Ideas for entrepreneurs

Been there, done that...

And still seeing other entrepreneurs do the same mistake. 

One feature... One feature is all it takes. Adding new ones won't save your product. 

Marketing is taking a greater and greater lead (pun intended!) in SaaS companies as a part of the traditional scope of sales is shifting to marketers. That - plus the ability to understand product marketing through lean customer development - makes marketing skills a mus for SaaS founders. 

For having done a number of these mistakes myself, I find this is one of the best posts I've seen on that topic. 

Teams are made of a variety of people with different views and sensitivities. So when things don't turn out the way you want, it can be extremely hard to stay focused on the right things. 

#2 in particular is one thing I've seen many tech startups do, perhaps because a lot of them are engineering-driven at the core. They try to outcode themselves off a growth plateau through more features that will only get in the way and hurt their growth. 

If you're having doubts - or when you'll have doubts - this is a good checklist to go back to with your team. 

A classic but still very interesting read by Joel York. Saas startups who pick up one precise quadrant will be more focused and probably do a better job. But this doesn't mean they can't expand as they grow:

- for instance by expanding from Enterprise to Transactional as SalesForce did offering SMB plans,

- or by expanding from self-service to Transactional or Enterprise as Dropbox did after having built a strong presence with its consumer self-service product.

It's a messy world out there...

If you're stats are crap, don't worry: hurry up.

Mathilde Collin is the CEO & Co-Founder of Front App and she gives a great perspective from her experience raising in the US after having tried in Europe - a question many European entrepreneurs have.

Now, what she writes is awesome and full of insightful points but I also couldn't help thinking that this is more a post about raising before YC vs raising after Y Combinator (Front was in the last batch). Due to its amazing track-record, YC has become a super strong "buy signal" to the VCs here in SV who, as she points out, are more concerned about missing the next Facebook than losing a marginal amount of their ever bigger funds.

Of course, you can argue that the mere existence of Y Combinator itself is a sign of how the ecosystem is more organized in the US than in Europe. 

But if I were trying to raise seed right now, regardless of where I am, I would conclude one thing from her post: apply to YC.

Or as Ben Narasin wrote back a few months ago, the Series A is the new Series B.

I've often had that question and the above table is useful (and so is the template agreement that FounderDating put together here). Without going through too much complexity, formalizing (a little) helps making sure everyone is committed and aligned.

I love the "likeable... enough". 

Series B crunch? Not really according to this data by CrunchBase which tracks most of the funding rounds. While Series A have leveled off over the past few quarters (at lest in number of transactions), Series B have kept increasing both in volume and amount.

Interestingly the Series B to Series A ratio is now above 50%.

Find product / market fit to get Series A and you' re (relatively) safe then?

Do your marketing people know how many leads they need to generate for your sales team to be on target? Here's a quite straightforward but useful way to build the model up for Saas startups.

And define objectives for everybody.

Still think VC's are rich tycoons with big cigars? Read this.

You're not the only entrepreneur in the room...

James Altucher might have Woody Allen style neurotic accents but he makes a lot of good points in there. Bottom line is that the "safe" career path that worked for your parents or grandparents is a thing of the past. 

Time to think seriously about that startup project.

Very interesting analysis debunking the myth that one single growth hacker could fix any startup's lack of growth. The secret of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat? A deep understanding of their users' psychology and motivations. Plus a perfect execution to make it frictionless and simplement to understand and tell. 

Consumer Apps used to be all the rage and WhatsApps + Instagram and others showed it was justified. But SaaS could be the new black and with consumerization of IT, there are interesting models to explore.

When 10M users is the new 1M users in consumer Web, 11x revenue valuations are definitely worth considering.