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Starting in January, public software companies will report their financials using ASC 606. Normally, accounting changes are not that interesting, but ASC 606 will change several of the key attributes and benchmarks SaaS startups use. The two most important changes are changes to revenue and profitability. Today, all software revenue is recognized ratably over the contract period. If a business finds a 12 month contract for $12,000, the company record $1000 of revenue for each month. MORE
Product teams have been repeating the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) mantra for a decade now, without re-evaluating whether it’s the right way to maximize learning while pleasing the customer. Well, it’s not the best system. It’s selfish and it hurts customers. We don’t build MVPs at WP Engine. The motivation behind the MVP is still valid: Build something small, because small things are predictable and inexpensive to test. MORE
There are different uses of cement such as to make cement mortar, cement concrete which are used in various types of masonry and concrete structures. Building Materials Building Technology Guide Buildings Cement MORE
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Over the past 12 months I’ve invested considerable time thinking about, experimenting with and optimising my daily routine. I relish figuring out new ways to become more efficient and better at my work. There’s a limited number of hours in the working week, so the challenge is to use our time so that we not only produce our best work, but also clearly understand what’s going to have the biggest impact. Despite what you may think, productivity is a perennial, rather a millennial challenge. MORE
Back in 2010, on a Monday at 5 PM, I found myself at a bar called Memphis in Southern California in a heated discussion with two close friends. Patrick Vlaskovits was cheerfully drinking a mint julep while Sean Ellis and I were each enjoying a cold beer. At the time, Patrick was working on a startup and a book. Sean was advising a handful of high-growth tech startups including Dropbox, Eventbrite and my own company, KISSmetrics. MORE
Forget work/life integration for a minute. How much time do you have, regardless of partitioning? From your 24-hour daily allotment, the 1950s-style break-down is 8 hours for work, 8 for home and commute, and 8 for sleep and ablutions. So, “work” and “home” are the two things in which you can spend 40+ hours per week. This is the amount of time it takes to tackle something huge. A career. A parent. A startup. MORE
In the first part of this post , I looked at what some of the most knowledgeable people in the industry said about Product/Market Fit (PMF) and how they try to define and measure it. While everybody seems to agree on the broad concept of PMF there is (unsurprisingly) no consensus on how exactly it can be defined and measured, and some people set the bar much higher than others. MORE
How hiring our first salesperson led me to recognize that cluelessness is at the heart of entrepreneurship. Make More Happen MORE
Building a company is a lot like trying to predict the future. You’re looking through a crystal ball to see where the market is moving, and how you can adapt your product accordingly. You have limited cash, which means that you only have a finite amount of time and resources to scale your business. The longer you take to make decisions about your company, the more time and money you burn. Optimizing your startup for speed is the only way to keep your head above the water. MORE
Selling to c-level executives is a different ball game. You have to be concise, respectful of their time, and really think about how to differentiate yourself in order to break through the clutter and earn the right to ask for something. Here is a message to sellers from a real c-level buyer: Outbound tactics without strategy are sheer lunacy. We must lead with an insight-driven value narrative (‘hypothesis of value’), otherwise hammering away in blended channels is worthless. MORE
It was 2008, and I was having a classic founder moment. I had no idea what I was doing. But at least I was doing! I was founding a SaaS business, KISSmetrics. Like any startup, we were flailing, failing, and on fire, all at the same time. It was a wild, insane, and ridiculously exhausting experience. I was in charge of product development, operations, finance, funding, and probably 44 other things. At that point in 2009, I was also responsible for marketing. MORE
Ever since the 4-Hour Workweek where Tim Ferriss wrote about using virtual assistants (VAs) as a way to outsource your inbox – hiring virtual sales assistants has hit the mainstream. What is a Virtual Sales Assistant? A Virtual Sales Assistant is a remote contractor that you hire as a means of outsourcing a specific task or set of tasks in order to build a more efficient sales process. A virtual sales assistant can also refer to a contractor located overseas. MORE
Guest blog by Joe Rodden, Sales Systems Manager at Catalant Technologies. I get asked, “What should I look for when hiring someone for Sales Operations?” or “What skills should I have to break into Sales Operations?” a lot. Thinking about the best and worst Sales Operations professionals I’ve worked with over the years, I’ve come up with four skills that the best have and the worst lack. MORE
Customer Health Score takes multiple dimensions of customer data metrics and classifies them into a single representation of green, yellow or red. It is a consolidation of all the information the company has about the customer, from all probes, people and systems, past and current. Companies use customer health to speed up and scale communication, prioritization, decision making and forecasting of their customer success operations. MORE
