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| business plan for saas startup: Product-Led Growth Bush Wes, 2019-05 Product-Led Growth is about helping your customers experience the ongoing value your product provides. It is a critical step in successful product design and this book shows you how it's done. - Nir Eyal, Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author of Hooked |
| business plan for saas startup: On Startups: Advice and Insights for Entrepreneurs Dharmesh Shah, 2012-12-09 Note from the Author Hi, my name is Dharmesh, and I’m a startup addict. And, chances are, if you’re reading this, you have at least a mild obsession as well. This book is based on content from the OnStartups.com blog. The story behind how the blog got started is sort of interesting—but before I tell you that story, it’ll help to understand my earlier story. As a professional programmer, I used to work in a reasonably fun job doing what I liked to do (write code). Eventually, I got a little frustrated with it all, so at the ripe old age of 24, I started my first software company. It did pretty well. It was on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies three times. It reached millions of dollars of sales and was ultimately acquired. I ran that first company for over 10 years working the typical startup hours. When I sold that company, I went back to school to get a master’s degree at MIT. I’ve always enjoyed academics, and I figured this would be a nice “soft landing” and give me some time to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. As part of my degree requirements, I had to write a graduate thesis. I titled my thesis “On Startups: Patterns and Practices of Contemporary Software Entrepreneurs.” And, as part of that thesis work, I wanted to get some feedback from some entrepreneurs. So, I figured I’d start a blog. I took the first two words of the thesis title, “On Startups,” discovered that the domain name OnStartups.com was available, and was then off to the races. The blog was launched on November 5, 2005. Since then, the blog and associated community have grown quite large. Across Facebook, LinkedIn, and email subscribers, there are over 300,000 people in the OnStartups.com audience. This book is a collection of some of the best articles from over 7 years of OnStartups.com. The articles have been topically organized and edited. I hope you enjoy them. |
| business plan for saas startup: Turning the Flywheel Jim Collins, 2019-02-26 A companion guidebook to the number-one bestselling Good to Great, focused on implementation of the flywheel concept, one of Jim Collins’ most memorable ideas that has been used across industries and the social sectors, and with startups. The key to business success is not a single innovation or one plan. It is the act of turning the flywheel, slowly gaining momentum and eventually reaching a breakthrough. Building upon the flywheel concept introduced in his groundbreaking classic Good to Great, Jim Collins teaches readers how to create their own flywheel, how to accelerate the flywheel’s momentum, and how to stay on the flywheel in shifting markets and during times of turbulence. Combining research from his Good to Great labs and case studies from organizations like Amazon, Vanguard, and the Cleveland Clinic which have turned their flywheels with outstanding results, Collins demonstrates that successful organizations can disrupt the world around them—and reach unprecedented success—by employing the flywheel concept. |
| business plan for saas startup: Business Plan Template and Example Alex Genadinik, 2015 This book is now used by the University of Kentucky entrepreneurship program. This book will give you a fresh and innovative way to write a business plan that will help you: - Complete your business plan faster - Avoid confusion and frustration - Focus on the core of your business and create more effective business strategies To help you learn the business planning process from the ground up, this book gets you started with a very basic business plan and helps you expand it as you make your way through the book. This way, you have less confusion and frustration and are more likely to finish your business plan faster and have it be better. This way you get a business plan template together practical explanations and an example. So whatever your learning style might be, this book has a high chance of being effective for you. If business planning seems to you complex and scary, this book will make it simple for you. It is written in simple and clear language to help you get started and create a great business plan. So what are you waiting for? Get this book now, and start creating a great business plan for your business today. Also recently added in the last update of this book is a business plan sample since many people commented that they wanted a business plan example. Although for my taste as an entrepreneur, I rather give you lots of great business planning strategies and theory that you can use in the real world instead of having a business plan template or workbook to write your business plan from. After all, a business plan is just a document. But to make your business a success, you will have to do it in the real world. So when you try to figure out how to create a business plan, don't just focus on the business plan document. Instead, focus on a plan for the real world with actionable and effective strategies. Get the book now, and start planning your business today. |
| business plan for saas startup: Selling the Invisible Harry Beckwith, 2000-10-15 SELLING THE INVISIBLE is a succinct and often entertaining look at the unique characteristics of services and their prospects, and how any service, from a home-based consultancy to a multinational brokerage, can turn more prospects into clients and keep them. SELLING THE INVISIBLE covers service marketing from start to finish. Filled with wonderful insights and written in a roll-up-your-sleeves, jargon-free, accessible style, such as: Greatness May Get You Nowhere Focus Groups Don'ts The More You Say, the Less People Hear & Seeing the Forest Around the Falling Trees. |
| business plan for saas startup: Lean B2B Étienne Garbugli, 2022-03-22 Get from Idea to Product/Market Fit in B2B. The world has changed. Nowadays, there are more companies building B2B products than there’s ever been. Products are entering organizations top-down, middle-out, and bottom-up. Teams and managers control their budgets. Buyers have become savvier and more impatient. The case for the value of new innovations no longer needs to be made. Technology products get hired, and fired faster than ever before. The challenges have moved from building and validating products to gaining adoption in increasingly crowded and fragmented markets. This, requires a new playbook. The second edition of Lean B2B is the result of years of research into B2B entrepreneurship. It builds off the unique Lean B2B Methodology, which has already helped thousands of entrepreneurs and innovators around the world build successful businesses. In this new edition, you’ll learn: - Why companies seek out new products, and why they agree to buy from unproven vendors like startups - How to find early adopters, establish your credibility, and convince business stakeholders to work with you - What type of opportunities can increase the likelihood of building a product that finds adoption in businesses - How to learn from stakeholders, identify a great opportunity, and create a compelling value proposition - How to get initial validation, create a minimum viable product, and iterate until you're able to find product/market fit This second edition of Lean B2B will show you how to build the products that businesses need, want, buy, and adopt. |
