Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 21, 2014
Bill Macaitis, the former CMO of Zendesk, articulates how a SaaS marketing team should operate better than anybody else I’ve met. At a recent Point9 conference, Bill outlined the 9 marketing disciplines of great SaaS companies and how they fit together to create a marketing powerhouse. I’ve copied my notes from Bill’s talk below. Ops & Analytics Team.
The Angel VC
OCTOBER 12, 2014
People often ask me questions like: "How many people can I expect to sign up on my SaaS website?" "My conversion rate is x% – is that good or bad?" "My churn rate is x% – is that OK?" "What kind of growth rates are VCs looking for?" While we have quite a lot of data from our SaaS portfolio companies and from SaaS startups pitching to us (which I'll be happy to share, in aggregated form, in another post), I thought it would be good to increase our sample size by asking a larger number of SaaS sta
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Aaron Beashel
OCTOBER 13, 2014
The PDF eBook has been a staple of content marketing for a very long time, and for good reason too. It’s a great lead or subscriber magnet to offer people, and when done right it can significantly increase the amount of leads you generate and help build your all important email list. So when I sat down to plan out our latest guide on How to get Better Marketing Results with Beautiful Design , my natural inclination was to create a PDF eBook that would live behind a landing page with a lead captu
CloseSaaS
OCTOBER 28, 2014
In SaaS sales, it’s not enough to sell your customers on buying your product. You need to sell them on using it too! Many founders underestimate how much this matters, and their SaaS startups will never gain traction until they get this right.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
OCTOBER 2, 2014
Why in the world would I want a box of business cards with a different design on each one? In radio ads, I’ve heard a company that sells business cards promoting that very feature: “Business cards with a different design on each one.” I’m sure they use some very nifty software to make this happen. But why? Do people expect me to hand over more than one card when I introduce myself?
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
The Angel VC
OCTOBER 26, 2014
Last week, we've held our third annual SaaS Founder Meetup in San Francisco. Following the first PNC SaaS Founder Meetup in San Francisco in 2012 and the second one in 2013 in Berlin, this has become a tradition for us: Once a year we're bringing together the founders of our SaaS portfolio companies, co-investors and leading experts for a full day of intensive knowledge sharing.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 13, 2014
The startup acquisition market is poised to have its best year in nearly a decade. If acquirers maintain the same pace from the first nine months of the year through Q4, more than 450 venture-backed startups will have been acquired, generating more than $25B in proceeds. Given this state of affairs, it’s a good time to take stock of the major trends in the startup market.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 29, 2014
The real promise of the Internet of Things isn’t simply linking millions of devices together, just like the real innovation of the web wasn’t networking a bunch of computers. Instead, the true and still unrealized potential of IoT is to transform business models; it’s enabling companies to sell products in entirely new and better ways that benefit both the company and the customer.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 12, 2014
This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. Today, we’ll explore one of the enterprise behemoths, both in market cap and average revenue per customer: WorkDay. WorkDay envisions being the place of record for all Human Resources data for companies with more than 5,000 employees.
Speaker: Timothy Chan, PhD., Head of Data Science
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Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 9, 2014
The WSJ published a recent chart of the 49 startups with billion dollar valuations. According to their research, there have never been as many privately held companies with such high valuations ever. The absolute number of these massively valuable companies alone is amazing. Ten years ago, most of them would have gone public by now. But what other insights can we tease from the data about these very special businesses?
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 30, 2014
It’s Q3 earnings season and about half of the major public tech companies and recent startup IPOs have reported their figures. I keep track of earnings to get a sense for how these companies perceive their markets. Meeting or exceeding earnings indicates companies can forecast their growth and demonstrates how predictable these businesses are.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 28, 2014
At some point, most startups will begin to measure their customers’ happiness. Customer satisfaction is an important predictor of loyalty and can foster fantastically efficient word-of-mouth growth. Many companies employ Net Promoter Score to quantify customer satisfaction. NPS measures the fraction of a customer base which are promoters and detractors of a company’s product.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 25, 2014
When we analyzed the impact of location on a startup’s ability to raise capital, we found no statistically significant difference. Startups in San Francisco, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Austin and many other cities all demonstrated similar ability to raise follow-on rounds. But is the same true for investors of various locations? Do investors across the US invest similarly across Seed, Series A and Series B?
