2018

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We’re Overthinking Seed Round Signaling Effects

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

There is much hand wringing in the startup ecosystem about various forms of signaling between the seed and A rounds. Conventional wisdom, and advice, abounds: entrepreneurs should never include a venture firm in their seed round because it’ll scare other VCs off from pursuing the A. After all, the “insider” VC has more information and.

Startup 538
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1% of Salesforce's Revenue Makes a Unicorn

Tom Tunguz

Salesforce is worth $113 billion. 1% of $113 billion is $1.13 billion. ServiceNow is worth $34B and Workday is worth $33B. 3% of $33-34B is $1B. Atlassian is worth $20.5B. 5% of $20.5B is $1B. Why am I doing all this simple math you might ask? We have reached a point in SaaS where a small fraction of an incumbent is a billion-dollar company. If you start a business tomorrow that is able to cleave 1% of revenue from Salesforce, you will have built a billion-dollar business. 1% is not that much.

Revenue 275
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Live chat for business: everything you wanted to know about live chat but were afraid to ask

Intercom, Inc.

A great customer experience today is about meeting people where they already are. And today, there’s one channel where more potential customers are than any place else: messaging and live chat. Think about the way that you talk to people every day. If you’re anything like me, you use iMessage to talk to your family, WhatsApp for your close friends, and you probably spend your entire day on Slack talking to your teammates at work.

Scale 239
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Eliminate Churn Forever in 5 Simple Steps

Sixteen Ventures

Churn… ya boring. Yawn. Time to move on. I’m so over talking about churn and if you really understand what Customer Success is all about , you should be, too. Churn is so easy to get rid of… you just have to do five simple things. If churn is a problem for you, this post will change that (if you’ll let it) and then you can move onto bigger and better things.

Churn 129
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The Big Payoff of Application Analytics

Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.

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Why Good Site Architecture Is The Only CRO You Need

Neil Patel

When you hear the words “site architecture,” the first thing that comes to mind is probably SEO. It doesn’t take much digging into SEO best practice to learn that Google loves a site with clearly defined architecture that’s easy to crawl and index. But if you stopped your site architecture planning with just your SEO, then you’ve missed out on the greater picture.

More Trending

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Quick Ways to Make Your Google Ads Stand Out from the Competition

Unbounce

Google Ads amounts to billions of dollars in revenue for the search engine giant, but what about your revenue? Standing out in this competitive—and, let’s face it, cluttered—environment can be a huge challenge for advertisers, especially if they’re just starting out. There’s only so much space on a search results page to go around, after all.

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How Zapier Reached $35M ARR With This SaaS SEO Strategy

Ryan Berg

Want to drive more search traffic to your SaaS? In this case study, we’ll step outside the usual content marketing tactics most SaaS companies use. And look at how Zapier leverages SEO to drive millions of high intent searchers to their product every month. This strategy has nothing to do with blogging (although we’ll take a look at how they added a blog later to enhance this approach).

Strategy 111
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Sales Hacker’s 35 Most Influential Women in Sales

Sales Hacker

Welcome to Sales Hacker’s first-ever Influential Women in Sales list! In this exclusive list, we wanted to honor not just female leaders that promote their own sales platform (no shame in that!) but those that take it even a step further by being incredibly intentional about promoting the next generation of female salespeople and making their path a little easier.

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What Are Growth Teams For, and What Do They Work On?

Casey Accidental

This blog post was adapted from a presentation I did recently. Hence, slides. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I receive a lot of questions about growth teams. Naturally, there is a lot of confusion. Is this marketing being re-branded? Who does this team report to? What is the goal of it? What do they actually work on? When do I start a growth team for my business?

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6 Reasons Why Your Integrated Payments Strategy Could Fail

If you're in the software industry grappling with integrating payments into your business model, understanding where others have stumbled can be a game-changer for your revenue goals. Discover 6 key reasons behind the struggles many face. The challenge goes beyond the technicalities of integrating a payment system; it delves into the strategic oversight of revenue shares, negotiations with payment providers, and the full exploitation of potential revenue streams.

