So, should you require a Credit Card to get started in your SaaS Free Trial? TL:DR - By asking for a Credit Card up front, you will get fewer prospects into your Free Trial with no guarantee of converting more paying customers. Now, if you'd like to know why that is, read on ...

Tags: Conversion / Customer Acquisition / Features / SaaS / Share:

Via: SaaS Marketing Written by Lincoln Murphy I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu

What if I said there was something you were doing right now that was actively reducing your SaaS customer success? What if that thing you're doing was standing in the way of driving higher levels of engagement and was reducing the amount of expansion revenue you're generating while potentially increasing churn? ...

Tags: Analytics / Customer Experience / How To / SaaS / Share:

Via: SaaS Marketing Written by Lincoln Murphy I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu

Last month, Ryan Hoover had a great post about building email into your startup first, before moving on to other platforms. His awesome points: Email lets you validate ideas quickly. Since email is async, you can fake functionality with manual processes ...

Tags: Business Model / Ideas / Methodologies / Share:

Via: Sachin Written by Sachin Agarwal Please follow @agarwal.

I have known Dr. William Miller (co-founder of Value Centered Innovation) for a number of years and every conversation with him on business model innovation and beyond has been delightful and insightful. Hers is a quick interview with him on the topic. ...

Tags: Business Model / Interviews / Opinion / Share:

Via: Rajesh Setty Written by Rajesh Shetty Bringing Ideas to Life. With Love! Rajesh is an entrepreneur

In a startup (or any new product) where you don't yet know whether what you produce will generate customer value, you are better served by limiting or completely forgoing production (through an MVP or concierge MVP, for example) to first test value creation. You have to first find a problem worth solving before committing resources to build and scale a solution. ...

Tags: Advise and Tips / Business Model / Share:

Via: Ash Maurya Written by Ash Maurya Founder Spark59 - Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.

Is 5% a good monthly SaaS Churn Rate? Read on to learn the answer... As a consultant to SaaS and Cloud providers that are looking to grow, I get asked what an acceptable SaaS churn rate is all the time. ...

Tags: Advise and Tips / SaaS / Sales / Share:

Via: SaaS Marketing Written by Lincoln Murphy I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu

Hey, there. Four years ago this December, my husband and I launched our first software as a service, Freckle Time Tracking. Since then, it's grossed nearly $700,000, and we've grown, shrunk, hired, fired, stagnated and worked our tails off. To celebrate, I'm writing a series of blog posts about what we've learned. ...

Tags: Bootstrapping / Business Model / Case Studies / SaaS / Share:

Via: UnicornFree Written by Amy Hoy I put the Amy in anomaly. Bootstrapper, product crusader, Ru

There are only 2 reasons why companies buy from startups - The person buying has a very good relationship with the entrepreneur, or the person buying has a dying pain that she feels can be solved by the startup's solution. ...

Tags: Advise and Tips / B2B / Sales / Share:

Via: Be a Force of Good Written by Mukund Mohan CEO in Residence, Microsoft Accelerator @msftaccelerator

"Going viral" is often the holy grail for Internet startups, who hope to quickly scale to hundreds of thousands of users (then hundreds of millions) with relatively low user acquisition costs. However, in a recent blog post and presentation, Andrew Chen argues that SaaS products aren't viral ...

Tags: Opinion / SaaS / Viral Marketing / Share:

Via: Version One Ventures

Profitability is one goal that most of the SaaS CEOs who ask me for help all share. Though, while they're all focused on achieving profitability, how that is measured varies from company to company. For the sake of this post we'll consider profitability to be achieved once the Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) have been paid back ...

Tags: Advise and Tips / Customer Acquisition / Customer Relationship / SaaS / Share:

Via: SaaS Marketing Written by Lincoln Murphy I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu

SaaS products aren't viral from Andrew Chen I recently gave a short talk to the portfolio companies of a SaaS investor, and prepped some notes around the topic of SaaS products and virality. For consumer internet entrepreneurs that are working on big markets, getting to virality is hard enough. ...