| business plan for saas startup: How to Punch the Sunday Jitters in the Face Tk Kader, 2019-05-07 It's Sunday afternoon. You're rounding out your weekend with friends and family, and life is feeling great. But as the hours pass, you start to see Monday approaching and you get that pit in your stomach. Call it the Sunday Scaries, the Sunday Jitters, the Sunday Angst, or the Sunday Existential Crisis of What am I even doing with my life? We've all been there.I lived my life trying to escape the Sunday Jitters, dreading Mondays, and holding my breath through the week while counting down to weekends for all too long until I decided enough was enough. I learned (almost too late) in my life that taking a proactive approach to my days led to a calmer me. A less frantic me. This all happened when I developed a simple system to check in on myself every Sunday to get rid of the angst I was feeling. I started calling it my Unstoppable Sundays.In this book, I teach you five actionable steps you can start taking today to get more proactive in your life to become the unstoppable person you have within you. |
| business plan for saas startup: Startup CEO Matt Blumberg, 2020-08-04 You’re only a startup CEO once. Do it well with Startup CEO, a master class in building a business. —Dick Costolo, Former CEO, Twitter Being a startup CEO is a job like no other: it’s difficult, risky, stressful, lonely, and often learned through trial and error. As a startup CEO seeing things for the first time, you’re likely to make mistakes, fail, get things wrong, and feel like you don’t have any control over outcomes. Author Matt Blumberg has been there, and in Startup CEO he shares his experience, mistakes, and lessons learned as he guided Return Path from a handful of employees and no revenues to over $100 million in revenues and 500 employees. Startup CEO is not a memoir of Return Path's 20-year journey but a thoughtful CEO-focused book that provides first-time CEOs with advice, tools, and approaches for the situations that startup CEOs will face. You'll learn: How to tell your story to new hires, investors, and customers for greater alignment How to create a values-based culture for speed and engagement How to create business and personal operating systems so that you can balance your life and grow your company at the same time How to develop, lead, and leverage your board of directors for greater impact How to ensure that your company is bought, not sold, when you exit Startup CEO is the field guide every CEO needs throughout the growth of their company. |
| business plan for saas startup: Hello, Startup Yevgeniy Brikman, 2015-10-21 This book is the Hello, World tutorial for building products, technologies, and teams in a startup environment. It's based on the experiences of the author, Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman, as well as interviews with programmers from some of the most successful startups of the last decade, including Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, Stripe, Instagram, AdMob, Pinterest, and many others. Hello, Startup is a practical, how-to guide that consists of three parts: Products, Technologies, and Teams. Although at its core, this is a book for programmers, by programmers, only Part II (Technologies) is significantly technical, while the rest should be accessible to technical and non-technical audiences alike. If you’re at all interested in startups—whether you’re a programmer at the beginning of your career, a seasoned developer bored with large company politics, or a manager looking to motivate your engineers—this book is for you. |
| business plan for saas startup: Lean AI Lomit Patel, 2020-01-30 How can startups successfully scale customer acquisition and revenue growth with a Lean team? Out-of-the-box acquisition solutions from Facebook, Google, and others provide a good start, but the companies that can tailor those solutions to meet their specific needs, objectives, and goals will come out winners. But that hasn’t been an easy task—until now. With this practical book, author Lomit Patel shows you how to use AI and automation to provide an operational layer atop those acquisition solutions to deliver amazing results for your company. You’ll learn how to adapt, customize, and personalize cross-channel user journeys to help your company attract and retain customers—to usher in the new age of Autonomous Marketing. Learn how AI and automation can support the customer acquisition efforts of a Lean Startup Dive into Customer Acquisition 3.0, an initiative for gaining and retaining customers Explore ways to use AI for marketing purposes Understand the key metrics for determining the growth of your startup Determine the right strategy to foster user acquisition in your company Manage the increased complexity and risk inherent in AI projects |
| business plan for saas startup: Scaling Your Startup Peter S. Cohan, 2019-01-23 Know how your company can accelerate growth by not only tapping into new growth vectors, but also by adapting its organization, culture, and processes. To oversee growth from an idea to a company with billions in revenue, CEOs must reinvent many aspects of their company in anticipation of it reaching ever-higher revenues. Author Peter Cohan takes you through the four stages of scaling: winning the first customers, building a scalable business model, sprinting to liquidity, and running the marathon. What You'll LearnDiscover how founders keep their CEO positions by managing the organizational change needed to reach the next stage of scalingRead case studies that illustrate how CEOs craft growth strategies, raise capital, create culture, build their organizations, set goals, and manage processes to achieve themDiscover principles of successful scaling through comparisons of successful and less successful companies Use the Scaling Quotient to assess your startup's readiness to growFollow a road map for turning your idea into a company that can change the world Who This Book Is For Entrepreneurs, aspiring CEOs, capital providers, and all other key stakeholders |
