How many clicks does it take someone to actually purchase your product? How many steps are between your customers’ dollars and your product? Do everything you can to make the purchasing process as frictionless as possible, because extra steps and friction are costing you sales. While that seems obvious and intuitive, in practice companies…
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I cringe writing that title because we’re sticklers for cash efficiency and achieving cash break even. However, we looked at 100 tech companies at IPO and determined 75 of them were not profitable (75%) and 61 were not generating positive cash flow (65%). The data and additional observations are below. Ecommerce, Hardware, and…
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We spoke to an investment banker yesterday about his view of the SaaS market. Some of the learnings he shared where surprising, and a departure from what most bankers and investors will tell you. Because the conversation was so candid and not a glowing view of SaaS, he’ll remain anonymous for purposes of this article,…
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SaaS Capital, a lender to software businesses, put out an excellent research piece which examined the performance of publicly traded SaaS businesses during the recession. The 3 page research report is well worth the read, and we decided to summarize some of the findings. Below is the data and under that are observations. …
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IPO’s are not only an exit, they’re usually also a company’s largest capital raise. Below we look at the size of 106 tech IPO’s. The overall takeaway: i) the larger the size of your market, the more money you’re going to raise, especially at IPO; and ii) the year of a tech company’s IPO has…
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Below is a continuation of a recent blog post about a book called Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. Chris was one of the premiere FBI Hostage Negotiators in the world, and his tactics could be useful for negotiating with customers, vendors, and of course your VC. The original blog we wrote highlighted some…
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I just read a book called Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. Chris was one of the premiere FBI Hostage Negotiators in the world, and his tactics could be useful for negotiating with customers, vendors, and of course your VC. Excerpts from the book are below. Create warmth by using first names. “I’m…
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Last week we met with a SaaS business that in our view is doing literally everything right. Below some of my notes which I think any software executive will find helpful. Customer Success. At this company, customer success reps are specialized by industry so that they can speak the customer’s language and develop some…
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When you finally exit or IPO, will you be the CEO or will someone else be running the company? It’s a great question so we dug into 105 IPO’s to figure it out. Specifically, we looked at the CEO at the time of IPO/exit and compared it to the list of key founders to determine…
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What valuations are founders asking for when they raise their Series A? Since May 2018, we’ve had conversations with 275 companies about their Series A rounds. Below is aggregate data on these 275 raises with names redacted to preserve confidentiality. Figures like revenue, valuation, and round size are medians from conversations with founders. Remember the…
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