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Via: Andrew Chen Blog Written by Andrew Chen Bay Area entrepreneur, blogger, formerly in online ads and v

Building an enterprise software company used to be largely about sales, because enterprise software was sourced and purchased by high-level business people. Those business people needed to be charmed and convinced, an activity that was distasteful to many technologists. ...

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Via: chris dixon's blog Written by Chris Dixon Founder & investor

I do a lot of work with B2B SaaS / Web App / and Cloud companies - of all sizes - on Free Trial Optimization, helping them turn their Free Trial into a Customer-Acquisition Machine! Well, I was just asked about $1 Trials on Quora and at first, I didn't think I had much to say on the topic... but I guess I do ...

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Via: SaaS Marketing Written by Lincoln Murphy I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu

Give the text in this picture a read. Clearly Wright brothers had it all wrong - starting with customer segment, choosing one that not only had a pressing need but also had the budget to pay for it and charging for the product. Had they made it free for all, after all ...

Tags: Business Model / Freemium / Pricing / Share:

Via: Iterative Path Written by Rags Srinivasan Practicing Effective Pricing

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) continues to be one of the most popular tech-based business models as evidenced by the multiples for publicly-traded SaaS companies. It's easy to get excited about the model due to the recurring revenue, high gross margins, and general growth of the space. One area that doesn't get the attention it deserves is the #1 enemy of SaaS: churn. ...

Tags: Advise and Tips / SaaS / Share:

Via: David Cummings Written by David Cummings 10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family,

Dharmesh talks quickly and packs a huge amount of insight and data into all of his talks. This one is no exception. Here are a few of the highlights, quotes and things you will learn if you watch this video: Don't play golf. (Unless you enjoy it), SaaS and Subscription Business Models, Customer Happiness Index, Raising prices in SaaS businesses and more. ...

Tags: Advise and Tips / SaaS / Share:

Via: Business of Software Blog Written by Dharmesh Shah Entrepreneur. Founder/CTO @HubSpot inbound marketing and st

In complex B-to-B sales, multiple "Yes" votes are required to get an order. A single "No" can kill the deal. Understanding the saboteurs in a complex sale is as important as understanding the recommenders and influencers. We needed a selling strategy that took all of this into account. In a startup not losing is sometimes more important than winning. ...

Tags: Advise and Tips / B2B / Sales / Share:

Via: Steve Blank Written by Steve Blank Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford,

For those SaaS companies who've offered a Free Trial and had it fail, it is hard to see how it could ever work. For those who've never offered a Free Trial, the idea of adding an extra 30 or 60 days to the sales cycle seems like a bad idea ...

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Via: SaaS Marketing Written by Lincoln Murphy I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu

There's been an illness going around startup land, a crippling disease that is paralyzing startups everywhere. This sickness is called fear of money, and thousands may be afflicted with this epidemic.A lot of startups, especially SaaS startups, are extending their free beta for far too long. So many companies seem scared of pulling the trigger and asking their users to give them a dollar, and evol ...

Tags: beta / Mistakes / Pricing / SaaS / Share:

Via: Ilya Lichtenstein Written by Ilya Lichtenstein I've been driving traffic online for years. Now I'm building

Most technical founders abominably misprice their SaaS offerings to start out. I'm as guilty of this as anyone, so I wrote up my observations about un-borking this as The Black Arts of SaaS pricing a few months ago. ...

Tags: Business Model / Revenue Model / Share:

Via: Swombat on Startups Written by Daniel Tenner Cofounder of GrantTree and Woobius, Blogger @ http://swombat

Server Density does server monitoring to a) give you peace of mind when all is well and b) alert you really darn quickly when all isn't. (Sidenote: If you run a software business, you absolutely need some form of server monitoring, because the application being down costs you money and trust. I personally use Scout because of great Ruby integration options. ...

Tags: Pricing / Product Management / Revenue Model / SaaS / Share:

Via: Kalzumeus Software Written by Patrick McKenzie I'm a small software developer. Blog: http://www.kalzumeus.

In my opinion, right now there's way too much hype on the technologies and not enough attention to the real businesses behind them. - Mark Cuban. Whoever said "it's what's inside that counts" was only half right. Because sexy sells. Talk to any successful CEO in an "unsexy" vertical - like financial, infrastructure, communications, or data - and you can hear it in their voice: the struggle they en ...