| business plan for saas startup: Never Get a "Real" Job Scott Gerber, 2010-12-07 Young serial entrepreneur Scott Gerber is not the product of a wealthy family or storied entrepreneurial heritage. Nor is he the outcome of a traditional business school education or a corporate executive turned entrepreneur. Rather, he is a hard-working, self-taught 26-year-old hustler, rainmaker, and bootstrapper who has survived and thrived despite never having held the proverbial real” job. In Never Get a Real Job: How to Dump Your Boss, Build a Business, and Not Go Broke, Gerber challenges the social conventions behind the real job and empowers young people to take control of their lives and dump their nine-to-fives—or their quest to attain them. Drawing upon case studies, experiences, and observations, Scott dissects failures, shares hard-learned lessons, and presents practical, affordable, and systematic action steps to building, managing, and marketing a successful business on a shoestring budget. The proven, no-b.s. methodology presented in Never Get a Real Job teaches unemployed and underemployed Gen-Yers, aspiring small business owners, students, and recent college graduates how to quit 9-to-5s, become their own bosses, and achieve financial independence. |
| business plan for saas startup: From Impossible to Inevitable Aaron Ross, Jason Lemkin, 2019-06-05 Break your revenue records with Silicon Valley’s “growth bible” “This book makes very clear how to get to hyper-growth and the work needed to actually get there” Why are you struggling to grow your business when everyone else seems to be crushing their goals? If you needed to triple revenue within the next three years, would you know exactly how to do it? Doubling the size of your business, tripling it, even growing ten times larger isn't about magic. It's not about privileges, luck, or working harder. There's a template that the world's fastest growing companies follow to achieve and sustain much, much faster growth. From Impossible to Inevitable details the hypergrowth playbook of companies like Hubspot, Salesforce.com (the fastest growing multibillion dollar software company), and EchoSign—aka Adobe Document Services (which catapulted from $0 to $144 million in seven years). Whether you have a $1 billion or a $100,000 business, you can use the same insights as these notable companies to learn what it really takes to break your own revenue records. Pinpoint why you aren’t growing faster Understand what it takes to get to hypergrowth Nail a niche (the #1 missing growth ingredient) What every revenue leader needs to know about building a scalable sales team There’s no time like the present to surpass plateaus and get off of the up-and-down revenue rollercoaster. Find out how now! |
| business plan for saas startup: Subscribed Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert, 2018-06-05 SHORTLISTED FOR THE CMI MANAGEMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP AWARD Today's consumers prefer the advantages of access over the hassles of ownership. It's not just internet services like Netflix and Spotify; even industrial firms like GE and Caterpillar are reinventing themselves as solutions providers. Whether you sell software, clothes, insurance, or industrial machines, you need to master the transition to the subscription model. Adapting to the subscription economy takes more than just deciding to sell subscriptions instead of products. You'll have to reinvent your company from the inside out -- from your accounting to your entire IT architecture. No matter how large or small your company, Subscribed gives you a practical, step-by-step framework to rebuild your business around a customer-centric, recurring revenue model.In ten years, we'll be subscribing to everything: information technology, transportation, retail, healthcare, even housing. Informed by insights straight from the servers of Zuora, the world's largest subscription finance platform, Subscribed is the book that explains how this shift really works -- and how business leaders can prepare and prosper. |
| business plan for saas startup: Scaling Lean Ash Maurya, 2016 Scaling Lean offers an invaluable blueprint for modeling startup success. You'll learn the essential metrics that measure the output of a working business model, give you the pulse of your company, communicate its health to investors, and enable you to make precise interventions when things go wrong, --Amazon.com. |
| business plan for saas startup: Scaling Up Verne Harnish, 2014 In this guide, Harnish and his co-authors share practical tools and techniques to help entrepreneurs grow an industry -- dominating business without it killing them -- and actually have fun. Many growth company leaders reach a point where they actually dread adding another customer, employee, or location. It feels like they are just adding more weight to an ever-heavier anchor they are dragging through the sand. To make matters worse, the increased revenues have not turned into more profitability, so at some point they wonder if the journey is worth the effort. This book focuses on the four major decisions every company must get right: People, Strategy, Execution and Cash. The book includes a series of One-Page tools including the One-Page Strategic Plan and the Rockefeller Habits Execution Checklist, which more than 40,000 firms around the globe have used to scale their companies successfully. |
| business plan for saas startup: Traction Gino Wickman, 2012-04-03 OVER 1 MILLION COPIES SOLD! Do you have a grip on your business, or does your business have a grip on you? All entrepreneurs and business leaders face similar frustrations—personnel conflict, profit woes, and inadequate growth. Decisions never seem to get made, or, once made, fail to be properly implemented. But there is a solution. It's not complicated or theoretical.The Entrepreneurial Operating System® is a practical method for achieving the business success you have always envisioned. More than 80,000 companies have discovered what EOS can do. In Traction, you'll learn the secrets of strengthening the six key components of your business. You'll discover simple yet powerful ways to run your company that will give you and your leadership team more focus, more growth, and more enjoyment. Successful companies are applying Traction every day to run profitable, frustration-free businesses—and you can too. For an illustrative, real-world lesson on how to apply Traction to your business, check out its companion book, Get A Grip. |
| business plan for saas startup: The Definitive Business Plan Richard Stutely, 2012-08-21 This comprehensive book will ensure your business plan is robust enough to start, run or revitalise any business enterprise. Whether your goal is raising start-up finance for a new business, requesting venture funding from a corporate parent or directing operational management, The Definitive Business Plan will help you deliver the information the decision-makers are really looking for. Accessible to the newcomer and detailed enough for the experienced planner, the third edition of this international bestseller explains how to tailor a plan for specific readerships and meet specific objectives, helping you to focus your attention on strategic planning as well as on operational controls. The full text downloaded to your computer With eBooks you can: search for key concepts, words and phrases make highlights and notes as you study share your notes with friends eBooks are downloaded to your computer and accessible either offline through the Bookshelf (available as a free download), available online and also via the iPad and Android apps. Upon purchase, you'll gain instant access to this eBook. Time limit The eBooks products do not have an expiry date. You will continue to access your digital ebook products whilst you have your Bookshelf installed. |
