Why You’ll Want to Raise $100,000,000 for Your SaaS Start-Up: The Incremental Customer
With all the SaaS companies raising big, later-stage rounds these days you may wonder … why? I mean, just because you can raise $100m or whatever epic number … should you? Today, I think the answer is yes. Though perhaps not for the reasons you might think. There are a couple of standard reasons companies [...]
The Future of SAP HCM and SuccessFactors Consulting – 2013
It has been an extremely eventful year for SAP HCM and SuccessFactors since a group of us collaborated to write The Future of SAP HCM Consulting and SuccessFactors and a lot of people continue to reach out to me trying to understand what lies ahead in the overall consulting market. My thoughts are we are in the early [...]
The 48 Types of VP Sales. Make Deadly Sure You Hire the Right One.
Oy, the VP of Sales. The toughest hire. Such a high failure rate. I want to help. So this is the third in our series. The first post is What a Great VP of Sales Actually Does. So you expect the right things, and hire your rockstar at the right time to do the right [...]
Day 1: Who Should Be CEO? A Checklist.
SaaStr has now passed 100+ posts, and we’ve somewhat gone on a journey from the early days of a SaaS company, through the growth phases, and as of our last post, up to the Unstoppable phase. We’re not quite done with that journey but if you’ll forgive me going back in time, I wanted to [...]
The $64,000,000 Question: When Things Become Unstoppable
A little while back, a VC asked me what I thought of a prospective mid/late stage investment. I was/am reasonably familiar with this company as it is adjacent to EchoSign. My answer was, well, I’d probably pass — certainly at the valuation (12x+ ARR). I said the product was ooooold and the platform dated, the [...]
When Big Companies Can Kill You. And When They Can’t.
I remember every day, every moment, of both my start-ups with hyper-lucidity. But a few moments especially stand out. Those times when BigCo calls you up to their fancy office, and tells you they are going to enter your space and kill you. It happened to me twice at EchoSign. I’m not going to share [...]
Things Not to Share With VCs (and Others) Pre-Term Sheet
In the pre-diligence phase with either VCs or acquirers, I’ve learned you want to hold some things back. Not through the whole process. But at least until you are past the Second Date.
Enterprises Are Climbing Aboard the Cloud Disruption Train
Saving money is nothing compared to beating your competitors to market with a better product. This is the revelation that’s rapidly taking hold in the enterprise CIO’s office. Until very recently, most enterprise IT leaders would tell you that their primary goal in moving to cloud computing was related to cost reduction, primarily through server [...]
Hyperaggresiveness … Can You Do It?
Recently I’ve met with several of my friends who are moving on, or have moved on, to their next SaaS company after some real success in their first one. SaaS 3.0 entrepreneurs, I guess. They all have some measure of initial success in their next venture. To me, given their backgrounds, and their ability to [...]
Measure Your Churn. But What’s Even More Important is to Measure Your Almost Churn. 5 Tricks to Help You Here.
Churn is a paramount topic in SaaS, as we all know. If every dollar of ARR is worth $6+ in the long term, including upsells and second order revenue … then of course, by the same token, for every dollar of ARR that churns … you’re losing $6 of notional ARR. Lose a $100k customer? [...]
The Virtues and Opportunities in Being #2
In our insular tech world, we’re all obsessed with being #1. Look at Google Search vs. Bing + Yahoo! Facebook vs. Google+. Salesforce vs. nobody else of any scale. Etc. etc. We all know in tech, in internet, almost all the spoils go to #1. Except … Often, not always. In fact, there are a [...]
3 Tips for Building Discounts into Your SaaS Pricing Model (from OpenView Labs)
The good folks at OpenView Labs did an interview with SaaStr and broke it up into a few articles. The first they published the other day, on Pricing, reproduced below. They have a lot of interesting SaaS insights and advice on their blog that ties into the same themes we’re working on here at SaaStr [...]
The one number (45) that explains Constant Contact’s success
The Business of Software Conference sounds like a phenomenal event. I haven’t attended it, but I did recently run across one of the sessions from their 2012 conference, a talk by Gail Goodman, the CEO of Constant Contact: For those who don’t know, Constant Contact is a publicly traded online marketing company with over 500,000 [...]
Your Customer Success Team. Hire Early. And No Squishy Goals — It’s All About the Numbers.
If this is your first SaaS company, you may not have ever hired or built a Client Success team. This one isn’t nearly as risky as a VP of Sales, or a VP of Marketing hire. If you hire a great, experienced Client Success leader as your first hire here, and you like him/her, and [...]
10 Great Questions to Ask a VP Sales During an Interview
Ready to hire your first VP Sales? But haven’t done it before? Let me give you a partial interview script that may help a bit. You’ll have to vary it for different types of SaaS businesses — a bit. But it will basically work for all SaaS companies from say $200k in ARR to $10m [...]
