Operations

A couple weeks ago, I attended High Alpha’s marketing forum and was reminded by one of the speakers of the simple, yet remarkable function of all marketing efforts: enable sales to close more deals. That doesn’t mean marketing plays a subservient role when sitting at the table with sales executives, but it does serve a measurable purpose and it’s time marketing is held to a regular revenue commitment. So how do we help marketing help sales? Specific directives and clear goals. Here are some questions you need to ask your team to make sure they’re moving in the right direction. Is your content really king? Easily one of the greatest tools marketing can provide sales with is valuable, in-depth content that establishes the company as an authority and the product as a solution. eBooks, articles, emails and infographics can all play a vital role in properly educating the prospect and getting them comfortable with the buy. You must evaluate your current deliverables and decide if your sales team is being armed with the necessary ammo to hit their targets. Are you communicating clearly with prospects? Having the right content will keep the message clear and help your customers understand the product’s value while they’re not on the phone. But are they hearing the right message when it comes to demos and closing calls? That’s not only the responsibility of the sales team. Marketing reps should be sitting in on calls, stationed near the sales team and developing materials to improve communication in the sales process. Creatives should be helping with email communications and even provide some coaching with sales development reps (SDRs) and account executives (AEs) to help develop the right language that gets clients to commit. How do you measure if it’s working? Your marketing efforts should be every bit as accountable to quarterly goals as sales employees. Look at these data points—and more at Hubspot—to measure if they are making headway on their enablement efforts. Content production goals Quality content drives real results. But everyone has to hit numbers, right? Your marketing team should deliver quality at scale and hit regular production goals. Not only does it help predict traffic, boost SEO and create inbound leads, but it also helps the sales staff how many new assets they’ll have to dangle in front of potential clients. Sales team NPS Survey your sales team like you would any customer. Figure out if they are able to use marketing’s efforts to close deals easier. Is their feedback being considered? Does the content being created truly demonstrate value and explain the ways a customer’s pain points? If your sales team isn’t comfortable with the deliverables, your organization won’t maximize the value of your communications strategy and cause a riff that prevents true marketing-sales alignment. Other metrics to evaluate conversions Marketing is far from the only department that chips into sales enablement. The following metrics will help you measure marketing’s impact on sales enablement, but take into account that many other factors will move these metrics. Measure lead-to-customer conversion rate of marketing qualified leads Measuring lead-to-customer conversion rate help identify the success of a given channel. Marketing is no different. Evaluate the performance of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to check the effectiveness of your inbound efforts. Finding a drop in this number over time can signal a drop in the quality of content (and vice versa for improvement) or determine if a change in messaging has brought in a crew of unqualified prospects. Measure revenue per lead As we’ve mentioned before, revenue per lead is really important to track. Use the following formula to figure it out: Revenue Generated/Number of Leads = RPL RPL helps to determine if your funnel is healthy and your leads are quality. This is also a great way to check if leads are being converted well and if not, it might be time to refigure the enablement efforts. Earning more revenue on each lead can be one of the strongest indicators of a startup that’s growing right. Are you beating your competitors? One of the metrics that can truly determine if your startup is healthy and your sales team well-equipped is a good win/loss rate against your competition. You may feel your content delivers better quality and the messaging is clear, but if it isn’t providing the winning differentiator that edges out the competition, marketing efforts may be the problem. Tally these columns and share it with your team each month and tweak communications as necessary. Related Resource: What Should be in an Investor Data Room?