| business plan for saas startup: The 1-Page Marketing Plan Allan Dib, 2021-01-25 WARNING: Do Not Read This Book If You Hate Money To build a successful business, you need to stop doing random acts of marketing and start following a reliable plan for rapid business growth. Traditionally, creating a marketing plan has been a difficult and time-consuming process, which is why it often doesn't get done. In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, serial entrepreneur and rebellious marketer Allan Dib reveals a marketing implementation breakthrough that makes creating a marketing plan simple and fast. It's literally a single page, divided up into nine squares. With it, you'll be able to map out your own sophisticated marketing plan and go from zero to marketing hero. Whether you're just starting out or are an experienced entrepreneur, The 1-Page Marketing Plan is the easiest and fastest way to create a marketing plan that will propel your business growth. In this groundbreaking new book you'll discover: - How to get new customers, clients or patients and how to make more profit from existing ones. - Why big business style marketing could kill your business and strategies that actually work for small and medium-sized businesses. - How to close sales without being pushy, needy, or obnoxious while turning the tables and having prospects begging you to take their money. - A simple step-by-step process for creating your own personalized marketing plan that is literally one page. Simply follow along and fill in each of the nine squares that make up your own 1-Page Marketing Plan. - How to annihilate competitors and make yourself the only logical choice. - How to get amazing results on a small budget using the secrets of direct response marketing. - How to charge high prices for your products and services and have customers actually thank you for it. |
| business plan for saas startup: Start Small, Stay Small Rob Walling, 2010 Start Small, Stay Small is a step-by-step guide to launching a self-funded startup. If you're a desktop, mobile or web developer, this book is your blueprint to getting your startup off the ground with no outside investment.This book intentionally avoids topics restricted to venture-backed startups such as: honing your investment pitch, securing funding, and figuring out how to use the piles of cash investors keep placing in your lap.This book assumes: You don't have $6M of investor funds sitting in your bank account You're not going to relocate to the handful of startup hubs in the world You're not going to work 70 hour weeks for low pay with the hope of someday making millions from stock options There's nothing wrong with pursuing venture funding and attempting to grow fast like Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Facebook. It just so happened that most people are not in a place to do this.Start Small, Stay Small also focuses on the single most important element of a startup that most developers avoid: marketing. There are many great resources for learning how to write code, organize source control, or connect to a database. This book does not cover the technical aspects developers already know or can learn elsewhere. It focuses on finding your idea, testing it before you build, and getting it into the hands of your customers. |
| business plan for saas startup: High Tech Start Up, Revised And Updated John L. Nesheim, 2000-09-22 This revised and updated edition of Nesheim's underground Silicon Valley bestseller incorporates twenty-three case studies of successful start-ups, including tables of wealth showing how much money founders and investors realized from each venture. The phenomenal success of the initial public offerings (IPOs) of many new internet companies obscures the fact that fewer than six out of 1 million business plans submitted to venture capital firms will ever reach the IPO stage. Many fail, according to start-up expert John Nesheim, because the entrepreneurs did not have access to the invaluable lessons that come from studying the real-world venture experiences of successful companies. Now they do. Acclaimed by entrepreneurs the world over, this practical handbook is filled with hard-to-find information and guidance covering every key phase of a start-up, from idea to IPO: how to create a winning business plan, how to value the firm, how venture capitalists work, how they make their money, where to find alternative sources of funding, how to select a good lawyer, and how to protect intellectual property. Nesheim aims to improve the odds of success for first-time high-tech entrepreneurs, and offers an insider's perspective from firsthand experience on one of the toughest challenges they face -- convincing venture capitalists or investment banks to provide financing. This complete, classic reference tool is essential reading for first-time high-tech entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs already involved in a start-up who want to increase their chances of success to rise to the top. |
| business plan for saas startup: Preparing Effective Business Plans Bruce R. Barringer, 2016 |
| business plan for saas startup: The Millionaire Fastlane MJ DeMarco, 2011-01-04 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Is the financial plan of mediocrity -- a dream-stealing, soul-sucking dogma known as The Slowlane your plan for creating wealth? You know how it goes; it sounds a lil something like this: Go to school, get a good job, save 10% of your paycheck, buy a used car, cancel the movie channels, quit drinking expensive Starbucks mocha lattes, save and penny-pinch your life away, trust your life-savings to the stock market, and one day, when you are oh, say, 65 years old, you can retire rich. The mainstream financial gurus have sold you blindly down the river to a great financial gamble: You've been hoodwinked to believe that wealth can be created by recklessly trusting in the uncontrollable and unpredictable markets: the housing market, the stock market, and the job market. This impotent financial gamble dubiously promises wealth in a wheelchair -- sacrifice your adult life for a financial plan that reaps dividends in the twilight of life. Accept the Slowlane as your blueprint for wealth and your financial future will blow carelessly asunder on a sailboat of HOPE: HOPE you can find a job and keep it, HOPE the stock market doesn't tank, HOPE the economy rebounds, HOPE, HOPE, and HOPE. Do you really want HOPE to be the centerpiece for your family's financial plan? Drive the Slowlane road and you will find your life deteriorate into a miserable exhibition about what you cannot do, versus what you can. For those who don't want a lifetime subscription to settle-for-less and a slight chance of elderly riches, there is an alternative; an expressway to extraordinary wealth that can burn a trail to financial independence faster than any road out there. Why jobs, 401(k)s, mutual funds, and 40-years of mindless frugality will never make you rich young. Why most entrepreneurs fail and how to immediately put the odds in your favor. The real law of wealth: Leverage this and wealth has no choice but to be magnetized to you. The leading cause of poorness: Change this and you change everything. How the rich really get rich - and no, it has nothing to do with a paycheck or a 401K match. Why the guru's grand deity - compound interest - is an impotent wealth accelerator. Why the guru myth of do what you love will most likely keep you poor, not rich. And 250+ more poverty busting distinctions... Demand the Fastlane, an alternative road-to-wealth; one that actually ignites dreams and creates millionaires young, not old. Change lanes and find your explosive wealth accelerator. Hit the Fastlane, crack the code to wealth, and find out how to live rich for a lifetime. |
