I’ve been making a few presentations lately, so I thought I’d share the slides to this deck which I presented earlier this week at the All Hands meeting of a high-growth SaaS company as part of their external speaker series.
This one’s kind of a romp — it starts with some background on Kellblog (in response to some specific up-front questions they had), takes a brief look back at the “good old days” of on-premises software, introduces my leaky bucket concept of a SaaS company, and then discusses why I need to know only two things to value your SaaS company: the water level of your bucket and how fast it’s increasing.
It kind of runs backwards building into the conclusion that a great SaaS company needs four things.
- An efficient sales model. SaaS companies effectively buy customers, so you need to figure out how to do it efficiently.
- A customer-centric culture. Once you’ve acquired a customer your whole culture should be focused on keeping them. (It’s usually far cheaper than finding a new one to back-fill.)
- A product that gets the job done. I like Clayton Christensen’s notion that customers “hire products to do jobs for them.” Do yours? How can you do it better?
- A vision that leaves the competition one step behind. Done correctly, the competition is chasing your current reality while you’re out marketing the next level of vision.
Here are the slides:
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I’ve worked for a couple startups now and they had at most two of these four items and … well, it’s ultimately why I’m not working there anymore as their performance didn’t support my continued employment. These four items will make great questions to ask of founders should I ever get the chance to join a startup again.