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Three Things To Consider Before Your Next MarTech Purchase

CloudKettle

Marketers are living in a golden age of marketing. No longer do marketers have to rely. The post Three Things To Consider Before Your Next MarTech Purchase appeared first on CloudKettle.

Marketing 101
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Matrix Growth Academy – Zero to 100 Videos

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

Matrix Growth Academy – Zero to 100 was an educational event held in San Francisco, aimed at providing B2B Founders with a road-map for how to get from Zero to a repeatable, scalable and profitable growth process that would take them to $100m in revenue. Please find below the primary videos for They have been.

Education 278
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Why Fast Learning Curves are So Important to Startups

Tom Tunguz

Startups are business machines engineered to grow quickly. The forces of hypergrowth exert enormous strain on every aspect of the company. Internal break all the time as the company moults into a new skin. This is one of the most important things to keep in mind when hiring. Every lead hired today, whether marketing , sales, engineering or product, will have a very different job nine months from now, much less two years from now.

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Machine learning isn?t as hard as it looks

Intercom, Inc.

It’s easy to believe that machine learning is hard. An arcane craft known only to a select few academics. After all, you’re teaching machines that work in ones and zeros to reach their own conclusions about the world. You’re teaching them how to think! Indeed, the majority of literature on machine learning is riddled with complex notation, formulae and superfluous language.

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Driving Growth, Customer Satisfaction, and Retention through Usage-Based Pricing

As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.

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Good Questions, Bad Asks: The UX Of Questions In User Onboarding

Chargebee

There are three strategies you can use to turn good questions into good asks—gradual engagement, information priming, and immediate impact delivery.

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Why Being the Loudest Makes You the Weakest

Neil Patel

What’s one thing that you are constantly seeing on the web? Especially if you are on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube? Come on, take a guess… No, I am not talking about people taking half-naked selfies of themselves or posting their lunches. I’m talking about people showing off. From taking pictures of their cars or money and even their homes to standing in front of private jets and yachts.

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Five Key Skills for Sales Ops Career Success

InsightSquared

If you’ve ever thought about becoming a lawyer, the path is pretty clear: Get a Bachelor’s degree. Take the LSAT. Earn your JD. Pass the bar. The process may not be easy, but at least it’s laid out. You know exactly what steps to take, including recommended classes and exam prep courses, in order to put yourself on a path to success. When I think about sales operations, there is no defined route to take.

Sales 110
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7 Page Speed Stats Every Marketer Should Know

Unbounce

If we asked you to describe an effective digital marketing campaign, you might tout the value of strong design, ad targeting, or the benefits of conversion optimization. But even if your web and landing pages are aesthetically on point, it can mean nothing if you haven’t considered page speed. For context, if it takes more than three seconds for a page to load, just over half of visitors will leave it.

Marketing 111
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How to Achieve Product-Market Fit

Speaker: Dan Olsen - Product Management Trainer and Consultant, Author, and Speaker

Everyone working on a product is trying to achieve the same goal: product-market fit. But most products fail to do so. In this webinar, product management expert Dan Olsen will share his simple but effective framework for achieving product-market fit from his book The Lean Product Playbook. He will explain his Product-Market Fit Pyramid and The Lean Product Process, a 6-step methodology that guides you through how to: Determine your target customer Identify underserved customer needs Define your

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How to Apply the Rule of 40 for Your SaaS Company

The SaaS CFO

How to Calculate the Rule of 40 in SaaS The rule of 40 in SaaS is simple financial framework that balances revenue growth versus margins. It’s a rule of thumb to quickly determine the health and/or attractiveness of a SaaS company. You’ve probably heard of the rule of 40, but the application of the formula […]. The post How to Apply the Rule of 40 for Your SaaS Company appeared first on The SaaS CFO.

SaaS 96
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10 Most Important Sales Trends That Will Define 2019 (And Predictions)

Sales Hacker

It’s that time of the year again! Time for Sales Hacker’s Annual Top 10 Sales Trends and Predictions for the Future of Sales in 2019. Due to the proliferation of modern sales technology and people’s love of it, I added a new element this time. This new element is, “Companies to watch”. You know, since it’s extremely apparent that the sales technology landscape keeps growing like wildfire.

