I always ā¤ļø Analyst Day Presentations as once a year it gives public companies a chance to take a pause from their short term focus on quarterly earnings and zoom out on product and their longer term roadmap. Breaking down DocuSignās Analyst Day presentation, I found a number of interesting lessons for founders of SaaS/PLG companies. First, we all know DocuSign as the standard for eSignature and here they start with their big vision, the āAgreement Cloud.ā
Love this wedge of how DocuSign thinks about their businessā¦Focus on the individual user, signer and work the journey from there which leads to incredible efficiency on the sales and net retention side
It also took a long, long time to create a new market but accelerating big time!
Incredible PLG/Land and Expand model equals incredible sales and marketing efficiency as S&M went from 51% of sales to 44% with a goal to 35-39% by expanding existing customers through more spend on existing product and stapling on new products with its goal of becoming the market leader for the āAgreement Cloud.ā
There are a few lessons when I think about DocuSign:
Patience - building up a bottoms up PLG motion takes a ton of time but when done right can create tremendous value
Focus on the individual user and PLG motion pays off, never lose that product North š . Even 17 years later you can see in the GTM Customer Engagement Model that they always start with that eSignature use case.
Your initial market is way bigger than you may think, especially if growing rapidly, so donāt rush to add new products too quickly
As always, šš¼ for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues!
Scaling Startups
Founders, it takes a village to raise a startup and as weāre huge fans of helping founders bring the best angels on their cap table from day one, this is the single greatest invention for you and investors - I suggest reading on. But imagine having 10-20 angels and having to track every signature for important decisions when it comes to fundraising, selling a company, whatever requires chasing them down - this eliminates that and consolidates into one vehicle with one person voting. Read on!!!
AngelList@AngelList1/ Introducing Roll Up Vehicles, a way for founders to efficiently raise from up to 250 angels with a single line on the cap tableangellist.comRoll Up Vehicles | AngelList Venture
3:56 PM Ā· Mar 30, 2021242 Reposts Ā· 1.44K Likesšš¼ Pure gold from Shreyas Doshi, Stripe
Shreyas Doshi@shreyasA B2B Product Management Story: on discovering problems that customers actually care about Very visual story threadšš¾
4:49 AM Ā· Mar 28, 20211.65K Reposts Ā· 5.97K Likesand the TL:DR here when doing customer discovery
Shreyas Doshi@shreyasThe lesson
5:04 AM Ā· Mar 28, 202138 Reposts Ā· 339 Likes
Enterprise Tech
Slack thinking of what next and šÆ on importance of async communications, especially with multiple time zones - question is whether or not better filters to block out the noise
Noah Weiss@noah_weiss1ļøā£ With remote work, thereās a premium on written and async communication. As some people return to the office, teams will go āhybrid remoteā. Itāll be imbalanced. And even more challenging. Teams will need tools that enable inclusivity, flexibility, and connection.5:25 PM Ā· Mar 25, 20214 Reposts Ā· 56 LikesOn the other other end of the spectrum is the idea of Clubhouse-like audio channels for serendipitous communicationsā¦
Noah Weiss@noah_weissIt starts with Channels. Theyāre a place for every project, team, and office. They should be a place for serendipitous connection. Thatās why weāre building a way to instantly hop into audio discussions in channels. They easily snowball as teammates āwalk byā in Slack.