Zendesk is a family of products that helps companies manage the entire customer lifecycle in different ways. They are on a scale that is uncommon for B2B companies, with a $350M run rate, 90K paying customers, and an additional 50-100K free or trial customers at any given time. MORE
Founder salaries are not a topic I’ve had to spend a lot of time with so far. I usually just “OK” them, since the founders we are working with are all super reasonable people who carefully weigh how much they need against the interests of the company – their company. But sometimes founders ask me for a suggestion or some guidance because they are uncertain as to what is fair, and so I thought it might be useful to create a simple model. Here it is. MORE
Today’s customer success executives are being challenged to use unprecedented amounts of customer data to build more predictable revenue outcomes and run more efficient operations. That’s on top of their existing efforts to manage an entire customer base. If you are a VP of Customer Success, it is time to go beyond defining strategy and start ensuring the execution of your strategy across the organization. MORE
Without doubt, one of the most exciting parts of being a marketer today is the perpetual challenge of finding new channels and tactics to leverage. There’s a whole host of marketing arbitrage opportunities out there - if you know where to look and spend your time. Identifying opportunities that we think will create business value is not only a lot of fun, it's key to driving future growth. For that reason, organisations need to invest in the discovery and cultivation of such opportunities. MORE
I gave a talk this year at the 2017 SaaS North conference in Ottawa, where I discuss the fundamentals of building a repeatable, scalable, & profitable growth process for a startup. Building a Repeatable, Scalable & Profitable Growth Process [View on Slideshare]. Startup Help Business Model Growth SaaS SaaS business Sales & Marketing Machine MORE
Over the last seven years, software startup investing has changed quite a bit. In 2010, classic SaaS was booming, the benefits of a subscription model were finally becoming clear to the public markets and the mass-market. Since then, many other types of software businesses have been created in new categories like agriculture technology and robotics. Which of these markets are growing the fastest for investment dollars? MORE
Corporate executives know that if they don’t transform their companies into digital enterprises they are going to be at a significant competitive disadvantage going forward. Yet, many corporate leaders have been unable to make significant progress transforming their organizations. These executives have found that changing their corporate cultures is a lot harder than adopting the new generation of cloud-based applications and services that make the digital enterprise possible. MORE
Today is January 10, 2017. That means that in ten days, this jerk will become the leader of the free world. It still feels surreal to me. In less earth shattering news, the fact that it's 2017 also means that my "SaaS Funding in 2016" napkin needs an update. As a reminder, in the original post I tried to give a "back of a napkin" answer to this question: What does it take to raise capital, in SaaS, in 2016? Today I'd like to take a stab at the (early) 2017 answer to that question. MORE
As a sales leader, you’re only as good as your team, and it starts by managing a team effectively. It’s important to create a process to systematize the way your reps generate, manage and close opportunities. To encourage the right behaviors, you must provide evidence that shows your process is effective, and straightforward. MORE
Intro Many potentially great companies fail each year because, while they have an incredible product, they don’t figure out how to get it to market fast enough. Figuring out how to reach customers and break through to Product-Market-Fit remains one of the hardest parts of building a successful startup. This post introduces a four stage. Startup Help PMF product market fit SaaS sales Sales and Marketing MORE
For the last 6 months or so I've been working on my own SaaS start-up, Outseta. Most of my time to date has been spent on content marketing, in an effort to build a relevant audience of early stage SaaS businesses prior to our product launching later this year. After several years of leading marketing teams, I found myself once again in the familiar position of being a sole contributor. I am our marketing team. MORE
I’ve seen hundreds of startup pitch decks in my time at Matrix, and have found total addressable market (TAM) slides to be among the most frequently mis-executed. I get the sense they are often included as a formality in an attempt to get VCs to check a mental box and continue on hearing about other. Getting Funded Startup Help Business Model Funding SaaS TAM TAM slide Total Addressable Market Venture capital MORE
If you think your customers subscribe to your software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution only because they love the features or the price, think again. Of course, customers look at the solution’s features, the fact that it’s easy to use, or the attractive price… but that’s not all they look at. They’re also figuring out if they can trust you. MORE
