Sat.Jan 10, 2015 - Fri.Jan 16, 2015

article thumbnail

A result. Faster.

This is going to be BIG.

'Why do startups fail? They run out of money, of course. That''s an oversimplification and actually it''s more the result than the root cause. A lot of times, it comes down to failing to produce results, and enough of them. What I''ve realized recently, though, is that smaller, faster results are key--and it doesn''t always matter whether those results are good or bad.

board 360
article thumbnail

Benchmarking Xero's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up

Tomasz Tunguz

This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. There’s a SaaS company on the other side of the world founded nine years ago that is worth $2B, generates $100M in annual revenue and growing 80% year over year.

SaaS 40
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Hire slowly. Fire fast.

Berkonomics

'New hires can shore up the weak areas of a business in ways existing employees cannot, if hiring is done to fill true needs. Some employees lose their drive, or remain behind as the company grows, failing to gain the experience or knowledge needed to manage expanded processes or numbers of subordinates. Sometimes, there is just too much work for one person, and a second is needed to continue growth.

article thumbnail

The Rising Table Stakes in SaaS

Tomasz Tunguz

Christoph Janz , one of the best seed stage SaaS investors, published a great tweetstorm on the state of the SaaS ecosystem yesterday. I’ve copied it below. There’s no excuse for not understanding your metrics, for not providing great customer service, for not understanding the role of customer success, for not doing intelligent lifecycle marketing, for not doing great content marketing…What was hard and innovative 5 years ago is #tablestakes now.

SaaS 40
article thumbnail

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Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business.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.

article thumbnail

Are SaaS Startups Less Profitable than they Used to Be?

Tomasz Tunguz

We’ve seen a sudden decline in SaaS pricing. In the past 3 years, the median Average Revenue by Customer of SaaS companies going public has dropped by about 70%. But has the shift towards smaller customers, shorter and faster sales cycles created less profitable businesses? Not at all. The chart above shows the gross margin trends of public SaaS companies broken down by their ACV (average customer value).

SaaS 40
article thumbnail

The Sales Motions of B2C2B Companies

Tomasz Tunguz

After writing about B2C2B companies last week , I received a lot of great comments about the differences between the B2C2B models, particularly the sales models after a company has acquired the initial Consumers. These are three sales models I’ve observed B2C2B companies use to convert the initial momentum with consumers into dollars. The first sales model is the 2 Phase Sell.