đź“• Identifying the right ICP for your startup; Conducting effective customer interviews; The best way to validate your ideas...

December 10, 2021
The SaaS Playbook


Strategy

💸 SaaStr founder Jason Lempkin had an interesting piece on picking the right ICP to target for your business. He believes that in startup’s early days (sub $1MM ARR), the customer segment split is surprisingly often 40/40/20: 40% big enterprises, 40% SMEs, and 20% micro businesses. At the $1MM ARR mark he suggests doubling down on one segment rather than being a tool for everyone (different segments require different GTM, so focus helps), and urges founders to consider the enterprise – if you are selling a solution. The distinction between a solution and tool is that a solution solves a larger pain point (for example, billing) rather than one specific problem (so in relation to billing, a dunning).

Strategy

🏋️ If you are looking to start a new venture, you will find no shortage of inspirational, “pump up” articles to get your entrepreneurial juices flowing. Unite Labs CEO, Maximilian Schulz, isn’t a fan of them, and takes the Elon Musk view that “if you need inspiring words (to do something), don’t do it”. After recently leaving Unite, he gave an honest view of his time with the business and how he battled the uncertainty which comes with operating a startup. Two interesting bits he would tell his former self: be passionate enough about the problem you are solving to work on it for the next 5 - 10 years, and to deeply understand the market you are entering so you can evaluate whether taking capital is a must, or a mistake.

Strategy

đź“ą When Albert Kozlowski started working on Birdslate, an asynchronous video platform for teams, the idea was fresh and there were no similar tools in the market. Video was booming so he and his co-founder elected to go straight for an MVP rather than spending time to validate the idea first, which turned out to be a mistake. Despite getting lots of VC interest, customers were not biting, and the team made the tough decision to call it quits just a few months after their initial release. The story is a great reminder that even if macro trends point towards a need for your startup, the only way to truly validate an idea is countless conversations with prospective customers.

Strategy

🌳 There is a science to conducting customer interviews, and if you don’t believe me, Stanford even has a course on it in their entrepreneurship program. There are a few key principles though for those who don’t have time for a course, starting with asking open ended questions. Open ended questions remove an opportunity to bias your interviewee and can result in answers you probably weren’t expecting. But that does not mean you have to stick totally to the script, it’s good to ask for details and clarification frequently to dig up more information. For example, if someone tells you that migrating their data to your platform was difficult, you should ask them “what do you mean by difficult” to get to the root of the problem.

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Previous Weekly Playbooks

April 9, 2021
đź“• The Guide to Building a Sellable Product; First-Time CMO Mistakes; Call or Email?...

There have never been more software companies than there are today, yet there’s an asymmetry between the rising interest in SaaS and the availability of private SaaS company data. This study from Andre Retterath took a look at the top startup databases to see which provided the most extensive and accurate data. Tl;dr: if you are an operator looking for general info like company location, leadership and light funding history, Crunchbase is the best bang for your buck. If more detailed funding history and competitive analysis is a must (and you can afford the starting rate of 18k/year), then Pitchbook is probably your best bet.

April 2, 2021
📕 What B2B SaaS can learn from NFTs; No-code no-joke; Why Google is seeing more “0 click searches”...

There’s still time for others to catch up, but our early leader for the 2021 SaaS buzzword of the year is no/low code. Jokes aside we are totally on board with the hype, tools that enable non-engineers to build play a huge role in the democratization of software development, opening up the door for almost anyone with a computer to become a creator. The linked post from Pietro Invernizzi (Stride VC) categorizes no/low code tools into the primary categories we see today, and rightfully shares the love with some of the smaller players out there not named Zapier.

March 26, 2021
📕 Gong’s most effective marketing channel; Why referral = better retention; A holistic B2B SaaS marketing guide

We’re still not over Stripe’s 95b valuation, partially because they haven’t shared much on the metrics which got them there. TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm looked at previous Stripe data to suss out why they could be worth the 95b label, coming to the conclusion that if Stripe processed $400b in 2020 (they were quoted as processing “hundreds of billions last year”), you can apply their ~3% fee to come to get to a $12b run rate, or 7.9x multiple on revenue. Even if we assume half that amount of payments, it would equate to a $6b run rate and 15.8x multiple, far lower than the public market multiples they will likely receive at IPO. This is all to say, 95b might not be too crazy after all.

March 19, 2021
đź“• Dissecting investment memos; Moving on from the Metric Monolith; How to make ideas sticky...

Happy Friday mis amigos. We’d be remiss not to mention Stripe’s historic week, in which they raised 600m at a gasping $95b valuation. While the number is staggering, what’s most impressive is how they got there – the business has only 3,000 staff today, ⅓ as many as Facebook did when they IPO’d at a similar valuation, allowing them to be highly capital efficient relative to their unicorn peers. Funds will supposedly be spent on EU expansion, which could mean more acquisitions… It's a good day to be a European payment platform!

March 5, 2021
📕 Why it’s time to retire the MQL; Board meetings for beginners; Expert outbound sales sequences...

Welcome to the end of the week. We’ve got some big news, as we’ve just launched a brand new website featuring a SaaS Playbook library! Now if you’re looking for great B2B SaaS content in a specific area, you can filter through our historical playbook features by topic to quickly find the best of the best. Historical features are being added as we speak so you should have access to the full library soon... excited to see what you think!

