Wednesday, October 13, 2010

MassTLCB3 | SaaS Startup Challenges and Monetization

Joe just did a great summary on the Above the Fold blog

SaaS Challenges and Monetization | Official Blog for Above the Fold

The session was facilitated by Curt Raffi, Marketing Director at Metanga, who did a spectacular job moderating the discussion, including getting all the participants involved. This session was my favorite because a) the challenges were truly challenging, and b) the quality of contributions was high.

As in my last post, I want to share my favorite 2 of the 9 challenges and offer additional thoughts on each of them:


Original Session Notes

From @joebaz

1. SaaS Companies at the table:
* Farnaz Bakhtari of TrainingPal - personal training SaaS company
* Erik Jackson of Class VI (http://www.c6sw.com/) - financial modeling tools for SMBs
* Mark MacLeod of Tungle.me, FreshBooks (www.freshbooks.com), Shopify (www.shopify.com)
* Mike Beckerle of Oco (www.oco-inc.com) - manufacturing/supply chain management
* Dries Buytaert of Mollom.com and DrupalGardens.com
* ??? Apptegic - real-time business insight for APIs
* ??? of NoteFlight (www.noteflight.com.com) - music
* ??? Cambridge Cloud Partners (www.cambridgecloudpartners.com) - accessing salesforce.com on your mobile device
* ??? of Cervello (www.mycervello.com) - BI solutions
* ??? of MailGeni.com - workflow solution
2. Issues facing SaaS:
* Awareness/Marketing
* Scaling
* Onboarding Customer Service
* Pricing/Upsell
* Engagement/Mindshare
* Professional Service Dilemma
* Security - Federation/Privacy
* Data Ownership
3. Awareness
* Segmentation - Be niche in your initial target and grow your segmentation piece by piece
* Viral - Get customers talking
* Love them
* KissInsights.com - measure feedback in real-time
* Referral programs
4. Onboarding
* Fee from HubSpot $250 - gets more serious users
* No follow up kills new companies
* Game mechanics
* UX - usability testing/paper prototyping - vet the idea with your customers: 1st impressions count
* Feedback
* easy = mindshare
* Relationship
5. Customer Service
* Walk in my shoes - everybody serves on the customer service team for a period of time.
* Community
* "6-9 FTE support reps/1000 paying subscribers" Mark
6. Pricing
* Premium service
* "Are we losing the opportunity to get them to buy premium? and how often do you contact your customer base?"
* Email with a reason
* Two types of SaaS services:
* Saves me time
* Or makes me money
* Value
7. Other
* "In every sprint, we improve our customer support efficiency" Dries
* Nov 5th - SaaS pricing models


Session Discussions/Takeaways (via threaded comments)
Use <b> and </b> to highlight session takeaways and snippets in the comments below

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