No matter how long the list of amazing features you offer, if you’re marketing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, that’s not all you’ve got to sell. You should be talking about the “non-feature” pieces as well. If not, you’re underselling your solution. That’s because prospects are usually thinking about more than just features when they’re evaluating a solution. They’ve got other questions that you need to address: Can the solution be implemented successfully? MORE
This is part of the Winning By Design Blueprint Series in which we analyze and provide practical advice for SaaS sales organizations. In this blueprint, we’ll breakdown how to structure your SaaS metrics, and measure the right data for your business. Many organizations are excited about the amount of data that is flowing into their platform. However, with the explosion of data, they soon are lost on how to interpret it. This results in no action, or actions with adverse impact. MORE
InsightSquared
DECEMBER 29, 2017
There are different uses of cement such as to make cement mortar, cement concrete which are used in various types of masonry and concrete structures. Building Materials Building Technology Guide Buildings Cement
For Entrepreneurs with David Skok
DECEMBER 6, 2017
I’ve seen hundreds of startup pitch decks in my time at Matrix, and have found total addressable market (TAM) slides to be among the most frequently mis-executed. I get the sense they are often included as a formality in an attempt to get VCs to check a mental box and continue on hearing about other. Getting Funded Startup Help Business Model Funding SaaS TAM TAM slide Total Addressable Market Venture capital
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The Angel VC
NOVEMBER 18, 2017
Founder salaries are not a topic I’ve had to spend a lot of time with so far. I usually just “OK” them, since the founders we are working with are all super reasonable people who carefully weigh how much they need against the interests of the company – their company. But sometimes founders ask me for a suggestion or some guidance because they are uncertain as to what is fair, and so I thought it might be useful to create a simple model. Here it is.
Hitenism
JANUARY 9, 2017
Building a company is a lot like trying to predict the future. You’re looking through a crystal ball to see where the market is moving, and how you can adapt your product accordingly. You have limited cash, which means that you only have a finite amount of time and resources to scale your business. The longer you take to make decisions about your company, the more time and money you burn. Optimizing your startup for speed is the only way to keep your head above the water.
Totango
OCTOBER 14, 2017
Customer Health Score takes multiple dimensions of customer data metrics and classifies them into a single representation of green, yellow or red. It is a consolidation of all the information the company has about the customer, from all probes, people and systems, past and current. Companies use customer health to speed up and scale communication, prioritization, decision making and forecasting of their customer success operations.
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SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
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A Smart Bear
AUGUST 22, 2017
Product teams have been repeating the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) mantra for a decade now, without re-evaluating whether it’s the right way to maximize learning while pleasing the customer. Well, it’s not the best system. It’s selfish and it hurts customers. We don’t build MVPs at WP Engine. The motivation behind the MVP is still valid: Build something small, because small things are predictable and inexpensive to test.
Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth
SEPTEMBER 25, 2017
Over the past 12 months I’ve invested considerable time thinking about, experimenting with and optimising my daily routine. I relish figuring out new ways to become more efficient and better at my work. There’s a limited number of hours in the working week, so the challenge is to use our time so that we not only produce our best work, but also clearly understand what’s going to have the biggest impact. Despite what you may think, productivity is a perennial, rather a millennial challenge.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
NOVEMBER 4, 2017
No matter how long the list of amazing features you offer, if you’re marketing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, that’s not all you’ve got to sell. You should be talking about the “non-feature” pieces as well. If not, you’re underselling your solution. That’s because prospects are usually thinking about more than just features when they’re evaluating a solution. They’ve got other questions that you need to address: Can the solution be implemented successfully?
Entrepreneur - SaaS
APRIL 21, 2017
How hiring our first salesperson led me to recognize that cluelessness is at the heart of entrepreneurship. Make More Happen
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No one designs bad dashboards and reports on purpose. So why do so many applications have terrible analytics experiences? Download this ebook for secrets to creating dashboards and reports your users will love.
Tomasz Tunguz
JANUARY 26, 2017
Over the last seven years, software startup investing has changed quite a bit. In 2010, classic SaaS was booming, the benefits of a subscription model were finally becoming clear to the public markets and the mass-market. Since then, many other types of software businesses have been created in new categories like agriculture technology and robotics. Which of these markets are growing the fastest for investment dollars?
