Startup Leadership Management Strategy 100

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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

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.

Technology 100

Technology Marketing Enterprise Revenue 100

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

Data 100

Data 100

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

Venture Capital 100

Venture Capital Startup Banking Trends 100

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

Interviewing 100

Interviewing Venture Capital Banking Benchmarks 100

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Revenue

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.

Content Marketing 100

Content Marketing Marketing Engagement Data 100

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.

Scale 100

Scale Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence SaaS 100

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.

Innovation 100

Innovation Development Investment Marketing 100

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.

Acquisition 100

Acquisition Trends Startup Marketing 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

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.

Data 100

Data Data Analysis Trends Startup 100

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.

Sales 52

Sales Startup 52

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.

Sales Outsourcing 52

Sales Outsourcing Business Startup Sales 52

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?

Development 52

Development Sales Startup 52

Advertiser: Data Robot

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Generative AI

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?

Software 52

Software Management SaaS Sales 52

CloseSaaS

JULY 3, 2014

How should you source your leads for your outbound sales campaign? I see a lot of people getting this wrong—they take the most obvious, easiest and least intelligent way, and it hurts their business.

B2B 52

B2B Startup Sales Business 52

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.

Enterprise 52

Enterprise Business 52

CloseSaaS

JULY 1, 2014

We just released an update that lets you specify the currency you’re primarily working with. Simply go to the Settings page -> Customizations and pick your currency.

52

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

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.

Business 52

Business Startup Sales 52

CloseSaaS

JULY 1, 2014

A lot of startups are hesitant to make their users pay early. After all, it’s the internet, right?

Startup 59

Startup B2B Sales 59

CloseSaaS

JULY 10, 2014

The biggest challenge for people working in inside sales? It's what I call the inside sales distraction trap.

Sales 52

Sales 52