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Raise capital, update investors and engage your team from a single platform. Try Visible free for 14 days. The cloud computing industry is a rapidly growing and innovative space attracting significant investment from venture capital firms worldwide. VCs are often attracted to cloud computing startups due to their potential for high returns, driven by factors such as the growing demand for cloud computing services and the scalability and innovation of the industry. Accel estimates, “there is around $770 billion available to buy cloud companies, with $440 billion of cash on the balance sheets of strategic investors and $330 billion of dry powder from technology-focused private equity funds” Reuters reports. Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz has also stated that the shift to cloud computing has created new opportunities for investment and innovation, similar to the shift from centralized mainframe computers to the current distributed model with the advent of personal computers. He predicts that cloud computing will result in a significant wave of technological innovation in areas such as networking infrastructure, storage, and servers. Gartner has forecasted that end-user spending on public cloud services will grow by 20.7% to reach $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022. The forecast indicates that infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) will experience the highest growth rate of 29.8% in 2023. Other segments like platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) are also expected to see growth, with Gartner forecasting growth rates of 23.2% and 16.8% respectively for 2023. The forecast suggests that inflationary pressures and macroeconomic conditions will have a push and pull effect on cloud spending, while organizations will only spend what they have and cloud spending could decrease if overall IT budgets shrink. Source: Gartner (October 2022) What Makes Cloud Computing Interesting for Investors Cloud computing startups are an attractive option for venture capitalists (VCs) due to their many advantages. One of the most significant advantages is their ability to scale services up or down as needed, which allows them to handle large amounts of traffic and data while also quickly adapting to changes in customer demand. Another advantage is the high gross margin of cloud startups, which is driven by the low variable costs and high demand for cloud services. This means that a cloud startup can generate a high-profit margin even with a relatively small customer base, and with a subscription-based revenue model that provides a predictable and recurring revenue stream. Cloud startups have a global reach, as they can serve customers all over the world, and can offer a wide range of services such as software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which allows them to target a diverse range of customers with different needs. The exit opportunities for cloud startups are also quite attractive, including strategic acquisition and IPOs. Overall, the barrier to entry and operational costs for cloud startups are much lower than traditional software companies, making it relatively easy for them to get started with a small amount of capital and have a high earning potential. Metrics Specific to Cloud Companies That Startups Should Be Tracking Tracking vital metrics specific to cloud computing is crucial to ensure its success and growth. These metrics provide insight into the performance, scalability, and efficiency of your cloud services, and can help identify areas for improvement. For example, tracking metrics such as network traffic, storage usage, and server utilization can help a cloud company optimize their infrastructure and reduce costs. Monitoring customer engagement metrics such as sign-ups, retention, and customer lifetime value can provide valuable insight into customer behavior and help inform product development and marketing strategies. Additionally, tracking metrics related to security and compliance, such as data breaches and regulatory compliance, can help a cloud company ensure that they are meeting industry standards and protecting their customers’ data. By tracking these vital metrics, cloud companies can make data-driven decisions, improve their services, and ultimately drive growth and profitability Network traffic: Measuring the amount of data that is transferred in and out of the cloud environment can help identify bottlenecks and optimize infrastructure. Throughput: The number of requests or data transfer per second that a cloud service can handle. Storage usage: Tracking how much storage space is being used can help identify areas where capacity needs to be increased or optimized. Server utilization: Measuring the utilization of servers can help identify underutilized resources and optimize the allocation of resources. Cloud resource costs: Monitoring the cost of resources such as compute, storage, and network can help cloud companies optimize their resource usage and reduce costs. Sign-ups and retention: Measuring the number of customers signing up for services and the rate of customer retention can provide valuable insight into customer behavior and help inform product development and marketing strategies. Customer lifetime value: Tracking the revenue generated by each customer over time can help cloud companies identify their most valuable customers and target their marketing efforts. Data breaches: Tracking incidents of data breaches can help cloud companies identify vulnerabilities in their security systems and take appropriate measures to protect customer data. The number of security incidents and the response time to them. Regulatory compliance: Monitoring compliance with industry regulations such as HIPAA, SOC2, and PCI-DSS can help cloud companies ensure that they are meeting industry standards and protecting customer data. As well as the number of compliance requirements that the company’s cloud service meets. Service availability: Measuring the availability of cloud services can help cloud companies identify and resolve issues affecting service uptime and availability to customers. Latency: The time it takes for data to be transferred to and from the cloud. Painless Metric Tracking with Visible, try for free for 14 days here! Future of Cloud Computing The cloud computing industry is constantly evolving and the future is expected to bring some significant changes. One of the major trends that is expected to shape the cloud industry in the coming years is the increased adoption of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies. Organizations are increasingly recognizing the benefits of using a combination of public and private clouds to meet their specific needs. Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies allow organizations to take advantage of the benefits of different cloud providers and to build more resilient and flexible IT infrastructure. This approach enables organizations to choose the right cloud for the right workload and to avoid vendor lock-in. Another trend that is expected to shape the future of cloud computing is the emergence of edge computing. Edge computing is the practice of bringing computing power closer to the edge of the network, in order to reduce latency and improve performance. As organizations look to support new use cases such as IoT and real-time analytics, edge computing will become more prevalent. As the adoption of cloud services continues to grow, there will be an increased emphasis on security and compliance. Organizations will be looking to protect their data and comply with industry regulations, which will drive innovation in areas such as identity and access management, data encryption, and threat detection and response. Finally, advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will continue to shape the cloud industry in the future. Cloud providers will continue to invest in these technologies, making them more accessible and affordable for organizations. This will enable organizations to leverage these technologies to improve their operations, automate repetitive tasks and gain insights from data. Resources for Cloud Startups Cloud industry groups like the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) provide information, resources, and networking opportunities for cloud startups. These groups offer information on industry standards, best practices, and regulatory compliance, and host events and webinars to connect startups with other industry professionals. Cloud-focused communities and forums: Cloud-focused communities and forums like Stack Overflow and Quora provide a platform for cloud startups to connect with other industry professionals and share information and resources. Professional services: Professional service providers like Deloitte, PwC, and KPMG offer advisory services and cloud computing consulting to startups. They can help startups with cloud strategy, cloud migration, and cloud optimization. Cloud providers: Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offer a wide range of services, tools, and resources for cloud startups. These providers offer various services such as storage, computing power, and databases that startups can use to build and run their applications. VCs Investing in the Cloud Computing Space Ignition Partners Location: Washington, United States About: Ignition Partners, a dedicated early-stage enterprise software venture capital firm, invests based on decades of operating experience and enterprise relationships. We have lived through the transitions from mainframe to mini to PC to cloud. We are the only firm operating with significant footprints in both Seattle and Silicon Valley, and our network has a global reach. Investment Stages: Seed, Series A, Series B, Growth Recent Investments: Snaplogic Archipelago Aviatrix New Enterprise Associates Location: Menlo Park, California, United States About: New Enterprise Associates is a global venture capital firm investing in technology