Trends 106
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Feature/Product Fit

Casey Accidental

Through various methods, Silicon Valley has drilled into the minds of entrepreneurs the concept of product/market fit. Marc Andreessen says it’s the only thing that matters , and Brian Balfour has an amazing series of posts that talk about how to find it. But what happens after you find product/market fit? Do you stop working on product? I think most people would argue definitely not.

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How to use customer feedback to fuel your business growth

Baremetrics

Jack Ma, founder and CEO of Alibaba, attributes the growth of his company to customer feedback. In one interview he said , “I’m not a tech guy. I’m looking at technology with the eyes of my customers… normal people’s eyes.”. Most businesses assume that to grow, they need to look at the numbers. When really, they should look at the people: who is using their product, and how can that product make their lives better or easier?

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Innovation Systems: Advancing Practices to Create New Value

As technology transforms the global business landscape, companies need to examine and update their internal processes for innovation to keep pace. Ultimately, organizations will have to improve the velocity of innovation by creating repeatable processes that support ideation, exploration, and incubation, essential to capturing an idea’s full value.

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2018 SAAS Private Survey Results- Part 1

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

For the seventh year in a row, we’re proud to work with KBCM Technology Group (formerly Pacific Crest Securities) to share results from a survey of ~385 private SaaS companies. Thank you to the readers of forEntrepreneurs who participated in taking the survey! Thank you also to David Spitz (@dspitz) and the team at KBCM Technology Group for their.

SaaS 271
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Ten Year's Worth of Learnings About Pricing

Tom Tunguz

Last week, I shared a presentation with an executive team at a large public SaaS company on everything I’ve learned about pricing. Here’s a summary of the frameworks and theory that I’ve aggregated over a decade of investing in startups. Why do we set prices? Setting aside the important reasons of generating revenue and maintaining solvency for a business, there are many other reasons to set price.

Pricing 236
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Customer retention is the new conversion

Intercom, Inc.

Convincing potential users to sign up for your product isn’t easy. But what happens next is far more important. The latest batch of billion-dollar companies are built on high customer retention. They help their users be successful, and that means providing great onboarding. At Traction Conference, an event all about how to keep and grow customers and revenue at scale, I explained how to build onboarding based on your customers’ goals, and why when your product improves, your onboardi

Retention 223
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User Onboarding: How To Get The Little Things Right

Chargebee

The tiny details in user onboarding make the difference between good and great. It’s important we think about them and take time to get them right. Here’s something that can help.

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Software Composition Analysis: The New Armor for Your Cybersecurity

Speaker: Blackberry, OSS Consultants, & Revenera

Software is complex, which makes threats to the software supply chain more real every day. 64% of organizations have been impacted by a software supply chain attack and 60% of data breaches are due to unpatched software vulnerabilities. In the U.S. alone, cyber losses totaled $10.3 billion in 2022. All of these stats beg the question, “Do you know what’s in your software?

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25 Sales Questions to Qualify Your Leads Faster

Neil Patel

You can attribute a lot of great relationships to perfect timing. When you connect with the right person at the right time, everything seems to just fit. This is especially true for sales. Connecting with your lead too early means they won’t be ready to buy. But if you wait too long, they may have moved on to a competitor. Unfortunately, finding the perfect time to connect with a customer is complicated.

Scale 101
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Is revenue operations just another word for sales operations?

InsightSquared

During a recent analysis of the available “operations” jobs on LinkedIn, we discovered a significant number of “revenue operations” jobs — 59,110 to be exact. It sparked the question, “Is revenue operations just another word for sales operations, or are the roles fundamentally different?”. We spoke to several operations professionals to help us better define revenue ops, and understand how the role fits into an organization relative to sales ops.

Scale 109
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It’s Time to Retest Your Page Speed [Google’s latest update]

Unbounce

Back in October, we were the first to claim that 2019 will be the year of page speed. We’ve got our eyes on the market and lemme tell you: Google is sending serious signals that it’s crunch time to deal with your slow pages. Faster pages are a strategic marketing priority. And sure enough, Google has made yet another change to uphold that prediction.