Tags
Startups & SaaS
AI custom autofill
Published
Main values observed:
- Founders are super focused. Super focused on the long term growth.
- They just appears around after having a success case and having the company running well.
- Founders focused from early beginning. Very Resilience business.
Day 2
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- Be clear with the backpay period in order to value the business;
- Start with simple pricing models;
- Investments in Mkt is avg 30% of SaaS revenues spend;
- USA has lots of marketing vision.
- SaaStr is super focused in Markting metrics.
- Americans are very aggressive in Customer acquisition because their market is super competitive here.
3 Key Metrics to grow your business
- Payback period is the key
- LTV / CAC
- Cost to deliver the product
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- Using AI as translation, writing and editing;
8 Key Learnings:
- People is prefering to start business with Executives;
- KPIs for all teams even thrid parties;
- Hiring Managers and SMEs methodically;
- Who is your ideal candidate?
- What skills you want to prioritize?
- Be very very clear about 5w2h.
- Always plant the right Culture
- Super clear values and behaviors
- Build netword enablement
- Prioritize existing customers
- Talk to them, be in person with them.
- Customers will teach you a lot. Get advice by your clients.
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- 2/3 of economy is Customers to business;
- Find your ICP and Niche first;
- Get 10 to 20 super loved Clients. SUPER LOVED ones.
- Ask them what products they like most;
- Ask them what they really love;
- What are the opportunities of growth and how do you break than down in multi pieces?
- Bootstrap in the early beginning to have a higher upside.
- SaaStr main cases grow 60% y.o.y
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- AI helping in developing new persona will speed up;
- Customer ChatGPT to create personas;
- Reproposing content;
- How to became customers more efficient?
- What have been the most challenges to deploy innovation?
- People are too buzy to think out of the box;
- AI is to multiply teams not substitute;
- AI won’t place your job, but someone who knows it will (improve in my CV);
- The Demand Letter - (EvenUp business);
- Gen AI is all about to get the data and get the best out of it;
- Don’t sell software, sell work;
- Working with AI is different than SaaS, more unclear of the impact and where you can get.
Day 3
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Rippling (Brex competitor) - Onboarding, HR management, Taxes, Payments. All HR process.
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- Marketing intend signals and events signals.
- Fund raisings and acquisitions helps as signals to brand awareness.
- Its all about Saturation….If you want to sell, go aggressive all around.
- Outbound is dead? 50% revenues still cold calling…
- Email sequence is easier;
- Pick up the phone is challenger;
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- Specific sales teams for each product. Super specialized;
- Build the unit economics well to build and focus on a Sales team;
- If the economics makes sense, leverage sales team (American Mindset to leverage once the equation is positive).
- Who owns upsells?
- CSM: SaaS customer success managers take ownership of a portfolio of clients and are responsible for their success and retention. CSMs interface with customers to define goal outcomes, create success plans, and coach and train users on the software.
- Better making a Account Manager know CSM, client empathy than the opposite.
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- Rippling started with 4 products and has now 30.
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- Looks for Hospitality
- Super focused on high expertise in vertical business. Founders must known deep about their industry.
- All about how recurring the business is.
- She said AI does not change their Valuation, what changes is the revenue wallet
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- Started in 2006
- Amazing case of SMBs.
- 12 different payments revenues streams.
- Took him a decade for building the business.
- Specialists in bill, payments. 100 engineers to manage all payments process. Took in 5 years
- Compliance and regulatory - 30-50
- Today’s there is too much choice. Branding is even more important.
- His dad had a payment company….legendary expertise.
Business Model
- Have your model clear with the right balance;
- Receivables discount.
What are the learns of the real TAM?
- TAM is based on customers and products.
- How do you think about your network?
- 500k customers.
AI
- 5M predictions per day with AI.
- AI must be integrated with your business.
- Customers wants to move money fast, they don’t about the AI, they just want things done.
- Fall in love with your customers
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- How to approach customers?
- Experiment, Experiment, Experiment
- Enterprise SaaS is about products.
- Non customers are more transparent.
- Detractors with promoters into the same room.
- 80% of your customers with use 20% of your products.
- How are you building with AI?
- AI is in the DNA;
- When is working is AI when is not working is Gen AI, rsrs;
- When things does not goes on: When own from it, learn from it.
- 3 things to remember from this conversation:
- Everyone operating in all levels. Understanding the overall of the business.
- Scale is not hiring and delegating is now about productivity. Leaders operating in all levels.
- Put the customers always first. Build the trust of relationship with your customer.
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- Everybody needs to share the same metrics.
- Suggest to focus on Organizing and simplifying DATA.
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- Differential Nowadays: Integration is the most important tool nowadays due to the numbers of applications being uses at once;
- Payback period increase by 12.5%;
- No Statistics yet about AI actually being helpful for sales.
- Challenges to use AI tools to increase sales.
Conclusions
- Founders more positive than 2022
- Sales Cycles are Longer
- Which Linearly Increases Payback Periods
- Still, Quotas are 14% Higher than Last Year vs 3.4% CPI Inflation
- 9% Sales Lead Conversion Makes the Numbers Foot
- Al is Not Impacting Conversion Rate
- Al Has no Noticeable Impact on ARR Growth
- Perceived Al Efficiency Gain >> Measure Gain
- Combination Seat + Usage Saw 3x the NDR of Other Pricing Plans
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- GRR for SaaS investment;
- NRR - Net Ret Rate
- What is your cohort-level GRR? Gross Retention Rate vs ARR
- What are your early warning indicators in your business?
- What makes your customers sticky?
- What do you do operationally to improve retention?
- First Value
- Second Maturing Usage
- What do you do to show the value your clients are receiving?
- What are they trying to acchieve?
- Who are your biggest advocates?
- What is your cost structure for CS?
- What are you doing to scale efficiently?
How does your NRR break out into various components?
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- The classical approach for Outbound is dead;
- Keep always resilient. If you reached USD1M ARR with 20 clients and sales stuck, doesn't matter, you have already prove, keep tracking the business.
- Trending for multi product cias, vertical SaaS.
- Lamon SDR is dying
- SMBs has a huge demand for business like Shopify.
- There is no issue to copy a business that worked pretty well. Like Shopify. Even they having the best product in market there are thousands of potential customers that don’t even know them.
- IF you find the 5 start employee or thrid party, make a way to hire them. Doesn’t matter if you take your money or raise more, but do not loose the opportunity to hire this person.
- ARR USD20M bootstrap, forget a VC, go to a PE.
- Companies wants to be boostrap.
Do what ever you know how to do and, do whatever you know that words