| business plan for saas startup: Sales Engagement Manny Medina, Max Altschuler, Mark Kosoglow, 2019-03-12 Engage in sales—the modern way Sales Engagement is how you engage and interact with your potential buyer to create connection, grab attention, and generate enough interest to create a buying opportunity. Sales Engagement details the modern way to build the top of the funnel and generate qualified leads for B2B companies. This book explores why a Sales Engagement strategy is so important, and walks you through the modern sales process to ensure you’re effectively connecting with customers every step of the way. • Find common factors holding your sales back—and reverse them through channel optimization • Humanize sales with personas and relevant information at every turn • Understand why A/B testing is so incredibly critical to success, and how to do it right • Take your sales process to the next level with a rock solid, modern Sales Engagement strategy This book is essential reading for anyone interested in up-leveling their game and doing more than they ever thought possible. |
| business plan for saas startup: Lean Analytics Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz, 2024-02-23 Whether you're a startup founder trying to disrupt an industry or an entrepreneur trying to provoke change from within, your biggest challenge is creating a product people actually want. Lean Analytics steers you in the right direction. This book shows you how to validate your initial idea, find the right customers, decide what to build, how to monetize your business, and how to spread the word. Packed with more than thirty case studies and insights from over a hundred business experts, Lean Analytics provides you with hard-won, real-world information no entrepreneur can afford to go without. Understand Lean Startup, analytics fundamentals, and the data-driven mindset Look at six sample business models and how they map to new ventures of all sizes Find the One Metric That Matters to you Learn how to draw a line in the sand, so you'll know it's time to move forward Apply Lean Analytics principles to large enterprises and established products |
| business plan for saas startup: The 7 Day Startup Dan Norris, 2016-11 From generating ideas to gaining your first paying customers. This is the bootstrapper's bible for launching your next product. 1. Why validation isn't the answer 2. How to evaluate your business idea 3. How to choose a business name fast 4. How to build a website in 1 day for under $100 5. 10 proven ways to market a business quickly |
| business plan for saas startup: Mastering Product Experience in SaaS Nick Bonfiglio, Mickey Alon, Myk Pono, Aptrinsic, 2017-11-15 Your success as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company is completely dependent on acquiring and keeping users in your product. But if you¿re using traditional marketing tactics, you¿re likely struggling to scale your business quickly. That¿s because conventional marketing techniques focus on engaging prospects and users outside of the product. |
| business plan for saas startup: The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook Étienne Garbugli, 2020-04-23 “A great no-BS resource where you are guaranteed to pick up useful tips and approaches, whether you’re an email pro or just starting out.” – Andrus Purde, Founder & CEO, Outfunnel - - No matter how great your product is, it’s very likely that 40–60% of free trials never see your product a second time. This means that you stand to lose up to 60% of your hard-earned signups. Do you just let them go? Email marketing is one of the highest leverage activities in a SaaS business. It can help: • increase onboarding and trial conversions; • reduce churn; and • grow monthly recurring revenue (MRR). By introducing a single campaign today, you could significantly increase your conversions, and get the benefits of that increase predictably and repeatedly, week after week. That’s the beauty of automation. It’s also how we created an upsell program at LANDR that was generating up to 42% of weekly subscription conversions. When I joined LANDR, we were only sending 3 automated emails (and only 1 of those was performing). By focusing on sending the right email to the right user at the right time, performance jumped up, with increases in: • product onboarding completion; • engagement; • sales; and • upgrades to annual subscriptions. We made a lot of mistakes along the way (including sending 85,000 emails to the wrong users). It took a lot of trial and error, long hours, and exhaustive internet searches, but the results were obvious. Email was more effective at generating revenue than: • Investing in more ads; • Building new features hoping they’ll drive engagement; • Redesigning at the cost of trial and error. You can learn SaaS email marketing the way we did (through hard work), or jump to the front of the line. The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook includes everything I would have loved to know about email before I got started at LANDR: • how and when to create new emails or In-App messages to influence your users’ behaviors and purchase decisions; • how to double, triple, or quadruple the performance of every single email you send; • how to stand out in an increasingly more crowded inbox; and • how to create processes and structure to systematically grow the performance of an email marketing program. The book also includes seven deep dives to help you implement your onboarding, upsell, retention, referral, and behavioral sequences, among others. You don’t need to be a master copywriter (or have one on your team) to send effective emails. You just need the right processes and knowledge to start growing your business with email. The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook contains everything you need to plan, build, and optimize your email marketing program. - - The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook was written for businesses with clear signs of Product-Market Fit, that are: • selling to consumers or businesses; • charging monthly or yearly subscription fees; • generating more than $2k MRR; and • adding at least 200 email signups per week. |