Tags: B2B / Ideas / Opinion / Share:

Via: 500 Startups Written by Christen O'Brien

And that's true. B2B is unsexy in that I don't build things that my college friends want to use. But that doesn't mean it's unsatisfying, or somehow inherently less valuable than a social/consumer product. In fact, I'd argue that the opposite is true. Spending every day making someone's life easier is awesome. Especially when that someone actually wants to pay you for it. ...

Tags: B2B / Business Model / Share:

Via: Dan Shipper Written by Dan Shipper UPenn junior. Co-Founder at @UseFirefly. Jets fan.

Complicated Isn’t Cool…it Kills Conversions! Confused minds don’t buy… they bounce, and take the money that you spent to get them to your site and their lifetime value as a customer with’em! Look at your SaaS sales funnel, your Free Trial sign-up process, their first in-app experience, etc. If anything in there isn’t 100%, absolutely [...]Free Trial Rules of Eng ...

Tags: Freemium / Revenue Model / SaaS / Share:

Via: SaaS Marketing Written by Lincoln Murphy I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu

There is no such thing as an “inactive user” in a Free Trial. You can’t be a “user” if you aren’t “using,” right? Makes sense. I think we get confused because in software the “user” connotation comes from the fact that a user is literally someone for whom an access account has been created. For [...]Free Trial Users are a Vanity Metric is ...

Tags: Design / Pricing / SaaS / Share:

Via: SaaS Marketing

SaaS is widely accepted as the way software (with a few exceptions) should be developed and delivered. SaaS is the industry standard, not something revolutionary or cutting edge. Today, you'd have to be insane to be working on software to be delivered as a locally installable application. ...

Tags: Development / SaaS / Share:

Via: kashflow Written by Duane Jackson 33, Founder and CEO of KashFlow - Leading UK SaaS Accounting

"Marketing is about relationships" is a common phrase on blogs or Twitter. Unfortunately, it is also very misleading. Here are three reasons marketing should not be developing relationships and what marketing needs to do instead. ...

Tags: B2B / Customer Relationship / Marketing / Share:

Via: B2B Digital Marketing Written by Eric Wittlake Focus: Digital Media & Marketing for B2B. Belief: Marketing

Alexander Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas is the tool of choice for a quick, one page dashboard of your business hypotheses. It very much appeals to the business guy in me, but it irks the User Experience (UX) part of my brain. But hey...the canvas is a tool. Use the right tool for the right job. ...

Tags: Business Model / Lean Startup / UI/UX / Share:

Via: Grasshopper Herder Written by Tristan Kromer #leanstartup, #custdev, #RoR, banjo, questions, tao, #bmgen,

Getting a 50-page business plan reviewed is hard. Getting a 1-page business model reviewed is easy and, is an important part of the process. It is imperative that you share your model with at least one other person - Ash Maurya, Running Lean ...

Tags: Business Model / Lean Startup / Share:

Via: Customer Development Labs Written by Justin Wilcox Entrepreneur-ish

I have a love hate relationship with the Business Model Canvas. Steve Blank uses it brilliantly in his Lean Launchpad class, I've had less success. ...

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Via: Grasshopper Herder Written by Tristan Kromer #leanstartup, #custdev, #RoR, banjo, questions, tao, #bmgen,

The Business Model Canvas has proven to be a great way to express the current state of affairs for a startup. A business model canvas is best thought of as a methodology or worksheet to articulate the most important details of a startup in a simple, one page format. One pagers, like the one page strategic plan, are great for aligning people as well as providing clarity. ...

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Via: David Cummings Written by David Cummings 10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family,

when you see the next consumer mobile/internet product with millions of engaged users, let's stop asking about their business model expecting a clever answer - they'll have dozens of off-the-shelf solutions to choose from - and instead, let's start asking about the parts of their business that aren't commoditized yet. (More on this later) ...

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Via: Andrew Chen Blog Written by Andrew Chen Bay Area entrepreneur, blogger, formerly in online ads and v

One way to evaluate the strength of your business model is to assess how difficult it is for your customers to leave you. The idea is to rate the business model's attractiveness based on 10 questions. ...

