Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2023

The company raised $455m in venture capital, but has used only $15m, growing nearly entirely on profits. Typically, enterprise customers expand more than SMB. Klaviyo is a customer data platform company which ingests marketing data & empowers their customers to automate their marketing with data & AI.

Benchmarks 172

Benchmarks Venture Capital Marketing SMB 172

SaaStr

APRIL 10, 2023

Others may seek to corner the SMB market. Zendesk knew that they could risk selling to startups like any other SMB, so that was the problem they set out to solve. Durham says, “We are judging ourselves in how we treat startups differently from an average SMB. However, what many businesses may overlook is the startup segment.

Startup 195

Startup Scale SMB Venture Capital 195

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2023

The company raised $455m in venture capital, but has used only $15m, growing nearly entirely on profits. Typically, enterprise customers expand more than SMB. Klayviyo is a customer data platform company which ingests marketing data & empowers their customers to automate their marketing with data & AI.

Benchmarks 158

Benchmarks Venture Capital Marketing SMB 158

SaaStr

OCTOBER 27, 2023

Venture capital is a niche niche niche asset class only designed for outliers. In Enterprise, it’s often around 100 customers, mid-market is about 1000, and in SMB, you’re lucky to get to 10000 customers without hitting significant headwinds. VCs are looking for outliers, so make yourself an outlier as much as possible.

Sales Hiring 233

Sales Hiring Scale Venture Capital Generative AI 233

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2022

In the early days, UserZoom struggled with deciding whether its target market should focus on enterprise or SMB. Many start-ups think they need to net venture capital to jumpstart their growth. Define and focus on one target persona. This focus can be a risk because it is shrinking your market. Be creative with funding.

Scale 205

Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring SMB 205

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2021

It’s very helpful to see this called out for SMBs, and is pretty low for a public SaaS company. But perhaps not that uncommon for higher-churn SMB categories. Casalena maintained such a large share by bootstrapping for a long time until taking an initial growth round of venture capital years down the road.

Payment Methods 325

Payment Methods Merchant Services Payments Payment Services 325

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 31, 2022

We are delighted to share that we are officially launching our new program for fast-growing, venture-backed startups. We’re working with venture capital, accelerator, incubator, and technology partners to help founders bring the best communication experience to their customers. Apply here.

Startup 118

Startup Venture Capital Scale SMB 118

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2022

This also happens sometimes when a top portfolio company goes through a big transition, say from SMB to Enterprise. More on bridge rounds here : How Bridge Rounds Work in Venture Capital: Messy, Full of Drama, and Not Without High Risk. These bridges are what VCs reserve for. Or expanding its TAM. You bridge those.

Venture Capital 276

Venture Capital SMB Startup Investment 276

SaaStr

APRIL 28, 2019

All the great SaaS companies IPO’ing now have strong revenue retention, whether SMB or enterprise focused. million funded by Slack and the balance funded by the venture capital funds who partner with Slack Fund.” Revenue Retention / Net Negative Churn of 143%. A continued them of our 5 Interesting Learnings Series.

Scale 276

Scale Venture Capital SMB Enterprise 276

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 21, 2017

Segmentation - focus on SMB, Mid-Market, or Enterprise, to play where competition isn’t present. I believe competition is a major driving force, especially since venture capital is conspicuously copious. Trades market size for better product market fit. SaaS company formation has fallen by 44% in the last 3 years.

SaaS 187

SaaS Venture Capital Finance Machine Learning 187

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 24, 2017

The story behind Fleetmatics and Geotab illustrates the way two companies pursued the SMB logistics market in radically different ways, but built roughly similar sized businesses. They haven’t raised venture capital. Founded in 2004, Fleetmatics employs about 1150 employees. The tradeoff is somewhat slower growth.

Sales Hiring 186

Sales Hiring Strategy Venture Capital Marketing 186

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2022

I believe you, it’s true, but venture capital is a weird niche thing that… Frankly, venture capital at any stage only wants to invest in folks that are already off to the races. SMBs are doing that every day. It’s frustrating, but it’s true. And so that’s just a fact to deal with.

