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Curated SaaS and tech insight from around the web repackaged for people to put to good use
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1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Attribution. Marketing attribution models help marketers assess the data behind user touch points and conversions to understand the return on Investment and effort. Learn more here about Single-touch attribution models, Multi-touch attribution models, attribution tools, and more to make better data-driven marketing decisions.
2. PAYFAC: Crack open your Tech Dictionaries—I have implemented PayFac (or Payments Facilitator) to create an additional (recurring) revenue line for the business, but I was not aware of this pre-existing portmanteau for that. Stripe has a good guide on bringing PayFac in-house, and here is a downloadable PDF on the same topic. It's very low-touch once it's up and running! 3. EMPLOYEES: Here is a great question: How many employees should you have based on your ARR? In 2023, this answer may be much lower in our Leanops market, but my former big boss David Sacks has a great slide from his SaaStr presentation on optimal SaaS Org Charts (Full deck here) - Series A is 40-50 at 1m ARR. Yup, that's only $20-$25k ARR per employee - the full report is here, which expands into what roles you should hire and what the org chart looks like. 4. SALES OPS: For those of us lucky enough to be in Scale-Up mode but not in a PLG way. Scaling creates some real teething problems, especially regarding revenue teams and moving beyond the founder being the primary (or only) salesperson. Eventually, a dedicated team will be needed (that doesn't involve the founder), and in more modern times, sales operations operators are required to coordinate cross-departmental activities to help a revenue organization hum. Read this Sales Ops primer article from Point Nine Capital on starting all this. 5. COMPENSATION: To complement #3 and #4 above (and also add to last week's popular link covering How Cheap a Product Can You Have And Still Have Salespeople?), here is a three-part Guide to Sales Rep Compensation for startups highlighting compensation plans (part 1), SPIFFS (part 2), and Commission Rate benchmarking (part 3). 6. MVT: Here is another one for your tech dictionaries: MVT, or Minimum Viable Testing, is about creating hypotheses and conducting tests that allow you to predict whether a market will appreciate a product before even launching an MVP. 7. PRICING: Pricing AI products is complex due to variable costs. Late last week, I was asked questions about pricing AI. After some research, SaaStr has a solid piece on how to price and package AI SaaS products. 8. STARTING: Who's been asked the "How do I get started" Question before? Y Combinator has a deep-read startup playbook that distills key advice into actionable segments: Idea, Team, Product, Execution, and relevant podcasts. For anyone wanting to get started, it's all about simplicity, understanding the market, and maintaining operational momentum as the critical fundamentals for success. Highly bookmarkable for those at the earliest stages. 9. FEMALE VENTURES: According to the Pitchbooks All In, Female Founders in the VC Ecosystem report, Startups founded and co-founded by women entrepreneurs in the U.S. received about 28% of all total VC dollars last year. This is up from 2022 and shows progress (albeit slowly), but most of that $$ was with OpenAI. Take that out of the equation, and cumulative dollars are actually down. Interestingly, Pitchbook has slightly similar stats on their Female Founder Dashboard (25.5%) and a good chart showing how Female founder-only startups get a MUCH smaller piece of the pie. 10. CASE STUDY: Moving upmarket into larger organizations is a standard SaaS growth strategy and Tech-ism. Increasing ARPU (Average Revenue Per Customer) is good! However, there is a lot to learn and a lot of time, learning, and effort required to succeed in this market segment. It's not easy, but it can be done. Here is an excellent guide from Outreach on breaking into deals over $100k ARR. POD OF THE WEEK: The Video version of #7 above from Unusual Ventures - How to price and package AI SaaS Products. Comments are closed.
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October 2024
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