| business plan for saas startup: Price To Scale Ajit Ghuman, 2021-04-13 Chances are that you are leaving money on the table. Smart pricing can add multiples to your revenue and valuation. Yet, pricing is often considered too complex or just not paid enough attention. Software pricing is not rocket science. But so far, literature on the subject has varied between clickbaity blogs or obtuse research methods. A practical guide to SaaS pricing has been sorely needed. This book aims to fill the void. Written for CEOs, CMOs, Product Marketers, Revenue Leaders, and Product Managers, this book provides a simple soup to nuts approach in deploying winning pricing systems for high growth SaaS startups. In addition to pricing techniques, learn from real-life case studies from pricing leaders drawing on their experiences at companies such as Gainsight, Mixpanel, Nosto, Oracle, Verint, Rubrik and more. The book will help you get to the following four fundamental pricing decisions and guide you on how to operationalize pricing within your organization: 1. Packaging: What will be your product 'offers'/'packages'? ★ Learn why Good-Better-Best packaging is not automatically the best approach and how to use packaging to unlock hidden value from your product's features. 2. Pricing Metric: Which metric or set of metrics will drive your core pricing model? ★ Learn how a Silicon Valley startup unlocked up to 10x revenue/account via smart pricing metric selection 3. Pricing Structure: How will you structure your pricing model? ★ Learn how an eCommerce SaaS company evolved its pricing structure as it grew first to maximize market share and then increase revenue predictability. 4. Price Point: What specific price point will you charge? ★ Learn five different methods to hone in on the right price point for your product. Finally, the book includes nine in-depth case studies from Silicon Valley's top pricing leaders from their past experiences at companies like Gainsight, Mixpanel, Nosto, Oracle, Verint, Rubrik, and more. Case studies include instances of pricing challenges across growth stage and established post-IPO companies and cover a wide gamut of topics, including: Moving from perpetual licensing to subscription pricing Revamping product packaging for maximum growth Switching the key SaaS pricing metric Pricing design in a high cost/unit environment Recommended ways to structure pricing projects |
| business plan for saas startup: Customer Success Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman, Lincoln Murphy, 2016-02-29 Your business success is now forever linked to the success of your customers Customer Success is the groundbreaking guide to the exciting new model of customer management. Business relationships are fundamentally changing. In the world B.C. (Before Cloud), companies could focus totally on sales and marketing because customers were often 'stuck' after purchasing. Therefore, all of the 'post-sale' experience was a cost center in most companies. In the world A.B. (After Benioff), with granular per-year, per-month or per-use pricing models, cloud deployments and many competitive options, customers now have the power. As such, B2B vendors must deliver success for their clients to achieve success for their own businesses. Customer success teams are being created in companies to quarterback the customer lifecycle and drive adoption, renewals, up-sell and advocacy. The Customer Success philosophy is invading the boardroom and impacting the way CEOs think about their business. Today, Customer Success is the hottest B2B movement since the advent of the subscription business model, and this book is the one-of-a-kind guide that shows you how to make it work in your company. From the initial planning stages through execution, you'll have expert guidance to help you: Understand the context that led to the start of the Customer Success movement Build a Customer Success strategy proven by the most competitive companies in the world Implement an action plan for structuring the Customer Success organization, tiering your customers, and developing the right cross-functional playbooks Customers want products that help them achieve their own business outcomes. By enabling your customers to realize value in your products, you're protecting recurring revenue and creating a customer for life. Customer Success shows you how to kick start your customer-centric revolution, and make it stick for the long term. |
| business plan for saas startup: The Sales Development Playbook Trish Bertuzzi, 2016 A book to help companies find customers and create repeatable sales by developing effective inside sales organizations and development strategies. |
| business plan for saas startup: Traction Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares, 2015-10-06 Most startups don’t fail because they can’t build a product. Most startups fail because they can’t get traction. Startup advice tends to be a lot of platitudes repackaged with new buzzwords, but Traction is something else entirely. As Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares learned from their own experiences, building a successful company is hard. For every startup that grows to the point where it can go public or be profitably acquired, hundreds of others sputter and die. Smart entrepreneurs know that the key to success isn’t the originality of your offering, the brilliance of your team, or how much money you raise. It’s how consistently you can grow and acquire new customers (or, for a free service, users). That’s called traction, and it makes everything else easier—fund-raising, hiring, press, partnerships, acquisitions. Talk is cheap, but traction is hard evidence that you’re on the right path. Traction will teach you the nineteen channels you can use to build a customer base, and how to pick the right ones for your business. It draws on inter-views with more than forty successful founders, including Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Alexis Ohanian (reddit), Paul English (Kayak), and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot). You’ll learn, for example, how to: ·Find and use offline ads and other channels your competitors probably aren’t using ·Get targeted media coverage that will help you reach more customers ·Boost the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns by automating staggered sets of prompts and updates ·Improve your search engine rankings and advertising through online tools and research Weinberg and Mares know that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution; every startup faces unique challenges and will benefit from a blend of these nineteen traction channels. They offer a three-step framework (called Bullseye) to figure out which ones will work best for your business. But no matter how you apply them, the lessons and examples in Traction will help you create and sustain the growth your business desperately needs. |
| business plan for saas startup: Business Model Generation Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, 2013-02-01 Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation. Co-created by 470 Business Model Canvas practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition. Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to the business model generation! |
| business plan for saas startup: The Startup Protocol Sally Ann Frank, 2024-03-01 There are lots of founders and lots of ideas floating around to help improve the delivery of healthcare services and positively affect the health of each of us as individuals, as well as groups of patients afflicted by chronic or acute diseases. Unfortunately, many of these ideas never reach their full potential to improve patient outcomes or reduce costs of care. Sometimes, it’s because the idea isn’t feasible or scalable. Sometimes, it’s because the market isn’t ready, or regulators aren’t ready. And sometimes, it’s just because the founder or founding team has a blind spot (or two). Not only do these hidden blind spots ensure their failure, but in many cases, with better planning or a greater, more holistic understanding of the market forces, the blind spot can be overcome. Or better yet, the founder can realize that their idea is doomed from the start and consider other, better options to solve the problem they are attacking. The goal of this book is to help founders and their teams identify blind spots and avoid the most common pitfalls of starting a digital health company. Having spent time with founders, VC companies, and most importantly, prospective digital health startups, patterns have emerged regarding those startups that are successful and those that die an often slow and painful death. While not a recipe for guaranteed success, having a guidebook of sorts can help navigate the perils associated with building a digital health company and can very likely improve the odds of success. The book will go through the typical life cycle of an early-stage company, from ideation to the first few customer deals, and highlight best practices for tackling the challenges at each stage including: ◾ What problem are you trying to solve? ◾ And why are you trying to solve this problem? ◾ Who will help you build the solution and company? ◾ How will you build the solution? ◾ How will you pitch your company? ◾ How will you sell your solution? ◾ And, what does success look like to you, your stakeholders, and your customers? |
| business plan for saas startup: Super Founders Ali Tamaseb, 2021-05-18 Super Founders uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar startups from the rest—revealing that nearly everything we thought was true about them is false! Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on startups, comparing billion-dollar startups with those that failed to become one—30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more. And what he found looked far different than expected. Just to mention a few: Most unicorn founders had no industry experience; There's no disadvantage to being a solo founder or to being a non-technical CEO; Less than 15% went through any kind of accelerator program; Over half had strong competitors when starting--being first to market with an idea does not actually matter. You will also hear the stories of the early days of billion-dollar startups first-hand. The book includes exclusive interviews with the founders/investors of Zoom, Instacart, PayPal, Nest, Github, Flatiron Health, Kite Pharma, Facebook, Stripe, Airbnb, YouTube, LinkedIn, Lyft, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Square, venture capital investors like Elad Gil, Peter Thiel, Alfred Lin from Sequoia Capital and Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, as well as previously untold stories about the early days of ByteDance (TikTok), WhatsApp, Dropbox, Discord, DiDi, Flipkart, Instagram, Careem, Peloton, and SpaceX. Packed with counterintuitive insights and inside stories from people who have built massively successful companies, Super Founders is a paradigm-shifting and actionable guide for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in what makes a startup successful. |
| business plan for saas startup: Thrive Arianna Huffington, 2014-03-25 In Thrive, Arianna Huffington makes an impassioned and compelling case for the need to redefine what it means to be successful in today's world. Arianna Huffington's personal wake-up call came in the form of a broken cheekbone and a nasty gash over her eye--the result of a fall brought on by exhaustion and lack of sleep. As the cofounder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group--one of the fastest growing media companies in the world--celebrated as one of the world's most influential women, and gracing the covers of magazines, she was, by any traditional measure, extraordinarily successful. Yet as she found herself going from brain MRI to CAT scan to echocardiogram, to find out if there was any underlying medical problem beyond exhaustion, she wondered is this really what success feels like? As more and more people are coming to realize, there is far more to living a truly successful life than just earning a bigger salary and capturing a corner office. Our relentless pursuit of the two traditional metrics of success--money and power--has led to an epidemic of burnout and stress-related illnesses, and an erosion in the quality of our relationships, family life, and, ironically, our careers. In being connected to the world 24/7, we're losing our connection to what truly matters. Our current definition of success is, as Thrive shows, literally killing us. We need a new way forward. In a commencement address Arianna gave at Smith College in the spring of 2013, she likened our drive for money and power to two legs of a three-legged stool. They may hold us up temporarily, but sooner or later we're going to topple over. We need a third leg--a third metric for defining success--to truly thrive. That third metric, she writes in Thrive, includes our well-being, our ability to draw on our intuition and inner wisdom, our sense of wonder, and our capacity for compassion and giving. As Arianna points out, our eulogies celebrate our lives very differently from the way society defines success. They don't commemorate our long hours in the office, our promotions, or our sterling PowerPoint presentations as we relentlessly raced to climb up the career ladder. They are not about our resumes--they are about cherished memories, shared adventures, small kindnesses and acts of generosity, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh. In this deeply personal book, Arianna talks candidly about her own challenges with managing time and prioritizing the demands of a career and raising two daughters--of juggling business deadlines and family crises, a harried dance that led to her collapse and to her aha moment. Drawing on the latest groundbreaking research and scientific findings in the fields of psychology, sports, sleep, and physiology that show the profound and transformative effects of meditation, mindfulness, unplugging, and giving, Arianna shows us the way to a revolution in our culture, our thinking, our workplace, and our lives. |
| business plan for saas startup: Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold My SaaS Startup Andrew Gazdecki, 2022-01-11 Andrew Gazdecki knows startups. He founded Bizness Apps as a broke, twenty-something entrepreneur and sold it to a private equity firm before the age of thirty-after going head-to-head with Apple over a blanket App Store policy that threatened to ruin him. He's been a growth consultant for several more multimillion-dollar startups. His companies have been featured in TechCrunch more than a dozen times. Now, he shares his remarkable story in Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold My SaaS Startup. Follow Gazdecki's journey: starting a company at the age of twenty-one and hiring, then leading, over one hundred employees without any real work experience of his own. This honest, personal look behind the scenes reveals both his successes and his mistakes as he labored to build a compelling brand story and catalyze growth on a shoestring budget, almost lost everything, and finally sold the company for millions at the age of twenty-nine. |