InsightSquared
DECEMBER 11, 2017
As a sales leader, you’re only as good as your team, and it starts by managing a team effectively. It’s important to create a process to systematize the way your reps generate, manage and close opportunities. To encourage the right behaviors, you must provide evidence that shows your process is effective, and straightforward.
For Entrepreneurs with David Skok
DECEMBER 13, 2017
Intro Many potentially great companies fail each year because, while they have an incredible product, they don’t figure out how to get it to market fast enough. Figuring out how to reach customers and break through to Product-Market-Fit remains one of the hardest parts of building a successful startup. This post introduces a four stage. Startup Help PMF product market fit SaaS sales Sales and Marketing
The Angel VC
JANUARY 10, 2017
Today is January 10, 2017. That means that in ten days, this jerk will become the leader of the free world. It still feels surreal to me. In less earth shattering news, the fact that it's 2017 also means that my "SaaS Funding in 2016" napkin needs an update. As a reminder, in the original post I tried to give a "back of a napkin" answer to this question: What does it take to raise capital, in SaaS, in 2016? Today I'd like to take a stab at the (early) 2017 answer to that question.
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With so many factors and people to consider, how do you make sure you pick the right LMS? It’s simple: This guide covers crucial considerations with actionable advice and professional insights, so you know you’ve picked the perfect eLearning solution.
Hitenism
APRIL 24, 2017
Back in 2010, on a Monday at 5 PM, I found myself at a bar called Memphis in Southern California in a heated discussion with two close friends. Patrick Vlaskovits was cheerfully drinking a mint julep while Sean Ellis and I were each enjoying a cold beer. At the time, Patrick was working on a startup and a book. Sean was advising a handful of high-growth tech startups including Dropbox, Eventbrite and my own company, KISSmetrics.
Totango
SEPTEMBER 6, 2017
Zendesk is a family of products that helps companies manage the entire customer lifecycle in different ways. They are on a scale that is uncommon for B2B companies, with a $350M run rate, 90K paying customers, and an additional 50-100K free or trial customers at any given time.
Sales Hacker
DECEMBER 1, 2017
Ever since the 4-Hour Workweek where Tim Ferriss wrote about using virtual assistants (VAs) as a way to outsource your inbox – hiring virtual sales assistants has hit the mainstream. What is a Virtual Sales Assistant? A Virtual Sales Assistant is a remote contractor that you hire as a means of outsourcing a specific task or set of tasks in order to build a more efficient sales process. A virtual sales assistant can also refer to a contractor located overseas.
A Smart Bear
OCTOBER 17, 2017
Forget work/life integration for a minute. How much time do you have, regardless of partitioning? From your 24-hour daily allotment, the 1950s-style break-down is 8 hours for work, 8 for home and commute, and 8 for sleep and ablutions. So, “work” and “home” are the two things in which you can spend 40+ hours per week. This is the amount of time it takes to tackle something huge. A career. A parent. A startup.
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Download this template that includes calculations, formulas, definitions and a customizable dashboard. The template includes subscription momentum metrics (ARR, customer count, avg. ARR), churn and retention metrics, and customer lifetime value metrics.
Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth
DECEMBER 4, 2017
Without doubt, one of the most exciting parts of being a marketer today is the perpetual challenge of finding new channels and tactics to leverage. There’s a whole host of marketing arbitrage opportunities out there - if you know where to look and spend your time. Identifying opportunities that we think will create business value is not only a lot of fun, it's key to driving future growth. For that reason, organisations need to invest in the discovery and cultivation of such opportunities.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
OCTOBER 7, 2017
If you think your customers subscribe to your software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution only because they love the features or the price, think again. Of course, customers look at the solution’s features, the fact that it’s easy to use, or the attractive price… but that’s not all they look at. They’re also figuring out if they can trust you.
Think Strategies
NOVEMBER 11, 2017
Corporate executives know that if they don’t transform their companies into digital enterprises they are going to be at a significant competitive disadvantage going forward. Yet, many corporate leaders have been unable to make significant progress transforming their organizations. These executives have found that changing their corporate cultures is a lot harder than adopting the new generation of cloud-based applications and services that make the digital enterprise possible.