and healthcare. Investment Stages: Pre-Seed, Seed, Series A, Series B, Series C, Growth Recent Investments: Regression Games PixieBrix Timescale Intel Capital Location: Santa Clara, California, United States About: Intel Capital is a force multiplier for early-stage startups – inspiring and investing in the future of compute via investments in Cloud, Silicon, Devices, and Frontier. Investment Stages: Pre-Seed, Seed, Series A, Series B, Growth Recent Investments: SaVia Medical Informatics Astera Labs Mohr Davidow Ventures Location: San Mateo, California, United States About: For 30 years the Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV) team has invested in early-stage technology-based startups that redefine or create large new markets. The firm partners with exceptional entrepreneurs to build companies where big data, applied analytics, and the reach and power of the web/mobile cloud can be leveraged to drive emerging opportunities in verticals ranging from social commerce to finance to online marketing to consumer-driven healthcare and cleantech IT. Investment Stages: Seed, Series A, Series B Recent Investments: Kabbage Aryaka Webscale Battery Ventures Location: Boston, Massachusetts, United States About: Battery Ventures is a leading venture capital firm focused on investing in technology companies at all stages of growth. With a team of over 30 experienced investment professionals, Battery leverages its people, expertise and capital to actively guide companies to category dominance. The firm has invested in over 160 technology companies worldwide across the communications, software, infrastructure, and media and content industries. Investment Stages: Pre-Seed, Seed, Series A, Series B Recent Investments: Seek AI Mews Galileo Aspect Ventures Location: San Francisco, California, United States About: Aspect Ventures is a venture capital firm investing in the emerging mobile marketplace. Investment Stages: Seed, Series B, Growth Recent Investments: Silverfort Future Family Vida Health F-Prime Capital Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States About: F-Prime grew from one of America’s great entrepreneurial success stories. Fidelity Investments was founded in 1946 and grew from a single mutual fund into one of the largest asset management firms in the world, with over $2 trillion under management. For the last fifty years, our independent venture capital group has had the privilege of backing other great entrepreneurs as they built ground-breaking companies, including Atari, Ironwood Pharmaceuticals and MCI. Investment Stages: Seed, Series A, Series B Recent Investments: Neumora Therapeutics Elicidata Ashby Formation 8 Location: San Francisco, California, United States About: Formation 8, a California-based technology investment firm, focuses on seed, early, and later stage venture investments. Investment Stages: Seed, Series A, Series B, Growth Recent Investments: Aviatrix Ascus Biosciences Fieldwire Looking for Funding? We can help We believe great outcomes happen when founders forge relationships with investors and potential investors. We created our Connect Investor Database to help you in the first step of this journey. Instead of wasting time trying to figure out investor fit and profile for their given stage and industry, we created filters allowing you to find VCs and accelerators who are looking to invest in companies like yours. Check out all our investors here and filter as needed. To help craft that first email check out 5 Strategies for Cold Emailing Potential Investors. Related Resource: All-Encompassing Startup Fundraising Guide After finding the right Investor you can create a personalized investor database with Visible. Combine qualified investors from Visible Connect with your own investor lists to share targeted Updates, decks, and dashboards. Start your free trial here.

Data rooms are the next step to help us on our mission of giving founders a better chance of success. Data rooms are the culmination of a fundraise, diligence, or M&A event. They combine all of the documents, data, and resources that an investor will use to evaluate a company. With data rooms, you can now manage all parts of your fundraising funnel with Visible. Find investors with Connect, our free investor database. Track your conversations in our Fundraising CRM. Share your pitch deck with potential investors. And communicate with current and potential investors with Updates. Learn more about Visible Data Rooms and how you can leverage them for your next raise below: Organize and Structure Key Fundraising Documents Build data rooms specific to your raise. Organize your data room with folders, upload files, and create pages directly in Visible. Segment and Share Specific Folders Securely share your data with investors. Segment their access by individual folders or give them access to the entire data room. Understand How Investors Are Engaging with Your Data Rooms View analytics to understand how individual investors are engaging with different documents and files in your data room. Data rooms are enabled for all Visible users. Log into Visible below to get started on your first data room below: Create a Data Room Check out a few of our other resources to help get you started: What should be in a data room? How to write a cover letter for your data room How to create a data room How to share your data room How to create a folder in your data room How to view the analytics in your data room Build and share your data room with Visible At Visible, we oftentimes compare a fundraise to a B2B sales and marketing funnel. At the top of your funnel, you are finding new investors. In the middle, you are nurturing and pitching potential investors. At the bottom of the funnel, you are working through diligence and ideally closing new investors. With the introduction of data rooms, you can now manage every aspect of your fundraising funnel with Visible. Find investors at the top of your funnel with our free investor database, Visible Connect Track your conversations and move them through your funnel with our Fundraising CRM Share your pitch deck and monthly updates with potential investors Organize and share your most vital fundraising documents with data rooms Manage your fundraise from start to finish with Visible. Give it a free try for 14 days here.

Building a startup is difficult. On top of building a product, hiring a team, and taking a product or service to market — founders need to find funding for their business. Since the early 2000s, venture capital has exploded as a common funding option for many startups. However, venture capital is not always the right solution for every business. Learn more about venture capital and how you can find it for your business below: Related Resource: How to Find Investors What kinds of companies are venture capital for? While the venture capital industry has exploded, it does not necessarily mean it is the right funding solution for every business. Venture capital is primarily for businesses that operate in large (or potentially large) markets that can turn into huge exits for venture capital funds. VC funds are funded by limited partners (LPs). Limited partners generally invest in many different markets and assets — because of this, VCs are competing against public markets meaning they need to invest in companies with the opportunity for huge success. Related Resources: Understanding Power Law Curves to Better Your Chances of Raising Venture Capital What is the difference between venture capital and angel investment? Another option similar to venture capital is angel investors. Both generally operate as equity investors, but angel investors do not have the pressure to generate huge returns that a venture capital fund might feel. As put by the team at Investopedia, “An angel investor is a high-net-worth individual who provides financial backing for small startups or entrepreneurs, typically in exchange for ownership equity in the company. Often, angel investors are found among an entrepreneur’s family and friends. The funds that angel investors provide may be a one-time investment to help the business get off the ground or an ongoing injection to support and carry the company through its difficult early stages.” Related Resource: How To Find Private Investors For Startups 1) Online platforms and investor databases like Visible Connect If you determine that venture capital is right for your business, you’ll need a strategy to find and pitch the right investors for your business. We have found that the average founder speaks with 50-100 investors over the course of a fundraise. In order to make sure you are spending time on the right investors, you need to have a clear understanding of the type of investor you are looking for. From here, you can build out a list and start reaching out and finding warm introductions. To find investors your for your startup, check out our free investor database, Visible Connect. Related Resource: Building Your Ideal Investor Persona Related Resource: Miami’s Venture Capital Scene: The 10 Best Firms Related Resource: The Rise of Venture Capital in Utah: A Look at Utah’s Top 10 VC Firms 2) Venture Capital Associations Different venture capital associations and firms can be a great way to get familiar with the eco-system and finding connections to potential investors. Check out a few popular VC associations below: National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) As written by the team at National Venture Capital Association, “NVCA unites the U.S. venture ecosystem to support the formation of high-growth companies and ensure the U.S. remains the most competitive environment in the world for entrepreneurs.” Learn more about NVCA here. The Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) Program As put by the team at The Small Business Administration, “Created in 1953, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) continues to help small business owners and entrepreneurs pursue the American dream. SBA is the only cabinet-level federal agency fully dedicated to small business and provides counseling, capital, and contracting expertise as the nation’s only go-to resource and voice for small businesses.” Learn more about the SBA here. Related resource: Business Venture vs Startup: Key Similarities and Differences 3) Online VC databases and lists There are countless online VC databases and lists intended to help founders filter and find the right investors for their business. Over the course of a fundraise, it is crucial that you are spending time on the right investors for your business. With Visible Connect, our free investor database, you’ll be able to filter and find investors based on the properties that matter most to your business. Related Resource: Exploring VCs by Check Size Related Resource: Exploring the Top 10 Venture Capital Firms in New York City Related Resource: Chicago’s Best Venture Capital Firms: A List of the Top 10 Firm 4) Social media platforms Venture capitalists tend to be active on social media — like Twitter and LinkedIn. If you are unable to find a warm introduction to specific investors, social media can be a great place. By engaging with potential investors and introducing your business to them, you’ll be able to better your odds of finding an introduction or booking a meeting. 