February, 2018

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Zero to $50M – A Roadmap of the Key Stages, and How to Win at Each Stage

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

There are seven key stages in a startup’s evolution from $0m to $50m in revenue. Understanding where you are in that evolution, and how to act at each stage is critical for success, as what is appropriate at one stage is not appropriate at another stage. In my talk at SaaStr 2018, I will lay.

Revenue 255
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Run Less Software

Intercom, Inc.

by Rich Archbold, Senior Director of Engineering at Intercom. It’s hard to win a battle you don’t realise you’re in. It’s even harder if you don’t know all of the armies on the field, their strategies and weapons, or even who’s a friend and who’s a foe. The same is true in software. We are all in a battle, multiple battles in fact, with a lot at stake: whether it’s the fate of the company we work for or for the product that we build.

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Expanding Your Time Horizon To Scale Your Startup

Tom Tunguz

When a startup takes form, the first weeks and months and years are spent furiously. The team assembles itself. The lightbulb illuminates. It is formed and reformed again and again as customers supply feedback. Eventually the team hews the right product. The startup raises capital. Then the team returns focus to hiring, evolving the product, and closing customers.

Scale 209
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Before you talk about the solution, point out the problem

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

Lots of people who you think should be interested in your software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, couldn’t care less. It doesn’t matter that they perfectly fit your “ideal customer” persona. It doesn’t matter that your solution is full of features built especially for them. It doesn’t even matter that you’re sure it’ll be a huge help to their business.

Finance 178
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Beyond the Basics of A/B Tests: Highly Innovative Experimentation Tactics You Need to Know

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.

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Sales Enablement Statistics for 2018

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

To me, there’s never been a better time to be a sales enablement professional. It’s a rapidly growing area and while there’s a lack of publicly available sales enablement statistics or indeed, widely adopted best practices and standards, this is due, largely to the fact, that many of us are figuring out exactly what sales enablement is, means and does.

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To Win in the New Delivery Economy Go to the Cloud – A Guest Commentary in E-Commerce Times

Think Strategies

All you have to do to recognize the changing face of the consumer retail market is pay attention to the growing number of packages piling up on your neighbor’s front step. The explosive growth of the home delivery business also has been influencing the industrial, business-to-business world. As Amazon sets consumer expectations for rapid delivery to the home, companies in nearly every industry have been recognizing that they must move to the Cloud to keep pace.

Cloud 100
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Want to hire great designers? Start a blog.

Intercom, Inc.

A few years ago I came out of a meeting with my product manager where we talked about the next feature we should build. At the time there was a lot of hype around Foursquare-like location sharing apps. We worked for a social network so we had to build something like that as well. Needless to say, we didn’t have a clear product strategy. To take my mind off things I opened my RSS reader and a post called “ Product strategy means saying no ” caught my eye.

Strategy 217
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Dropbox S-1 Analysis - The King of Freemium

Tom Tunguz

Founded in 2007, Dropbox epitomizes the freemium go-to-market. Dropbox has grown from 0 to 500 million users over that time period. 2% of those users convert to paid and pay an average of $9.33 per month. 90% of revenue originates through self serve channels - an astounding figure for company that generated more than $1B in revenue last year. Dropbox’s revenue grew from $604M to $1.1B from 2015 to 2017, a compound annual growth rate of 35%.

Scale 205
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How to categorize expenses in a SaaS startup

Baremetrics

Given you probably just finished closing your books for 2017, it’s a good time to introduce changes to plan for the coming year. Proper expense categorization improves your visibility into your company’s spending while enabling more accurate metrics and forecasting. After all, as a startup founder, you want to have a solid idea of what your true gross margins are and what it actually costs to acquire a customer!

Startup 81
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The Big Payoff of Application Analytics

Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.

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Sales Stack 2018: The Tools

yoursales

SALES STACK 2018 SALES TOOLS FOR. PROFESSIONAL SALES SALES STACK 2018: THE TOOLS SALES STACK 2018: THE TOOLS. Want the 2019 list instead? Then click here! I n an ever evolving world, we in the business of selling SaaS have to embrace and stay ahead with the latest sales tools that are emerging in the market. These tools are what we use to deliver elite services to our clients and strengthen our B2B sales processes.

Scale 86
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The Scientific Approach To Setting Sales Goals For Your Sales Development Team

Sales Hacker

As a VP of Sales, you’re probably not too familiar with SaaS metrics or costs — that’s the CFO’s job, right? Well today, we’ll breakdown how to understand SaaS costs basics, and then explain how to accurately set sales goals and metrics that drive success. We’ll also review how to determine if your team structure is working or not, as this is a crucial factor that impacts revenue goals.

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What Sales Operations Can Learn from Restaurants

InsightSquared

Boston’s Trident Booksellers and Cafe thrums on a Saturday morning. The place is packed — Busboys bustle past waiting patrons to drop off clean glasses for the bartenders, only to be coaxed out of the way by a waiter looking for their next order, or a host seating a table. The kitchen rages, tossed about under the weight of tickets from the two dining rooms.

Scale 82
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Move fast and optimize for the long term

Intercom, Inc.

As a student of engineering you’re incentivised to write a lot and to read a lot. You’re expected to solve many well understood, discreet, simple problems, on paper, on sunny afternoons in late May and early June. This kind of learning has its place – it encourages discipline of thought and allows you to develop certain important muscles that will be useful for later – but to be successful as product engineer , you’ll also need to master a bunch of different skills.

