Topic
SaaS
- On Markets, TAMs, and Agency
If you've been involved in investing or fundraising activities in the past, you've likely heard about "TAMs" (total addressable market), as in "So what's your TAM look like?" The general idea is to determine a metric…
- Stealth Objections
An interesting post from Sandy on the "stealth objection": when a customer, investor, user, employee — anyone — harbors some resistance to what you're selling them, but doesn't make it explicit. My experience here is…
- TAM for Seed Stage is Overrated
One of my favorite ideas from my friend Sandy Kory is that "great product-led companies create their own TAM". His latest post is on this topic, that worrying about deep TAM analysis is a distraction for early compani…
- Learnings from Palantir
Jason Lemkin with some interesting takeaways from Palantir's performance over the recent years. A couple of highlights: #2. Its Top 20 Customers pay an average a stunning $45m a year (!). And that’s 24% higher than a…
- A Brief History of Construction Startups
The construction market for startups (one that I'm fairly involved in, but only as a segment of our market) has been a historically tough nut to crack for technology companies. This is a great breakdown from Brian Pot…
- Weekend Reading: Robotic Bricklaying, Medici and Thiel, and Airtable, Roblox of the Enterprise
🧱 Where Are the Robotic Bricklayers? Brian Potter wonders why work as taxing and seemingly-mechanically simple as brick masonry is difficult to automate: Masonry seemed like the perfect candidate for mechanization, b…
- Stripe's Content Strategy
Morgan Mahlock wrote recently about the promise of Stripe Press, Stripe's book publishing outfit: Within the legacy publishing industry, Stripe’s young publishing press is refreshing - it is Sutherland’s electric cove…
- Weekend Reading: Guide to SaaS, a Few Rules, and Starting a Company Now
📕 Stripe’s Guide to SaaS Stripe Atlas has a great batch of guides on various parts of company-building. 📜 A Few Rules Some great random clippings from Morgan Housel. I’m currently reading his latest, The Psychology…
- Helping Instead of Selling
David Skok opens this post on selling with the classic sales training mantra — customers love to buy, but hate to be sold to: Customers hate being sold to. They don’t mind getting expert help when they want to buy som…
- Churn is a Company Problem
Customer success teams in SaaS are most closely associated with measuring and preventing churn in business, often even having compensation or performance metrics tied to churn rates. We look to CS teams to identify ch…
- Go-to-Market Fit
I recently watched this Mark Roberge session where he had an interesting way of describing the challenge that follows product-market fit. Tons of startup literature is out there talking about p-m fit. And likewise the…
- On Atlassian's Unique Sales Model
I enjoyed a couple of notes from this interview with Atlassian President Jay Simons. They've famously built a business with bottom-up adoption dynamics, allowing them to hit the $1bn revenue milestone without a tradit…
- Weekend Reading: Neutrinos and Math, Waymo Progress, and Freemium in SaaS
🧮 Neutrinos Lead to Unexpected Discovery in Basic Math As long as you consider linear algebra and eigenvectors "basic math": They’d noticed that hard-to-compute terms called “eigenvectors,” describing, in this case,…
- Second-Order Revenue
In SaaS there are dozens of common metrics to measure on performance, like a pulse check on your company. Because of the often-high customer-to-revenue ratio with SaaS products, recurring revenue itself becomes a wate…
- The Magic of Recurring Revenue
Any business that makes money from the same customer more than once can be said to have "recurring revenue." But the term in the SaaS universe has a more specific flavor to it, thanks to the unique nature of the busin…
- Growth, Sales, and a New Era of B2B
This talk from a16z's Martin Casado covers how the market for B2B SaaS go-to-market is changing from sales-driven to a marketing-driven. We've been thinking a lot about this lately in the context of Fulcrum — how the…
- On Retention
Earlier this year at SaaStr Annual, we spent 3 days with 20,000 people in the SaaS market, hearing about best practices from the best in the business, from all over the world. If I had to take away a single overarchin…
- Weekend Reading: Summer Solstice, Zoom Learnings, and TeachOSM
📺 5 Learnings from Zoom Zoom is one of those admirable SaaS companies built on solid product and amazing execution. I love this — not relying on anything sexy or super inventive, just solving a known problem better t…
- How Airtable Became a Unicorn by Reinventing the Spreadsheet
This post from Hiten Shah tells the backstory of one of the more interesting startups these days, Airtable. Like the title states, the objective of Airtable is to build a no-code system for data management and applica…
- Weekend Reading: Calculator, SaaS Metrics, and System Shock
💻 Open Sourcing Windows Calculator Seems silly, but this kind of thing is great for the open source movement. There’s still an enormous amount of tech out there built at big companies that creates little competitive…
- How Investors Think About Ideas
A good overview from YC’s Kevin Hale on how to break down startup ideas: The “solution looking for a problem” trap is all too easy to fall into, and to justify your way out of even if you fall prey to it. I love the a…
- SaaS Valuations Look Good
Some interesting data on the current state of public SaaS company performance: SaaS multiples look steady: of the 82 SaaS companies we follow, the average public SaaS business is trading at 10.03x revenue while the me…
- Getting to 1,000
I saw this tweet a couple of days back that I thought was interesting: What’s the most interesting or useful “how I did X” blog post you’ve read in the past year? 🤔 Examples:- How I made my first dollar- How we acqui…
- Weekend Reading: Business Applications, Rays Prospects, and the Florida Panhandle
👨🏽‍💻 Okta Businesses @ Work 2019 Interesting data here in Okta’s annual report. It’s clear that the way customer’s buy SaaS is very different than the “single-vendor” purchasing preferences from years past. SaaS al…
- 16 Mini Lessons for Startup Founders
This is a good series of bite-sized videos with lessons on various components of sales strategy for startups. Peter Levine of a16z talks through things like channel definitions, marketing vs. sales spend, setting quot…
- Previewing SaaStr Annual 2019
I'm headed out to San Jose, CA next week for the SaaStr Annual conference. It'll be my third in a row; definitely one of the events I most look forward to nowadays. It always brings a great combo of interesting conten…
- Weekend Reading: CAC, Alexander Hamilton, and Flow
🛒 What is Customer Acquisition Cost? This is a great overview of the importance of CAC in a SaaS business. One of the enjoyable things about SaaS is how much you can modify and optimize what you’re doing by measuring…
- A Product Origin Story
Fulcrum, our SaaS product for field data collection, is coming up on its 7th birthday this year. We’ve come a long way: from a bootstrapped, barely-functional system at launch in 2011 to a platform with over 1,800 cus…
- The Power of the SaaS Business Model
We’re about to head to SaaStr Annual again this year, an annual gathering of companies all focused on the same challenges of how to build and grow SaaS businesses. I’ve had some thoughts on SaaS business models that I…
- Subscription Pricing Models
Since Apple changed their subscription pricing options for App Store developers back in 2016, several high-profile apps that have made the switch from fixed pricing to the subscription model. TextExpander, Day One, an…
- Software Pricing and SaaS
Jeff Lawson of Twilio gave this talk on SaaS pricing at the Business of Software conference last year: Everyone in the SaaS product business should watch this. Great approach to thinking through putting prices on your…