When your startup hits growth stage, scaling the number of sales from channel partners is a no-brainer. For one, the customer acquisition costs are lower. A 2014 survey showed that companies spent about $0.53 for every $1 it attracted in new annual contract value (ACV)—almost half of what is spent on field sales: $1.02. Sales from channel partners also allow you to secure deals without scaling staff. Furthermore, your partners are likely hitting different customer and geographies. As Tomasz Tunguz notes, new channels diversify acquisition efforts “insulating the bookings number from the episodic underperformance typical of a single channel go-to-market.” That produces more predictable revenue and a greater multiple when you’re ready to raise money or sell the company. At first look, growing partner sales seems like the closest thing to a magic bullet. But your channel partners will not simply provide passive income. In order to achieve efficient and effective growth, start by interrogating your reselling efforts with the following questions: Are you actually securing more deals each quarter? It’s a simple question but one that needs to be quantified and shown to investors each quarter. Your partners need to produce and make reselling an indispensable part of your growth strategy. But if you’re just starting to create your first partnerships, this won’t come easy. Channel sales for partnerships require a lot of work upfront to get going. Be clear with investors when you embark on a reselling program that you need time to train your new partners. Nevertheless, after a few quarters, it’ll be time to show the program is working. Jim Somers at Openview has a great list of metrics for judging your partners. Here are some numbers he recommends for founders to record: How many partner deals are currently registered? What is the deal registration value? How many deals have been accepted/denied? How many deals have been won and lost? What is the value of the deals won? What is the deal velocity? Are you training partners properly? You can’t ignore your partners and expect the deal cash to flow. Channel partners may have experience in your industry or even share a similar business model, but will still need as much training like any account executives. “Developing reseller channels do require building a dedicated internal team to cultivate relationships, educate resellers, align internal and external incentives, and ensure success,” Tomasz Tunguz wrote. David Skok recommends creating marketing materials and programs specifically for channel partners to use. Sometimes, your staff will even have to convince your partners to help out with webinars and events to share these marketing efforts. Two things Somers recommends keeping tracking of is the number of courses your partners have attended and the number of training courses your partners have actually completed. Are your partners improving? Your partners have different priorities and, if the company is at a later stage, a different pace of business. It’s your job to prove the value in their participation and create a reason for them to be a better partner. You also need to figure out how to hold them accountable. “Establish partner quotas,” Jim Somers writes. “Both the supplier and the partner to agree to revenue goals and the required investment each must bring forward to be successful.” Assess your sales and training partner metrics and determine how you can improve each partner. Are they attending enough training sessions? What’s there close rate? Could their attempts be improved with more customized marketing materials? Working closely with your partners that are slumping will require a time investment but can pay off huge dividends in the long run. Moving a second-rate partner to a first-rate reseller can be as easy as looking at what’s worked for your top performer and figuring out to replicate the process. If a couple strategies don’t pay off, it’s worth both your time to end the partnership and move on. Are you adding partners? Treat your referral channels are an extension of your product. With new partners you have to test, measure and determine which fail and which scale. Provide incentives for your internal team to research new partners and develop leads. Measure the amount of leads generated, meetings set and deals made just like you would for your field sales squad. Scaling your sales from new partners protects you against saturation from other partner’s markets or a lackluster few quarters from otherwise reliable resellers. By going through this exercise each quarter and answering these questions, you’ve provided a framework for growing your partner channel, improving results with consistent focus on training and measuring any potential weak points that can be fixed or abandoned. If reselling is one of the most efficient ways to scale, evaluating the results and adjusting for future performance is one of the best ways to spend your time.

Last year, we put together a list of 17 startup newsletters that people here on the Visible team read and love. In one way or another, each of those newsletters helps to inform our decision-making around strategy and product or features content that we find generally entertaining and insightful. Related Resources: Our 15 Favorite Newsletters for Startup Founders The 16 Best Startup Newsletters In the months since, we have come across a few more newsletters that have quickly become can’t miss material for us each week. Snippets from Social Capital As a firm, Social Capital focuses on backing companies solving big problems. Snippets, their weekly newsletter surfaces content to help readers learn more about those big areas – like healthcare, education, and technology’s impact on society. The Ringer While the newsletter from Bill Simmons’ new venture, The Ringer, doesn’t even remotely focus on product or business – like his old site, Grantland, it focuses on the intersection of sports and pop culture – it does allow the reader to follow along with how one of the media world’s more interesting thinkers is going about building something from the ground up (albeit with an existing audience of millions). UX Design Weekly Kenny Chen’s newsletter is pretty simple — which any good UX designer knows is important. The best UX focused content from around the web sent out weekly. The list includes articles, tools, resources, and even portfolios to help readers advance their understanding of how to build usable products. L2 News – The Daily & The Week, Winners & Losers If you follow our blog, you know we love the stuff produced by L2 Digital and include videos and images from their reports in a lot of our posts. The firm focuses on benchmarking the performance of firms in the digital space — for example, how effective are Nike’s Ecommerce efforts vs. competitors — and their newsletters deliver all of that great content right to your inbox. Farnam Street Brain Food The Farnam Street Blog is difficult to describe succinctly. Basically, founder Shane Parrish has tried to build a site that pulls together great resources to make readers smarter and better. Decision-making, mental models, leadership, innovation…these are all topics that the blog touches on. The newsletter distills the best stuff from the site each week. Paul Singh’s Weekly Newsletter Over the years, Singh has worked on both sides of the table – founding multiple companies and working as a partner at 500 Startups. Since selling his most recent company, Disruption Corp., to 1776, Singh has built a community around his newsletter, where he shares 10 or so links that he and his community loved in the last week. And since you made it all the way to the end…we’d love to have you check out our little newsletter, The Visible Foreword. We generally send stuff twice per week. On Wednesdays, we share a new investor letter and over the weekend we provide some commentary on what we launched, learned, wrote, and thought about during the week.