5) Networking – online and in-person Investors are making a large bet when investing in a business. In order to build trust and move your fundraising along, you need to be constantly building and maintaining relationships. One of the best ways to do this is by leveraging online resource and in-person events to network. We find that sending a simple monthly update is a great way to help investors build conviction and trust in your business. Check out an example below: Related Resource: Potential Investor Nurture Update Template Tips for securing venture capital As we mentioned above, making sure you are spending your time on the right investors is crucial to a successful fundraise. Check out a few tips for securing and finding the right investors below: Find venture capital firms that invest in similar companies First things first, you want to make sure you are pitching investors that invest in similar companies to yours. This means similar market, check size, and stage. You can filter by all of these fields in Visible Connect. Know your business valuation VCs are equity investors. Because of this, it is important that you have an understanding of your valuation and will be able to speak to it during your fundraise. Related Resource: Valuing Startups: 10 Popular Methods Ensure the VC firm matches the necessary funding stage Venture capital spans many stages. Some investors will primarily invest in pre-seed or seed stages. On the flip side, some investors might solely focus on later stage investments. In order to make sure you are the making the most of your time, be sure that the investors you are targeting invest in your stage. For example, if you are looking to raise a $1M seed round, you should not be pitching investors that write $20M+ checks. Related Resource: The Understandable Guide to Startup Funding Stages Examine the firm’s funding history Another area to consider is a firm’s funding history. Venture capitalists typically raise 1 fund at a time. Generally, they will distribute this fund over 8-12 years. If you notice that a VC fund was last raised 8 years ago, it might be time to look for a fresher fund. This is because they might be more stringent with their investment criteria as they are reaching the last of their funds — the last capital could be reserved for current investments. Related resource: Carried Interest in Venture Capital: What It Is and How It Works Understand considerations for location Some investors will only invest in specific locations and geographies. Most investors are very clear about this on their marketing site. Make sure you are paying attention to their investment criteria and fit the geographies they are investing in. Secure venture capital funding with Visible At Visible, we like to compare a venture fundraise to a traditional B2B sales process. At the top of your funnel you are adding qualified investors. Moving them through your funnel with meetings, email updates, pitches, and other communications. And ideally, closing them at the bottom of your funnel as a new investor. See how Visible can help you along every step of your fundraising funnel. Give VIsible a free try for 14 days here. Related resources: Understanding the Advantages and Disadvantages of Venture Capital for Startups 12 Online Startup Communities for Founders

Accounting and finance are skills that every founder should hone. While you don’t need to be an expert, you should be comfortable with different financial statements and be able to answer questions from current and potential investors. Check out our quick breakdown of startup financials below: What are startup financials? Startup financials are the vitals behind how a company operates. Financials are the metrics and data that drive the different financial statements for a startup — income statement, balance sheet, cash flow, changes in equity, etc. As we wrote in our post, Building A Startup Financial Model That Works, “The goal of a financial model is not to be exactly right with every projection. The more important focus is to show that you, as a founding or executive team, have a handle on the things that will directly impact the success or failure of your business and a cogent plan for executing successfully.” Why are startup financials important for pitch decks? An investor’s job is to generate returns for their investors (AKA limited partners or LPs). In order to invest in the best companies, investors need to leverage data and their own insights to fund companies they believe have the opportunity to generate returns for their investors. Related Resource: How To Build a Pitch Deck, Step by Step Part of this process involves collecting financials and data. Different investors might look for different things when it comes to a company’s financials and metrics — inevitably, an investor will need to take a look under the hood to see how a company operates. Learn more about the financials that VCs look for in a pitch deck below: Essential startup financials to include in pitch decks As we previously mentioned, different investors will look for different metrics and data when it comes to a pitch deck. In order to best help you prepare the metrics and data you need, we laid out the following common metrics that VCs might look for in a pitch deck below (as always, we recommend sharing what you believe is best for your business): Related Resource: Tips for Creating an Investor Pitch Deck Gross revenue Gross revenue is the sum of all money generated by a company. This is important for a pitch deck because investors will want to understand how much revenue a business is generating. For companies that are pre-revenue, make sure you are targeting investors that invest in pre-revenue companies. Cost of goods sold As put by the team at Investopedia, “Cost of goods sold (COGS) refers to the direct costs of producing the goods sold by a company. This amount includes the cost of the materials and labor directly used to create the goods. It excludes indirect expenses, such as distribution costs and sales force costs.” Gross profit As put by the team at Investopedia, “Gross profit is the profit a company makes after deducting the costs associated with making and selling its products, or the costs associated with providing its services.” This is important because investors want to understand how your business efficiently turns revenue into profit. Operating expenses Operating expenses are exactly what they sound like — the expenses a business incurs from normally operating. Operating expenses help investors understand how and where your business is spending money. Net income As put by the team at Investopedia, “Net income (NI), also called net earnings, is calculated as sales minus cost of goods sold, selling, general and administrative expenses, operating expenses, depreciation, interest, taxes, and other expenses.” Net income truly reflects the profitability of a company as it takes into account all of the expenses a business will face. Related Resource: 18 Pitch Deck Examples for Any Startup Understanding forecasting vs accounting Over the course of building a startup, founders will inevitably have to understand different basic accounting, forecasting, and budgeting principles. Learn more about forecasting vs. accounting for your startup below: Related Resource: 7 Essential Business Startup Resources Financial forecasting A financial forecast and financial model is a tool that founders can use to tell their startup’s story. As we wrote in our post, Building A Startup Financial Model That Works, “The goal of a financial model is not to be exactly right with every projection. The more important focus is to show that you, as a founding or executive team, have a handle on the things that will directly impact the success or failure of your business and a cogent plan for executing successfully.” Accounting Basic accounting is a skill that every founder should be familiar with. Accounting is a realistic look at the financial performance of your business. It’s critical to have a grasp on all elements of your company’s books to ensure your company can grow and scale in an effective way and avoid costly financial errors down the line. Related Resource: A User-Friendly Guide to Startup Accounting Financial statements: your startup’s report cards Having a grasp on your financials is a surefire way to clearly articulate your needs for capital and how you plan to spend any additional funding. Learn more about common financial statements for startups below: Related Resource: 4 Types of Financial Statements Founders Need to Understand Income statement As put by the team at Harvard Business School, “An income statement is one of the most common, and critical, of the financial statements you’re likely to encounter. Also known as profit and loss (P&L) statements, income statements summarize all income and expenses over a given period, including the cumulative impact of revenue, gain, expense, and loss transactions. Income statements are often shared as quarterly and annual reports, showing financial trends and comparisons over time.” Balance sheet As put by the team at ProjectionHub, “A startup balance sheet or projected balance sheet is a financial statement highlighting a business startup’s assets, liabilities, and owner’s equity. In other words, a balance sheet shows what a business owns, the amount that it owes, and the amount that the business owner may claim.” Statement of cash flows As put by the team at Accountancy Cloud, “A cash flow statement, or CFS, is a financial statement that accurately summarizes the total amount of cash that goes into and eventually leaves a startup business. Cash flow statements are designed to accurately measure if a startup is managing its cash wisely.” Impress potential investors with Visible With our suite of fundraising tools, you can easily find investors, share your pitch deck, and track your fundraising funnel. Learn more about our pitch deck sharing tool and give it a free try here. Related resource: What is Internal Rate of Return (IRR) in Venture Capital

