Hiten's Pick
SaaS is ripe for disruption
SaaS disrupted on-premise software. What's going to disrupt SaaS?
I think about consumer businesses a lot, because I see the pattern of value creation moving more and more to consumer-centric models that make it easy for customers to use and buy. There’s a ton of opportunity to provide people with great products, putting aside whether you'd call it B2B, consumer, or SaaS.
The reason this is so important is that people don’t want to pay for software. To create a non-linear growth curve, you need to make your product as free as possible so that it can spread to hundreds of thousands if not millions of people and businesses.
My friend Justin Jackson has put a ton of thought into what the disruption of SaaS will look like. In this excellent read, he's mapped out the challenges SaaS as a model is hitting up against and he's laid out a few possibilities for what's next after SaaS.
medium.com
Business
Rise Awards
We're always hearing about the CEOs and the founders of companies in the press and now it's time to hear about all the other awesome team members too! A new project called the Rise Awards is designed to highlight the team members inside of companies and I'm a judge for the awards. There will be 15 winners in these 15 categories:
Back-End Engineering
Business Development
Community
Data Science
Design
DevOps
Front-End Engineering
Human Resources
Marketing
Mobile Engineering
Operations
Product Management
Public Relations
Recruiting
Sales
Know awesome people who work at tech companies? (Of course you do!) Celebrate their work by taking a few minutes to nominate your favorite team member(s), on your team or in another company.
riseawards.co
I hated writing documentation so I founded a company
Today, ReadMe is a fast-growing SaaS business that makes it easy to create well-designed API documentation. But before they'd gotten into the Winter 2015 batch of Y Combinator, they'd been rejected by YC with a similar idea in 2013. Founder Gregory Koberger writes about why they kept working for 2 years after getting rejected and how everything had changed when they got their second chance.
readme.io
Product
The Dos and Don’ts of Aligning Your Welcome Page and Welcome Email
Julia Chen of Appcues has a nice tactical piece about how users experience your welcome page and your welcome email. They have two separate jobs. The welcome page gets users started with the product, while the welcome email opens a conversation with the user.
appcues.com
Marketing
How We Grew SaaS Inbound Traffic By 300% In 6 Months
Stuart McKeown of Gleam grew their traffic to nearly 120,000 visits per month by focusing 100% on organic. Read the article, and don't miss the cute trick they use to bring you back to the article when you click away from the tab.
gleam.io
What Analyzing 50 Brand Guides Taught Us About Building a Lasting Company
Start thinking about your startup's brand today. Define it. Write it down. To help you get started, check out this article by SketchDeck that analyzes 50 brand guides that define the brands of companies ranging from startups to big companies.
sketchdeck.com
Sales
10 Sales Leadership Lessons From 10 Years at HubSpot
HubSpot built a once-in-a-generation sales engine that people are going to study and deconstruct for a long time. This must-read article by Mark Roberge, former Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot, details 10 sales leadership insights he learned from 10 years of growing the company from $0 to $100 million in revenue.
readthink.com
Growth
Crawl, Walk, Run: Business Lessons from a Toddler
After I watched my son play with a box the other day, I had to write this blog post. Some of the hardest things to learn in business, you'll understand better from watching your kids.
hitenism.com
What The 50 Fastest-Growing B2B Companies Can Teach Us About Sales & Marketing
Don't miss this article and the attached 38-slide deck. It's the product of extensive research on what the fastest growing B2B companies are actually doing with their content, communication, funnel, and pricing. What stands out to me is how much opportunity there still is to build lightweight, self-serve, customer-centric businesses.
drift.com
Tip of the Week
Crisis Management for Startups
There are right ways and wrong ways to deal with a crisis.
Steli and I have been through our fair share of crises. I got my degree in crisis management when a class-action lawsuit was brought against KISSmetrics.
Learn how to keep your head during a crisis and make it out alive:
What is a crisis really?
Why sounding boards are useful during a crisis
Asking the question: “Is it going to matter in…?”
The difference between action people and “frozen” people
The importance of business liability insurance
The small steps to take during a crisis
How to find help in a crisis
thestartupchat.com
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