Your VP Sales Has a Sales Quota. Your VP Marketing Needs a Lead Quota. Period.
A ways back, we did an extremely popular post entitled, Hire the Right Type of VP Marketing or You’ll Just End Up With a Bunch of Blue Pens with Your Logo On Them. The basic idea was to help folks who haven’t hired a VP or Director of Marketing hire the right one for a […]
5 Tips To Make The Journey More Fun
Really, there’s nothing I’ve done in my life that is harder than being a founder CEO. Nothing. It’s 100x harder than being a VP. Even if the actual work is easier. It’s 100x harder than being a VC. Even if delivering top returns as a VC is maybe even harder than as a founder. But I […]
SaaStr Podcast on Time, Core Metrics and More on “Million Dollar Insights”
Do you podcast? If so, Cara Hogan of InsightSquared has kicked off a great SaaS podcast series of which I was fortune enough to participate. We talked quite a bit about the learnings on the SaaS Journey. Feel free to listen below or download on iTunes here. The draft notes and script I used (we went […]
5 Tips to Grow 10-20% Faster Than Plan in ’15
It’s time to do a series of posts on SaaSt to sort of … kick your arse a bit. What I mean by that, is that no matter how well you are doing post-Initial Traction in SaaS … you can almost always do at least 10-15% better. Pretty much almost always. Because there’s almost always more […]
Job #1 Once You Hit Initial Traction — Stop Owning Anything
We all screw a lot of things up. But I think the biggest, #1, mistake successful first-time entrepreneurs in SaaS make time and time again these days is they micromanage too long. I see this again and again, and in SaaS, it’s a real lost opportunity. I think it’s a byproduct, in part, of the […]
If You’re Going to Do a SaaS Start-Up … You Have to Give it 24 Months
It seems like everyone wants to be a SaaS founder these days. I meet with great VPs of Sales and Product in particular who are Ready. It’s time. To go out on their own. Start their own SaaS company. Awesome. I get it. I’d like to recruit you to be a VP at one of […]
Negative Churn
In a board meeting yesterday, we had a brief discussion around “negative churn”. Negative churn is a catchy phrase and apparently a hot-topic in some SaaS circles. I like some of the concepts and disciplines that an understanding of negative churn implies, but I also think it is an unnecessary concept that actually makes it […]
Some Career Advice for Aspiring Tech CEOs
You’ve never been a CEO but might like to be one some day. But how? Nobody sees you as a CEO since you’ve never been one? I wrote this conundrum and the need to take charge of how the market define your skills in my much-read blog post on “personal branding.” If you don’t create the […]
In SaaS, Your Burn Rate is Muchly a Function of Your Chosen Competition
I’ve been doing this SaaS thing for a solid decade now, with some success, and plenty of mistakes, and yet there are some questions that are at some level, almost a mystery, mostly around “average” CACs and “average” burn rates in SaaS: Why was Veeva able to burn only ~$10m net on its way to an IPO? […]
Be Careful About Being a Meddling Startup CEO
I recently wrote a post talking about how some VCs meddle in operating company decisions or some executive teams are too reliant on VCs to jump in and make hard calls for them. Fred Wilson also wrote on a similar topic in his usual more succinct manner, with a great quote being: “One thing I […]
Why Most Online Video Companies Will Fail
I live in LA and fund startups. So you can imagine that I see a lot of video startups. Most will fail. I repeat the same mantra to every one I see. “You can’t build a large online video company. You have to build a large online tech company that distributes video.” I try to […]
Roundtrip Revenue: Probably, Just Do It.
If you’ve been around since the Web 1.0 days, a certain phrase may send shivers up your spine — “Roundtrip Revenue.” People went to jail at AOL for this, folks, overstating revenue by as much as $1 billion that wasn’t really real. It was just matched against AOL purchases, making the revenues in essence nonexistent. […]
Ok, We’ve Shut Registration Down at 1,850 Folks for The SaaStr Annual. What You Need to Know.
Phew. Ok well we went a bit over capacity, but we’ll have 1,850 SaaS founders, CEOs, execs and entrepreneurs at the (first?) SaaStr Annual this Thursday in San Francisco at The Regency Ballroom. A few things to know, if your coming, and if you’re not: > If you’re coming to the day sessions, come early […]
One Weird Trick to Build a Personal Brand
My long-time friend Jason Lemkin is on the verge of launching a spectacular SaaS conference called SaaStr this week. What Jason has achieved in no time flat in VC is astounding. Without inventing the browser he has single-handedly created a personal VC brand on a shoestring. And as I’ve written about before – building a […]
Why CAC is Usually Irrelevant in Early-ish Stage SaaS Companies (vs. B2C Where It’s Critical)
I recently meet with a very high-growth “XaaS” company. Not software as a service, but one that provides some version of humans-as-a-service. And after huge top-line growth, they were struggling now with CAC. They’d fueled their hyper growth with a combination of Adwords and Groupons and Facebook Ads and Twitter Cards. And when that party […]
