SaaStr
JULY 22, 2020
I’m not ashamed to admit that when I set up our first SaaS sales comp plan, I had no idea what I was doing. In my first start-up, yes I sold to the enterprise. I sold $6m our first year (man, that sounds good looking back on it). But I did all the sales myself, and stupidly, had no sales comp plan at all ??. Then at Adobe Sign / EchoSign I had some good — and painful — learnings.
Predictable Revenue
SEPTEMBER 9, 2020
Keeping your existing users is much more cost effective that finding and converting new leads. Despite this, the average business mailing list loses 25% of its subscribers every year. Reactivating your lapsed customers is key to preventing them from becoming lost customers. The post 6 Most Effective Reactivation Strategies for Lapsed Customers appeared first on Predictable Revenue.
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Predictable Revenue
OCTOBER 22, 2020
Ari Levine has learned to approach everything from the position of the consumer. Even in B2B enterprises, that buyer is a person and we shouldn't forget that. Let's learn how to be more human in our outreach approach and create quality connections with our target audience. The post How to Diversify Your Top of Funnel (And Add a Figure in Revenue) appeared first on Predictable Revenue.
Andreessen Horowitz
OCTOBER 18, 2020
New technologies enable activities that fall into one of two categories: 1) doing things you could already do but can now do better because they are faster, cheaper, easier, higher quality, etc. 2) doing brand new things that you simply … The post Doing Old Things Better Vs. Doing Brand New Things appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.
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When test coverage falls behind release velocity, quality suffers, and your team feels the consequences. This guide outlines when it makes sense to outsource quality assurance (QA), the risks to watch for, and how to scale testing without increasing headcount or slowing down engineering. You will learn how leading teams are leveraging external QA partners to expand coverage, enhance defect detection, and remain aligned with CI/CD timelines.
The Daily Egg
DECEMBER 18, 2020
Planning and executing any experiment is crucial but is only half the battle. It’s analyzing all of the data that’s the other half, and perhaps the scariest. But it doesn’t have to be scary. An excellent statistical analysis software allows users to collect, structure, analyze, and interpret data from the market. It comes with tools […]. The post Best Statistical Analysis Software appeared first on The Daily Egg.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
InsightSquared
JULY 21, 2020
The best sales teams consistently deliver for their organizations, plain and simple. It’s not just the effort of one or two rainmakers, but one of the entire team. This is no mistake, as the elite teams are relentless in their development of sales skills. The team leader sets the expectation of excellence and instills a culture of learning and self-improvement to achieve both short- and long-term goals.
Cobloom
SEPTEMBER 7, 2020
This is a guest post from Benjamin Brandall. Benjamin is a content marketer at Process Street , where he writes on startups, SaaS, and workflows. In his spare time, he runs Secret Cave , a site covering obscure entertainment and internet culture.
Chargebee
DECEMBER 21, 2020
Churn is a universal problem that every company faces. Let's look at some real-life examples and understand how companies in SaaS dealt away with churn.
SaaStr
NOVEMBER 18, 2020
Second-timers know the playbook and can execute against it faster. But often times, they also have a bit of healthy skepticism, a bit of baggage, from the last time. First-timers often know very little, but are baggage free. That can be very powerful. I’ve had a chance to watch a whole cohort of SaaS first-time founders go from $1m to $10m ARR in 5 quarters or less (more on that here ) and just been awestruck by how much better than me they are as founders, and how much better they̵
Speaker: Tamara Fingerlin, Developer Advocate
Apache Airflow® 3.0, the most anticipated Airflow release yet, officially launched this April. As the de facto standard for data orchestration, Airflow is trusted by over 77,000 organizations to power everything from advanced analytics to production AI and MLOps. With the 3.0 release, the top-requested features from the community were delivered, including a revamped UI for easier navigation, stronger security, and greater flexibility to run tasks anywhere at any time.
SaaStr
AUGUST 17, 2020
Here’s my list of the best golden advice I was given as a first-time — and second-time — CEO: Manage People — In General, and Earlier. The earlier in your career you can learn how to manage people, the faster you can excel in learning to scale. Managing people isn’t always fun. But embrace it if you want to be a CEO, a founder, and/or be a part of something bigger.
SaaStr
NOVEMBER 17, 2020
If you get even 10 paying customers in your first 90 days in market, and they don't churn … You have something. Never, ever quit then. Even if you have no money. Even if the team isn't sure. Even if the competition is fierce. Even if they say it's too hard. — Jason BeKind Lemkin (@jasonlk) November 17, 2020. One of the tough things in SaaS, a downside of the fact that it compounds , is that you’re always running on the Habitral.
Chargebee
SEPTEMBER 28, 2020
“A culture is not a set of beliefs; it’s a set of actions.” –Bushido.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 18, 2020
Most high-growth software investors value public companies on enterprise value to forward revenue multiple. But investors in private companies use a different metric, enterprise value to forward annual recurring revenue (ARR).The private markets project the ARR a year from now. The public markets project revenue for the next 12 months. What if we could compare the relative valuation multiples of public and private high growth software companies?
Speaker: Alex Salazar, CEO & Co-Founder @ Arcade | Nate Barbettini, Founding Engineer @ Arcade | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO @ Aggregage
There’s a lot of noise surrounding the ability of AI agents to connect to your tools, systems and data. But building an AI application into a reliable, secure workflow agent isn’t as simple as plugging in an API. As an engineering leader, it can be challenging to make sense of this evolving landscape, but agent tooling provides such high value that it’s critical we figure out how to move forward.
SaaStr
DECEMBER 15, 2020
It took us 2 years just to figure out our ultimate business model. What you think you do on day 1 may look very different by day 365. [link]. — Aaron Levie (@levie) September 11, 2020. It seems like everyone wants to be a SaaS founder these days. I meet with great VPs of Sales and Product in particular who are Ready. It’s time. To go out on their own.
