We-Wired Web Financial planning for SaaS Startups: Q&A with Christoph Janz I quit my day job with my friend Igor I started a new company called elastic.io, a solution that helps people connect cloud API’s without programming. One of the major hurdles we faced when starting our company was how to do the financial planning for our SaaS startup. Since we thought this might be useful for other entrepreneurs, I wanted to share with you what we learned. Financial planning for Saas resources There are multiple resources that you simply HAVE to read before doing any financial planning for SaaS. After that I would recommend Christoph Janz‘ blog. In March 2012, Christoph published a couple of blog posts about financial planning for SaaS, which we studied intensely. This sample financial plan is pretty detailed and you can read it on Christoph’s blog, so I won’t go into it again, but after we studied it, we still had a few unanswered questions about it. Is a cheaper SaaS product always easier to sell? Unfortunately, according to Christoph, this is just not true.
Cloud Integration | itDuzzit Automate backup transfers for Dropbox, FTP, SFTP, Amazon, MySQL, and lots more | Backup Box 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.
Daily Positive Affirmations The World Is All Yours Saying daily positive affirmations is an essential tool to changing your life right before your eyes. It has been widely accepted by the personal development community that the way you think, as well as the way you speak has a huge influence on your life and how you live it. To see a real change in the world around you, you must first change the way you think about it. What exactly are affirmations? When using affirmations, it is important to remember to repeat them every single day. Key Points when using Daily Positive Affirmations Once again, we are training our subconscious' to think differently. The second key point in having your affirmations work is to keep it in a positive context. The third key point to remember when saying your daily positive affirmations is to keep the phrase present. The final key point is last for a reason. Try to repeat your affirmations every day when you wake up, before you go to bed, and even randomly throughout the day. Positivity:
HTTP and HTML Analyzer software and Browser Automation Web Testing tools Is SaaS heaven on earth for B2B Software startups? Startup development & the platform dilemma The following guest post is contributed by Thomas Oriol, who is the co-founder and CEO of online sales analysis and forecasting application Salesclic. You can follow him at @ThomasOriol as well as his company at @Salesclic. SaaS has considerably reduced B2B startup development costs. Think of the products and services you had to buy when starting a B2B software company 10 years ago, and that you can now rent. These include servers, productivity suites, telecom networks, software development tools and project management and CRM software. Of course the lifecycle cost of these services may be higher than their perpetual license equivalent (SaaS wouldn’t exist as an industry otherwise), but given the cashflow profile of a startup, renting vs. buying makes a big difference. Sales and marketing boost Furthermore, reduced costs are only the supply-side advantage of SaaS. One obvious drawback of SaaS is its difficult economics during the first phases of a company’s lifecycle. Platform orphans
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.