“ As a founder, there is no variable more important to manage adeptly than momentum” – Glenn Solomon, GGV Settling on a single definition for “momentum” in an early stage business is difficult. There is product momentum — delivering on the value proposition you promise to existing and potential customers time and time again. There is team and hiring momentum — fostering a culture that effectively attracts and retains great people. There is revenue momentum – building a predictable growth engine that targets the right segment of the market and packages your solution effectively over time. There is fundraising momentum – regularly engaging with current and potential investors to gauge the market and lay the groundwork for future fundraising events. All of these different momentum subsets contribute to the overall momentum (and long-term success) of a business. But how should a Founder prioritize these (and other types of) momentum? After all, if any of these processes lag for too long, the company is likely to fail. The 1 Weird Momentum Trick! Notice the words we used above to explain different types of momentum a CEO needs to manage: “Time and time again…” “Predictable growth engine…” “Regularly engaging…” All of these hint at the single best way to make sure you are successful managing your company’s momentum: Consistency. Stakeholders – your team, your customers, your investors – need to know that you, as CEO, are doing something every single day to push the ball forward in each of those areas. Leveraging Your Time to Build Momentum Understanding that you should be trying to move the needle in each of these areas each day is the easy part. Now, where will the time to actually deliver on that commitment come from? Trying to micromanage every process in your company is a recipe for disaster – you lose the trust of the your team (which you were trying to gain by touching every project) and the context switching saps you of energy and limits your effectiveness. To most effectively leverage your time, think of the momentum management process like a flywheel: We often talk on this blog about the two types of resources a business has – talent and capital. By focusing first and primarily on the attraction and retention of those two areas each day, you leverage the impact you can make on the momentum of your company. Great people build great products and bring them to market. Those results compound over time and become visible to new talent and capital. That new capital enables new growth strategies and more hiring and those new people step in to execute on the expanded mission. It is the virtuous cycle of startup momentum.

Our First Time on Product Hunt Back in the beginning days of 2014 Ryan Hoover shot me an email asking me to do an AMA on ProductHunt –at the time I still think it was a side project. (I’m user 1,077 #humblebrag) I’m a sucker for product and community so was happy to help out. Also file Ryan’s email under things that don’t scale and how to build a community. We launched Visible 1.0 on Product Hunt January 3, 2014, you can see the post and AMA here. The post got 93 upvotes I think we were near the top but honestly can’t recall. We got some nice inbound from the post, definitely our largest day of traffic for Visible to that point. I don’t have any hard data on signups but do have the old app and marketing site Google Analytics profile. Fast forward 593 Days. Our Visible 2.0 release was featured on Product Hunt (find it here). We got 290 upvotes, finished 10th overall (the top hunt had 963 votes for reference) and we got 67 companies to sign up and become active on Visible. That number is impressive because we have a high barrier for a company to become active on Visible. The day we were featured also ended up being our highest trafficked day in our marketing site’s history. Product Hunt referrals ended up over 235% from the first feature 593 days ago. Other Notes: While I’m incredibly impressed by the traffic and growth Product Hunt sent and the growth of the community, I thought the number was a little low. There are some factors like us not being in the Top 3, we didn’t heavily market it, etc. However, after some quick digging I remembered that Product Hunt used to directly send you to a Hunt URL. This is represented as a “/” in the Referral Path in GA. Today it takes an additional click on the “Get it” to get to a hunt. This totally makes as they want you to stay in the PH community, engage, etc. I’d be curious what would happen if they still directly sent you to the site! Feel free to email me any questions about launching on Product Hunt. Up & To the Right! Mike

