Girish Mathrubootham is the Poster Child of VC funded Indian SaaS industry. He raised $400m from marque investors like Sequoia, Accel, Google and Tiger Global. SaaSBooMi, the Asian Saas meet for founders is, well, booming. This year it is slated for 24 & 25 Jan and yours truly will be there (thanks to Suresh Sambandam, CEO Kissflow).
It is important to understand Who and How they are profiting from our personal data. Gregory Barber a staff writer of Wired tried to sell his own data through sites like Datum, Doc.ai and Wibson amongst others. He made precisely 0.3 cents.
Well a lot of diverse stuff. I found this interesting list by Amr Kafina a indie web developer who sourced the list from mostly public domain and aggregated the public recommendations from founders. Then he built a site where you can search these by Title, Author or the Founder who recommended that book and a link to the Amazon page for the book.
Is there a method in the sky high ambition of Jeff Bezos? Apparently yes. It’s called ‘Working Backwards’ writes Justin Bariso in Inc. citing Ian McAllister on Quora detailing ‘Amazon’s approach for product development’.
We all know it. Building a product is relatively easier than selling it. One of the reasons founders keep pushing, first – the face to face with customers and after that asking for money from them – is because we want to keep the fantasy rolling. In many guises – the product is not ready, we need to add those two features, our market it elsewhere and so on.
Well let’s get real. Thanks to Tracey Ruff‘s list of 10 must watch videos for SaaS Growth, I found this great talk by Mark Roberge (MD, Stage 2 Capital, Prof, HarvardHBS and former CRO at Hubspot) and Michele Law (former CRO at Castlight Health and former COO at OpenDNS). And they list these four core issues failing SaaS sales, ergo – what not do to.
1. Pre-mature focus on growth/ Going into growth mode too early
2. The first sales hire
3. Ignoring sales impact on customer success
4. Aligning GTM by function rather than buyer
There is more advice on what To Do. It’s a 20 min listen. Go for it. hashtag
Where I learnt this #382
Learn from the Leaders: 10 Must-See Videos on SaaS Growth https://blog.userlane.com/saas-growth-videos/
I have about 60 folders. 22 Favourites. How many mails are in your inbox? How many mails come in each day and how many are critical ? How may do you look at partially and revisit many times. How many distributed amongst multiple mail ids you have – which you thought would help manage your inbox?
Saastr Founder Jason M. Lemkin shared lessons learned from focusing on Social growth and here are the highlights.
A good place to start reflecting on the state of startups is to analyze the state of VC investments in 2019. As expected possibly the most succinct and comprehensive overview is available in this post by Tomasz Tunguz. The investment in quantum and the number of rounds have declined in Q4 – although it is possible that all deals have not been announced yet.
Looking for predictions for 2020 this compilation of 25 forecasts by Christina DesMarais lept out at me for the very first point :
1. Consumers will increasingly demand more privacy – predicted by Thibaud Clément CEO of Loomly.
The Betts Recruiting Compensation Guide 2019 shows the current hiring pay for all levels of Sales, Marketing and People positions in the Tech Industry.
The typical compensation structure (Base + Commission) was 100% Salary + bonus for a Sales Ops role to a 50:50 (B+C) split for Enterprise sales. Typical SDR had a 60:40 split between salary and commissions.
