It’s often said that 1% of success comes from the idea and 99% comes from execution. We disagree. This might be true at later stages, but at the initial stage of a startup, the core idea makes a huge difference. In fact, we believe the biggest waste in our startup/VC ecosystem is great people working on mediocre ideas.
Launching with a 100% free product was a huge mistake. Why? Free helped get a handful of early users testing the product and talking about it, for sure. But you don’t learn anything about what paid customers want from free users. The things our free customers asked for turned out to have very little in common with what paid customers valued.
Your homepage headline is the most important part of your website. It decides whether the visitor is going to continue further or not! A generic headline does not connect with anyone, because it is spread too thin. We need concrete, outcome-oriented, customer-centric headlines that provoke emotion...and subsequently ACTION.
“The nature of SaaS implies that your customer is constantly re-evaluating your product — weekly, monthly, or yearly.” This is why it’s absolutely critical that SaaS companies focus on developing very strong product teams by hiring employees carefully. This is particularly true for the managers as they are the ones who need to lead members to success.
Discounts are one of the worst tactics you can use to grow your business, because like a virus they’re a ticking time bomb for your growth. You probably won’t notice the effect at the outset, but the impact will be felt eventually. You may think I’m being dramatic, but I kind of need to be, because I don’t think you realize just how pervasive discount thinking is within our industry.
You can’t just give your copy a “refresh” or aimlessly fiddle with headlines to get a huge boost in conversions. These kinds of false hopes (and complete lack of a process) are why so many conversion copywriting projects fail, and so many new sites perform worse than the old ones. Want to make sure your new copy hits a conversion home run? Keep reading.
It is crucial to have a “clean” Salesforce instance, but it’s another daunting task to maintain it. Startups are built from the ground up and one of the major stepping stones is promoting an environment of accountability among your sales reps to properly input data and to follow sales best practices.
Since 2014, Sendgrid has quadrupled its revenue, doubled its employees, experienced a successful IPO and was recently acquired by Twilio. In this session, we’ll will highlight SendGrid’s journey from growth stage through acquisition and why focusing on people and culture is mission critical to success as a company goes through the scaling process.
Average revenue per user (ARPU) is one of the most important measures needed to understand the quality of revenue SaaS companies generate. At first glance, ARPU looks like a weird metric to track — why should I care about the average customer and the price they pay? Shouldn’t we be more interested in specific (groups of) customers? Read on to see why.
The words outcome-oriented are written on an old whiteboard in Guru’s Philadelphia office, inscribed so long ago that the ink can no longer be erased from the board. That’s exactly how co-founder and CEO Rick Nucci regards the company tenet: It’s inextricable from a startup that’s laser-focused on relentlessly delivering outcomes.
Subscriptions are all about relationships, because the customer relationship is baked directly into how you make money. To see how in-person sales and customer success affects the long-term success of subscriptions, we looked at the data from over 3.5 thousand companies and nearly twenty thousand subscription consumers.
“Let’s re-evaluate our SaaS pricing” is usually an afterthought. Are you thinking “But, I already have a steady MRR.”? Your revenue has grown as your customer usage scaled. If you’re a recurring revenue business that continuously ships updates and invests heavily in go-to-market activities, you need to go beyond acquisition and retention and start looking at monetization as an equally enabling growth lever.
We’ve all navigated our fair share of automated phone menus or interacted with support bots to get help. As the head of our Support Ops team, I work daily with my teammates to develop automated solutions that don’t frustrate customers, but empower them. Our goal is to personalize every experience through automation.
For all the email marketing haters out there, it’s worth noting that recent stats show the ROI on email can be up to 4,400%. That should perk up the ears of even the biggest skeptics. The truth is, to get those kind of returns you have to be more thoughtful and diligent about the way you approach email campaigns.
Do you suffer from “revolving door” syndrome? You may feel like your product has a revolving door attached to it—free trial users leave as quickly as they came. Yet here you are investing time, manpower and resources into attracting more leads, only to have them move through an onboarding funnel wrought with more holes than a hockey net.