Earlier this year, we asked top early stage investors for their opinions on the future of accelerators and their answers stood in stark contrast to their views on the rest of the market. While they were optimistic on the general state and future of the early stage market (although the Series A crunch worried many), their outlook on accelerators was overwhelmingly bearish. Image via Q1 2015 Sentiment Index Report – Download for Free Here After receiving funding from accelerators, companies often receive their next round of funding from seed stage firms, the so called “Micro VCs”. Firms of this type had a record year of fundraising in 2014, meaning that plenty of capital is available in the market for companies at the stage. However, this doesn’t mean that the fundraising process is any easier for accelerator backed companies than it is for ones that haven’t gone through a program. In fact, because of the way perceptions are forming among later stage investors, it may be getting harder “There are too many incubators and that has hurt them all. Too many entrepreneurs think if they get into an incubator they have accomplished something. They haven’t. It’s a false sense of confidence. Call it incubator inflation.” – Mark Cuban in a 2014 Triangle Business Journal interview Last week in Montreal, our team attended AcceleratorFest, held a day before the well known StartupFest that draws in top entrepreneurs and investors from across the globe. Sustainability seemed to be on the minds of many at the event, with a panel focused on the topic as well as separate breakouts intended to help facilitate discussion among industry leaders around what approaches and platforms can help contribute to the long term success of a nascent accelerator. Related resource: The Top 16 Accelerators Powering Startup Growth 1. Understand what value you are adding to the companies entering your program The world and it’s high growth companies don’t need another one size fits all accelerator. This is something that was clear in our earlier survey of investors and also to conference attendees. Without a world class brand behind it (see: YCombinator) an accelerator with too wide of a focus will only end up getting second tier companies in their respective industries and verticals. 500Startups, whose Elizabeth Yin was a speaker at the conference, has carved out a successful niche by helping companies focus on product distribution and growth. They have done this by developing a strong set of subject matter experts and a quantifiable framework that companies follow throughout the program. (AARRR) Companies enter the 500Startups program knowing that they are going learn how to more effectively acquire customers and the firm delivers on it promise. Another example of this targeted approach is the Fashion Technology Accelerator. With offices in San Francisco, Milan, and Seoul, they are able to expose companies to the world’s hubs of high technology and high fashion, helping form valuable connections with suppliers, distributers, and technical talent. Related Reading: What is an Incubator? 2. Prioritize alignment among all of your key stakeholders One thing that is not often discussed is the importance of understanding the motivations (and performance) of everyone involved in your program – companies, LPs, mentors and your own team. Successful alignment comes from being able to successfully tell the story around the purpose of your firm as well as the performance of the companies in your programs. Your goals as an accelerator leader dictate the story you tell to the LPs funding your accelerator as well as to the companies you are targeting. Once companies are in your program, the focus shifts to empowering the founding teams to understand and tell the story around their key data. This helps increase the odds of success in post-program fundraising and supplies you with the information you need to keep your own backers engaged in your progress. Alignment from top to bottom (and bottom to top) drives sustainability. 3. Build a “Startup Compost” In the aforementioned panel on sustainability in the accelerator market, Sylvain Carle of Montreal-based accelerator Founder’s Fuel coined a new term to help program leaders understand how they should work most effectively with the companies in their programs that will inevitably fail. He calls it “Startup Composting”. Accelerators spend a lot of time (and money) educating founding teams and setting them up for future success. Unfortunately, that success often comes too far in the future for the accelerator to see much benefit. To run an effective “Startup Composting” program, it is crucial to understand exactly how all of your companies are performing (both while in the program and after) so that you can help teams understand when it may be time to pivot to a new business model or think about blowing things up and either starting fresh or joining forces with one of your other teams whose company is on a more likely path to success.

