Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 9, 2013

One number investors use to benchmark SaaS startups across sectors and industries is sales efficiency. There are a handful of variants of this metric, sometimes called the magic number, but ultimately they all aim to provide some sense of the incremental revenue returned by sales and marketing investment. To make it more concrete, if a startup invests $500k in marketing and sales this quarter and generates $1M in incremental revenue, net of the cost to provide the service, for the next 12 months

Benchmarks 127

Benchmarks Sales Recruiting Startup Sales 127

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

OCTOBER 8, 2013

There's a guy in my town who advertises himself as "The Bulkhead Man." What he does is install the entryways that go from the outside of a house into a basement. Most are heavy steel doors that are mounted onto the concrete foundation. Here's a photo of mine, partially obscured by a very healthy holly bush. I assume "The Bulkhead Man" could probably handle a lot of other construction projects around the house: build a deck, hang new cabinets, replace siding, whatever.

Marketing 100

Marketing SaaS Underperforming Technical Team Acquisition 100

CloseSaaS

OCTOBER 7, 2013

40

40

Chaotic Flow

OCTOBER 8, 2013

SaaS product management professionals should always remember that there are four P’s in marketing , one being product. Unfortunately, software companies have a bad habit of thinking about product in isolation from the rest of the marketing mix. This is a particularly costly mistake in SaaS and is the root cause of many a SaaS Don’t. Unlike other businesses, SaaS creates a real-time, always-on connection between the customer and the company through the SaaS product.

SaaS Payments 200

SaaS Payments Payment Methods Payments Payment Services 200

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Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 10, 2013

If a typical SaaS business loses about 2 to 3% of their customers each month to churn, the business must grow by at least 27% to 43% annually to maintain the same revenue. The idea written as an equation: Revenue Growth = Customers x Avg. Contract Value x (Growth Rate - Churn Rate). At the beginning of a SaaS startups' life, when the company generates $1M in annual revenue, churn in absolute dollar terms is small, about $300k for the year.

Customer Success 100

Customer Success Startup Scale SaaS 100

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 7, 2013

Over the course of the past few months, I’ve built six projects that use APIs from Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Mailchimp and others. These APIs enable me to extract data that I use to analyze this blog and build tools to be more effective. Once I extract the data from their platforms, no API platform understands why or how I use the data. While web companies measure many things on websites and mobile apps, very few apply the same rigor to APIs.

Mobile 100

Mobile Data Revenue 100

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 6, 2013

On this blog, Twitter is the second largest source of traffic. Twitter yielded 21% of visitors in the last 30 days. Because I suspect that tweets containing my blog’s links don’t reach a very large proportion of my Twitter followers, I’m experimenting with traffic recirculation techniques by retweeting older articles periodically. Of the approximately 150 posts on Svbtle, I have recirculated 30.

Content Marketing 100

Content Marketing Scale Marketing Subscription 100