| business plan for saas startup: The Sales Acceleration Formula Mark Roberge, 2015-02-24 Use data, technology, and inbound selling to build a remarkable team and accelerate sales The Sales Acceleration Formula provides a scalable, predictable approach to growing revenue and building a winning sales team. Everyone wants to build the next $100 million business and author Mark Roberge has actually done it using a unique methodology that he shares with his readers. As an MIT alum with an engineering background, Roberge challenged the conventional methods of scaling sales utilizing the metrics-driven, process-oriented lens through which he was trained to see the world. In this book, he reveals his formulas for success. Readers will learn how to apply data, technology, and inbound selling to every aspect of accelerating sales, including hiring, training, managing, and generating demand. As SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services for software company HubSpot, Mark led hundreds of his employees to the acquisition and retention of the company's first 10,000 customers across more than 60 countries. This book outlines his approach and provides an action plan for others to replicate his success, including the following key elements: Hire the same successful salesperson every time — The Sales Hiring Formula Train every salesperson in the same manner — The Sales Training Formula Hold salespeople accountable to the same sales process — The Sales Management Formula Provide salespeople with the same quality and quantity of leads every month — The Demand Generation Formula Leverage technology to enable better buying for customers and faster selling for salespeople Business owners, sales executives, and investors are all looking to turn their brilliant ideas into the next $100 million revenue business. Often, the biggest challenge they face is the task of scaling sales. They crave a blueprint for success, but fail to find it because sales has traditionally been referred to as an art form, rather than a science. You can't major in sales in college. Many people question whether sales can even be taught. Executives and entrepreneurs are often left feeling helpless and hopeless. The Sales Acceleration Formula completely alters this paradigm. In today's digital world, in which every action is logged and masses of data sit at our fingertips, building a sales team no longer needs to be an art form. There is a process. Sales can be predictable. A formula does exist. |
| business plan for saas startup: Product-Led Onboarding Ramli John, 2021-06-04 When you borrow a plate from grandma, does she ask you to pay a deposit? Of course not. Likewise, blocking your non-paying (freemium) customers from the core experience of your product, is like chopping your own leg off while running a marathon. Yet, this is just one of the crucial mistakes that most SaaS companies make right off the bat. Think about it. Do YOU have... Stalled accounts taking up valuable space? Sub-par clients who only expect freebies and don't ever use the full features of your product? Low conversion from free accounts to paid? Then, you might have a shot-yourself-in-the-foot problem. In this book, you'll find the easy, 6-step formula you can apply to your operations today that can change absolutely everything. You'll be able to count your company among giants like Mixpanel, Ubisoft, and Outsystems when you: Captivate clients' attention from the get-go. Make it easier for clients to get good at using your software so they are more likely to use it. Create a fool-proof checklist to make your product go viral. Match services with behaviors, and get users addicted to your product. Win rave reviews by making clients feel like VIPs. Use this strategy at each level in your team to supercharge its effect. Rinse and repeat, and watch your business grow while you sleep. In short, you'll discover why putting your customer first is the ultimate secret to growing your company. And how you can achieve astronomical conversions and customer loyalty without even trying. Check out what others are saying: |
| business plan for saas startup: The Lean Startup Eric Ries, 2011-09-13 Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever. |
BUSINESS | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
BUSINESS definition: 1. the activity of buying and selling goods and services: 2. a particular company that buys …
VENTURE | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
VENTURE definition: 1. a new activity, usually in business, that involves risk or uncertainty: 2. to risk going….
ENTERPRISE | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
ENTERPRISE definition: 1. an organization, especially a business, or a difficult and important plan, …
INCUMBENT | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
INCUMBENT definition: 1. officially having the named position: 2. to be necessary for someone: 3. the …
AD HOC | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
AD HOC definition: 1. made or happening only for a particular purpose or need, not planned …
BUSINESS | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
BUSINESS definition: 1. the activity of buying and selling goods and services: 2. a particular company that buys and….
VENTURE | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
VENTURE definition: 1. a new activity, usually in business, that involves risk or uncertainty: 2. to risk going….
ENTERPRISE | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
ENTERPRISE definition: 1. an organization, especially a business, or a difficult and important plan, especially one that….
INCUMBENT | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
INCUMBENT definition: 1. officially having the named position: 2. to be necessary for someone: 3. the person who has or….
AD HOC | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
AD HOC definition: 1. made or happening only for a particular purpose or need, not planned before it happens: 2. made….
LEVERAGE | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
LEVERAGE definition: 1. the action or advantage of using a lever: 2. power to influence people and get the results you….
ENTREPRENEUR | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
ENTREPRENEUR definition: 1. someone who starts their own business, especially when this involves seeing a new opportunity….
CULTIVATE | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
CULTIVATE definition: 1. to prepare land and grow crops on it, or to grow a particular crop: 2. to try to develop and….
EQUITY | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
EQUITY definition: 1. the value of a company, divided into many equal parts owned by the shareholders, or one of the….
LIAISE | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
LIAISE definition: 1. to speak to people in other organizations, etc. in order to work with them or exchange….
