The Angel VC
MARCH 22, 2012
[Update 03/23/16: I've created an improved version of the template - check it out! ] A few people who read my recent post about financial planning asked if I could provide an example for a good financial plan, so I'd like to post one here. The plan is very similar to the one that I created in the very early days at Zendesk and re-used a few times in the meantime, but I had to make a few adjustments to make it more generic.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
NOVEMBER 8, 2012
Most companies offering a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution can't afford to sell it. I'm talking here about "selling" in the traditional sense: finding prospects and convincing them to buy a product or service. In some cases that's done with experienced sales executives working their Rolodex (or its electronic equivalent). Or it might be sold by a team of inside sales reps making cold calls from a purchased list.
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Chaotic Flow
OCTOBER 9, 2012
Which is more important in B2B social media, social or media? For way too many B2B marketers, the answer is media. In the B2B marketing community, content marketing has eclipsed blogging, engagement is measured in click-throughs, and gamification is sexier than conversation. Too many B2B professionals see social media as just another marketing communication channel.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 19, 2012
When building a freemium SaaS company or an ecommerce company or any product that requires users to move through a funnel towards an objective, it’s important to track this funnel to understand where the funnel can be improved. But tracking one funnel may not be enough. The aggregated funnel may be masking conversion differences across customers segments.
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Neil Patel
MAY 30, 2012
Facebook Insights is a powerful tool for those wanting to track user interaction on their Facebook business page. Facebook Insights can be seen by all the admins of your page, and it can provide a wealth of information about your content and audience. By using Facebook Insights, you’ll be able to determine the best time of day to post , the best day of the week to post, and what type of content is most popular.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Sixteen Ventures
SEPTEMBER 14, 2012
Hidden VNXe performance statistics « Henriwithani. EnterpriseAdmins.org » Blog Archive » Install VMware Tools in openfiler. CrashPlan packages for Synology NAS « PC LOAD LETTER.
The Angel VC
DECEMBER 16, 2012
If you're building a modern SaaS solution for the Fortune 5,000,000 , the importance of your marketing website cannot be overstated. In the old world of enterprise software, most software vendors used to have pretty lame websites. Most of them were poorly designed and looked very technical and uninspiring, and the only images they contained were the seemingly obligatory stock photos (suit-wearing business people trying to out-smile each other, handshake close-ups and of course an attractive head
The Angel VC
NOVEMBER 8, 2012
Point Nine not only loves animals , we also love dog food. After all, some months ago we invested in ePetWorld , which runs hundeland.de , a fast-growing online shop for dog food and supplies. Today I'm going to talk about a different type of dog food though. If you know us a bit you'll know that we talk a lot about the Cloud. In our opinion, the move of software from the desktop or local servers to the Cloud, along with the consumerization of enterprise software and other developments that go h
The Angel VC
NOVEMBER 24, 2012
With some delay I'd like to continue my little series: 3rd DO for SaaS startups Create an awesome product This one is a little tricky. Firstly because it feels like I'm just stating the obvious – who doesn't want to create an awesome product? Secondly because it's hard to offer a lot of useful advice in a blog post on a topic which shelves of books have been written about.
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The Angel VC
DECEMBER 6, 2012
Last August, Marc Andreessen wrote a great essay titled "Why software is eating the world". In his article, which got a lot of attention in the tech world, Marc explains why and how a variety of industries have been and continue to be disrupted by software. Read it if you haven't read it yet, it's a well-written and inspiring post by one of the most successful and knowledgable people in the Internet industry.
The Angel VC
MARCH 4, 2012
In the last few years I've seen a lot of financial plans, and since we started Point Nine in the middle of last year that volume has been skyrocketing. I've seen everything from just a few numbers in an email to extremely sophisticated Excel spreadsheets with dozens of tabs and tens of thousands of cells, and I thought I'd offer some advice on what I think a good financial plan looks like.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
OCTOBER 9, 2012
If you manage a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, at some point you'll be forced to make a tough decision about your customer acquisition process: Feed it or starve it? Should you pony up the money to feed a full-blown sales and marketing effort? Or should you starve the process and keep the cash in your piggy bank? Because of the way the SaaS business model works, if you feed the customer acquisition process, you hurt profits and burn cash.
The Angel VC
OCTOBER 18, 2012
Continuing my little series using the "minimum viable" approach , here is my 2nd DO for SaaS startups: Build the right team I've written about the topic before, so if you've read this post from early this year most of what I'm going to write now won't be new for you and you may want to skip this article. I'm going to assume that you want to build a modern SaaS solution for the "Fortune 5,000,000" – a great product that's easy to understand and so useful that it will almost sell itself.
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The Angel VC
SEPTEMBER 29, 2012
I've been thinking about a "DOs and DON'Ts" article geared towards early-stage SaaS founders and upcoming SaaS founders for a little while now. I thought it would be a good idea to summarize what I've learned about SaaS in the last few years and put it into a format like this. Problem is, it's a very large topic, and if I try to make it as broad, deep and well-written as I'd like it to be I'll never do it.
