Dharmesh Shah knows a thing or two about SaaS. And it takes a lot of wisdom to distill complex ideas into simple truths. I found a 2017 post by him recently where he talks about what is the secret to SAAS success. And it is so simple that once you get it straightened in your mind your entire go to market strategy could follow from there.
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.
The recent BDO report has pegged the global Martech business at $121Bn (more on this later.). That made me revisit the 2019 Martech Landscape which saw the lowest annual growth rate (3%) vis a vis the previous 7 years when the landscape grew from 150 (2011) to 6800 (2018) products. In the accompanying article Scott Brinker explains the evolution of the space.
Product led growth and self selling self serving saas can go only so far – $50 to $100mn but rarely beyond in the same manner. Enterprise sales needs to kick in for hyper growth and this article by Mark Cranney in the A16Z blog of 2014 has some interesting insights. Mark headed OpsWare – a data center automation services company it outlines a model for attempting Enterprise sales. True job of sales people is not to communicate value to customers but to create new value for them.
The NASSCOM Annual Product Conclave and Awards are on in Bangalore, the tech capital of India. I was there.
The SaaS Summit was day long in-depth sessions, starting with ‘Transitioning from IT Services to Product’ (Get a fix on the Mother problem for your ICP) by Amit D Mishra, Founder of Interview Mocha,
The Software Report has published the list of the Top 50 Women leaders in SaaS for 2019. It is comprehensive and provides a peek into the influence women have in the industry today. In most industry meets Women representation is low and one wonders why when you look at the breath of leadership roles they play in the wide variety of software companies.
Tomasz Tunguz wrote this very brief post on the counter intuitive situation to find that negative churn or account expansion best co-relates to the valuation of a SAAS company during Series A. Not revenue or rate of growth of revenue.
Yesterday I attended the Startup Grind Durham region spearheaded by Sherry Colbourne CEO of Spark Centre, Oshawa with two electrifying guests Sean Sheppard and Andrew Goldner founders of GrowthX. It was a rocking time full of bonhomie and nuggets of wisdom. Here’s one: the ‘Service as a software’ idea shared by Sean.
There has been a lot of advice to the contrary. While I understand that as a philosophy – to focus on your customer and not your competitor – on the ground it makes a lot of tactical sense to know what the competitors are up to and how the ecosystem is reacting to their moves.
Over 500 companies participated in the 2019 edition of the SAAS Benchmarks study by OpenView Partners, now in its 3rd year.
70% of the companies were under $10mn ARR and ranged from Very small to Midmarket by size. According to the findings top two concerns of founders were
– product execution and go-to-market (GTM) execution.
– 2018 was the best year on record for software IPOs with 17 new public companies raising a collective $5.1B, 2x more than the next highest year. Software companies spend $63.1B on R&D, accounting for one-fifth of all domestic business R&D in the US.
