A tale of a support team – when Scrum leads to Kanban – Episode 2 – Mission Impossible « Control Your Chaos
So the first thing we needed to do is to break that horrifying atmosphere. A manager sticking his nose into everything, knowledge transfer, to another company, organizational havoc, it all has taken its toll on the people. So I did something unexpected – I brought balloons into one of their meetings. Just plain, colorful balloons. And I kept the manager outside the door, he wasn’t allowed to enter.
Keeping It Simple: Unit Economics
Back in November, I wrote about financial modeling and wanted to pick up the topic again. I think this is very important for lean startups. A financial model focuses your brain on key goals and assumptions. It’s great to obsess over product-market fit, but you also need to take the time to make sure your economics are reasonable as well. When you are just starting, a fully-fledged financial model of your customer growth, revenue, and costs can feel daunting, so sometimes it is most useful to break the process into smaller tasks.
Evernote to change premium price as CEO says 'it was the wrong price'
Cloud service Evernote is preparing to raise the price of its premium subscriptions in early 2015 from its current $5 a month, according to chief executive Phil Libin. “We’ve never changed our price: we launched seven years ago at $5 a month, but we realised a couple of years ago that it was the wrong price,” said Libin, speaking at the Web Summit conference in Dublin. “I know it was the wrong price because we picked it at random seven years ago and never changed it, so our chances of getting it right were very slim!” Libin said that Evernote has spent the last few months “trying to work out what the right price is” and plans to announce its plans early in 2015.
The critical metrics for each stage of your SaaS business (Guest post by Lars Lofgren of KISSmetrics)
[My friend Lars is a product marketer at KISSmetrics and loves helping SaaS businesses understand how their business is growing. He writes regularly for the KISSmetrics blog and his personal marketing blog. He wrote the following post about SaaS products and the metrics you use to evaluate their success level. Lots of great information in there. You can follow Lars at @LarsLofgren -Andrew] How healthy is your SaaS business?
User Profiles - Relocate to another Partition or Disk
How to Relocate User Profiles to another Partition or Disk in Windows 8 InformationThe method described in this tutorial allows relocating user profiles and folders already while installing Windows 8, before any user accounts are created, as well as after installation on an already installed system.The advantage of this method is that it changes some internal Windows 8 environment variables, being a “Do it once and forget” procedure. Changing the variables takes care of all existing and future user profiles, locating them when created to selected drive or partition. The method is fail proof and reversible.When Windows 8 is installed, 5 or 6 system folders are created depending on chosen bit-version:PerfLogs (Performance Logs), where Windows stores performance and reliability logsProgram Files, where applications and software are installed.
SaaS Unit Economics - Calculating COCA by Segment (and why its hard)
At a high level calculating the cost of customer acquisition (COCA) is relatively straightforward to calculate for a SaaS company. It's simply the total Sales and Marketing expense for the period divided by the number of customers acquired in the period. Easy. Unlike other SaaS unit economic metrics, unfortunately, this simplicity breaks down rapidly when calculating COCA for a specific segment. How do you break down the marketing spend aimed at the software industry vs marketing spend targeting manufacturing?
Evernote Shows Startups: 'Free' Can Pay
So how do you make money if you are offering a product that has millions of users and only a small percentage pay for it? ‘The easiest way to get a million people to pay for nonscarcity product may be to make 100 million people fall in love with it.’ That’s the so-called Freemium model that many companies have bet on only to find it doesn’t turn into a pile of gold immediately. But the answer, according to Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote, is that the money will come if you focus on just keeping your millions of users happy, regardless of whether they pay or not. Libin’s advice and impressive slides were welcomed by a roomful of budding entrepreneurs at The Founder Conference in Mountain View, California Tuesday. “The easiest way to get a million people to pay for nonscarcity product may be to make 100 million people fall in love with it,” Libin said, calling his users his marketing team.
Why Lead Velocity Rate (LVR) Is The Most Important Metric in SaaS
One thing that is great in SaaS, from a 20,000 foot perspective at least, is You Can See The Future. It’s the benefit of a recurring revenue stream in a B2B model. If you did $100k last month, and have grown 6% a month each month for the last 12 mos, I can pretty much say you’ll be a $2m+ ARR business in the next twelve months or so. The thing is, sales is variant, and sales pipelines have big data quality issues — and worse, sales as a metric is a lagging indicator. In fact, your monthly sales tell you about the past. Pipelines are cr*p for predicting the future.
Measure for Measure: Unit Economics Plays a Leading Role on Today's Economic Stage
The most fundamental business strategy calls for black numbers on the bottom line. In simplest terms, it's proof the business is generating more cash than it is spending. All too often, though, entrepreneurs get involved in businesses without employing a proper system to help them keep a watchful eye on what they're earning and what they're spending.
How SaaS Marketing is Different from Every Other Type of Marketing
SaaS marketers have a tough job. Marketing is hard. But what about marketing something that has no physical presence?
