Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 29, 2013

At Google, the director of my team repeated a management mantra to us quite often. “Manage yourself out of a job; make yourself redundant”, she would say. “Empower your people and then get out of the way.” Our director was a terrific team builder. Before Google, she founded a startup where she learned to build a company. When she told us her mantra, she was sharing her learnings with us.

Startup 124

Startup Management Business 124

Chaotic Flow

AUGUST 27, 2013

What’s the stronger driver of SaaS company growth: customer acquisition or customer lifetime value? The answer is yes. Rapid, sustainable SaaS growth is equal parts customer acquisition and customer lifetime value. Simply multiply these two numbers and you get your SaaS growth ceiling , the most revenue your SaaS business can ever achieve. Period.

Customer Lifetime Value 122

Customer Lifetime Value Marketing SaaS Scale 122

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 25, 2013

How much should your SaaS startup spend on sales and marketing? I’ve written about using unit economics and lead funnel performance to answer this question. Emulating the patterns of successful SaaS companies is another technique. There are about 34 publicly traded SaaS companies that have published their revenue and sales & marketing expenses. Though their revenue growth rates are each unique, the sales and marketing spend patterns are quite similar.

Marketing 113

Marketing SaaS Sales Strategy 113

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 29, 2013

There’s a force in mobile app distribution that isn’t talked about much despite its magnitude: mobile social networks. Mobile social nets are becoming the predominant mobile app paid discovery/distribution platforms. How big is this force? Line, the Japanese mobile messenger with more than 200M users is on a $400M run rate , 60% of which is derived from app distribution.

Mobile 100

Mobile Acquisition Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 100

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Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 25, 2013

I’ve been promoting my Twitter account since October 2012 in effort to better understand social media content marketing and to promote that great vanity metric, Twitter follower count. At the outset, I promoted my account and links to blog posts. I prize followers more than one time visits to a blog, because the long term marketing relationship provides many chances to bring someone to my blog.

Social Media 100

Social Media Content Marketing Trends Investment 100