Scale 187

Scale SaaS Payments Scaling SaaS 187

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2019

About the episode: Chetan Puttagunta is a General Partner @ NEA, one of the world’s largest venture capital firms in the world, with over $3Bn in their latest fund and a portfolio including the likes of Mulesoft, Jet.com, Uber, Houzz, and many more incredible companies. Episode No. What are the inherent challenges to this switch? #9:

Technical Review 141

Technical Review Development Team Review Scale Software Review 141

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

That was great and created freedom from venture capital and many other benefits. Field vs. mid-market vs SMB early. We did it by focusing on second-order revenue to generate low-cost leads, and by taking in 110%+ of our MRR each month in cash. But it had a hidden tax I only mostly understood. on the balance sheet.

Part-Time VPE 254

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 254

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2020

The plus side of this is that it leads to a comradery at start-ups and SMB organizations that is often hard to replicate at the enterprise level. Salespeople are not as tightly managed in start-ups or SMBs, and most of us like that. There are thousands of very successful SMB companies that offer lucrative sales careers.

Scale 77

Scale Enterprise Sales Hiring Technical Review 77

Tom Tunguz

JULY 14, 2013

With more than 80% of venture capital investments occurring in enterprise and with the public markets disproportionately rewarding SaaS companies with huge enterprise value-to-revenue multiples ( median is 7.6 ), it’s no surprise that interest Software-as-a-Service is booming.

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Venture Capital SaaS Machine Learning 100

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Before I joined the venture capital industry many years ago, I was a software developer, and I worked for a startup around the 2000 time period. Now, I’m a venture capital investor. Contrast that with companies that might also sell into the SMB segment of the market where the ASPs, the average deal sizes are lower.

Cloud 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

Chart Mogul

AUGUST 15, 2019

You may have heard of Revenue-based financing (RBF), venture debt or hybrid structures blending a revenue or profit share concept with an equity ownership stake. Or, maybe you haven’t and are still thinking your only options are to bootstrap or pursue angel and/or venture capital. Who is it for? Simplified RBF.

Finance 85

Finance Payments Revenue Payment Solutions 85

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

So I went down the hall, met with the head of marketing, and I discovered a lot about in bound SaaS, about SMB, the importance of building this machine as I call it now that generates all these lovely leads. They all looked at me really weird because remember, I’d never done SMB before. Liberate some operating expenses.

Scale 166

Scale SMB VP of Engineering Leadership 166

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 21, 2020

About Angus Davis & Foundation Capital [1:45]. SMB Sales & SDRs at (Smaller) Scale [18:20]. Angus Davis: Foundation Capital is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm. It was a lot of fun to take what I’ve learned building an enterprise type business and applying it to SMB.

Payment Methods 55

Payment Methods Scale CTO Coach SMB 55

Chart Mogul

AUGUST 15, 2019

You may have heard of Revenue-based financing (RBF), venture debt or hybrid structures blending a revenue or profit share concept with an equity ownership stake. Or, maybe you haven’t and are still thinking your only options are to bootstrap or pursue angel and/or venture capital. Who is it for? Simplified RBF.

Finance 52

Finance Payments Revenue Payment Solutions 52

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2019

To date, Amit has raised $68m in funding for Gong from the likes of Norwest, Battery Ventures, Cisco Investments, and Wing Venture Capital, just to name a few. To date, Amit has raised $68 million in funding for Gong from the likes of Norwest, Battery Ventures, Cisco Investments, and Wing Venture Capital, just to name a few.

Outsourced Development 128

Outsourced Development Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale 128

The Angel VC

APRIL 30, 2015

So if you're selling to both SMBs and bigger enterprises, consider showing one MRR movement chart for the SMB customer segment and another one for the enterprise customer segment. Make sure to provide the raw data along with these charts (and any other charts you provide) to allow the viewer to do his or her own calculations.