The Angel VC
MAY 3, 2012
One of the most important tools to better understand the usage of a web application – or a service, a game or a mobile app, it doesn't matter – is a cohort analysis. In fact, it's almost impossible to get a really good understanding of a service's usage without looking at activity and retention numbers on a cohort-by-cohort basis. And yet, most startups that we're talking to haven't looked into cohort analyses yet.
The Angel VC
APRIL 21, 2012
About one and a half years ago I became a vegetarian, after coming to the conclusion that it's impossible to ethically justify to kill – and in almost all case inflict enormous suffering on – living creatures that are capable of experiencing pain, just for the pleasure of eating meat (which, make no mistake about it, is a huge pleasure). Maybe I'll write more about that topic in another post.
The Angel VC
JANUARY 2, 2012
It's that time of the year – you're looking back to the old year and you're reviewing your plans for the new one. The last year was very busy for me, both privately and professionally. I became a dad for the third time, and I teamed up with Team Europe to create Point Nine Capital. Two startups, so to speak. It's also a good time to take a look at my angel investments because from now on I'm going to make all new investments via Point Nine Capital.
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The Angel VC
SEPTEMBER 3, 2012
If you're running a SaaS startup it's likely that sooner or later you'll want to increase your prices. The reason is simple: It's impossible to find the perfect pricing right off the bat, so most startups launch with a pricing scheme that's on the low end to make sure that they don't scare away potential customers. "In the beginning, err on the side of being too cheap", was also one of the tips that I gave in my previous blog post about SaaS pricing.
The Angel VC
MARCH 21, 2012
I just created a slide about the development of Point Nine Capital for a little company presentation and thought it might be useful if I posted it here as well to give everyone some information on where we're at and how we got there: In 2008, Lukasz Gadowski – who almost everyone in the German Web startup scene knows because he built or helped build some of Europe's biggest Internet success stories, e.g.
The Angel VC
OCTOBER 3, 2012
Further to my post about my "1st DO for SaaS startups" (and again, in the spirit of releasing early and iterating fast) I'd like to touch on a few additional points with respect to the right market. Market size If you want to go big and build a large, successful company it's obviously important that your market is big enough. How big is big enough? Most large VCs would answer that the TAM of a SaaS company should be at least $1B.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 30, 2012
In 2010, Gaia Online started a user acquisition campaign to grow their user base. To simplify the on boarding process, they launched the Big Red Button home page below. It worked. Conversion rates from the home page spiked. Simple user experiences, like this big red button, are effective because users understand what is expected of them. There is just one flow.
As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 26, 2012
Two weeks ago, James Reinhart, founder and CEO of ThredUp , led his company through a branding exercise. The team spent an afternoon comparing and contrasting the brand attributes of Starbucks and Peets, Whole Foods and Safeway and a few other competitive pairs. The team quickly distilled each company’s brand into one word. Long ago, each of these brand selected the value that would define their brand.
The Angel VC
JANUARY 1, 2012
Our last investment in the old year is a novelty for us – our first investment in a startup from Italy. Founded by 23 year old entrepreneur Guk Kim, Cibando operates a popular iPhone app that makes it easy to find the best restaurants in Rome, Milan, Florence and other Italian cities. What makes this significant (beyond its obvious significance for Cibando and for us) is that this is one of only a very small number of VC investments in Italy.
Tom Tunguz
DECEMBER 20, 2012
About three years ago, I started journaling my startup education by blogging. In retrospect, blogging has been one of the most rewarding activities for me as an investor. Blogging helps me some observe changes in the start-up ecosystem, communicate trends primarily through data while strengthening and building relationships. It’s been more gratifying than I could have hoped.
Tom Tunguz
DECEMBER 19, 2012
It’s easy to call a tablet a larger a mobile phone. Or a replacement for a notebook or ultrabook. But to dismiss tablets as scaled clones of their bigger and smaller brothers is a mistake. Tablets are the third type of device: the one with the most revenue potential for ecommerce and developers alike. Tablets drive greater volumes of traffic, that convert to paid at better rates, and drive better qualified and less expensive leads through advertising.
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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
DECEMBER 18, 2012
When I started working at Google, I heard the word generalist over and over. “We only hire generalists,” I was told. Eight years later this mantra is pretty common. I hear it often both referring to the desired characteristics of new hires and also the aspirations of a team - “we want to be a team of generalists”. At the time, I understood the word generalist to mean someone really good at a lot of things.
Tom Tunguz
DECEMBER 17, 2012
The famous global macro hedge fund manager George Soros once said, “I don’t play the game by a particular set of rules; I look for changes in the rules of the game.” Inside the House of Money. Soros' insight is equally well applied to startups. Successful startups discover and leverage changes in the rules of the game. Discovering the changes in the rules of the game is one of the hardest things about starting a company, but understanding precisely the change and developing a hypothesis for expl
Tom Tunguz
DECEMBER 16, 2012
Email and most meetings aren’t work. We all know this to be true. But huge swaths of our days are allocated to meetings and answering email. It’s impossible to accomplish much aside from information dissemination. A close friend, who like me is a productivity nut, asked me a question that made this point clearly: What fraction of your day is spent in meetings you asked for compared to meetings that were asked of you?
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