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. This was the turning point. Changes in the technical elements were greater than ever. But most important is that they were setting their own goals. So what made the change possible? Breaking the lethargic atmosphere. You may not believe, but 4 months later this team got rid of the bug queue completely. Introducing new people got easier as well – due to tutorials and warning signs in the code, they at least didn’t mess up things. Their Definition Of Done evolved. Let’s sum up. Technology: as complex as it can be. I still remember one moment when on one of the retrospectives a team member that visited the customer organization the most told us story: But how does that lead to Kanban? Like this:
Startups and financial models for SAAS companies The other day I met with an entrepreneur I was advising as he prepared to raise his next round of funding. In the meeting, he wanted me to narrow in and focus on his financial model. Financial models for startups are important from a big picture perspective, but I never like to get mired in the full details as things always change in the early stages. So first and foremost, I let him know that while it was nice to have a well thought out spreadsheet, that the most important thing was getting the product developed and the right team in place. I don't invest based on detailed spreadsheet models - getting comfortable with the team, the problem being solved, and the market opportunity are more important in the early days. Secondly, what is most important for me to understand is the expenses and what milestones will be achieved with this first round of funding and whether or not it would be suitable enough to raise the next round of financing.
Evernote to change premium price as CEO says 'it was the wrong price' | Technology 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. “I think it can go up in some countries and probably down in some countries,” he said. Evernote currently has between eight and nine million paying users, according to its chief executive, who reaffirmed his belief that premium subscriptions rather than advertising are the best business model for his company. “We’re about work.
Financial models are always wrong. Build one anyway. - Foresight The financial model doesn't matter; the thought process does. To start, financial models are always wrong. But it’s important to create one anyway. I have created, modified, and delivered hundreds of custom financial models in Excel for a range of clients over the past decade, and learned a lot about how to create and use financial models in decision-making. Creating a financial model forces an entrepreneur to outline very specifically how a business “works”: how a company creates their products, how users and customers find and use their products and how those processes create revenues and costs. The result, a set of operational metrics, financial statements and the “equation of the business”, is one view of a potential reality of the business. Instead of focusing on the bottom line profit and net income, focus on the assumptions and key drivers of the business. Sounds hard? Resources for Business and Financial Modeling Financial Model Excel Templates Best Practices and Guidelines
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. How healthy is your SaaS business? We’re bombarded with KPIs and an endless series of metrics to tell us how we’re doing. But instead of using data to measure our progress, it’s much more likely that we get lost and start focusing on metrics that are easy to track but don’t mean anything. For a SaaS business, there are a few core metrics that need your undivided attention. In this post, I’m going to break down the essential metrics for each stage of a SaaS business. What this framework will give you: Let’s jump in. Before Product/Market FitYou’ve just made the decision to start your business and you’ve got plans for world domination. Primary Goals:
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.
Financial planning for SaaS startups A few people who read my recent post about financial planning asked if I could provide an example for a good financial plan, so I'd like to post one here. The plan is very similar to the one that I created in the very early days at Zendesk and re-used a few times in the meantime, but I had to make a few adjustments to make it more generic. It's a simple plan for an early-stage SaaS startup with a low-touch sales model – a company which markets a SaaS solution via its website, offers a 30 day free trial, gets most of its trial users organically and through online marketing and converts them into paying customer with very little human interaction. Therefore the key drivers of my imaginary startup are organic growth rate, marketing budget and customer acquisition costs, conversion rate, ARPU and churn rate. If you have a SaaS startup with a higher-touch sales model where revenue growth is largely driven by sales headcount, the plan needs to be modified accordingly.
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. Libin says the most annoying question he gets is what percentage of users are paying for the product.
Cloudonomics 101 - Creating a Financial Plan for your SaaS or Cloud C… 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. >> But there’s a better metric, your Key Metric, you should track and score yourself to, and hold your VP Marketing and marketing team to – Qualified Lead Velocity Rate (LVR), your growth in qualified leads, measure month-over-month, every month. As long as you are using Qualified Leads, and you use a consistent formula and process to qualify them, you can then See The Future: If the leads keep coming in, and sales growth does not track your lead growth, you’ll know you have one of two problems: And you know what? Like this: