Box accelerates platform ambitions with new pricing scheme. Box caught the world's attention earlier this week when it filed its IPO.
At today's BoxDev developer event at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, the cloud collaboration software vendor is keeping the train rolling with a slew of major enhancements to its platform: an enterprise app store, a usage-based (rather than seat-based) platform pricing plan, the introduction of metadata support to enable developers to build smarter applications, and the introduction of an enhanced cloud-based document viewer called Box View. "Let me just address the elephant in the room: I have no idea why Facebook bought Oculus," Box CEO and Co-Founder Aaron Levie joked to open the event. Levie then went on to give a brief overview of the history of Box, offering some impressive customer statistics -- Box apparently can boast 225,000 businesses on the platform, with 25 million users overall.
Here were the main announcements. Platform pricing. The unprofitable SaaS business model trap. Got email marketing?
We've got best practices from LivingSocial and estate sale guru Everything But The House in our next Insight webinar. Jason Cohen is the founder of WP Engine & Smart Bear Software. Marketo filed for IPO with impressive 80 percent year-over-year growth in 2012, with almost $60m in revenue. Except, they lost $35m. WTF? It’s not impressive when you spend $1.60 for every $1.00 of revenue, force-feeding sales pipelines with an unprofitable product. Don’t tell me this is normal for growing enterprise SaaS companies. I know the argument: The pay-back period on sales, marketing, and up-start costs is long, but there’s a profitable result at the end of the tunnel. Bullshit. So no, this upside-down business model isn’t what a SaaS business should construct.
The mindset works like this: It costs a lot of money to land an enterprise customer. Early in a company’s life, this line of reasoning is correct. Why, exactly? The fallacy is: That time never comes. It’s worse. Perfecting Your Pitch. By Garage Technology VenturesDownload PDF version Endless articles, books, and blogs have been written on the topic of business plan presentations and pitching to investors.
In spite of this wealth of advice, almost every entrepreneur gets it wrong. Why? Because most guides to pitching your company miss the central point: The purpose of your pitch is to sell, not to teach. Your job is to excite, not to educate. Pitching is about understanding what your customer (the investor) is most interested in, and developing a dialog that enables you to connect with the head, the heart, and the gut of the investor. What is the investor most interested in? To win over the hearts and minds of investors, your pitch has to accomplish three things: These latter two issues are beyond the scope of this modest guide. Most of the articles on pitching are generally right about the topics, even if they miss the nuance (sell, don’t explain). Nevertheless, it is useful to have a guide.
Do Things that Don't Scale. July 2013 One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale.
A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist. [1] Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. Recruit The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Stripe is one of the most successful startups we've funded, and the problem they solved was an urgent one. Startups building things for other startups have a big pool of potential users in the other companies we've funded, and none took better advantage of it than Stripe.
There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. The other reason founders ignore this path is that the absolute numbers seem so small at first. Fragile.