Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

MAY 7, 2013

Like most conventional wisdom, ideas about the "best" way to market software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions make sense for some companies. But for other companies, those same ideas don't work at all. Take free trials, for example. For applications and markets where the prospective customer can actually get a good sense of how the solution works over the course of a short trial, where the company has the resources to support the trial, and there's an effective process in place to move prospects fr

Marketing 124

Marketing Social Media SaaS Entertainment 124

Tom Tunguz

MAY 9, 2013

In the summer of 2008, a crisis evolved on my team at Google: social networks had grown exponentially. The AdSense network was flooded with social network page impressions whose poor performance challenged advertisers and Google alike. During that summer, we formed a tiger team of about four or five key people. We shed our daily responsibilities, relocated our desks to a conference room in a deserted building on the edge of campus where we brainstormed and debated and wrote patents and developed

Underperforming Technical Team 100

Underperforming Technical Team Advertising Development 100

CloseSaaS

MAY 6, 2013

In part 1 of this series, we built a search query parser using pyparsing which generates an abstract syntax tree (AST) that represents the structure of a search query. In this part, we will cover how to generate an Elasticsearch query by extending the code of the first part.

Data 40

Data Sales 40

Tom Tunguz

MAY 5, 2013

Kenny van Zant drew this diagram for me on white board and I think it’s the best visualization of how SMB SaaS freemium business grow. The diagram highlights a few important mechanics of the SMB SaaS business model. In any given freemium user base, small-office/home-office (1 to 20 employee shops) users tend to be a few times larger in size than true SMB customer (20 to 500 employees).

SMB 100

SMB Scale SaaS Mobile 100

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Payments

Tom Tunguz

MAY 8, 2013

Craigslist’s generic market place gave rise to fifty or more single-purpose alternatives some of which are quite valuable companies: AirBnB, Care.com, 99Designs, oDesk, CustomMade, Gazelle. Each of these startups operates verticalized market places that solve customer problems better than Craigslist’s generic platform. In so doing, these startups have grown their observed markets.

Mobile 124

Mobile Acquisition Startup Trends 124