The Angel VC

AUGUST 10, 2011

I recently wrote that investors (myself included) should do a better job of making their investment criteria transparent to founders. Today I'd like to tell you a bit more about what we at Point Nine Capital are looking for in SaaS startups (other sectors are something for another blog post). To put it as simple as possible, the health of a SaaS business is mainly determined by two factors: Customer lifetime value (CLTV) and customer acquisition costs (CAC).

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Sales Recruiting Startup Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 155

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

DECEMBER 11, 2011

So you say you want to launch a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. And you need to find some customers. So where do you start? If you're like a lot of folks, your first thought will be about a web site, search engine optimization, and adwords. Or maybe a webinar series or a social media campaign. Any of these tactics might work in your customer acquisition plan, so they may be the place you end up. but they're not the place to start.

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Marketing SaaS Social Media Acquisition 113

Aber Law Firm

DECEMBER 5, 2011

2 Takeways From the CarrierIQ Situation, from a SaaS Attorney. Ok this CarrierIQ situation is really crazy, but there are some things (from a SaaS Attorney’s perspective) that every software or SaaS company should think about. 1) Who is really at fault here: CarrierIQ or the carriers? While this is a complex question (and as of today all of the facts are not known) what we do know is Carrier IQ is the software provider and the carriers have licensed their software for use on mobile devices

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The Angel VC

NOVEMBER 12, 2011

I've just read on TechCrunch that Peter Thiel, famous among other things for making one of the best investments in the history of mankind by investing in Facebook in its early days, said that he looks for platforms that are big among small businesses, not consumers. I couldn't agree more. Although there are of course plenty of exciting and profitable opportunites for consumer Internet startups, my main focus over the last three years has been on companies that provide a product, service or platf

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Scale Point of Sale Advertising Startup 117

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Payments

The Angel VC

AUGUST 21, 2011

One thing I've been thinking about for a while is how to make Board Meetings as effective as possible. If you want to read some great posts about the topic by people who've been to many, many more Board Meetings (and apparently Bored Meetings!) than I, check out these links: Brad Feld's initial post on the topic back in 2004 Reactions by Fred Wilson ( post 1 , post 2 , post 3 ) More recent posts by Brad Feld and Fred Wilson , as well as Mark Suster In my opinion it's not that much about whether

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The Angel VC

JULY 31, 2011

I just came across a great blog which I hadn't been aware of yet: " VC Matters " (100 points if you get the pun), written by Rory O'Driscoll of Scale Venture Partners. Rory has an incredibly successful track record of SaaS investments, having invested in home-runs like Omniture, ScanSafe, Box.net, DocuSign, ExactTarget and many others. After reading through his posts I immediately added his blog to my RSS reader and to the "must-read list" of recommended resources that I maintain for the founder

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Scale Startup Investment Technology 104

The Angel VC

JANUARY 4, 2011

Here's the third part of my 2010 portfolio review. If you're new here, please start with part 1 , move on to part 2 and then (hopefully) return to this post. The next stop is Crakow in Poland, home of inFakt.pl. inFakt.pl was founded in 2008 by two extremely sharp students of the Cracow University of Science and Technology who wanted to build a simple, easy-to-use, web-based invoicing and billing application for small businesses in Poland.

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Payment Solutions Payments Payment Features Software Review 104

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 24, 2011

The conventional wisdom is that starting a web business is (at least) 10x less expensive today than it was 10-15 years ago. It’s said that a decade ago, you needed millions of venture capital in order to launch an Internet startup whereas today, thanks to open-source software, cheap hardware and new ways to acquire users for free (in particular virally via Facebook/Twitter and with SEO via Google), you can do the same with a small fraction of that.

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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

NOVEMBER 8, 2011

I've never bought a ShamWow! , but I love their TV ads. The hyper-enthusiastic pitchman, Vince, tells me precisely who should buy the product, what it does, why I desperately need it, and how to buy it. all in 60 seconds! And what's true for super-absorbent towels is often true for software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. Sixty seconds may be all the attention you're likely to get from a prospective customer in your first encounter.

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Merchant Services Marketing SaaS Enterprise 100

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Innovation

The Angel VC

NOVEMBER 1, 2011

On November 17, The Europas will be held , an annual awards for the Internet scene in Europa. My partners at Team Europe and Point Nine Capital and I are nominated in a few categories, so if you still need some inspiration on who you could vote for, here you go! BTW, I feel bad about leaving a two months blogging hiatus with a self-serving post.but anyway. ;-).

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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

OCTOBER 30, 2011

I recently switched to a new health club. It's better maintained, friendlier, and less crowded than my old club. I also like that there's no up-front membership fee, just a monthly subscription. But making a change from my well-worn routine, set in place over 12 years, could have been a difficult jump. New location, new equipment, new people. But all worked out well.

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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

OCTOBER 12, 2011

I'm not always sure what people mean when they say "marketing." PR agencies sometimes call themselves "marketing agencies." So do some graphic design firms. Even the outfits that sell tchotchkes - the stuff you give at away at tradeshows, annual sales meetings, and holiday parties - call themselves "marketing firms." It can be hard to tell what "marketing" is or what it's supposed to do.

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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

One afternoon in the Spring of 1993 in a conference room in San Jose, California I learned that product versions for software are meaningless. Well, not exactly meaningless, but mathematically illogical, as in 1 + 1 = 4. The product manager for Lotus 1-2-3 and I were briefing an influential Dataquest analyst on the forthcoming enhancements to the Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows spreadsheet.

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Revenue

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

I was talking yesterday with a friend who I know from the old days doing public relations. PR back then was about preparing announcements, backgrounders and glossy photographs, arranging press and analyst tours (usually under embargo ), and pitching stories over the phone. Moderate success was a few column inches and a color screenshot in a trade publication.

