Weekend Roundup, August 17 2013, Sales, Conversions, Marketing, Leads, Segmentation, Metrics, Failing, and more.
issues are available here. Don’t forget to check the revamped SUM Library, where you can quickly reference a curated list of articles on dozens of topics, and save a lot of time finding the best links. We’re doing this work for you. I'm happy to report an average of 50% open, and 20% click rates on this email (with a peak of 22%). Let's beat those metrics this week-end, and please forward this email to someone who needs it. If you’re in Toronto on Oct. 23rd, join me to a fireside conversation with Albert Wenger, USV partner, in co-operation with Wattpad. CEO Brad Feld has 7 key objectives for a startup CEO you can pin to your wall, in Being a Great CEO. Fred Wilson reminds us that building-out a company has parallels to iterating on a product, in The Similarities Between Building and Scaling a Product and a Company. I published a framework for thinking about the various CEO transition points, in Startup Founder-to-CEO Transition Toolset. And Ben Horowitz explains the pitfalls of a product-minded CEO, inWhy Founders Fail: The Product CEO Paradox. SaaS Models Jason Lemkin goes through the economic realities behind selling a cheap SaaS product with sales people, in
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William Mougayar's Blog
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Weekend Roundup, August 17 2013, Sales, Conversions, Marketing, Leads, Segmentation, Metrics, Failing, and more.
issues are available here. Don’t forget to check the revamped SUM Library, where you can quickly reference a curated list of articles on dozens of topics, and save a lot of time finding the best links. We’re doing this work for you. I'm happy to report an average of 50% open, and 20% click rates on this email (with a peak of 22%). Let's beat those metrics this week-end, and please forward this email to someone who needs it. If you’re in Toronto on Oct. 23rd, join me to a fireside conversation with Albert Wenger, USV partner, in co-operation with Wattpad. CEO Brad Feld has 7 key objectives for a startup CEO you can pin to your wall, in Being a Great CEO. Fred Wilson reminds us that building-out a company has parallels to iterating on a product, in The Similarities Between Building and Scaling a Product and a Company. I published a framework for thinking about the various CEO transition points, in Startup Founder-to-CEO Transition Toolset. And Ben Horowitz explains the pitfalls of a product-minded CEO, inWhy Founders Fail: The Product CEO Paradox. SaaS Models Jason Lemkin goes through the economic realities behind selling a cheap SaaS product with sales people, in
How Cheap a Product can you Have and Still Have Salespeople?
It’s a must-read if you’re new to SaaS, although you might have learned it the hard way. And I warn about the need to strike a balance between pain and gain when on-boarding a SaaS product, in
. Robert Abbott at Norwest Venture Partners writes that the mid-market, companies with 50-2000 employees has been quite accepting of the SaaS model, in
Fred Wilson says, when it comes to listening to mentors and outsiders, advice on scaling the structure of your startup is valuable, because they have been there, in
. It reminded me of the ice cream flavors analogy; there is one for everyone. A deep dive (with code) into Cohort Analysis, with sample trend reports by Tomasz Tunguz, in
outlines the many angles to marketing approaches. In it, you can find out if you’re a “snarky marketer” or “data whiz”. Most startups don’t communicate their value propositions well. April Dunford has outlined
is worth looking at, to avoid failing, by Ada Chen Rekhi. And there is a (short) must-see video, from Mark Suster where he talks about common mistakes he made while running a startup during the dot-com days,
Segmentation is to marketing what location is to real estate. Anh Nguyen from the OpenView blog outlines how to develop your market segmentation hypotheses, in
, because not all these “lessons” were sound, although some of them are good. You will see several comments from Marc Andreessen and others pushing back. A review of Bill Aulet’s new book,
. Long story short, A/B testing is not answer to everything, and you need to understand the constraints of your expected outcome. And a short, but insightful post by Lightspeed Venture Partners,
, A very practical post with content best practices to “attract readers, not pageviews”, e.g. “don’t be too clever, as clever writing can result in a confusing message”, and “don’t give the full story away in the headline”. Read it if you are blogger. That SUMs it up! Don’t forget to
How Cheap a Product can you Have and Still Have Salespeople?
It’s a must-read if you’re new to SaaS, although you might have learned it the hard way. And I warn about the need to strike a balance between pain and gain when on-boarding a SaaS product, in
. Robert Abbott at Norwest Venture Partners writes that the mid-market, companies with 50-2000 employees has been quite accepting of the SaaS model, in
Fred Wilson says, when it comes to listening to mentors and outsiders, advice on scaling the structure of your startup is valuable, because they have been there, in
. It reminded me of the ice cream flavors analogy; there is one for everyone. A deep dive (with code) into Cohort Analysis, with sample trend reports by Tomasz Tunguz, in
outlines the many angles to marketing approaches. In it, you can find out if you’re a “snarky marketer” or “data whiz”. Most startups don’t communicate their value propositions well. April Dunford has outlined
is worth looking at, to avoid failing, by Ada Chen Rekhi. And there is a (short) must-see video, from Mark Suster where he talks about common mistakes he made while running a startup during the dot-com days,
Segmentation is to marketing what location is to real estate. Anh Nguyen from the OpenView blog outlines how to develop your market segmentation hypotheses, in
, because not all these “lessons” were sound, although some of them are good. You will see several comments from Marc Andreessen and others pushing back. A review of Bill Aulet’s new book,
. Long story short, A/B testing is not answer to everything, and you need to understand the constraints of your expected outcome. And a short, but insightful post by Lightspeed Venture Partners,
, A very practical post with content best practices to “attract readers, not pageviews”, e.g. “don’t be too clever, as clever writing can result in a confusing message”, and “don’t give the full story away in the headline”. Read it if you are blogger. That SUMs it up! Don’t forget to
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