5:25 PM Ā· Mar 25, 202112 Reposts Ā· 189 LikesAmazing developer growth in India - so much more opportunity ahead
Erica Brescia@ericabresciaThe growth in the community on @github in India is just incredible - it is now the fastest growing country *in the world* in terms of new devs contributing to OSS: - 1.8M new devs - 5.8M total - 7.3M new repos (ā¬ļø81% YoY) - 1M devs opened their 1st repoyoutu.beGitHub Satellite India 2021 - Celebrating the Developer Community in India: Past, Present and Future
3:58 PM Ā· Mar 26, 202133 Reposts Ā· 143 LikesServiceNow coming in aggressively into RPA space with purchase of Intellibot
āServiceNow is the platform of platforms for the workflow revolution, offering powerful end-to-end automation capabilities that allow customers to streamline business decisions and unlock new levels of productivity,ā Kahn said in a press release. āOur customers represent nearly 80% of the Fortune 500, and the vast majority are trying to drive automation across a mix of legacy and modern applications. With Intellibot, we will extend ServiceNowās ability to help customers connect systems so they can easily automate workflows and drive productivity.ā
ServiceNowās buyout ā its first this year ā comes after Google said it would partner with Automation Anywhere to develop RPA capabilities and Microsoft and IBMĀ snatchedupĀ Softomotive and WDG Automation, respectively.Ā
Donāt Settle for Less than 100% Net Retention from SMBs (Jason Lemkin)
One Year of Graviton2 at Honeycomb - š¤Æ read on to learn about how Honeycomb was able to see 30% price performance improvement from switching to the arm64 architecture at Amazon vs. Intel
Traffic to Honeycomb has surged in the past year, but the expense for serving and the complexity of our services hasnāt. Graviton2 is a large part of how we do it. We proactively were able to double the number of threads (and dramatically improve the performance per thread) available to our āretrieverā query engine when we switched from i3.xlarge instances to m6gd.2xlarge instances, without needing to double the cost. Weāve profiled our newĀ Refinery sampling agentĀ on both Intel and Arm instances for our own dogfood workload. We can wholeheartedly recommend Graviton2 given that the same size Refinery cluster runs cheaper and at higher throughput on Graviton2. Furthermore, we includeĀ support for Refinery with Honeycomb Enterprise plans, no matter which architecture youāre using.
The Identity Crisis Facing Open Source Companies in the Cloud from Tomasz Tunguz - great post as always but heās missing a 3rd path and one I would recommend, always go managed service/cloud and use Replicated (a portfolio co) to handle the on-prem using modern-on prem, still just one version of your SaaS but using k8s can also deploy for those customers who want more control
Do you support on-premises deployments or launch a managed service (aaS)?
This is a challenging, hand-wringing, sleepless-nights decision for many open source companies.
On one hand, the previous generation of open source companies did start out supporting on-premises. With that strategy, theyāve built huge businesses. And for good reason. The open source user base already uses, deploys, and contributes to the project.
On the other hand, the future is in cloud.
Will we see a resurgence on consumer spending post COVID like the roaring 20s? Check out McKinseyās framework for how to think about it - from savings to what behaviors will stick when we return to more in-person.
Creator economy come to enterprise marketing - fun video from Dinginem on Doolyā¦
DoolyHQ@DoolyHQThereās a slim notetaker in all of us š š¤£ **Crank up the volume and watch to the end, seriously** š¤ 1st single by Dinginem- "Without Dooly" š¤ For the full video: bit.ly/3m7hPwA A huge thank you to everyone involved in making this absolute š„ video! #dooly #sales7:10 PM Ā· Mar 30, 20211 Repost Ā· 10 Likes
Markets
So much more room to šš¼āāļøfor the āļø
Jamin Ball@jaminballThe power of the cloud in one simple graphic. Cloud provides a multiplier on the size of traditional markets Link for graphic: techradar.com/news/cloud-speā¦
1:03 PM Ā· Mar 26, 202154 Reposts Ā· 267 LikesFYI for those not following crypto marketsā¦you shouldā¦has not hit enterprise yet but payments are starting to flow and it will eventually. As for me, Iāve dipped my toe in the water a few years ago as we led Blockdaemonās first round, Heroku for blockchain, largest independent blockchain infrastructure platform connecting institutions and developers to leading networks - supporting over 20 protocols now and growing
Meltem Demirors@Melt_Demthe crypto market is about to break $2 trillion in value š„š„š„ there are nearly 100 protocols and projects with a market cap over $1 billion š„µš¶ in hindsight, it was inevitable. but it feels so surreal on days like this š¤Æ š§”11:24 AM Ā· Apr 2, 2021101 Reposts Ā· 1.19K Likes