Learn why establishing a regular investor communication pattern is priority number one plus what to include once you’ve made it a habit.
The number one reason a startup fails is a dwindling bank account that fails to support its business. One of the best ways to keep your investors happy, and therefore willing to help when you need your next round of funding, is to establish a consistent line of communication. Ty Danco and Dharmesh Shah explain what you should be including in your regular investor communication in this post at OnStartups.
Entrepreneur, startup advisor, and VC John Greathouse shares eight red flags inexperienced entrepreneurs routinely raise when pursuing venture capital investment.
Because of the rapid pace with which venture capitalists review investment opportunities, they must employ pattern matching techniques which include identifying common fundraising deal breakers.
Fortunately, most deal breakers can be avoided, with a bit of pro-active thought and deft execution.
For most SaaS companies, offering free trials and freemium plans is a no-brainer. But according to one SaaS entrepreneur, going in the opposite direction might actually do more for your bottom line.
In most SaaS circles, conventional wisdom suggests that in order to have any hope at rapid growth, SaaS businesses must offer freemium plans and free trials that entice prospective customers to give a product a try before they actually decide to pay for it.
Pitch decks can be tricky, especially if it’s your first time raising capital. Fresh off landing his first investment, Leo Wildrich, co-founder of Buffer, shares his secrets to a great deck.
Raising your first round of investment money can be a tricky undertaking if you don’t have years of history to draw from. Most examples and case studies are released years later, which won’t help you in a rapidly evolving market. Having just raised the first round of capital for Buffer, co-founder Leo Wildrich decided to share the challenges he faced in putting together a winning pitch deck in this article at OnStartups.
You don’t have to be an experienced CFO to understand and improve your company’s economic performance. In fact, with this high-level guide you can dive right in by learning how to discover, develop, and optimize your economic model.
When most software companies are founded, they follow a similar developmental path.
First, company founders work hard to build a solution with a great product-market fit. Next, as the business gains traction, its team begins to focus on growing the company’s user and customer base. Finally (and often concurrent with the previous step), the business continually pushes its people to establish a clear competitive advantage in its market.
But as most entrepreneurs know, there’s much more to building a great, big software company than those three things.
Jason Lemkin, author of the popular SaaS blog, saastr.com, points to the one metric SaaS founders and CEOs should be focusing on first. Hint: It’s not revenue growth, or churn, or even lifetime customer value, but he argues it’s the true key to your long-term success.
In the SaaS world, there are a lot of metrics that founders proclaim as the harbingers of sustainability and corporate health. For instance, some might argue that it’s all about revenue growth rate or churn. Others suggest that lifetime customer value or average revenue per customer are SaaS metrics that deserve top billing.
For EchoSign co-founder and CEO Jason Lemkin, however, those SaaS metrics aren’t nearly as important as one particularly crucial driver of SaaS company success and growth:
Venture partner Mark MacLeod shares why you shouldn’t be scared to take on a crowded market — and neither should potential investors.
One of the most common objections you hear from investors is that the market you are going after is too crowded. I have been on the receiving end of this many times and had to convince investors about the vision we saw for disrupting that market despite the existing players.
As an investor, I don’t care if a market is crowded. And history backs me up on this.
Thinking the time is right to raise VC funding and take your company to the next level? Here are four common mistakes you absolutely have to avoid.
Securing venture capital funding can be instrumental to your company’s growth and success, but handled the wrong way it can also be a recipe for disaster. OpenView Associate Ricky Pelletier sheds light on four pitfalls to avoid at all costs.
Raising too much investment funding at once might not be the most capitally efficient way to run a business. Here’s why.
It’s New Year’s resolution time, and people everywhere are determining to cut back on bad habits, having determined that you can in fact have too much of a good thing. As OpenView’s Ricky Pelletier explains in this short video, investment funding is no different.
Learn how VCs use operating talent to strengthen their investments.
Drew Hansen of Forbes describes how venture capitalists employ operating talent to help protect their investments and make startups more likely to succeed.