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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

AUGUST 27, 2011

Thinking too hard can tire out your brain. Research has shown that our brains can suffer from "decision fatigue" after strenuous mental exercise. It's similar to the way our muscles get tired after strenuous physical exercise. Experiments conducted at German automobile dealerships put prospective customers through a kind of mental decathlon. They asked them to choose among four choices of gearshift knobs,13 choices of wheel rims, 25 engine and gearbox configurations, and 56 color options.

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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

AUGUST 10, 2011

For the last few years, NASCAR, Indy car, and Formula One drivers have been wearing a special head restraint, known as a HANS (Head and neck support) device. It's designed to prevent severe injuries from violent whiplash when the race car suddenly decelerates, as in a crash. For business folks who have been whiplashed over the past few days by the sudden jolts in the stock market, this device might look attractive for more than just race car drivers.

Scale 100

Scale Marketing SaaS Subscription 100

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

JULY 27, 2011

Marketers beware! There's a ravenous beast on the loose in marketing land, and it's hounding us mercilessly - days, nights, weekends & holidays - with an insatiable craving. "Feed me. Feed me. Feed me." This beast inhales tasty blog posts for breakfast, devours hearty white papers for lunch, and feasts on entire websites for dinner. And in between meals, it snacks on a bottomless bag of tweets.

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SaaS Software Strategy Marketing 100

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Payments

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

JULY 12, 2011

The girl from Ipanema and Spinal Tap were stuck in my head - an unusual soundtrack that continuously looped through an entire weekend. You know how that happens with a song. You catch a fragment in a supermarket or an elevator. And then without warning, there's a smooth bossa nova swaying through your brain and you can't turn it off. As for Spinal Tap, an announcer on Sportscenter used the phrase, "he turned it up to 11.

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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

JUNE 29, 2011

The good news about the SaaS subscription model: long-term paying customers. The bad news about the SaaS subscription model: long-term paying customers. With the software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model, vendors can build a sustainable source of long-term, predictable revenue. As long as the subscription fees cover customer acquisition expenses and other costs, the model should support a profitable, growing business.

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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

JUNE 8, 2011

I recently read " Three Nights in August, " a wonderful book about the "game inside the game" of baseball. The author, Buzz Bissinger, shadowed St. Louis Cardinal manager Tony La Russa through a three game series against the Chicago Cubs. Bissinger chronicles in detail the manager's thought processes and decision making through 27 innings. It's not a story about dramatic home runs, sparkling pitching, or spectacular defensive plays.

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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

MAY 2, 2011

I'm sure the recent service outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) had lots of engineers scurrying around, looking for a fix. I've been at a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider when the solution's gone down. The operations and support people work through the night and weekends. Marketing people aren't completely off the hook, though. They should be doing some scurrying around too.

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AWS Marketing SaaS Education 100

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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

APRIL 24, 2011

I learned something recently about software-as-a-service (SaaS) from a table. This isn't just any table. This is a bivi table made by Turnstone , a division of Steelcase that specializes in office furniture for small, innovative organizations. This table starts as a work surface. With an add-on "back pocket," it becomes a workstation. Drag two of them together and it's a shared work area.

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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

MARCH 27, 2011

I'm one in a million. Actually, I'm number 172,370 in a million. So says the thank you note I recently received from Reid Hoffman, Co-founder and Chairman of LinkedIn, as a way of showing his appreciation to me and the other first million LinkedIn users. His note says, "I want to personally thank you because you were one of LinkedIn's first million members (member number 172370 in fact!

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The Angel VC

MARCH 19, 2011

If there’s one thing that all fast-growing technology startups have in common, it’s that they’re constantly looking for great developers. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer got it right: My portfolio companies are no exception, almost all of them are looking for engineers in various roles right now. So – if you’re a great developer and you’re living in San Francisco, Edinburgh, Vancouver, Berlin, Cracow, London or Munich (or willing to relocate) and if you want to join one of the best SaaS companies in

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Development Engineering Software Development Startup 100

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

MARCH 10, 2011

My regular readers can skip the next two paragraphs. I need a minute to talk to my brethren in the PR community. privately. To the PR folks who have been pitching me on stories about computer viruses, streaming music to cars, online advertising solutions, and 3D mice, please stop. If you've read my blog or newsletter , you'd know that I do not write about these topics.

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Software Review Advertising Finance Enterprise 100

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

Pricing

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

FEBRUARY 24, 2011

NPR's Fresh Air host, Terry Gross, recently interviewed Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter. She asked him, once the founders created Twitter, how did it catch on. Stone's candid answer, "Well, it didn't at first." He explained that for the first nine months of the product's existence, the only people using it were friends and family. Most people they talked to about it decided that "Twitter is not useful" and "it's the most ridiculous thing we've ever heard of.

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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

I hear this question often from software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers: "How much should we spend on marketing?" If these marketers have experience working in the traditional, on-premise licensed software world, they're usually familiar measuring marketing spend as a percentage of annual revenue. That metric is often used to allocate and track marketing budgets for licensed software companies, and they typically spend somewhere between 5 and 8 percent of annual revenues on marketing.

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The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 3, 2011

I’m thrilled to announce that together with Robin Klein at Index Ventures , Dave McClure ’s 500 Startups fund and my friend and former Atlas Venture partner Alexander Bruehl I’ve made an investment in Geckoboard. Geckoboard is a beautiful real-time status board that lets businesses keep an eye on all the indicators that matter to them. It’s a bit like “Pageflakes for businesses” (although “Chartbeat for everything else” is probably a better analogy), which is one of the reasons why investing in

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