Tags: Business Model / How To / Share:

Via: David Cummings Written by David Cummings 10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family,

I've been building a new product and I'm almost ready to launch it. However, I'm having a really hard time figuring out the right pricing structure so I'm going to analyze my favorite Freemium SaaS businesses. ...

Tags: Conversion / Pricing / SaaS / Share:

Via: On Startups Written by Dharmesh Shah Entrepreneur. Founder/CTO @HubSpot inbound marketing and st

My team and I of course aim to avoid the failures outlined above with the software company we're building. More importantly, however, we strive to provide the software-based tools that can help us manage the risk of failure in order to build prosperous businesses. ...

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Via: Business Model Alchemist Written by Alex Osterwalder Bestselling author, member of the Business Model Generation,

The CEO of Zuora has a nice slide deck online titled The Only 3 SaaS Metrics that Matter where he talks about the subscription economy, gives the three metrics, and provides benchmarks from publicly traded companies. The three metrics are straightforward and make sense are: ...

Tags: SaaS / Share:

Via: David Cummings Written by David Cummings 10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family,

Illustrates graphically why churn is a huge problem 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 business, not just SaaS. ...

Tags: Customer Acquisition / SaaS / Share:

Via: For Entrepreneurs Written by David Skok Serial entrepreneur turned VC. - Author of forEntrepreneurs

It seems like in B2B we are always in a rush. The next trade show, the next product release, the upcoming networking event. And unfortunately, it seems like content is always the last thing on the to-do list for these events. That results in a rush job that stresses everyone out (from the sales person to the print shop) and all that effort frequently ends up getting scrapped after the event becaus ...

Tags: B2B / Content Marketing / Share:

Via: Savvy B2B Marketing Written by Kate Headen Waddell Hi-tech marketing communications copywriter, beagle lover an

As I've mentioned many times before: churn (the rate at which customers cancel their subscription) is the most important metric for any recurring revenue business. This should make sense. The longer a customer keeps paying you, the more valuable that customer is. ...

Tags: SaaS / User Engagement / Share:

Via: Mark MacLeod Written by Mark MacLeod Seed investor for SaaS, e-commerce and other awesome startup

Someone asked me this question recently, and it's a good one. Understanding your competition is important, but ultimately it should have very little impact on what you do. For starters, your biggest competitor is likely not another company, but in fact the most difficult alternative to overcome: doing nothing. ...

Tags: Business Model / Competition / Lean Startup / Share:

Via: Instigator Blog Written by Ben Yoskovitz VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder

The class is intensely and deliberately experiential to develop the mindset, reflexes, agility and resilience an entrepreneur needs to search for certainty in a chaotic world. Students were going to get a hands-on experience in how to start a new company. The premise of the class is that startups, are not about executing a plan where the product, customers, channel are known. ...

Tags: Business Model / Business Planning / Cust-Dev / Lean Startup / Share:

Via: Steve Blank Written by Steve Blank Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford,

What’s the difference between a business model and a business plan? It depends on who you ask. Business plan means a lot of different things to different people, and so does business model. I’ve complained occasionally about confusing terminology, but I guess it’s just the way things are. There are similar problems with strategic plan, [...] ...

Tags: Business Model / Business Planning / Share:

Via: Tim Berry Written by Tim Berry Founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software; entrepreneur, bu

What type of business you decide to build very much dictates what kind of life you will lead. A lifestyle business is, as the name suggests, a business created to facilitate the kind of lifestyle you desire. In my case, and I suspect for many of the current solo-internet marketers out there, the kind of business you want is one that requires little time to manage, yet makes enough for you to live ...

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Via: Entrepreneurs Journey Written by Yaro Starak Blogger and Internet business entrepreneur from Australia

Last week I was talking to an entrepreneur about an idea-stage B2B startup. After a few minutes of casual talk I asked for the pitch: tell me about the idea. Now this wasn’t a technology idea, so I didn’t have much experience, but it still didn’t sound right. I wasn’t clear why a business would [...] ...

Tags: B2B / Failure / Share:

Via: David Cummings Written by David Cummings 10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family,