A reprint of a story I wrote in 2009 to celebrate one of my favorite traditions – The Santa Hat Believer’s Club.
The Santa Hat Believer’s Club
SaaS
OpenView SaaS Financial & Operating Benchmarks 2021
OpenView Partners is a Boston-based expansion stage venture capital firm. They have a portfolio of SaaS investments that consists of over 60 companies. 24 have been acquired (Exact Target, Lessonly) and two have gone public (DataDog & Instructure). OpenView Partner is a huge proponent of the Product Led Growth (PLG) movement. They also regularly publish financial and operating benchmarks for SaaS companies, including product led growth companies. In November they published the 2021 version of the report. It includes 17 financial and operating metrics, many segmented by company revenue size.
Are AI Writing Tools Going to Conquer the World?
AI writing tools are here to stay. Market leader Grammarly just raised $290 million at a $13 billion valuation. Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI and its GPT 3 technology. I have seen firsthand the benefits of basic AI-enabled writing tools. On a year-to-date basis, my blog traffic is up 21%. While AI writing tools may have some drawbacks, they are not going to conquer the world.
Revenue churn is a major challenge for any B2B SaaS product manager. Every month and year customers decide to stop paying for your product. While some of the churn is involuntary (business closed, merger/acquisition, etc.), the majority is voluntary. Customers decide for a number of reasons not to continue using your product. Product Managers need to understand the scale and why do your B2B SaaS customers churn.
Product Managers Should Learn SEO to Drive B2B SaaS Revenue
.Demand generation is a challenge every product manager faces. Being highly ranked on Google is critical to drive potential buyers to yur solutions. While many enterprises use pay-per-click advertising, it is expensive and not available to many organizations. Product managers can be a key player in driving organic, free search results. Product managers are responsible for understanding market and user problems and translating them into actionable items for product owners and development teams. They are the experts in the market, the problems, and the solutions. Product managers should learn SEO to drive B2B SaaS sales. They are the source of content to drive effective demand generation programs.
2021 Benchmarks for SaaS Firms Under $25 Million in Revenue
Understanding how your firm performs in relation to your competitors and industry is important. Finding benchmarks about revenue, expenses, and valuation for private firms with less than $25 million in revenue is tough. This post presents 20 benchmarks and metrics for private SaaS firms under $25 million in revenue. The data is from four research reports that cover over 500 SaaS firms’’ performance in 2020 and 2021. You can compare your company’s performance using an included Excel file.
Software Equity Group October 2021 SaaS M&A Update
The Software Equity Group (SEG) regularly publishes quantitative research on the software and SaaS market M&A activity. It is always great information and clearly shows the trends in the industry. SEG offers its research for free. SEG publishes every month and for every quarter. The SEG SaaS Index contains dozens of publicly traded SaaS companies. The SaaS-only market has dramatically different performance than the overall market that also includes on-premise software.
15 Product Management Memes for 2021, Volume 5
I belong to a Facebook Group called Product Management Memes. It has over 3,700 members and is simply a meme stash for product managers, marketers, and corporate life. People post amusing stuff every day. There’s no self-promotion or spam, just entertainment, Here are 15 of the most popular posts from the past few weeks based on likes and shares.
Product Management Competitor Business Intelligence
There is more to competitive intelligence than understanding the features and functionality of competitive solutions. Product managers need to understand competitors’ revenues, headcount, funding, industry analyst relations, global footprint, and enterprise value. Fortunately, there are many free resources and tactics product managers can use to learn about these items.
Do Product Managers Need to Show The Quantitative Benefits of Their Products?
Convincing an enterprise to buy your SaaS solution is a hard thing. Convincing Late Majority and Laggard buyers is even harder. Should product managers of Late Majority products be able to show the quantitative benefits of their products?
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