Raise capital, update investors and engage your team from a single platform. Try Visible free for 14 days. 2022 has been a challenging year in the startup world. After a hot start to the year, funding and growth has slowed. As Tomasz Tunguz pointed out in the chart below, funding has collapsed since October. At Visible, we’ve spent 2022 building tools to help founders update investors, raise capital, and track key metrics. With the help of these 6 new features, founders will be able to level up their investor relations and strike when the funding iron is hot. Check them out below: Share and Comment on Fundraising Pipelines You can now share a fundraising pipeline via link. This allows you to ask current investors or peers for introductions or information about investors in your pipeline. In turn, your investors or peers can leave a quick comment to help make an introduction to investors they know. Customize Fundraising Columns and Properties Our fundraising pipelines have become more flexible so you can further tailor your pipeline to match your fundraise. With customizable fundraising columns and properties, you will be able to select the properties you would like to see at the pipeline level. Check out some of the most popular custom fundraising properties below: Min & max check size Who can make/made a connection? Data room shared? Investor type Will they lead? Log Emails with Potential Investors in Visible With our BCC tool, founders will be able to simply copy & paste their unique BCC email address into any email. From here, the email will automatically be tracked with the corresponding contact in Visible. This is great for cold emailing investors, nurturing investors, and staying in touch with current investors. To learn how to get BCC set up with your Visible account, head here. Automatic Fundraising Follow-up Reminders Over the course of a fundraise, most founders should expect to communicate with 50-100+ investors. In order to best help you stay on top of their ongoing conversations, you can now set email reminders for when to follow up with potential investors. This is a great way to speed up the fundraising process and get back to what matters most — building your business. Pitch Deck Branding and Custom Domains Control your fundraise from start to finish. With Visible Decks, you can share your deck using your own domain. Plus you can customize the color palette of your deck viewer to match your brand. You can check out an example here. Include Pitch Decks in Updates Keeping current and potential investors in the loop is a great way to speed up the process when you are ready to raise capital. In order to best help nurture current and potential investors, you can now include your Visible Decks directly in Updates. This can help when kicking off a raise, nurturing potential investors, or sharing a board deck with your board members. Custom Properties as Merge Tags in Updates As we mentioned above, updating current investors and nurturing potential investors is a great way to speed up a fundraise when the time is right. To best help you customize your Visible Updates, you can now use custom properties as merge tags in Updates. For example, if you’re tracking the city in which your investors live you can use that in an Update. Improved Dashboard Layout and Widgets If you’re sharing Visible Dashboards with your team or more involved investors, you can now customize the layout and include additional widgets (like text, tables, and variance reports). This will allow you to give additional context to any of the data your key stakeholders might be looking at regularly. Our mission at Visible is to help more founders succeed. Over the next 12 months, we’ll be building more tools to help you do just that. Raise capital, update investors and engage your team from a single platform. Try Visible free for 14 days.

Tomasz Tunguz, VC at Redpoint Ventures, recently shared a chart (above) detailing the best time of the year to raise capital. 2022 looks a lot different than 2021 (and the previous 10 years). After a hot start, the # of deals has collapsed since October. As fundraising slows and the holidays/New Year approach, founders might want to consider re-grouping and putting together a plan for raising in 2023. Check out 3 ways to get a head start on your 2023 fundraising efforts below: 1. Build the right audience As we mentioned in a previous Visible Weekly, most founders should expect to communicate with 50-100 investors over the course of a raise. When balancing 50+ conversations it is important to make sure you are spending time on the right investors. Use Visible Connect, our free investor database, to filter and sort investors by the fields that matter (sweet spot check size, investment geography, fund size, etc.). 2. Track ongoing conversations 50+ conversations is a lot. If you’re running a fundraising process off the cuff, using the last few weeks of the year to set up a pipeline and outreach process will allow you to spend more time on what matters most — building your business. Check out some tips for setting up a Fundraising Pipeline here. 3. Keep investors engaged with updates If you’re planning on sending an investor update to your current investors at the end of the year, you can use a “lite version” to engage with potential investors (think big wins, fundraising status, high growth metrics, etc). Check out an example here. Reading List The Best Time of Year to Raise for Your Startup Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures studies recent funding data to understand the best month to raise venture capital. Read more 3 Tips for Cold Emailing Potential Investors + Outreach Email Template On the Visible Blog, we share a template to help you craft cold emails for potential investors. Read more Founder How-To: Writing Forwardable Emails Stephanie Rich of Bread & Butter Ventures breaks down how founders can best write a “forwardable email” for fundraising. Read more

Visible is a founder-friendly portfolio monitoring and reporting solution used by VC’s around the world. Thanks to the continued engagement from our investor community, the last twelve months at Visible have been full of growth. As a Visible user, you’ve helped bring more transparency to the Venture Capital industry through improved KPI tracking, accessing deeper portfolio insights, and by more regularly communicating with your companies, teammates, and LP’s. Here are some 2022 highlights: 7k+ Requests completed by portfolio companies around the world 550+ LP Updates were sent to investors 800+ Investors deepened their VC expertise by engaging with our educational webinars 300+ VC firms verified their profiles in our Connect database Biggest Product Updates of 2022 More Flexible & Scalable Dashboards Portfolio Dashboard Templates – A more scalable way to visualize and extract insights from portfolio company data. Flexible Dashboard Grids – Flexible widget sizing means you have more control over how you can display data visualizations for you and your team. Intraportfolio Benchmarking and Insights – Compare individual company performance against portfolio quartiles using custom segments. Improved Portfolio Request Experience Request UI Overhaul – It’s now much easier to understand when your Request has been sent, % completion, and when the next scheduled reminder email will be sent. Multiple File Uploads in Requests – Companies can upload multiple files into the same file block in a Request, saving them time each reporting cycle. Export Request Summaries – Easily export and analyze Request responses in just a few clicks. Re-open a Request – Mistakes happen. Re-opening a Request lets companies re-submit their data. Advanced Investment Insights Chart Investment and Fund Metrics – Chart and visualize key fund metrics such as TVPI, RVPI, DPI, and more. Automatic SAFE Conversion & Token Support – Visible supports 6+ investment types. Multiple Funds – Segment your investment data by fund in custom-built reports. Interested in learning more about Visible’s portfolio monitoring solution for investors? Book a demo below. Interested in learning more about Visible? Meet with Our Team Webinar Recap from 2022 More than seven thought leaders from around the world joined us to share their expertise in different topics related to improving the venture capital ecosystem. Check out the recordings and resources below. ESG Best Practices with Tracy Barba ESG for VC –> Watch Here Building Scalable Support with Jessica Lowenstein of K50 Ventures and Erica Amatori of Left Lane Capital – Watch Here Benefits of a Hybrid SPV + Fund Strategy with Kingsley Advani of Allocations — Watch Here LP Reporting Best Practices with Aduro Advisors — View the Report SaaS Company Benchmarking with Christoph Janz of Point Nine Capital — Watch Here Best practices for portfolio monitoring & reporting with Gale Wilkinson of VITALIZE Venture Capital — Watch Here Interested in learning more about Visible? Meet with Our Team How to Partner with Visible in 2023 Increase your VC firm’s brand awareness by hosting your Update template in our public Update Library for investors. Refer your investor friends to Visible and receive a $500 Amazon gift card. Invite us to host a webinar for your portfolio companies on ‘Investing in Investor Updates’. Verify your firm’s profile in our investor Connect Database. To get started with any of the partnership opportunities above, send an email to belle@visible.vc. Interested in learning more about Visible? Meet with Our Team