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Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 23, 2014
I met a really smart vice president of sales a few weeks ago working in a company with mid-market customer values in the $10-100k per year range. When I asked her about her sales process, she described how her team employs statements of work (SOW), which isn’t something I hear about very frequently in startups, despite the fact they are very powerful sales tools.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 16, 2014
In “ Time to Hang Up on Voice ,” Sam Lessin argues voice isn’t the interface of the future for three reasons. First, voice is hard to use in public places because background noise complicates interpretation, and because many people are in earshot, voice isn’t private. Second, speaking to computers is less efficient than typing or using gestures.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 15, 2014
In the past, we have benchmarked the revenue per employee of large publicly traded SaaS companies and determined that the average is about $200k of revenue per person. But, that analysis examined revenue per employee that only one point in time. As Jesse Hulsing pointed out to me, examining this figure over five years reveals quite a bit about the health of the business.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 8, 2014
Yesterday, I attended an event held by the IT team of a major bank. When the data analytics team took the stage, I listened with great interest as the chief of the group described their internal struggles with data and the areas where startups might help them achieve their goals. He articulated his team’s needs and goals in a very concise way by bucketing his users into three personas.
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Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 7, 2014
I started working in venture capital three months before Lehman imploded. After the bankruptcy, the fundraising market contracted as investors internalized the new normal of the public markets. Over the past six years, the fundraising markets flipped from quite bearish to mildly bullish to extremely bullish. Or at least, that’s the way it feels to me.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 1, 2014
Come work at Redpoint! The Redpoint Software team would like to add a new associate to the software team in our Menlo Park office. We’re looking for someone to work alongside the small, tightly-knit group managing Redpoint’s early stage software practice. This person will work shoulder-to-shoulder with all the members of the team, discovering new startups, evaluating their market opportunities, working with portfolio companies , expanding the firm’s network and contributing to
CloseSaaS
OCTOBER 29, 2014
One of our reps was in the process of selling our inside sales CRM to a pretty large company. They had sales teams all over the world, and their US team manager loved our product, and wanted to champion it within the company.
CloseSaaS
OCTOBER 24, 2014
When was the last time you did something that made you feel like you looked stupid to others? When was the last time you put yourself out there in a way that was uncomfortable to you because it was totally out of your comfort zone? When was the last time you chose to trade your dignity for a new.
As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.
CloseSaaS
OCTOBER 20, 2014
It can happen to the best of us. We pursue a deal, negotiate for the terms, put in all this effort and get them to sign the dotted line. Only to figure out a short while later, that the terms of the deal are bad. That’s sellers remorse.
CloseSaaS
OCTOBER 17, 2014
The difference between good salespeople and great salespeople is probably not what you think it is. Most people would say something along the lines of: great salespeople are charismatic, slick, outgoing alphas.
CloseSaaS
OCTOBER 16, 2014
If you’re doing sales—whether you’re pitching a potential investor, demoing your product or just cold calling prospects—you’ll feel nervous at times. Everybody does. What matters is how you deal with this anxiety. Do you let it throw you off your game, or do you use it to fuel your success.
CloseSaaS
OCTOBER 14, 2014
You've got a prospect on a sales call, or even in the room with you. How do you captivate and keep his attention? It's not enough that he hears you speak—you want him to really listen.
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CloseSaaS
OCTOBER 13, 2014
I recently got an email from Vivek, one of my blog readers, who had to pitch to a massive car company. It was a high-pressure sales situation for Vivek. The stakes were high as a lot depended on this deal and he had just one shot.
CloseSaaS
OCTOBER 9, 2014
If you're a founder, or managing a team, you're probably overwhelmed by requests from people who rely on you for feedback, comments, input and approval. Every day, there's a new barrage of emails in your inbox, requiring you to respond, so that somebody else is able to do their job.
CloseSaaS
OCTOBER 8, 2014
Here's another example of what some good, old-fashioned hustle can do for you. Even if what you're going after is not to close a major deal or build your own business, even if what you want is to "just" get a good job at a company, hustling can get you—or the people you care about—there.
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