Think about some of the online tools you can’t live without. Chances are, you backup your work to Dropbox, keep your colleagues updated on your progress via Slack, and automate your marketing emails with a service like Mailchimp. And what all these companies have in common, according to Forbes, is that they’re product-led growth companies. […]
Strategy
Thinking About Selling Your Startup? Here’s How to Skip the BS
Hey, mistakes happen. However, in the startup world, mistakes can be costly, time-consuming, and just flat-out embarrassing on a legendary scale (remember when Yahoo could have bought Google for just $1 million?). If you’re planning on selling, it can be tempting to rush into the process to get it over with as quickly as possible, […]
6 Lessons about Customer-First Strategy
Customers no longer base their loyalty on price or product. Instead, they stay loyal with companies due to the experience they receive. If you cannot keep up with their increasing demands, your customers will leave you.” – Toma Kulbytė, SuperOffice Last week, we attended a fantastic webinar hosted by Paddle which discussed the benefits of […]
SaaS Strategy: Balancing and Managing Short- and Long-Term Tradeoffs
Growing a SaaS company at >50% YOY (at scale) is hard. If it was easy, everyone would do it. One of the big reasons it’s so hard is that you’re constantly trading off between short-term results and long-term scalability. This is true in technology, where there’s constant angst around amassing tech debt in the name […]
Is Your SaaS Charismatic Enough to Build a Tribe?
Nurturing the characteristics of a charismatic company to inspire devoted, loyal advocates to provide social proof. Social proof is huge in SaaS marketing. What people think and say about your SaaS has a lot to do with its momentum and market fit. But how they feel about your solution has wider implications. Real advocacy comes […]
Unprepared for SaaS Due Diligence?
Many SaaS companies go through due diligence in a less-than-ideal state. That’s a lot less stressful when you know what that means. A while back I wrote about what to expect in SaaS due diligence and provided an interactive institutional readiness report card to help you prepare, but today I want to address the consequences […]
The Power of SaaS Storytelling Versus Storymaking
A lot of SaaS marketing is made up. The best marketing is not. And the reasons for that may be way deeper than you think. Yes, this is another post espousing the value of authenticity in SaaS marketing. But it’s much more than that. Storytelling in tech marketing is critical because what we’re marketing is […]
SaaS Feedback Lifecycle: Listen to all. Act only on consensus.
Even experienced leaders can easily forget that one voice shouldn’t drive change. I try and write from recent inspiration and this post is far from an exception. Over the last few weeks, several of the CEOs we work with have all reinforced the problem of the lone voice driving change, which is a symptom of […]
How effective are your SaaS learning loops?
Agile is great, but we need to continuously process and ingest what we learn. Here’s how. Agile management across the majority of a SaaS organization provides the framework for rapid, innovation, iteration and improvement. Ultimately, the efficiency of that improvement comes down to how well we ingest and distribute what’s being learned — our SaaS […]
The 4 P’s of SaaS: People, Product, Playbooks, and Process
When looking at a problem, I have a simple framework for evaluating what’s wrong. Is it People, Product, Playbook or Process (or some combination thereof)? When the 4 P’s are all aligned and functioning well, great performance follows. And if we aren’t hitting numbers or executing well, then something within the 4 P’s isn’t right. […]
