Building the Billion Dollar SaaS Unicorn: CEO Guide

Describes the steps required to build a Sales and Marketing Machine that is predictable, scalable, automated, well instrumented, and cost efficient. This was a presentation that I gave at the Lean Startup Circle in Boston on March 24th, 2011.

Slides David Shoenberger recently used in his discussion w/ mentees of The Product Mentor. The Product Mentor is a program designed to pair Product Mentors and Mentees from around the World, across all industries, from start-up to enterprise, guided by the fundamental goals…Better Decisions. Better Products. Better Product People. Throughout the program, each mentor leads a conversation in an area of their expertise that is live streamed and available to both mentee and the broader product community.

A presentation about 9 mistakes that SaaS founders should avoid, with some practical advice on how (and why) to avoid them.

In this slide deck, David Skok talks through his 9 step process for B2B startups to get through product/market fit, and to then find a repeatable, scalable, and profitable growth process. In David's experience some of the most fatal and expensive mistakes founders make is trying to skip steps. Understanding this roadmap will save you countless hours and potentially millions of wasted dollars.

Launching a startup isn't easy. At each stage of scaling - from founding to product-market fit, from product-market fit to hyper growth, and from hyper growth to maturity - entrepreneurs face unique challenges. Greylock Partners hosted an event, called Greyscale, focused on these challenges at each stage. In the opening keynote, Jerry Chen of Greylock Partners discusses the state of enterprise software after the first quarter of 2016. He summarizes the private and public markets, M&A activity, and explains how this climate affects the startup environment.

Deep dive into Pricing Strategy. Learn the axes available to pull pricing lever for SaaS growth in subscription economy. Understand the influence ASP has on the options available and how to align it strategically across the 3 key SaaS sales model.

Latest Lean Analytics workshop from the Lean Startup Week in San Francisco. Focusing on what metrics matter to both startups and big corporations. Incorporates elements of corporate innovation into the Lean Analytics framework to help bigger companies think through the data that really matters.

David Skok and Stephanie Friedman host the Zero to 100 podcast focused on helping B2B startups find predictable, repeatable, and profitable growth. The podcast covers topics like building a repeatable sales process, funnel design, sales operations, and turning theory into practice. The event agenda includes sessions on founder-led selling, building a sales organization, forecasting, and the role of the CEO in scaling a business. Attendees can ask questions using the Sli.do question system.

The document provides an overview of key metrics, terms, and growth strategies for building a billion dollar SaaS unicorn company. It discusses 11 important SaaS metrics including MRR, ARR, CAC, LTV, NPS, churn, cohort analysis, and revenue per employee. It also outlines typical growth phases like the "T2D3" model of tripling revenue twice and doubling revenue three times to hit benchmarks like $2M, $6M, $18M, and $72M in ARR. Finally, the document emphasizes the importance of product-market fit and conducting customer interviews in the early "lean startup" phase.

The document discusses the three phases of a SaaS startup's lifecycle: searching for product-market fit, scaling the business, and searching for a repeatable and profitable growth model. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing what phase a startup is in and taking the appropriate actions, such as not jumping ahead or expanding sales too quickly before completing the current phase. Cash conservation is also stressed until reaching the scaling phase. Aligning sales, marketing, and other functions is highlighted as important for predictable growth. The phases and lessons provided serve as a guide for SaaS founders to strategically navigate their company's development.

I gave this presentation about the Lean Analytics book at the Lean Startup Meetup in Karlsruhe. Follow my blog for updates: http://jan-koenig.com/blog/ Or Twitter: https://twitter.com/einkoenig

Something important has changed in the recruiting process: the best people are almost never on the market, and you have to develop recruiting processes to find and sell passive candidates. In many cases, it will take months or years of relationship building with these candidates to find the right moment when they are open to considering a change. Closing them takes greater selling efforts than in the past due to the intense competition over the good candidates. This leads me to believe that there is now a third crucial startup skill that needs to be developed: recruiting.

Part of finding product/market fit is turning early wins into repeatable, scalable, and profitable sales. In this talk given as part of the Heavybit speaker series, I discuss how to shorten the time to customer conversion from trials, freemium and open source products.

Zuora Sales Deck

This presentation described how and when outbound prospecting (Cold Calling 2.0) can work to provide a predictable flow of leads from highly targeted prospects.

Keynote by David Skok, Matrix Partners & forEntrepreneurs at #SaaStock17, Dublin, Ireland, Tuesday September 19th, 2017

There is a common problem where startups have an unbalanced business model with too high of customer acquisition costs compared to lifetime customer value. This document discusses the importance of having a well-balanced business model with consideration for cost to acquire customers, monetization and lifetime customer value. It also covers how the internet has shifted power to customers and changed buying behavior, requiring sellers to have an intimate understanding of customers to be successful.

Given at SaaS U in Seattle, 5/21/13 The preso misses a bit without video, but will try to add that when I have it...

This document summarizes an analysis of founding CEO versus professional CEO performance in the software as a service industry. It analyzes data from 48 SaaS companies that had exits from 1998-2009, comparing metrics like total investment, time to exit, and exit valuation between companies led by founding CEOs versus those led by professional CEOs hired later. It finds that companies led by founding CEOs generally had better performance on these metrics, even when accounting for biases. Possible reasons discussed include higher equity stakes and ownership mentality among founding CEOs.

The Ultimate How-To CRM Guide is the document that you need to make your decision between cloud-computing technology and on-premises. We call it "Ultimate" because it is the Ultimate How-To CRM Guide, the "Must-have" Guide :)

Oracle and cVidya Cloud webinar with the first part by Oracle covering SaaS market and opportunities in the cloud and Oracle's SaaS partnering strategy and second part by cVidya's covering cVidya's Journey into the Cloud with cVidyaCloud.

The document discusses key metrics and strategies for Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses. It outlines important metrics to track such as acquisition, activation, retention, churn rate, customer lifetime value, and cost of customer acquisition. Pricing strategies like freemium models are examined through case studies. Valuation approaches change from qualitative factors like team quality in early stages to quantitative metrics like revenue multiples in later stages. The presentation emphasizes the importance of measuring business performance, focusing on a single customer benefit, engaging with users, and providing excellent customer service.

This document analyzes valuation multiples and growth trends across different technology sectors including software as a service, marketplaces, consumer internet, and e-commerce from 1999-2015. It finds that while consumer internet multiples have remained steady in the past 5-10 years, SaaS valuations have increased 30-100% making it harder to generate high returns. Marketplace models command higher multiples than traditional e-commerce. Growth rates below 30% often lead to multiple compression. The document concludes that while valuations have increased, the sectors are not in a bubble and remain attractive compared to legacy sectors.

This document provides guidance on selecting target customer segments and generating qualified leads for B2B SaaS companies. It emphasizes that most founders initially think their product can appeal to everyone, but targeting a specific segment is important. Selecting the right segment determines strategic choices. Generating leads requires inbound and outbound marketing to find potential customers experiencing problems the product solves. Qualifying leads confirms a fit between the product and customers' needs. The document offers tips on segmentation, marketing, sales approaches, and qualifying leads for the target segment.