Q&AWhy are SaaS companies so hot right now?
It just took Wall Street a while to fall in love with recurring revenue for business software. You can see Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, sharing how Wall Street viewed…
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Q&A
Early, Q&AThe 5 “Secrets” to Closing a $6,000,000 Deal in Year 1, At Least For Me, Once
The biggest deal I ever closed myself was for $6,000,000. It was about 4 months after we founded my first start-up, and I’d never sold in the industry before or…
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Q&AIs it the entrepreneur who drafts the term sheet, the VC or both? Who should initiate the process?
It depends who is selling and who is buying. In the old days, term sheets only came from VCs. Founders were almost always selling. Well, almost always. But even in…
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Q&AIs it possible to sell a SaaS product without a well established brand?
Well of course it is 🙂 The question is, how do you get past the brands? Brands are incredibly powerful because they are the default choice. But there’s good news:…
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Q&AHow/why does a CEO get fired?
Let me answer the question from a venture perspective. Most seed and early-stage investors, the very last thing they want to do is fire a CEO. Even in a struggling…
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Do you know the customer acquisition costs of Slack & Dropbox?
Dropbox is public so we have a general sense — it spends ~28% of each dollar that comes in on sales and marketing: But … averages are misleading. A huge…
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Why has Salesforce become such an indelible CRM?
It solves a lot of problems. There are plenty of ways to track Leads, Contacts and Opportunities. Maybe even better ways, especially if your business isn’t that complicated. But Salesforce…
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Q&AWhat is the average rate of closed deals for a SaaS product?
Don’t get confused by averages. Instead, just measure a core funnel metric, keep the funnel relatively constant — and then drive the metric up. Why? You can stuff any funnel…
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Q&AHow would you structure a sales team to get you from $10s to $100 millions in revenue?
Don’t. This is too complicated. You need to hire an experienced VP+ of Sales to do this for you. By $10m+ in ARR, it all does start to become a…
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Q&AHow much would you pay an affiliate to your SaaS product and for how long?
A rough rule of thumb is it’s a good deal for both sides if you pay an affiliate what it would cost you to acquire that lead on your own….
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Blog Posts, Early, Q&A10 Things Maybe Not to Do In The Earlyish Days
A lot of rules are just that — guidelines. You can blaze your own path. 1 founder, 5 founders. Bootstrapped, overfunded. There are many ways to get there. But here’s…
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Customer Success, Early, Q&AWhat do you think about designing compensation plans/OTE for a customer success team for an early stage startup ($1M-$2M ARR)?
In early days, you basically have 2 decisions to make on comp plans for Customer Success: First, do you want: a variable component (often 85/15 or 80/20 or so), or…
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Q&A, SalesWhat would be a fair OTE for a VP Sales that has a $1M quota (20k ACV)?
$0 or {null} Let me step back. I don’t think it makes any sense for a VP of Sales to have a $1m quota. Why? A “real” VP of Sales…
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Q&AHow, if at all, does acquiring your first 10 paying customers inform finding your first scalable customer acquisition channel?
It probably doesn’t — directly. Whatever hackey way you get your first 10 customers probably won’t be the same way you get to 1,000. Because that way probably won’t scale….
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Q&AWhat should a bootstrapped startup focus on during the initial stages of revenue growth, getting more customers or making few customers really happy?
Yes. You must close every customer you can, and treat every customer like they are the King/Queen. Even the tiniest customer must get every hour of attention they need, want,…
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