Startup school: How to get unicorn money from a VC
For the right team, raising venture capital money can seem fast, simple, and easy. Here’s why it’s not that simple.
Eating My Own SaaStr Dogfood: Why I Invested in a Start-up With a Seeming 50+ Competitors
I was asked on Quora why I recently invested in Pipedrive. I thought I would share the answer here, because it ties together so many themes on SaaStr, from Lead Velocity Rate, to Room at the Bottom, to Getting from Initial Traction to Initial Scale. I’m making a bet here that everything I know, and […]
The Troll Economy
Q: What do you get when journalists get paid by the number of pageviews their stories generate? A: The Troll economy. Not to sound like a grumpy old man (though I am) but what passes for journalism has sunk to a new low. As far as I can tell, headlines are now chosen based on […]
We’re Having a SaaStr Social on September 5th on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park — and You’re Invited!
Having crossed 4,000 Followers on Quora (and thousands more on SaaStr.com), we’ve decided it’s time for a SaaStr Social, where we can get together in-person. The date’s been set: Thursday, Sept 5. We’ll be out on the beautiful decks at 2440 Sand Hill Road, overlooking the rolling hills of the valley, drinking Don Draper-inspired Old Fashioneds […]
Social Media is Really Tough in China. At Least There is Quora.
SaaStr is in Shanghai for the month of July. While I have internet access and an iPad … it’s tough to stay connected with the domestic SaaStr audience. Why? Well, first almost everything is blocked: Facebook, Twitter, WordPress (as an app and URL — individual sites with custom URLs sometimes barely work, sometimes not at […]
If You Don’t Have a Truly Great Founding Team, Just Take a Pause. Don’t Start Your Start-Up Yet.
Ok I know this post and its title seems like the most obvious thing in the world. But empirically, I can tell you isn’t. Over the past 12 months, I’ve met with friends/colleagues/partners/ex-customers who are total rockstars and working on starting a company. I mean, total rockstars. (Yes, I know that’s an abused team). What […]
4 Good Reasons Not to Start a SaaS Start-Up
There’s been one huge change in “entrepreneurship” IMHO over the past 10 years. >> No, it’s not that it’s cheaper than ever to do a start-up. That’s not even true. In the old days, when software came on a disk, or a CD-ROM, it was even cheaper. You didn’t even need a single server to […]
A Little Less About Pricing. A Little More About Deal Size. Please.
It’s not that this is rocket science. It isn’t. But if you haven’t lived it, understand that Deal Size is the single most important factor in your SaaS business model. Because it will completely define how you do sales and marketing, and to a just somewhat lesser extent, prioritize feature development and product/engineering.
The Misstep of Quora and The Importance of Trust Amongst Your Community
You know the old saying about trust … “It takes years to build and seconds to destroy.” And once destroyed it is very difficult if not impossible to repair. You need to be the guardian of your own reputation. You need to constantly ask yourself whether your actions in rapidly scaling an online community are […]
How is AWS Failing to Service Webscale Applications?
I’ve made the argument on numerous occasions that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is essentially the quintessential cloud computing offering, particular for infrastructure. To boil down my argument again, it’s essentially: Cloud computing is an entirely new model for IT This model displaces ‘enterprise computing’ (or ‘client/server’) just as that model displaced ‘mainframe computing’ “Enterprise clouds” […]
The Controversial First Role to Hire After Your A Round
I’ve thought a lot about team construction of early stage companies. I was once asked on Quora what my idea startup team would be. I wrote the following: “I like to invest at the seed or A round. My ideal team is simple: Assuming 6 people 1. 5 engineers 2. 1 CEO who doubles as […]
It is not Facebook that needs to worry about G+ it is Quora
For those of you who have been playing around with G+ over the last couple of days, what started off as an interesting way to share the ephemera of our daily internet lives has turned into some of the best question and answer sessions I have seen outside of Quora. For those who do not […]
5 Techniques To Deal With Spam: Open Letter To Twitter
I love Twitter, but lately, I am getting annoyed by Twitter spam and I’m not the only one. I don’t want Twitter spam to become email spam. I don’t want to whine about that either, so I spent some time thinking about what Twitter could do to deal with spam. Consider this an open letter […]
Too much Social Me-dia going on
Hat tip to Sameer Patel for the tweet that led me to this: @lehawes Folks taking the Me in Social Me-dia too literally 🙂 I’ve noticed quite a bit of this lately. A few weeks ago, I unfollowed 20% of my follows because they either RT’ed themselves or their friends, and vice versa. Seeing a […]
The Enterprise Social Goodness
Ever since the word “social” became a famous consumer token that is overused and overhyped every minute of every day, the business world started wondering about how to build an enterprise social network that had all the right and relevant component…