SaaStr
DECEMBER 10, 2020
I hear again and again from SaaS founders growing to $5m, $10m ARR or even more that they don’t need a certain VP — with the exception of a VP of Sales. That they can get away without no one in the role, or a just a junior person in marketing, in product, in success, in biz dev, etc. Basically, in SaaS, everyone “gets” that they need a VP of Sales.
SaaStr
NOVEMBER 19, 2020
IME, rough order to make hires in: VPM: $0.2m ARR VPS: $1-$1.5m ARR VPCS: $2m ARR VPP: $3m-$4m ARR VPE: $5m-$6m ARR CFO: $10m ARR COO: $20m ARR. More here: [link]. — Jason BeKind Lemkin (@jasonlk) July 21, 2019. The other day I was meeting with a great CEO who had raised a modest seed round. Enough to invest, but not enough to go crazy with. He’d found several good First VP candidates, in particular, a strong first head of marketing and a strong first head of product.
SaaStr
NOVEMBER 12, 2020
I held off for 6+ years and 3000+ Quora answers on writing a post on Board Meetings. Why? Because every investor in the world writes lengthy posts on How to Have a Great Board Meeting. How to Have a Great Pre-Board Meeting. How to Have a Great Board Meeting Week. Etc. etc. etc. etc. VCs, once they have been doing it a while, basically become professional Board Members, and they write a lot about that.
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SaaStr
DECEMBER 7, 2020
I know you are probably like me. You go to a web service. What do you do? Free trial. Sign Up Now. The very, very last thing I am going to click is “Contact Me.” The last thing I want, as a web-centric small customer/user, is some sales rep selling me on some product I just want to try for 20 minutes and see if it works for me. You and I are like that.
SaaStr
NOVEMBER 19, 2020
Shopify has grown so quickly, it’s tough to even comprehend. From A $1.6B run rate a year ago to $3.2B today. Wow. Zoom is the most obvious “Covid Beneficiary”, but Shopify in many ways isn’t far behind: Ok the issues marching to $4b in ARR are a bit removed from what most founders experience. But, there are still many interesting things we can learn from Shopify, especially since it sells to so many SMBs, has been late to go upmarket, and combines a payments/fintech e
The Daily Egg
NOVEMBER 5, 2020
Even the smallest teams need an easy way to work together and stay connected, especially when they’re not working in the same physical location. But whether you’re a remote team, have numerous locations, or manage a small team working in the same space, collaboration is a critical piece of crushing your business goals and finalizing […]. The post Best Collaboration Software appeared first on The Daily Egg.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 30, 2020
I’ve been steadily progressing through the excellent books in the Stripe Press catalog. First, I read High Growth Handbook. Most recently, I read An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson. It’s the best book I’ve read on engineering management. Will has worked at Digg, Uber, Stripe, and is now at Calm and has seen many engineering teams endure and thrive through hypergrowth.
Speaker: Pete Uselman, Director of Partner Experience at Wind River Payments
Most integrated payments providers share a percent of the payment revenue with their software partners. But, oftentimes, that revenue share is only a fraction of the true income potential software providers can realize. If you want to maximize income opportunities from your payments program, check out Wind River Payments’ webinar-on-demand.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 21, 2020
High growth software companies are valued based on forward revenue multiples. In other words, to calculate the enterprise value of a business, you multiply the revenue by the forward multiple. But, how does the market set the multiple? What predicts the forward multiple, or correlates with it? I pulled together the data for the basket of the roughly 60 publicly traded SaaS companies and ran a linear regression to understand the predictive power of the many key metrics reported by public companie
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 20, 2020
The Economist ran a story about the future of work this week. Working remotely, we have reduced meeting length by about 15% and increased our total time at work by 2 hours per day. We might declare we have found an extra 10 hours in the workweek from nothing. This productivity boost might seem universally positive, but there’s a catch. One of the critical topics in many boardrooms today is managing employee burnout.
SaaStr
SEPTEMBER 13, 2020
90% of my evaluation of any leader that works for me is the quality of people they can get to work for them. This could be wrong… Maybe it should be 95%. — Todd McKinnon (@toddmckinnon) September 13, 2020. Recruiting is tough. I certainly don’t do it well enough. But to be a great CEO, you need to find a way to force yourself to be a great recruiter.
SaaStr
DECEMBER 14, 2020
“Churn” is a term we all use in SaaS as a core metric, but its roots, as near as I remember and can tell, come from our B2C colleagues. Folks churn out of their Verizon plan, their Netflix subscription, etc. In a low-end subscription model for a tool, not a solution (e.g., semi-commodity storage, semi-commodity hosting, etc. etc.), the dynamics are similar.
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Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 26, 2020
Asana filed their S-1 this week. Asana builds productivity and task management solutions. When they launched, their vision of eliminating email through task management made big waves in the market. Today, the company is a massively successful SaaS business and another example of the flywheel business model that creates demand at the individual user and leverages that interest to sell department and company-wide contracts.
SaaStr
AUGUST 14, 2020
A mistake many founders make is hiring a VP of Sales who has many strengths — but not at sales per se. A VP of Sales who is smart, polished, and worked at the right place, in a management-level position. That can talk about quota attainment and sales operations and scaling and number. But actually isn’t great at … sales itself. I can tell you empirically the best VP of Sales I know were strong salespeople in the early career.
SaaStr
OCTOBER 11, 2020
Q: What are some of the most costly mistakes done by novice investors? My biggest mistakes in SaaS investing actually in the end haven’t been truly costly because, in the end, power laws mean your winners overwhelm your losers if you do it right. A few winners more than make up for the mistakes. The real mistakes are just not getting in more winners.
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