A few years ago we interviewed Lindsay Tjepkema, Founder of Casted, about starting a podcast. One of her key tips was to “wring out your content.” If you’re going to take the time to record a podcast, you should take the time to repurpose and distribute that content on different channels. How to Repurpose Investor Updates The same is true for investor relations and fundraising. If you’re going to take the time to send an investor update, you can “wring out” your metrics, big wins, asks, audience, etc. to fuel other fundraising materials. An investor update can be re-purposed to help build out other fundraising assets — for example: Potential Investor Monthly Updates — For a simple hack, take your normal investor update and edit it down to a few key metrics and wins to nurture potential investors. Pitch Decks — If you’re sharing data in your investor updates, this can be used to help build out the different metrics and data you’ll need in a pitch deck. Data Rooms — Data rooms are a combination of all of the data and assets you’ll share over the course of a fundraise. Including past investor updates is a surefire way to show potential investors your history of regular communication. Cold Emails to Investors — Investor updates can be a starting point for crafting a cold email to potential investors. Board Decks — There is likely a lot of crossover between the content in an investor update and a quarterly board meeting. Investor updates can be a great backbone for building out the different slides in a board deck. Team Updates — A modified version of your investor update is also a great way to keep your team in the loop and build trust. Investor communication is no easy feat for founders. Taking the time to send monthly updates already puts you ahead of 50% of portfolio companies — taking the few minutes to wring out your investor updates will help you speed up your next raise when you are ready. Reading List How to Handle: Keeping Your Investors Updated Brett Brohl of Bread & Butter Ventures breaks down the 5 components he likes to see in investor updates. Learn more Investor Outreach Strategy: 9 Step Guide On the Visible Blog, we share a 9 step guide to help founders develop a plan to reach out to potential investors. Read more Why You Should Always Send Your Investor Updates Kera DeMars of Hustle Fund makes the case why founders should send investor updates. Read more

What is a Community-driven Company? A community-driven business is a company that puts community at its core. This can be a case where the community is the product (e g. Reddit) or where the community is central to the business’s identity and success (e.g. Peloton). A community-driven company is one whose value is its members and its success depends on them. The value that is derived from the community benefits both its members and the company. The community can either be the company’s product or its community is built around its product. These companies are often founded by individuals who believe they can solve problems better through collaboration and are built around a specific mission, problem, or just simply the community itself. Lolita Taub of Ganas Ventures points out that there are various takes on what community-driven companies are but it’s part of what makes this model so special. At Ganas, they focus on companies whose, customers identify as members members are able to create value for other members members start the marketing and sales flywheel She also believes that companies with the community at the core will become unicorns and produce outsized returns. What Makes a Community-driven Company Valuable and Successful? Community-driven companies are becoming increasingly common in today’s competitive environment. In order to survive and thrive, organizations need to adapt to changing customer demands and expectations. Community-driven companies are able to respond faster to these changes because their users are directly involved in decision-making processes. This new way of thinking about customer relationships means that companies no longer focus solely on selling products or services. Instead, they create value for their customers through the experience of the community- redefining the relationship between consumers and businesses. Companies that are driven by their customer base and community are growing at a faster rate than other companies. They also tend to outperform competitors because they focus on solving real problems instead of chasing trends. Which is why community-based businesses are becoming increasingly popular. Some of the other community-driven benefits include: Less marketing spend Brand Loyalty and LTV Lower operating and sales costs (companies can be leaner and small) Retention Referrals Defensible business model (difficult to replicate) What’s a Community-Led Company’s Secret Sauce? Community-led growth (CLG) is a type of go- to market strategy that these companies are using to leverage their communities to sell. The important thing to note here which Lolita points out, is that “community-led growth should not be confused with marketing. Community-led growth companies focus on creating a safe space for their community to come together, share value, create relationships, and best use their products/services to solve a problem or help achieve a goal.”. As a result of nurturing this space, “your community acts as a multiplier for company growth”. Community-driven companies are also often considered more innovative because they focus on solving problems or sharing information, and they get the answers from the people that matter most- their customers as well as enthusiasts on the topic. This approach has become known as ‘community-based innovation’ (CBI). They rely heavily on their customers or consumers to create new ideas, develop new products, and even provide feedback. This also tends to make running a community-driven company less expensive to start and run. Taking feedback or observing what the community is saying gives you the best understanding of customer needs and wants. When you then use this information to shape future decisions you have a competitive advantage and can deliver exactly what is wanted and needed. This also helps build trust between the company and its customers. In addition, it allows the company to stay relevant and responsive to changes in the marketplace. What Might the Future of Communities Look Like? With social media platforms becoming more powerful than ever before, communities are booming. People are creating their own networks, sharing information, and collaborating together. This has led to the rise of the Creator Economy, which has allowed people to monetize their following. According to CMX Community Industry Report, “Communities are cautiously dipping their toes into Web 3.0- 15% of communities are actively working on Web 3.0 focused projects and an additional 17% are considering it. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are the most common form of Web 3.0 project that community teams are working on.” Web 3 is not only allowing companies to monetize on their community but their members can now also benefit as well through NFTs and DAOs. What is the Difference Between a Web2 and Web3 Community-driven Company? Ganas Ventures highlights two pain points for each: “Web2 companies – People create content, products, and services – Companies earn money Web3 companies – People/communities create content, products, and services – People/communities earn money” Related Resource: 10 VC Firms Investing in Web3 Companies Additional Resources and Tools for Startups Community-Driven Companies: What They Are and Why We’re Investing in Them CMX Community Industry Report Ganas Ventures Resources Follow Lolita Taub for updates in the space Origami– helps Web3 communities launch and grow their DAOs Paragraph– Paragraph turns your subscribers into members through NFTs which gives your audience ownership in your community. VCs Investing in Community-Driven Companies Flybridge About: Flybridge is a seed and early-stage venture capital firm whose mission is to assist entrepreneurs in growing innovative, global companies. With more than $625 million under management, the firm is focused on seed and early-stage investing in technology markets and is led by a team with domain expertise and more than half a century of combined experience in venture capital. Thesis: We see a vibrant community as a source of competitive advantage and we are excited to invest in companies and entrepreneurs who share our vision for the power of community across a range of sectors. Investment Stages: Pre-Seed, Seed Recent Investments: Dame Products Trend Teal Ganas Ventures About: Ganas Ventures invests in pre-seed and seed Web 2 and Web 3 community-driven startups in the US and Latin America. Thesis: Ganas Ventures invests in pre-seed and seed Web 2 and Web 3 community-driven startups in the US and Latin America. It’s run by solo-GP Lolita Taub. ​​ Investment Stages: Pre-Seed, Seed SV Angel About: SV Angel is a San Francisco-based angel firm that helps startups with business development, financing, M&A, and other strategic advice. Investment Stages: Seed Recent Investments: Kiln Payload FlowForge Lerer Hippeau About: Lerer Hippeau is an early-stage venture capital firm founded and operated in New York City. Since 2010, we have invested in