Software Review 186

Software Review Outsourced Development SMB Acquisition 186

Point Nine Land

NOVEMBER 10, 2020

If most of your customers are on a monthly plan and some are on an annual plan (typical for SMB SaaS), don’t mix them together when you determine your churn rate. This is not an unusual pattern in SMB SaaS. That makes no sense. Use gross profit. This is particularly important if you’re early and/or growing fast.

Outsourced Development 97

Outsourced Development Customer Lifetime Value Churn Forecasting 97

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

I talked to another and it says, “Look, you’ve done some sales at the SMB and up side, so bring in a sales lead.” Jason Lemkin: So it’s usually down to say 3X for SMB, and 5X for enterprise. If an SMB rep wants to make 120, right, then they got to close three times that, 360. Don’t go into it.

Scale 201

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 201

Kellblog

JANUARY 5, 2020

I’d argue it’s not – the markets have changed structurally such that companies are staying private far longer and thus living off venture capital (and/or growth-stage private equity) in ways not previously seen. The interesting question here is whether mean reversion is relevant.

DevOps as a Service 63

DevOps as a Service Blockchain Technical Review AI Search 63

Point Nine Land

JANUARY 17, 2019

The tokenization of traditional financial instruments such as stock, bonds, loans, private equity and venture capital investments will become increasingly common. 2018 already paved the way for a number of tokenized fund launches such as Blockchain Capital and SPiCE VC. inVision and Intercom launching their app store).

Technical Review 40

Technical Review Marketplace as a Service Software Review Venture Capital 40

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2019

* Messaging is very dependent on the customer being targeted, how does the messaging need to be different when targeting SMB vs enterprise? How does the creative plan to get the message to the target customer change dependent on SMB vs enterprise? Where does Sara see most people go wrong here? * How do you think about that?

Scale 133

Scale Sales Hiring SMB Interviewing 133

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

On the side, I do some stuff in the venture capital community, some scouting for a wonderful VC firm, Cowboy Ventures. I helped to build out our EDU org, our non-profit org, our SMB org, our compete programs, our outbound motion, and all of these things are actually all now full functions today at Slack.

Scale 118

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 118

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

Enough venture capital can certainly bridge that gap. There was another company I invested in called Automile, that for a while was quite successful in SMB fleet tracking, tracking where your fleets of vehicles are. Jason Lemkin: And if you’re billing monthly, it’s almost impossible to recuperate that.

Scale 206

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 206

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

How to Raise Venture Capital with Poor Customer Retention by Mark Roberge, Stage 2 Capital However, if a startup’s customer retention is off the mark, even significantly, they can still position the company as an attractive investment. But many employees are afraid to ask for a simple explanation.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SaaS 52

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

I just raised that venture capital. He immediately made him head of SMB. We’re getting to traction, we’ve got a million?and?a?half, half, two million in revenue. It’s just like me after I raise that series B, series A, whatever it was. I got to get it done. I got this obligation. I got no VP of sales.

Sales Hiring 248

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 248

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2020

So my SMB reps, for example, are going to get many more at bats during their first quarter for maybe then one of my enterprise or global reps. I think where a lot of folks screw up is they take a big slug of venture capital, they go, “This is awesome. So I think that’s why we have sales ramps.

Sales Hiring 187

Sales Hiring Scale Leadership Technical Review 187

FastSpring

DECEMBER 8, 2022

David Vogelpohl 02:42 We had some fairly large customers in my agency days, but the majority of them would be be what you would consider in the larger scale, like an SMB software company. So kind of mid size to small even just getting started, which is a lot of the customers that actually use the FastSpring platform.

Payment Methods 78

Payment Methods Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Software Review 78

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 4, 2020

And to shift resources, we had to automate more and more of our SMB offering and make sure that we could refine our product to make sure self service journeys were more productive and frictionless. Earlier this year, we redoubled our focus on our enterprise segment where we have a strong leadership position.

Scale 154

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Branding 154