The Angel VC
APRIL 10, 2013
[Update 12/20/2013: I have extended the dashboard to include multiple pricing tiers and annual subscription plans. Check it out here.] [Update 01/17/2015: There's a new company called ChartMogul ( which we invested in ) which makes it easy to get a real-time dashboard similar to the template below. Check it out! ] Over the last few years I've helped quite a lot of SaaS startups to create or fine-tune their KPI dashboards.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 13, 2013
Earlier this week, I chatted with a friend of mine who has founded an incredibly successful business, which he and his co-founder have been scaling impressively. I asked him about his biggest learning over the past few years. He said before having started his company and having built the team, he perceived management as a Band-Aid, as a fix for something wrong in the organizational design, communication or day-to-day operations of the company.
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Chaotic Flow
JUNE 11, 2013
SaaS growth isn’t a goal; it’s an obsession. The good news is that SaaS growth can be very smooth and predictable, because of the SaaS recurring revenue subscription model. The bad news is that SaaS growth can also be predictably slow the bigger you get. After a few years of rapid SaaS startup growth, it’s easy to find yourself on the short end of the hockey stick if you don’t know the right levers to push.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JUNE 3, 2013
Sorry to break this news to you, but customers don't really care about you. Even when they ask about you , it's really about them : "What problems can you solve for me?" "What experience do you have with companies like mine?" "What do you know about my business, my market, my product?" "How can you help me?" You may have a broad range of expertise. You might have solved problems for all kinds of different companies in all kinds of different industries.
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.
Incredo
DECEMBER 30, 2013
There are too many mobile applications now, but in this article we’ve narrowed them down for you to a list of 5 must-have apps. We want you to enjoy your business, without the hassle of going to look for apps in your time, so here they are. 1. Track your calls with LogMyCalls. This mobile marketing app is not only a call tracking web application, it’s so much more.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Aber Law Firm
SEPTEMBER 23, 2013
Yea I know the $ and the functionality of the SaaS offering are important in any SaaS contract negotiations, but there is a lot more going in the mind of your buyers. I think the best metaphor for this, is from the book “Switch. How to Change Things, When Things are Hard.” Imagine a rider on an elephant. How do you get the elephant to go where you want it to go?
ITPro
MARCH 1, 2013
Reviews. The granddaddy of enterprise software reminds us how it's done. 4.
The Angel VC
OCTOBER 24, 2013
[Note: This post first appeared as a guest post on Andrew Chen's blog. Andrew is a writer and entrepreneur and has written a large number of must-read essays on topics such as viral marketing, growth hacking and monetization. He was kind enough to publish my post on his blog, and I am republishing it here.] If you’re a long-time reader of my blog (or if you know me personally) you’ll know that cohort analyses are one of my favorite tools for getting a deeper understanding of a product’s usage.
The Angel VC
DECEMBER 20, 2013
[Update 01/17/2015: There's a new company called ChartMogul ( which we invested in ) which makes it easy to get a real-time dashboard similar to the template below. Check it out! ] [Note: This post first appeared as a guest post on the blog of Totango. In case you don't know Totango, it is a powerful analytics product which gives online services the information they need to increase user engagement, conversion and retention.
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Explore how integrated payment strategies impact investor and buyer evaluations. Payments are more than a feature — they’re a key to long-term success and market differentiation. They help SaaS companies offer seamless user experiences and efficient operations. Investors and strategic buyers assess these integrated payment strategies as a measure of a company's growth potential and sustainability.
The Angel VC
NOVEMBER 29, 2013
“What gets measured gets done” – it seems like the source of this quote, often attributed to management expert Peter Drucker, isn’t certain, but its meaning is clear and very relevant for every SaaS founder. If you want to make sure that you make best use of your scarce resources, you need to have a clear understanding of your objectives and the KPIs that measure your progress towards those objectives.
Chaotic Flow
OCTOBER 29, 2013
Driving sustainable growth is a challenge for every SaaS business from startups to public companies. In the beginning, the SaaS recurring revenue model seems like a dream compared to the revenue fits and starts of licensed enterprise software. But within one short customer lifetime, every SaaS CEO startles awake to the fact that the churn monster is always looking over your shoulder.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 27, 2013
Though the industry is called venture capital, the goal of a VC isn’t to maximize every risk. Instead, we try to understand all the risks a business might face and weigh those risks with the reward - the exit. Here are the major risks that I typically review when a startup pitches. Market timing risk - Is now the right time for the business? It’s often hard to evaluate this risk, but nevertheless, it’s an important consideration.
The Angel VC
JUNE 9, 2013
Example for a Geckoboard KPI dashboard Last week I spent a day in Stockholm to attend a metrics seminar organized by our friends at Creandum. It was a great event with talks from people of some of the best Internet companies from the Nordic region such as Spotify or Wrapp. Thanks Johan , Joel , Daniel , Frederic and everyone at Creandum for setting it up and inviting me!
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Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 10, 2013
Constrained by a limited budget while seeking to grow as quickly as possible, startup founders must decide how to balance growing their engineering teams with their sales & marketing teams. To help inform those decisions, I’ve benchmarked the relative sizes of the sales and engineering teams of the 36 publicly-traded SaaS companies from founding to IPO, typically 7 years later.
