Managing Customer Success to Reduce Churn
The health of a SaaS business is directly tied to its ability to retain its customers and prevent churn. To do this, they have to ensure that their customers are happy. That means making sure they get the promised business …
SaaS Metrics 2.0 – A Guide to Measuring and Improving what Matters
“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it” – Lord Kelvin
This article is a comprehensive and detailed look at the key metrics that are needed to understand and optimize a SaaS business. It is a completely updated rewrite …
Validating your Decisions Using Surveys
Summary
This article describes in detail how to use on-line survey tools to validate your key startup assumptions, and gain actionable insights into topics such as pricing, target demographics, messaging, etc.…
Unlocking the Path to Negative Churn
Summary: Illustrates graphically why churn is a huge problem as a SaaS company gets larger. It also looks at a very surprising factor that can massively accelerate SaaS growth: negative churn. (This article is applicable to any recurring revenue …
The State of App Development
Today’s application developers are faced with a broad set of architectural decisions that can make or break their company going forward. This presentation, which was given as a keynote for the MassTLC application development conference, highlights the major changes that …
Scalable Pricing: A Key Tool For SaaS Success
Scalable pricing is a powerful tool to grow revenue in a SaaS or software business. It allows you to capture more of the revenue that your customers are willing to pay, without putting off smaller customers that are not able …
The Science behind Viral Marketing
The Science behind Viral Marketing is a look at the key factors that drive growth in viral marketing. (Hint, the most important factor is not the one everyone expects.) It also looks at what is needed to get virality to …
Brainstorming for New Startup Ideas: A Framework to Spur Creative Thinking
If you are a serial entrepreneur starting to look for an idea for your next startup, you are likely to want a way to stimulate your brain to come up with as many good ideas as possible. This blog post …
Cash is King: 8 tips to Optimize Fundraising Strategy
Introduction
This post aims to help startup CEOs optimize their funding strategy by examining how investors value startups, and explaining how to avoid the common cash management pitfalls.…
Slides on Building a Sales & Marketing Machine
Here is the slide deck that I presented last night at the Boston Lean Startup Circle.
The slide deck describes how to build a Sales & Marketing Machine that is predictable, scalable, automated, well instrumented, and cost efficient.
…A Case Study: Up Close and Personal for Product/Market Fit
Many entrepreneurs have a strong suspicion that there is an opportunity in a particular market, but lack the detailed understanding of customer pain needed to design an appropriate solution. The following guest post by John Raguin, ex-CEO, and co-founder of …
How Investors Validate Your Bookings Forecast
We have just gone through the time of year when startups present their 2011 plans to their boards for approval. In many ways, these meetings are very similar to the meetings we have with new startups that have projections for …
Setting the Startup Accelerator Pedal
Startups frequently make one of two mistakes: spending too much money, or spending too little money. A key job of the CEO is knowing where to set the startup accelerator pedal. In a recent series of three blog posts published …
Customer Acquisition: Maximizing your Funnel
This blog post focuses on how B2B companies can optimize their customer acquisition funnels using a customer-centric methodology to analyze and remove blockage points.
Acquiring customers in the B2B world involves using a variety of marketing and sales steps with …
What drives great entrepreneurs
If any of you read one of my blog posts entitled “Six Things VCs look for in an Investment,” you may remember that the first entry on the list is “An Extraordinary Entrepreneur with Unique Insight.”
I recently …