entrepreneurs with great ideas who aren’t afraid to do hard things. Our portfolio includes more than 350 leading enterprise and consumer businesses including Guideline, MIRROR, Blockdaemon, K Health, Allbirds, ZenBusiness, and Thrive. We’re experienced operators who invest early and stay in our founders’ corners as they build iconic companies. Thesis: We seek entrepreneurs with product vision, consumer insight, focused execution, and unwavering ambition. When we are lucky enough to meet such people, our hope is that they will choose us as a long-term partner. Investment Stages: Seed, Series A, Series B, Series C Recent Investments: Anode Labs Onward Bookkeep The Community Fund About: A $5 million early-stage fund that invests in community-driven companies through an investment partner team. Thesis: We’re an early-stage fund that invests in community-driven companies. Investment Stages: Pre-Seed, Seed Recent Investments: Elektra Health Kindra Founders Fund About: Founders Fund is a San Francisco based venture capital firm investing in companies building revolutionary technologies. Thesis: We invest in smart people solving difficult problems. Investment Stages: Seed, Series A, Series B Recent Investments: Namecoach Speak Elemental Machines General Catalyst About: General Catalyst backs exceptional entrepreneurs who are building innovative technology companies and market leading businesses, including Airbnb, BigCommerce, ClassPass, Datalogix, Datto, Demandware, Gusto (fka ZenPayroll), The Honest Company, HubSpot, KAYAK, Oscar, Snap, Stripe, and Warby Parker. Thesis: General Catalyst is a venture capital firm that makes early-stage and growth equity investments. Investment Stages: Seed, Series A, Series B, Growth Recent Investments: Guild OneSchema Buildkite K50 Ventures About: K50 Ventures is the most trusted first-check investor for mission-driven founders building a better future for the 99%. We invest up to $2M in pre-seed and seed stage companies in the US and LATAM that are prioritizing access, affordability, and wellbeing across the categories of Health, Finance, and Work. K50 partners with those who refuse to accept the status quo; those who have a vision for how to radically improve daily life for everyone – in our local communities, and around the globe. Since 2016, we have invested in 170+ companies including Groww, Mammoth Biosciences, Self, Tul, Frubana, Kueski, Fintual, Valon, Real, Osana Salud, June Homes, among others. Investment Stages: Pre-Seed, Seed Recent Investments: June Homes HoneyBee Osana Salud Halogen Ventures About: Halogen Ventures is an early stage venture capital fund focused on consumer technologies prioritizing a female in the founding team.Thesis: Halogen Ventures is an early stage venture capital fund focused on female led consumer technology companies. Investment Stages: Early Stage Recent Investments: Ellevest Vivoo Live Tinted Graph Ventures About: We are a group of founders & operators with experience starting and scaling technology co’s globally. 300+ investments. Investment Stages: Pre-seed, Seed Recent Investments: Tract Comm Technologies Disclo Founder Collective About: Founder Collective is a seed-stage venture capital firm that has invested in over 300 startups, including Uber, Airtable, PillPack, SeatGeek, The Trade Desk, Whoop, and Cruise. Founder Collective’s mission is to be the most aligned fund for founders at the seed stage. FC has offices in NYC and Cambridge, MA and has been the top-rated seed fund on the Forbes Midas list for four of the last five years. Investment Stages: Seed Recent Investments: Kapu Odyssey Energy Solutions Gigasheet Looking for Funding? We can help We believe great outcomes happen when founders forge relationships with investors and potential investors. We created our Connect Investor Database to help you in the first step of this journey. Instead of wasting time trying to figure out investor fit and profile for their given stage and industry, we created filters allowing you to find VC’s and accelerators who are looking to invest in companies like yours. Check out all our investors here and filter as needed. To help craft that first email check out 5 Strategies for Cold Emailing Potential Investors. Related Resource: All-Encompassing Startup Fundraising Guide After finding the right Investor you can create a personalized investor database with Visible. Combine qualified investors from Visible Connect with your own investor lists to share targeted Updates, decks, and dashboards. Start your free trial here.

The General Partner (GP) and Limited Partner (LP) relationship is built on trust. The best way to establish trust with LPs is through transparency, authenticity, and regular communication. When LP reporting is done well, LPs should easily be able to understand how both the fund and the fund manager are performing and be able to use this information to inform their investment strategies in the future. The best GPs view sending LP Updates as a relationship-building activity and as a fundraising tool — not as a way to simply check off a requirement from their LPA’s. For emerging managers, your relationships with initial LPs are of critical importance for your reputation as a fund manager and future fundraising. This rapport forms the basis of the fund manager’s credibility and will surface again when future LPs are doing diligence on the emerging manager. First-time fund managers will need to have clean data to support their track record and positive relationships with current LPs to set themselves up for success in raising additional funds. The Weekend Fund recently wrote a thoughtful article on How to Write LP Updates with four main takeaways: Send LP updates consistently Go beyond the basics Be authentic Don’t share sensitive information without portfolio founders’ sign-off We’ve translated this guidance into actionable steps that can be streamlined with Visible’s Portfolio Monitoring and Reporting tools below. 1. Send LP updates consistently. Weekend Fund Advice — “One of the biggest mistakes new fund managers can make is not sending LP updates consistently. Most send quarterly updates. At Weekend Fund we send updates approximately every two months. Regular, detailed, and transparent updates builds trust with your LPs, which is particularly important if you want them to write a check into your next fund.” Visible provides fund managers with tools to make sending updates to LPs on a regular basis easier. To start, you can Upload Your LP Contacts (including custom contact fields) via CSV within seconds. Then you can create Custom Lists to organize your contacts. We suggest organizing your LPs by Fund and also by whether they’re a current LP or a potential LP. This means within minutes you have all your contacts organized into custom segments that are useful to you. You can then simply choose which list you want to send an Update to in the future. Visible also streamlines the creation of your LP Update content by letting you choose from an Update Template Library. You can easily pull a template into your account, further customize it as needed, and save it as your own template to use for future updates. 2. Go beyond the basics. Weekend Fund Advice — “Of course, you should introduce new investments, share updates from the portfolio, report performance metrics, and other key updates from the fund, but the best updates go a step further to educate and inform LPs. This might include your analysis on the market, perspective on emerging trends, or learnings from experiments.” Visible’s LP Update editor supports rich text, videos, images, files, and perhaps best of all — custom data visualizations. This means you can visualize your custom fund analytics that will resonate with your LPs and embed them directly into your Update. The data is derived from data hosted within your Visible account and updates your charts in real time. It’s also a great idea to include a market overview section at the top of your update to shed light on how you’re evaluating and staying ahead of the curve in the markets in which you invest. This is a great way to continue to instill LP confidence in you as the steward of their capital. On top of that, it’s important to remember that “many LPs invest in funds as a learning opportunity. The updates are the primary artifact to support that learning.” (Source) You can also stand out to LPs by getting creative and embedding a video recording of your recent portfolio updates directly into your Updates. Open the update below to view an example of how a Visible customer incorporates video into their updates — —> View Update Example with Video Embed 3. Be authentic. Weekend Fund Advice — In general, people gravitate toward authenticity. Writing with personality is more engaging and magnetic. LP updates are an opportunity to share your unique voice and build your fund’s brand. The Weekend Fund incorporates authenticity in their updates through their narrative updates and transparency, but also by including personal photos. Visible lets you embed personal photos directly into your Update in two clicks. —> View the Weekend Fund’s Update Template 4. Don’t share sensitive information without portfolio founders’ sign-off. Weekend Fund Advice — “Fund managers often have inside knowledge into how a company is doing. Some founders are extremely sensitive to information shared about their company, even when the news is positive. It’s prudent to get approval for any non-public information shared with LPs.” Visible recommends explicitly asking for portfolio company’s permission to share information with LPs. One way to do this is by incorporating it into the descriptions of your Request blocks. (How to Build a Request in Visible). Here’s an example below — It’s important to remember that as a GP you’re not only competing with other GPs for LP capital but also with every other asset class. So it’s to your advantage to use every tool in your toolkit to stand out and impress LPs. Over 400+ VC funds are using Visible to streamline their portfolio monitoring and reporting processes.

