SaaStr Annual Day #2 Recap: The Insider’s Guide to Becoming a Pre-nicorn
Hi we’re Point Nine Capital and we are currently in SF for the awesome SaaStr ’16. For those who cannot attend the event we’ll share recaps…
Hi we’re Point Nine Capital and we are currently in SF for the awesome SaaStr ’16. For those who cannot attend the event we’ll share recaps (like this one). To be kept informed follow us on Medium.
Digital Ocean
Positioning Digital Ocean
Positioning well Digital Ocean early on was key as the service was competing with big companies such as Rackspace and Amazon Web Service.
In this case you need to leverage a strong differentiator, for Digital Ocean it’s design and product. They are the “Stripe” of cloud infrastructure.
Sales model
Originally self-serve only model, targeted at developers.
First they focused on a segment of the market that they could dominate.
Now they are targeting the enterprise segment as well and are building the sales team that makes it possible.
Going upmarket is a necessary step to grow past the 9 figures revenue.
“Developers are the new enterprise” => penetration of cloud infrastructure in enterprise comes from developers now, and since more and more companies are “software” companies…
Intercom
Intercom approach to a “crowded” software category
“We never wanted to do a better helpdesk or a better CRM, we took a step back and asked ourselves how we could help people communicate better with their customers at every level.”
This is how they came up with their current suite of tools for SMBs.
Sales model
Intercom is selling mostly to SMBs.
The SMB space / market is exploding. It was not a viable market for many SaaS startups some years ago but it is now.
This explosion is giving birth to a new generation of “product first” startups targeted at SMBs.
Traditional sales model = a sales person contacts a potential customer, shows the product, explains the value proposition and tries to close the deal.
SMB products sales model = people discover, use the product and perceive the value proposition by themselves. Inside sales are useful to drive upsells / upgrades. So, obviously, success is very product dependent.
Talkdesk
Talkdesk grew from $1M to $10M in revenue with 20% of MoM growth.
Their biggest challenge last year:
They were originally only selling to SMBs and now are also selling to mid-market / enterprise customers.
This change is very complicated to drive as it not only impacts sales and marketing but also product and leadership.
Raising money
Talkdesk has raise a total of $25M but they had the possibility to raise much more.
They decided not to do so because they wanted less dilution and felt they could keep growing that fast and raise more later.
The risk is that if you don’t manage to keep up with your growth you may be screwed up for the next round.
Sales model
When they started already 200+ competitors already existed.
But none was offering a great product for small businesses.
So they first focus on this segment to dominate it and now they are expanding to bigger accounts.
As their product evolved the pricing increased. Better product with more value => you need to update your pricing