When to Stop Doing It All Yourself
Perhaps the biggest difference between most first-time founders and most second-time founders is how long they try to do it all themselves. This isn’t a criticism first time you usually sort of have to. You have less capital to hire a team, and less experience building teams. But then after that there are at least […]
SaaS Financial Plan 2.0 (from Christoph Janz)
Recently on SaaStr, we did an important post on a simple Trailing Four Month Financial Model. This is one of my best hacks. If you average the growth rate over your last four months, and keep updating it — you’ll have a real-time model that keeps you honest. More on that here. But what about just […]
Is it SaaS? Is it ARR?
A lot of us SaaS old timers feel like it may almost be time to retire the SaaS acronym. Isn’t everything SaaS now? No one is building on-prem software from scratch anymore, are they? It’s a fair point. I remember when Salesforce used “No Software” as their tag line. I was at a Salesforce event, […]
I Was Wrong. NPS is A Great Core Metric.
When I was a founder, I though Net Promoter Score (“NPS”) was a pretty dumb, Big Company metric. There were a bunch of things I didn’t like about it: NPS is backwards looking. It doesn’t tell you much about your prospects, the future, or your most recent customers. I wanted to see the future. […]
When To Open Your First Int’l Office? Maybe When You Have $1.5m in ARR There.
We’ve had a lot of discussions on SaaStr and at SaaStr events on founders from outside the U.S. and the Bay Area coming here. We haven’t done enough on the opposite. When to go there. When to open your first international offices. We will do a couple of posts here from guest authors soon. But let […]
Maybe It’s Time For Marketing to Make a Real Revenue Commit
So a while back on SaaStr, we did a couple of posts about how B2B and SaaS marketing needed to catch up. That you needed your VP of Marketing to make a real lead commit, to have a true quota of some form. Not just get you blue pens with your logo on it. Even […]
The Power and Honesty in a T4M Model. Build One Now.
One thing I see most SaaS companies do a pretty crappy job until they have a great finance team is a go-forward model. A real financial model for the next year. It’s not that everyone doesn’t do one. Most do. It’s just … they tend to not really make any sense. Not when […]
Themes in SaaS in ’16
I have no great predictions to offer in SaaS in ’16, no profound insights, no epic thoughts on how BlockChain, VR and Uber-for-the-Enterprise will change the world. But … I do see a lot of stuff, and a lot of start-ups, and am at least in a position to reflect on some more tactical and […]
Don’t Worry Too Much If All Your Customers are in “Tech”
I remember at EchoSign, Back in the Day, I met with a Top 5 VC. The one question they asked me did stump me: “So many of your customers are in tech. What’s your plan to go bigger?” It wasn’t like 100% were in tech. But sure it was the majority. At the time, I […]
How to Prepare Yourself to Be a Great CEO
Being a founder is easy. You just start something. Grab a smart friend, hop on over to WeWork, hit 99 Designs for the logo, and you’re off to the races. Being a CEO is tough. You have to convince people to join you. To drag the troops up the hill. To invest in you when […]
Don’t Worry About Losing All Your Investors’ Money
In both my start-ups, I was constantly worried about losing all my investors’ money. The first time, my first start-up which we haven’t talked about, NanoGram Devices, I mainly worried about it because I realized we’d almost never have enough capital to achieve our long-term goals. So, FBOW, we sold for $50,000,000 after 12.5 months. […]
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 […]
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 […]