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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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The Impact of Blockchain on SaaS

Tom Tunguz

Much of the conversation today about crypto is about Bitcoin and currency. But that’s myopic. Soon, we will be talking about how crypto will change the software world. In fact, many founders have already started that pursuit. More than 30% of the initial coin offerings (ICO) in 2017 target developers and businesspeople with their products. The numbers are still small.

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5 Hidden Ecommerce Costs You Need to Know

FastSpring

You did it! You designed the perfect digital software, built a beautiful website, and have plans for marketing your new business. You even set up your social media profiles to build a loyal following. You’re ready to take the digital world by storm.

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Move Over Subscriptions. The Future Is Elastic And Built Around Relationships.

Chargify

Over the last decade, recurring revenue has emerged as the preferred model for businesses moving beyond transactional commerce. While the first generation of recurring revenue was defined by simple subscriptions—think Netflix’s original “one-size-fits-all” $7.99 pricing or the traditional “Good, Better, Best” plans—many businesses have found static subscription offers don’t always align with customers’ needs and limit growth potential.

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How To Structure Your Sales Development Team: The Navy Seal SDR Framework

Sales Hacker

In this article, you’ll learn how to structure your sales development (SDR) team for maximum efficiency and scalability. Sales leaders, read on! “The only easy day was yesterday.”. -U.S. Navy SEALs. This is one of the most famous principles of the U.S. Navy SEALs. From a business perspective, to me, this means you have to constantly improve your game.

Scale 85
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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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Lifecycle Operations: Nurturing Customers from Prospect to Advocate

InsightSquared

Guest blog by Ashley Coleman, Director of Marketing Operations at UserIQ. The concept of the customer journey is all the rage these days. It seems like every SaaS business wants to structure their sales, marketing and customer success team around a “customer journey framework” as the ultimate display of alignment. But for the most part, sales and marketing operations professionals have been busy working to unite sales and marketing around a spiraling technology stack, causing us to neglect a fu

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Successful employee onboarding should focus on culture

Intercom, Inc.

Onboarding new employees is a hard process to do well. You might think of onboarding as something you just have to check off your list, but it’s easy to forget that things which are second nature to you are totally new and unknown to someone that’s just started. I joined Intercom a few months ago as an engineering manager and onboarding for the first time in a while made me realize some things I hadn’t before.

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The Best Bit of Advice on Writing I've Received

Tom Tunguz

This is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve collected about writing. Put each sentence on a separate line when you write. When we read, we hear a rhythm. There is a rhythm to the words. And when we read, we look to find that rhythm, which pushes us through the end of a sentence, so if I write a really long sentence, and the reader isn’t expecting it – like this one – the reader will find it really hard to follow and understand where I am going.

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Adhere Creative Presents: Template Websites Vs. Custom Web Design, An Unbiased Comparison

Adhere Creative

W hen your company is on the market for a new website, one of the first things you’ll have to decide is whether or not to build a custom site, or use a premade template. Both choices rely on a CMS (Content Management System) to get the job done. Companies like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and Joomla, facilitate website building by offering powerful website construction platforms.

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Driving Growth, Customer Satisfaction, and Retention through Usage-Based Pricing

As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.

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We’re quietly judging you

FastSpring

Research shows that we judge websites just as we judge people: harshly and quickly. We all make snap judgments. It takes about 1/10th of a second to cobble together a first impression about a person, and home pages are no different. It takes 50 milliseconds for users to form an opinion of your site. That’s 0.05 seconds. The blink of an eye, a snap of the fingers.

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50 Must-Know Heavy Hitters: Winners of the Sales Hacker Top 50 Awards 2017!

Sales Hacker

In January, we announced a new initiative called The Sales Hacker Top 50 Awards. The Sales Hacker Top 50 Awards are an effort to show some love to the actual reps and practitioners on the front lines. They don’t often get the widespread recognition they deserve, since most other online sales awards often become influencer popularity contests. During the 6 weeks of open voting, over 5000 votes were placed.

Sales 84
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How digital workspaces are changing the way we work

ITPro

In-depth. The way we work is changing, and the way we manage our IT tools needs to change with it.

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How to use live chat for a product launch

Intercom, Inc.

In sales, we often talk about how to write great email subject lines or best times to cold call. This helps, but in the world of SaaS it’s more important to communicate with your prospects when the timing is right for them to engage. Case in point: product announcement day. Great companies will spend a lot of time crafting sophisticated product announcements with gorgeous design and content, attracting a windfall of traffic to your marketing site.

Scale 199
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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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Private Equity as an Exit Option for SaaS Startups

Tom Tunguz

At Saastr, Jason and I discussed the role of private equity in SaaS on stage as a potential acquisition path for SaaS startups. Private equity hasn’t been a common exit route for venture backed startups in the past. But that’s changing. The chart above depicts the total disclosed value of US venture-backed SaaS startups which have been acquired by PE firms since 2010.

Startup 165
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Getting Smart About Growth Podcast with Andrew Chen

Casey Accidental

Andrew Chen recently wrote a blog post about how growth is getting harder. I invited Andrew to the Greymatter podcast to chat more about why growth is getting harder, and more importantly, what to do about it. We talk about how viral growth is on the decline in consumer, but not in B2B, and how to leverage paid referrals effectively. We also walk through trends in paid acquisition, how to find your first channel of growth, and much more.

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How to Drive Traffic with Affiliate Marketing and Paid Media

FastSpring

If the traffic to your SaaS site is slow, it’s time to consider two time-tested routes to a bigger audience: affiliate marketing and paid media. Both require a bit of relationship-building, but it’s well worth the time. They help drive new traffic directly to your site.