The Angel VC
SEPTEMBER 16, 2013
The last post in my series on DOs and DON'Ts for early-stage startups was about lead generation. The next logical step is sales, and so I want to write about what you can do to convert as many of those leads into paying customers. 7th DO for SaaS startups Build a repeatable, profitable sales process Sales is a very different animal depending on the stage of your company, the market segment you're going after and on whether we're talking about inbound sales or outbound sales.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 4, 2013
I have never worked for a company that was dogmatic about project postmortems but I have always wished I had. After all, project postmortems teach us so much. Learning from the mistakes and experiences of others constitutes the better part of our business education. It’s why we ask successful entrepreneurs to coffee and hang on every word when they speak at conferences.
Chaotic Flow
JANUARY 15, 2013
Since publishing the original SaaS metics blog series and subsequent SaaS Metrics Guide to SaaS Financial Performance , I’ve received numerous inquiries on various details and hidden gotchas in SaaS metrics implementation. This new series of SaaS Metrics FAQs explores some of these finer SaaS metrics points in a simple Q&A format. In this second post, I examine SaaS MRR churn, a SaaS metric that extends from SaaS customer churn which was covered in the first installment.
As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.
The Angel VC
DECEMBER 14, 2013
Last night I returned from a 2-day offsite with the Point Nine team (in Schlepzig, of all places). Our (small) full-time team more than doubled in the last six months, and this was the first time for all of us to spend some time together away from the daily bustle. We had a long list of topics that we wanted to discuss, ranging from investment theses to portfolio companies and to a number of projects that we're working on.
Tom Tunguz
DECEMBER 5, 2013
Bitcoin has captivated the imaginations of many with its quasi-anonymous, hyper cost-efficient payment network. The potential for Bitcoin to change foreign exchange is hard to overstate. In the same vein, the technologies that enable the internet of things (IoT) like Bluetooth Low Energy and Apple’s Beacons and Electric Imp’s infrastructure will transform the way we interact with the physical world to something akin to the mall in Minority Report.
Chaotic Flow
MARCH 4, 2013
A few months back, Gartner placed big data at the peak of its hype cycle for cloud computing , meaning most big data products are solutions looking for a problem. I always find this bad entrepreneurial habit to be one of the most frustrating of our industry. Having recently joined Meltwater as head of marketing and product (BTW Meltwater is hiring marketing and product managers!
The Angel VC
FEBRUARY 20, 2013
Last week we announced the closing of our new fund, Point Nine Capital II. The most important information about the new fund is included in our official press release , but I wanted to write a brief blog post to give you some additional background and share some personal thoughts. When we set out to create the new fund last year, the goal was to raise €30 million.
Advertiser: Data Robot
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.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 26, 2013
With the analytics tools today, it’s easy to measure hundreds if not thousands of different metrics for your business. Cutting through all the chaff to determine the most important or insightful metrics can be quite a challenge. Below are the ten metrics I’ve found to be most useful in board meetings. They answer the questions of how should a startup founder might measure the business at the highest level.
The Angel VC
APRIL 4, 2013
Inspired by Paul Graham’s “Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund” post of a few years ago I’d like to start a series of posts about ideas that I find exciting and that we at Point Nine would be very interested in investing in. Here's the first one. Electronic signing I’m a huge, huge fan of electronic signing. Whenever I have to sign a document and I’m getting a “Please eSign.” email I rejoice because it saves me the hassle of printing, completing, signing, scanning and emailing the signature pages (d
Chaotic Flow
JULY 30, 2013
Most of us were taught at an early age that double negatives are a bad thing, because they are unnecessarily complicated and increase the chances of miscommunication. It is with this principle in mind, that I propose that we permanently ban the ridiculous term “negative churn” from the SaaS metrics vocabulary. Churn is negative growth. Negative churn is simply growth.
The Angel VC
APRIL 14, 2013
Following my post about electronic signing I'd like to describe another area that we'd like to invest in. It's not a specific idea this time, rather a category of startups that we're very interested in: Industry-specific SaaS solutions I talked about the topic before when I wrote about "The land of a thousand niches" and touched on it in my "1st DO for SaaS startups".
Speaker: John Mansour - President, Product Management University
You know that sinking feeling. You’ve come up with a winning product strategy, everyone’s on board and energized, and you’re halfway down the path to execution only to have it submarined by something someone convinced your leadership was more strategic! It’s a scenario that’s all too familiar, and it exemplifies one of the biggest struggles with individual product strategies.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 11, 2013
Sitting on a bench overlooking the South Beach marina, I asked an entrepreneur how he had been since he founded his company. He replied with a conundrum: Looking back I can’t believe it’s only been a year but if I think about every day, it’s taken forever. That’s a really succinct way of communicating how it feels to grind. Cementing each brick, each hire, each line of code, each product feature seems like just an incremental step, just another day.
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
The Angel VC
AUGUST 4, 2013
Failure may not have been an option for the Apollo 13 mission , but it certainly is an option for startups. In fact, since statistically the majority of startups fail, you could argue that it's the default option. Most successful entrepreneurs have a few failures under their belt, and most "overnight" successes are the result of years' of hard work – and in many cases years' of trial and error.
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