Top SaaS Insights of the Week
SaaS Growth
The SaaS Manifesto - How is the end around in football parallel to what many new SaaS companies are doing? Even if you aren’t a sports fan, you’ll find insights into how to “make forward progress by not having anyone in your way” in this video from Peter Levine of Andreesen Horowitz.
http://bit.ly/1e9xJS9
To help in your growth efforts, lob put together a list of 13 Useful Tools Every Startup Should Be Using. And we think Amity should be on that list too – maybe next time?
http://bit.ly/1knEMsZ
Customer Experience/Relationships/Success
Full of tips and actionable insights from some of the top experts in the industry – this 5 Minute Intro to Customer Success from Openview labs is one helpful guide! A sampling of what’s inside: Jason Whitehead, CEO of Tri Tuns – “Until you know what it takes to achieve success from your customers’ perspective you will just waste valuable time and money doing things that will have little long-term impact.”
http://bit.ly/1mUd6Mc
Although this is something we all should strive for “You need to wake up every day planning on how you will make a difference.” Dmitry Shkliarevsky captures this under the first of 4 characteristics that every customer success manager should have – Fanatical Drive for Success.
http://linkd.in/1hsqWn2
“The majority of startups now don’t have the luxury of having an initial user base of traditional tech early adopters that tend to be more patient and forgiving (i.e. remember all the Fail Whales?), understand the difficulties a new product may encounter, and thus, don’t churn as quickly.” Part growth, part customer success and part investment insights, Adam Besvinick’s post of about The Consumer Internet Feedback Loop is an important read.
http://bit.ly/1mY1vf6
An entire multi-media experience in one post! There is a Q&A, a video, a webinar link and the post itself from MindTouch. And a quote of all quotes: “Companies that focus on customer success enjoy a high ROI for a simple reason: your product is only as good as your customers’ ability to use it.”
http://bit.ly/1htdsay
Interesting SaaS Stats and Data
PWC does a ranking of the Global 100 software leaders and it interesting to see the Service and SaaS trends. For some tried and true enterprise software companies, % of software revenue from SaaS revenues is quite significant – see for yourself:
http://pwc.to/1krwUGF
“Of the 100 largest VC-backed tech exits since 2009, Sequoia Capital invested in a remarkable 22 of them. Benchmark Capital invested in the highest percentage at the early stage. “ – research report from CB Insights.
Read the entire analysis: http://bit.ly/1joIVKe
Super SaaS Fundings of the Week:
Crittercism - Mobile App Performance Management – received $30M in Series C funding
Quora – Real-time Q&A – received $80M in Series C funding
Lithium – Social Customer Experience Management – received $86.5M in Venture Round funding
Wattpad – The World’s Largest Community of Readers and Writers – received $46M in Series C funding
Newest SaaS 2.0 Services:
From Product Hunt – there is some very cool stuff out there and we are just scratching the surface. So visit or subscribe to Product Hunt to get a daily leaderboard of the best new products.
PayStand – Accept Payments with 0% Transaction Fees
SendInBlue – Free email marketing solution for entrepreneurs
Mailcloud – A New Way to Email
Pathwright – Create and sell online courses
Azendoo – Teamwork made easy
The SaaS 2.0 Hot or Not List:
There is so much interesting stuff in Mattermark, it’s hard to decide on exactly what to bring you each week. These are the top Mattermark scores (“The Mattermark Score is an average of all weekly momentum scores, which are determined by the growth of 6 signals: web traffic, mobile downloads, inbound links, Twitter followers, Facebook page likes and LinkedIn followers.”) for B2B SaaS Marketing companies in the US:
LeadPages Score = 1118
LeadPages provides HTML 5 templates for contact pages, webinar pages, sales lead and other types of landing pages to improve leads and get better conversions.
Sverve Score = 1028
Sverve connects businesses and the right social media influencers for online marketing.
ConvertMedia Score = 1025
Previously ContextIn, ConvertMedia is a revolutionary display media buying platform for performance driven marketers.
Since Lucrazon and NewsCred made the list again this week at a score of 976 and 975 respectively, we thought we’d include a couple notables with serious SaaS offerings:
OutBoundEngine Score = 923
OutboundEngine is a hands-free way for independent professionals to market and grow their business through email and social media.
Hatchbuck Score = 881
Hatchbuck is sales & marketing software that helps nurture prospects, reach new customers and retain existing ones by automating your sales and marketing activities.
Crunchinator Crunches:
Let’s see what we can crunch this week! Courtesy of the Crunchinator, we took a look at Social Networking companies headquartered in California. From January 1992, 180 companies were categorized as social media, including the likes of Work4, Traackr, and Jobvite, and the trinity of – Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest with 461 investors – of which these are the top 5:
SV Angel – 11 investments
Ron Conway – 7 investments
Y Combinator – 6 investments
Andreesen Horowitz – 5 investments
Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) – 5 investments
An Infographic of Interest:
Other Good Weekend Reads:
Caught in a never ending sales cycle? That’s both a question and the name of this great post from Saurabh Mehta, influenced by none other than David Skok. “Any entrepreneur needs to answer two very important questions: How are you going to find your customer? And How are you going to sell your product or service to them?”
http://bit.ly/PSgolr
A key component of building a successful company, is successfully building a team. We find value in using 15Five in our organization and find their blog posts both entertaining and insightful – “Please Micromanage Me” Said No Employee, EVER. Doesn’t the title itself just make you want to read it? It did for us and the content holds up the title very well.
http://bit.ly/1iy4fKo
And the latest from the Amity blog courtesy of guest contributor Paul Chilensky – The Role of Customer Success in New Product and Feature Design. Paul is Customer Success Industry Executive and former Vice President of Customer Success at OnShift.
Want something added to the SaaS 2.0 Tattler – let us know! And let us know your take on the SaaS 2.0 Tattler in general – we’d love your feedback.
Shout out to Jason Whitehead of Tri Tuns – thanks for sending us some good stuff!
Curated by the team at Amity using the outstanding tools provided by Mattermark, Product Hunt, Crunchbase and Crunchinator. We encourage sharing!
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