February 26, 2021
đź“• The weighted Rule of 40; Navigating SaaS loan interest rates; F#ck Content Marketing

Happy Friday everyone. The job market has been slower than usual for obvious reasons, but we do have some open roles here at Scaleworks which we’re looking to fill. Namely, we’re searching for a Corporate Development Associate to help us find great products to invest in and awesome B2B SaaS content to share with you all. Give us a shout if you think you or anyone in your network might be a fit… Referral fees included!

February 19, 2021
đź“• Get smart with sales intelligence; Hubspot hits $1B; Simple email marketing optimizations...

Morning folks, hope all our readers facing these winter storms are staying warm and safe right now. We’ll get to the newsletter shortly, but first we’d like to highlight a few organizations which are working to support Texans in need right now. There are links with information on how you can donate or help if you’re interested. 

  1. Feeding Texas 
  2. Crowdsource Rescue
  3. The Salvation Army
January 15, 2021
đź“• Pricing as a growth lever; 10x approach to content marketing; How to scale customer segments...

Two weeks into the year is a bit early to identify any real 2021 SaaS trends, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take out our crystal ball and at least try. Onetool CEO Gordian Braun thinks the increasing number of SaaS tools will create chaos for end-users – more options and new, super niche verticals could result in overlapping features for products in different categories, making buying decisions more difficult. No-code tools (like Notion and Airtable) and workflow automation tools should also be on the rise as both are “simplifiers” that address the issue of having too many tools to handle. Let’s see how his predictions shake out...

January 22, 2021
📕 Customer-Led growth FTW; Breaking a billion; Solving product problems…

It seems like every year, there’s a debate on if Silicon Valley is the best place to launch your startup. In 2020, this conversation picked up even more steam because, well, we don’t need to get back into those details. We recently stumbled across this LinkedIn thread that gives some great arguments for both sides of the table. We’ve always been partial to building new tech ecosystems outside the Valley, but would love to hear what you think.

Alright, now for this week’s Playbook!

January 29, 2021
đź“• How to measure your Power User Curve; Solving product backlogs; The Chief Customer Officer 2.0...

Howdy folks, and welcome to the end of the week! Today’s playbook takes a focus on customer-centric strategies, from unique methods to measure user engagement, to the best ways to gather and prioritize customer feedback. We also managed to wrap in not one, but two corny car analogies. Please forgive us, it’s the end of the month and we’re behind quota.

Have a great weekend.

January 8, 2021
📕 Amplifying content via thought leaders; The Adjacent Customer; “Obviously awesome” product positioning…

Happy Friday folks. We can’t be the only ones a bit behind on our 2021 business planning, so we thought you all might get some use out of this template from our very own Ed Byrne, which will help you review last year’s progress and set thoughtful 2021 goals. It’s a roughly two-day process that requires some buy-in from your team and serious self-awareness... let us know what you think!

November 20, 2020
đź“• The rise of the pod people; Self-caring your way to effective leadership; Simplifying revenue attribution...

Tech startup culture is known for two things: brooding dev teams and amazing office snacks. Kidding (sort of). What’s actually at the heart of startup culture is breaking down norms and creating new solutions to perennial problems.

Speaking of problem-solving – we’ve got some great content this week on solving the internal struggles most startups face, from team structure to leadership burnout and revenue attribution.

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November 27, 2020
📕 SaaS Black Friday deals; How Typeform built an A+ brand, Why you shouldn’t “just ship it”…

Good morning to those just waking up from a turkey coma, it’s time for your weekly serving of SaaS news. And, because we love a good deal, we suggest you check out the B2B SaaS blog’s 2020 Black Friday deal list. We know everyone is in 2021 planning mode, so hopefully, the ~200 discounted SaaS deals save you some dollars.

Enjoy the rest of the holiday weekend.

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December 4, 2020
📕 Avoiding the SaaS Valley of Death; Hiring “scrappers”; How to become a trusted advisor...

With the new year on the horizon it’s time to start thinking about that 2021 hiring plan. It’s hard not to focus on a candidate’s resume when making hiring decisions, but remember, an impressive resume doesn’t tell the whole story. More companies are foregoing those with “expert credentials” in favor of teachable hires who are willing to take risks. An openness to risk is especially important to surviving in B2B SaaS, so our advice is to always look for scrappers.

December 11, 2020
đź“• Flywheels over funnels; How to measure SaaS operating leverage; Nailing your value prop...

In just 5 years, The Morning Brew has emerged as one of the GOAT newsletters. Their growth to stardom is in large part thanks to their referral marketing mastery – 30% of their 2.5m million subscribers came through the channel. We aren’t saying that a referral program will work quite as well for your B2B SaaS product (newsletters charge time, SaaS products charge money) but if it can work even just 1/10th as well, it could be worth testing...

December 18, 2020
đź“• Avoiding measurability bias; The Shape-Up method; The power of Pre-Suasion...

Happy Friday folks. This is our last Playbook before Christmas, so we’ll wish you an early happy holidays now! It’s been an eventful year to say the least, here’s to hoping 2021 brings brighter days (we’re optimistic). Cheers!

January 1, 2021
đź“• Your intro to cognitive marketing; A SaaS growth simulator; Boosting retention with intent data...

Happy New Year folks! Can’t believe we actually made it to 2021, we hope you have a great start to the year. We’ve been working on some of our new year’s resolutions and have a couple nailed down: to better understand our customers and thoroughly testing our acquisition channels. We’re touching on both (plus more) today, hope you enjoy!