How do you go from 50 customers to a 1000? Let’s make it more interesting – how do you go from 50 customers to 1000 in 18 months?
Now that I got your attention I would love to point you to this great session at Saastr 2019 by Romain Lapeyre, Founder & CEO of Gorgias – a customer service platform for e-commerce stores. I will not dilute the focus of this piece by talking about the $14m round they just raised, but would rather focus on the task at hand.
At work, in life, what makes for a lasting relationship the bedrock for happy productive associations? When you interview a new potential coworker what is likely to indicate that this person will not be a jerk. What personal friendships worked and why did they work? Which ones failed and why?
Heidi Jannenga, founded WebPT way back in 2006 – a cloud based saas platform for the rehab industry. Today WebPT has over 30% market share and 13000 + customers with 99% retention and not CRM pipeline.
Do you spend time thinking about your startup’s culture, your managerial priorities and how to deal with people?
Kim Malone Scott is the author of Radical Candor and led products like AdSense, YouTube and Double click online sales and ops at Google. She recounted her management lessons from her work at Google, Apple, Dropbox Twitter and 3 failed startups in her post in the First Round Capital blog.
Every time a founder or founding team pitches a VC inevitably the question of entry barrier comes up. David Cummings wrote this short but very meaningful piece on this very question and how it came up time and again while trying to raise money for Pardot. “What’s stopping Google from assigning 100 engineers to this market and crushing you?”
Marisa Kopec of SiriusDecisions produced a report in 2015 where she analyzed inputs from over 1300 B2B buying executives across North America and Europe. The study shows that there are three distinct buyer journeys and they call it committee, consensus and independent. $B companies making purchases that are upwards of 100K up to a million will engage in this process that could stretch over 6 months and 18 touch points. I would like to believe it is likely to be a lot more.
I have been pondering about it for a while. We know we need to talk to target customers as soon as we can, but we don’t. We know we need to track key metrics – but we don’t. We know we need to reach out to mentors and founders who have been there and done that – we don’t. We know we need to engage with the press and basically invest in marketing (time, not necessarily money) but we don’t.
David Skok writes some of the most informative and educative articles that you can find. If you are serious about tracking what matters for your saas, this is one blog post you need to print out and pin on your board.
I have referred to Jason Cohen a few times this year as I read his blog at asmartbear.com. Jason is the founder of WP Engine and has quite a track record. As we try to fine tune our pricing in this piece in reference he talks about the pricing positioning – one that could potentially help you 8X your price. Super tempting.
Who ever has been watching the WeWork story unfold with the valuation going from 75B at IPO filing to 8B and no IPO or ’sinking IPOs of Uber, Lyft and Peloton’ may be reminded of the dot com bubble in 2000. According to Derek Thompson, staff writer at The Atlantic, host of podcast Crazy/Genius, it is actually ‘The Not-Com bubble’ popping.