For a bonus episode of the Founders Forward Podcast, we are joined by Mike Evans. Mike is the founder of GrubHub and the current CEO of Fixer — Fixer provides skilled experts, solving a variety of home problems in one visit. About Mike Evans Mike shares the ins and outs of his time building GrubHub — from humble beginnings in his Chicago apartment to the IPO 10+ years later. We cover everything from the difference between quitting and giving up, to building a valuable board, to raising capital, and more. Our CEO, Mike Preuss, had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Mike Evans. You can give the full episode a listen below: What you can expect to learn from Mike Evans: The difference between quitting and giving up Why Mike doesn’t like NPS as a metric How a board can be valuable How to build a list of potential investors Why cash doesn’t fix problems How to turn problems into resolutions Related Resources: Hangry: A Startup Journey Mike Evan’s personal website Building Your Ideal Investor Persona

Since the start of 2022, there have been major macroeconomic changes taking the startup world by storm. Rising inflation, paired with the tumultuous public markets (especially in the technology sector), has made its way downstream to startup fundraising. As the team at OpenView Ventures put it, “For operators, this has led to whiplash from grow at all costs to cut at all costs.” We partnered with OpenView Ventures for the 2022 SaaS Benchmarks Survey. The main takeaway? Nearly every company is cutting spend, regardless of how much cash they have in the bank. Valuations are also changing. In 2021, valuations were largely based on growth rates for the next 12 months. However, there has been a transition to public valuations being based on the “Rule of 40.” Put simply, the rule of 40 means a company’s YoY revenue growth % + profit margin % should exceed 40. As the team at OpenView points out, “For companies with ARR below $10M, Rule of 40 can vary widely from quarter to quarter. Achieving 40 each quarter is not required. But, it is required to have a grasp on what caused a drop or spike, and what can be done to get to 40 long term.” Learn how you can calculate, and automate, the rule of 40 using Visible below: 1. Track Revenue First things first, to calculate the rule of 40 you need to know your revenue for multiple years (or periods). You can enter this into Visible manually or using 1 of our integrations (likely Google Sheets, Xero, or QuickBooks). Once you have your revenue # in Visible, we’ll automatically calculate your growth % (more on this in step 3). 2. Track or Calculate Profit Margin % Next, you’ll want to make sure you have the necessary metrics in Visible to track your profit margin %. If you are using one of our accounting integrations (like Xero or QBO), or tracking this in a Google Sheet, you’ll be able to automatically bring this in. If you’re starting from scratch, you’ll simply need your revenue and COGs (or Gross Profit). Once you have your Revenue + COGs metrics in Visible, you’ll be able to calculate it using our formula builder. The formula for Profit Margin % is = Profit Margin % = ((Revenue – COGs)/Revenue) x 100 Which will look like the following in Visible: 3. Calculate Rule of 40 Now that we have Revenue and our Profit Margin %, we just need to add the two together. We’ll create a new formula shown below (Note: we’ll want to make sure we are using the annual change % insight for Revenue — this is automatically calculated): 4. Chart & Share Once your formula is set up, it will automatically be calculated as new data enters Visible. From here, you can chart and share your Rule of 40 using Updates and Dashboards — check out an example below: Track your key metrics, update investors, and raise capital all from one platform. Give Visible a free try for 14 days here. Related resource: The Only Financial Ratios Cheat Sheet You’ll Ever Need

The world has been consumed by data and metrics — startups are no exception. Founders need to leverage their key data and KPIs to fuel growth, build products, create interest from potential investors, and more. At Visible, we have a tool built for VC funds to collect data from their portfolio companies and enable GPs to report to their investors (LPs). In order to better help founders determine what metrics they should be tracking, we analyzed our data and found the most common metrics VCs are collecting from their portfolio companies. Check them out below: The Most Common Metrics Revenue Cash Headcount Customers / Users Total Operating Expenses The 5 metrics above are high level metrics that might sound obvious. However, great founders are able to recall them at anytime. Not knowing your key operating metrics is a ????. These can be used as the backbone for investor updates, board meetings, and determining more granular metrics to track. P.S. 75% of investors are collecting anywhere between 1 and 10 metrics so chances are your own investor updates should land in the same range. Reading List Key Insights from High Alpha’s Finance Leaders The team at High Alpha shares key takeaways from the finance leaders in their portfolio — they share why efficiency metrics are key in the current market, how data storytelling can be a differentiator, and more. Read more Time to Refine Your Metrics: Defining Growth and Success at a PLG Company Mikaela Gluck of OpenView Ventures highlights the key metrics that product-led companies should be tracking. Read more 6 Metrics Every Startup Founder Should Track On the Visible Blog, we share 6 basic metrics that every founder be tracking and sharing with their stakeholders. Read more

Founders are tasked with hundreds of responsibilities when starting a business. On top of hiring, financing, and building their product, early-stage founders are generally responsible for developing initial strategies — this includes the earliest sales and market strategies. In this article, we will look to help you craft a successful SaaS sales strategy. We’ll highlight the elements you will want to think of when you start to build your sales motion. This will help your team to understand how to measure the number of potential customers in your pipeline and the growth potential you might see in your revenue numbers. How are SaaS sales different from other types of sales? Like any sales strategy, it is important to start with the basics when looking at a SaaS sales strategy. At the top of your funnel, you have marketing leads that likely find your brand via content, word of mouth, paid ads, your own product, etc. From here, leads are moved through the funnel. In the middle, SaaS companies can leverage email campaigns, events, product demos, etc. to move leads to the bottom of their funnel. However, as the SaaS buying experience takes place fully online — sales and marketing organizations can be creative with their approach. The online experience allows companies to track more robust data than ever before. Additionally, SaaS products have turned into their own growth levers as well — the ability to manipulate pricing and plans has led to the ability for companies to leverage their own product for growth. Related Resource: How SaaS Companies Can Best Leverage a Product-led Growth Strategy The online presence and emergence of product-led growth have led to new sales strategies unique to SaaS companies. Learn more below: 3 Popular SaaS sales models There are countless ways to structure your Saas sales strategy. For the sake of this post, we’ll focus on 3 of the most popular strategies. Learn more about the self-service model, transactional model, and enterprise sales model below: Related Resource: The SaaS Business Model: How and Why it Works Self-service model The self-service model allows prospects to become customers without communicating with your team. As put by the team at ProductLed, “A SaaS self-serve model is exactly what it sounds like. Rather than rely on a dedicated Sales team to prospect, educate, and close sales, you design a system that allows customers to serve themselves. The quality of the product itself does all the selling.” This strategy is typically best for a strong and simple product that typically has a lower contract size. Transactional sales model The transactional model allows you to create income-generating actions where prospects have to become a customer at that point in time. This requires transactional sales models to have high-volume sales that can be supported by a strong sales and customer support team. Enterprise sales model The enterprise model is a strategy to sell more robust software packages to corporations – you will need baked-in features in a prepackaged manner to sell to a fellow business. Enterprise sales is the model that shares the most similarities with a traditional B2B sales funnel. Inbound vs outbound sales In a Saas sales funnel, you are constantly looking to consistently fill your sales funnel with fresh prospects. Once you have prospects you will look to find which prospects are worthy of being qualified and have a high likelihood of converting so you can spend your time communicating with those high-quality prospects. There are two popular strategies for creating fresh prospects that would be defined as inbound and outbound sales strategies. Inbound sales is when you invest in marketing to create prospects reaching out to you – fresh prospects reaching out to your business to ask about your software product. As put by the team at HubSpot: “Inbound sales organizations use a sales process that is personalized, helpful, and directly focused on prospects’ pain points throughout their buyer’s journey. During inbound sales, buyers move through three key phases: awareness, consideration, and decision (which we’ll discuss further below). While buyers go through these three phases, sales teams go through four different actions that will help them support qualified leads into becoming opportunities and eventually customers: identify, connect, explore, and advise.” An inbound strategy typically works best for SaaS companies that need a greater volume of customers and can nurture them and move them through their funnel at scale (e.g. self-service model) Outbound sales on the other hand are having members of your organization reach out to potential prospects to see if they would be interested in using your service. Outbound sales require highly targeted and proactive pushing of your messaging to customers. Generally, outbound sales require dedicated team members to manually prospect and reach out to potential customers. This means that outbound sales organizations do not naturally scale as well as an inbound sales organizations and will likely require a higher contract value. An enterprise model would rely heavily on Outbound sales, while a self-service business model will rely heavily on Inbound sales. The SaaS Sales Process The best Saas sales strategy will be a hybrid of inbound and outbound sales, but all of them should include a sales funnel. This funnel should have stages that help to qualify your prospects. These stages should be: Step 1: Lead generation This activity is often times a marketing activity that gives you contact or business information to explore the fit further Step 2: Prospecting This is where you develop the bio of who is the contact you are reaching out to within the organization. It is always helpful to prospect for someone who can make a buying decision Step 3: Qualifying In this step, you need to understand whether the prospect has the resources to pay for your product and the problem that your product can solve. This step is often the time for you to ask questions of your prospects Step 4: Demos and presenting This is when you will share the features and capabilities of your product with the qualified prospect. You want to show them the different features and where they can get the most value. Step 5: Closing the deal After your demo or a presenting call, the prospect should be pushed to a point where they need to make a decision on whether to buy your product. Step 6: Nurturing Once someone becomes a customer, you need to make sure to nurture them and grow your product offering with their business. This is the most difficult stage. Make sure to share your new product releases, stay in tune with how they are using your product, and build relationships with your customers. Cultivating a robust sales team To create a sustaining sales team, it is important to hire talented and tenacious people to own your sales funnel. They will need to track conversion numbers, stay organized with their outreach to prospects, and grow your funnel over time. There are three key roles within a Saas sales funnel. Those positions within your organization are: Sales development representatives (also known as business development representatives) These members of your team own lead generation, prospecting, and qualifying potential customers on your sales team. They get paid 40-60k/year depending on geographical location and experience. They should be tasked with outreach and drumming up new business. Account executives Account executives should focus on giving product demos, closing deals, and nurturing existing customers. They should be a bit more buttoned up in their approach and have a commission incentive associated with the # of accounts they manage. Sales managers/VPs Sales managers and Vice presidents of sales should take ownership of the data within your sales pipelines. Numbers like # of new leads, # of new qualified leads, # of new customers, # of churned customers, amount of new revenue, and lead to customer conversion %. Growing these sales numbers each quarter. Measuring these numbers weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Making them visible to the rest of the company regularly. 8 Key Elements of a successful SaaS sales strategy One of the most important elements of building a successful business is having a like-minded team around you to support and work with you. Make sure to align with all your team members and hire people with good work ethics and similar values of your company. A good sales team should be competitive, goal-oriented, and metric-driven. The sales managers and VPs will be really crucial in shaping the team dynamics and culture of your business. Hire great people and the numbers will take care of themselves! We’ve identified 8 elements of a successful sales strategy that every Saas sales strategy should include 1. Solidify your value proposition It is so important to understand thoroughly and communicate your product’s core value proposition. If someone decides to buy your product, they should know how to use the product and how to get the most out of it. 2. Superb communication with prospects Communication is of the utmost importance. Make sure your prospects understand your product and how it will help their business. Inform them of new product updates 3. Strategic trial periods An effective strategy is to give potential customers a free trial of your product to understand your value proposition. You want to make sure not to make this trial period too short or too long. Make it strategic so the prospect will understand the value prop but also be encouraged to make a buying decision. 4. Track the right SaaS metrics Tracking your core metrics is vital to success. See a few of those below: Customer Acquisition Cost – the amount of money it takes to acquire a new customer Customer Lifetime Value – the amount of value a customer provides your company over the course of their relationship with you as a customer. Lead velocity rate – the growth percentage of qualified leads month over month. This will help you understand how quickly you are qualifying your leads Related Resources: Our Ultimate Guide to SaaS Metrics & How To Calculate and Interpret Your SaaS Magic Number 5. Develop a sales playbook Every successful sales management team should develop a playbook on how to deploy their resources and where each team member should spend their time. Playbooks are often thought of in sports terms, but they also work wonders in the business world. They will help you do things efficiently and effectively. 6. Set effective sales goals How many new customers does your business hope to bring in next month? This is an important question and one your whole sales team should understand and work towards! 7. Utilize the right tools to enhance the process Your team should have all the resources at their disposal to communicate effectively and track their metrics. As you build out your strategy and team, be sure to give them all possible resources at their disposal. There are tons of great tools out there for teams to make the most out of their time and have direct methods of communication with customers and one another. 8. Establish an effective customer support program A huge part of an effective sales strategy is welcoming potential customers and making sure your existing customers are not forgotten about. When customers reach out, it is important to talk and listen to their issues. Understand what they are needing so your product can continue to evolve. Make sure anyone getting introduced to your product will also have the information they need to use your product successfully. It might be helpful to include this member of your team in your sales meetings and keep them informed as to messaging and efforts for growth! Generate support for your startup with Visible Developing a successful SaaS sales strategy is not an easy task. It will take a hybrid approach of many of the elements listed in this article and will need attentive members of your team to nurture it and test new things. We created Visible to help founders have a better chance for success. Stay in the loop with the best resources to build and scale your startup with our newsletter, the Visible Weekly — subscribe here. Related resource: Lead Velocity Rate: A Key Metric in the Startup Landscape

Last week we covered how many investors founders need in their fundraising pipeline. When communicating with 50+ investors during a fundraise, founders need a system to track and manage their ongoing investor conversations. Default Properties At Visible, we help founders do just this with our Fundraising CRM. Like any CRM, we offer default properties for investor contacts (e.g. potential investment amount, star rating, contact date, follow up date, etc). Popular Custom Properties In addition to the default properties, founders are using custom properties to match their fundraising efforts — check out the most common custom properties below to see how other founders are keeping tabs on their pipeline: Min & Max Check Size — In addition to our default check size property, we are seeing founders track min and max check size amount to get a more accurate look at where their round stands. Connection — Warm introductions are valuable when fundraising. Founders are tracking who made/can make an introduction. Data Room Shared — If a founder is moving an investor down their fundraising funnel, chances are a data room will be shared. In order to keep track of who has access, founders are creating a yes/no property to track who has access. Investor Type — We are seeing founders track the type of investor to have a better look at the mix of investors in their pipeline — e.g. strategic, existing, lead, etc. Will They Lead — Finding a lead investor is a must for a fundraise. Keeping an eye on lead investors is a surefire way to help founders stay focused on the right investors. Of course, these are just a few of the custom properties founders are using — we’ve even seen a few founders track an investor’s favorite sports team or personal interests. Learn more about our Fundraising CRM and give it a try below: Learn More Reading List Level up Your Fundraising Process with Email Syncing In order to best help founders stay on top of their raise, we recently launched a BCC tool to help founders sync emails from outside Visible to the respective investor record in Visible. Read more A Guide to Seed Fundraising The team at Y Combinator shares an in-depth guide covering the ins and outs of raising a seed round. Read more Seamlessly Manage Relationships with an Investor CRM On the Visible blog, we break down what founders should look for in an investor CRM and fundraising tracking tool. Read more