SaaS Growth Strategy
JUNE 1, 2017
For the last 6 months or so I've been working on my own SaaS start-up, Outseta. Most of my time to date has been spent on content marketing, in an effort to build a relevant audience of early stage SaaS businesses prior to our product launching later this year. After several years of leading marketing teams, I found myself once again in the familiar position of being a sole contributor. I am our marketing team.
Speaker: Daniel "spoons" Spoonhower, CTO and Co-Founder at Lightstep
Many engineering organizations have now adopted microservices or other loosely coupled architectures, often alongside DevOps practices. Together these have enabled individual service teams to become more independent and, as a result, have boosted developer velocity. However, this increased velocity often comes at the cost of overall application performance or reliability. Worse, teams often don’t understand what’s affecting performance or reliability – or even who to ask to learn more. Distributed tracing was developed at organizations like Google and Twitter to address these problems and has also come a long way in the decade since then. By the end of this presentation, you’ll understand why distributed tracing is necessary and how it can bring performance and reliability back under control.
InsightSquared
OCTOBER 16, 2017
Guest blog by Joe Rodden, Sales Systems Manager at Catalant Technologies. I get asked, “What should I look for when hiring someone for Sales Operations?” or “What skills should I have to break into Sales Operations?” a lot. Thinking about the best and worst Sales Operations professionals I’ve worked with over the years, I’ve come up with four skills that the best have and the worst lack.
For Entrepreneurs with David Skok
NOVEMBER 28, 2017
I gave a talk this year at the 2017 SaaS North conference in Ottawa, where I discuss the fundamentals of building a repeatable, scalable, & profitable growth process for a startup. Building a Repeatable, Scalable & Profitable Growth Process [View on Slideshare]. Startup Help Business Model Growth SaaS SaaS business Sales & Marketing Machine
The Angel VC
JULY 5, 2017
In the first part of this post , I looked at what some of the most knowledgeable people in the industry said about Product/Market Fit (PMF) and how they try to define and measure it. While everybody seems to agree on the broad concept of PMF there is (unsurprisingly) no consensus on how exactly it can be defined and measured, and some people set the bar much higher than others.
Hitenism
JANUARY 6, 2017
It was 2008, and I was having a classic founder moment. I had no idea what I was doing. But at least I was doing! I was founding a SaaS business, KISSmetrics. Like any startup, we were flailing, failing, and on fire, all at the same time. It was a wild, insane, and ridiculously exhausting experience. I was in charge of product development, operations, finance, funding, and probably 44 other things. At that point in 2009, I was also responsible for marketing.
Speaker: Esther Kieft, Delivery Manager (Group Technology) at Domino's Pizza Enterprises
It is well known that empathy is a key ingredient in creating lovable products, yet not all products offer the best customer experience. From meeting stringent deadlines to insufficient resources being available to carry out customer research, there is a range of reasons why customer empathy could be missing in product development. Join Esther Kieft, as she breaks down using empathy at a distance to evaluate the problems that customers are experiencing during this global health crisis.
Totango
SEPTEMBER 27, 2017
Today’s customer success executives are being challenged to use unprecedented amounts of customer data to build more predictable revenue outcomes and run more efficient operations. That’s on top of their existing efforts to manage an entire customer base. If you are a VP of Customer Success, it is time to go beyond defining strategy and start ensuring the execution of your strategy across the organization.
Sales Hacker
NOVEMBER 21, 2017
This is part of the Winning By Design Blueprint Series in which we analyze and provide practical advice for SaaS sales organizations. In this blueprint, we’ll breakdown how to structure your SaaS metrics, and measure the right data for your business. Many organizations are excited about the amount of data that is flowing into their platform. However, with the explosion of data, they soon are lost on how to interpret it. This results in no action, or actions with adverse impact.
Tomasz Tunguz
OCTOBER 28, 2017
Starting in January, public software companies will report their financials using ASC 606. Normally, accounting changes are not that interesting, but ASC 606 will change several of the key attributes and benchmarks SaaS startups use. The two most important changes are changes to revenue and profitability. Today, all software revenue is recognized ratably over the contract period. If a business finds a 12 month contract for $12,000, the company record $1000 of revenue for each month.
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