Announcing a Deal I’ve Wanted to Talk About for a Year
Let me not bury the lede. I’m super excited to announce that GRP Partners led the investment in Ethan Anderson’s new company MyTime (link has LA-based merchants but will give you a good feel for the product). I am taking the lead from GRP and we also invested alongside a number of friends including Dave McClure, [...]
How to Configure Your Startup Team
I am fond of quoting that about 70% of my investment decision of an early-stage company is the team. My rationale is simple: everything goes wrong and only great teams can respond to competitors, markets, funding environments, staff departures, PR disasters and the like. Final startup grind from msuster Final startup grind from msusterHow you [...]
Hire the Right Type of VP Marketing — Or You’ll Just End Up With a Bunch of Blue Pens with Your Logo On Them
Apologies to all those to whom this is already well known. But, I know many of you have never hired a head of marketing before. And as soon as you get your MSP (Minimum Sellable Product) out the door, and you’ve got your first 10 customers under your belt — you’re probably going to want [...]
You Really Don’t Know if Your Market is Too Small For Quite a While
One of the things that causes a lot of anxiety in SaaS is market size. If you’re creating the latest Pinning app, or Social Network, the odds are surely against you. But in consumer internet, often you know if you hit it, however low the odds are, at least the market is huge (or at [...]
How Should You Best Launch Your Product at SXSW?
It’s February now. That means a slew of companies will be preparing to launch their new products or announcing their companies at the annual SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. I get asked often how to best launch at SXSW. What strategies to use, how to get attention, how to become “hot.” I get asked many [...]
CLTV Isn’t The Whole Story. Don’t Shortchange Second-Order Revenue.
Everyone in SaaS talks about CLTV (or LTV, same thing). The lifetime value of your customer. You can see a great detailed analysis of how to calculate it here. And then, everyone goes on to calculate some magic metric telling
From Initial Traction to Initial Scale (~$10M in ARR): The Hardest Phase. But — The Cavalry is Coming.
The hardest phase of SaaS, at least for the founders, is the phase from Initial Traction ($1-$2m in ARR + 100% YoY growth + 50% of new customers from zero-cost marketing) to the next phase — Initial Scale. Inevitability in SaaS comes around $10m in ARR, plus or minus. Once you hit this point, [...]
Goodbye Jody.
Jody. You’re gone too early. We still had so many more times to spend together. I loved this image I saw posted by Andy Rankin. Because this is the one word that was not in your vocabulary. And it was the first word I muttered when I heard the news tonight. I remember when we [...]
Should You Bother Targeting the Tech Blogs for Your PR Campaigns?
I’ve started a recent series on PR at startups since I get asked for advice on this topic so often. I will put the full list of posts here. The start of this series was, Should Your Startup Announce Funding? 6 or 7 years ago when TechCrunch was at its peak market share (they are still [...]
Should Startups Announce Their Funding?
Understanding “The Funding Angle” I sit at enough board meetings to hear conflicting advice given to entrepreneurs about how to handle PR and announcements at startups. I think many board members (including VCs) were trained 10+ years ago when life was very different and their advice often comes from an outdated lens. One of [...]
Tier 1 VC is Great. But More Money May Be Even Better.
One thing you hear a lot is how great it is to get a Quality VC into your company. Take Quality Money, at a lower price, they say, over Crummier Money at a higher price. Certainly, there’s a lot of truth in this. The last thing you want is an investor that isn’t up for [...]
How To Know You’ve Hit First Traction In SaaS. The Moment When You’ve Got A Real Company.
There’s a common meme in Venture Capital that traction is tough to quantify, but you know it when you see it. Well, let’s take a stab at it anyway. Quantifying it. Because I don’t think Initial Traction is at all nebulous in SaaS — and I think it occurs earlier than many think. Here’s a [...]
SaaStr on TechCrunch! The M&A “Nibble” And What To Do When You Get One
Hopefully, you saw us last weekend on TechCrunch. We’re trying to do our small part and hopefully save you a few headaches and mistakes as you scale your SaaS start-up from $0 to Initial Traction to $10m in ARR, $20m in ARR, and beyond. We’re glad — on a good day — to get as [...]
A Post Startup Execs Should Forward to Your Spouse or Partner. 12 Tips for Making it Work
I recently wrote a post about how to manage relationships when you’re at a startup or are busy executive. It was based on an excellent book I had just read by Brad Feld & Amy Batchelor (his wife). I had images in my brain of all of the stresses I had placed on my wife [...]
7 Steps to Getting to Cash-Flow Positive Faster (in SaaS)
There are pros and cons, in these days of Fat Start-ups, to being cash-flow positive. In an ideal world, you’d experience both hyper-growth, and free cash flow from almost Day 1. The reality is though, in SaaS, especially if you are sales-driven, that’s often gonna be tough. You’ll need some capital to get either off [...]