Software Stack for Investors Every week our team collectively talks to hundreds of investors and startups. We frequently hear about the tools they are using and the tools they would love to have. We also get a lot of people asking for our opinion on what CRM they should be using or wondering what Investor Y is using for their back office. Over time we’ve saved all of these data points and have created the tech investing “software stack”. It buckets various products into categories such as CRM, Databases, Back Office, etc. Find it below! Please note: the logo sizes or hierarchy don’t reflect company size, performance, etc. Want the PDF version? You can download it here. Think we missed something and want to see it added? Mention us and the post at @VisibleVC

For people involved in the world of startups, determining what content sources to trust and what outlets to read can be a daunting task. Tech blogs, company blogs, VC blogs, Medium. Add to that the fact that people at early-stage companies tend to wear multiple hats and are looking for tips and tactics to help them excel in all of their roles and it seems like the firehose of information never stops. So how do you separate the signal from the noise and make sure you aren’t spending all of your time finding good stuff to read instead of taking action on the learnings? Related Resources: Our 15 Favorite Newsletters for Startup Founders, 6 More Great Startup Newsletters, How To Write the Perfect Investor Update (Tips and Templates) Startup newsletters are a great place to start and we have put together a list of some of our favorites to help you spend less time browsing for content and more time learning from peers and others with something interesting and important to say. Industry News & Curated Reading Lists First Round Review Whether your job is to build product, make sales, build community or do just about anything else that comes with building an early-stage company, you will find the First Round Review extremely useful. By using stories from First Round portfolio companies, the First Round review shares valuable lessons and does so with high production quality. Why We Love this Newsletter We love the First Round Review because of the first-hand stories. The team surveys and interviews the best leaders in the space to uncover stories and strategies to help startups at any stage grow. SaaS Weekly from Hiten Shah Hiten Shah is the founder of CrazyEgg and KISSmetrics (and now a startup podcast co-hosted with Close.io’s Steli Efti) so he know’s his stuff when it comes to growing a SaaS business. In his weekly newsletter, Hiten organizes SaaS focused content by category for easy reading no matter one’s job title or expertise. Why We Love this Newsletter Hiten offers a great look into the SaaS world by drawing on his own experiences from building some of the most successful Saas companies. Related resource: 11 Top Industry Events for SaaS Startups Benedict Evans’ Newsletter As Benedict Evans, a Partner at a16z puts it, the newsletter (delivered every Sunday) covers interesting developments in tech and mobile (globally) along with commentary on what it means for the market. Why We Love this Newsletter Benedict Evans is a bonafied thoughtleader in the space and offers good insights into the market in general as well as macro trends. Work-Bench Enterprise Weekly With links, events, and funding rounds focused specifically on the sector, the Enterprise Weekly – produced by venture fund and startup community Work-Bench out of New Your City – gives you everything you need to stay up to speed on the world of enterprise tech. Why We Love this Newsletter The Work-Bench Enterprise Weekly newsletter covers all things related to the enterprise world. They offer resources and insights as well as recent news and fundings in the space. The Visible Weekly Newsletter We search the web for the best tips to attract, engage and close investors, then deliver them to thousands of inboxes every week. We share everything to help founders succeed — everything from fundraising to mental health. Subscribe here. Why We Love this Newsletter We might be bias (as the Visible Weekly is our newsletter!) but we pride ourselves on curating the best content from investors and founders in the startup space to help founders grow their business. The Founder Playbook by Hustle Fund As put by the team at Hustle Fund, “The Founder Playbook is all about tactics. Specifically, tactics around fundraising and growing your startup. We cover things like: What metrics you should know before you pitch an investor How to grow an audience when you don’t even have a product yet And how to write a kickass cold email” Why We Love this Newsletter The team at Hustle Fund are well rounded in all things growth and fundraising. The Founder Playbook is full of some of our favorite fundraising tips as well as growth strategies for early stage startups. The Hustle The Hustle is full of trending topics in the tech space. While not the strategic advice that other newsletters on this list offers, The Hustle offers compelling stories and trends in the space. Why We Love this Newsletter The Hustle has the scoop on some of the most insightful, and entertaining, stories in the tech space. By having a pulse on the space, you’ll be able to better understand macro trends. Startup Funding & Venture Capital Newsletters CB Insights High-quality, data-driven insight into what is happening in the world of early-stage funding and company building, always delivered with a bit of an edge and a dash of humor. The CB Insights Newsletter is packed with sector specific research, breakdowns on emerging markets and companies, and insight into how the early-stage market is transforming. Why We Love this Newsletter The CB Insights is full of data-driven stories written with a level of humor. The daily newsletter is packed full of data, stories, and trends in specific sectors. StrictlyVC Interviews, funding updates, news on key personnel developments at top companies. StrictlyVC gives you a concise daily rundown of everything that you need to know about what is happening in the startup and venture world. Why We Love this Newsletter StrictlyVC is our go-to newsletter when it comes to news with startup fundings and acquisitions. The daily newsletter highlights any new fundings, acquisitions, and hits on major stories. Term Sheet While Term Sheet, from Fortune’s Dan Primack, tends to focus more on the growth stage and private equity markets, it is still a crucial bit of reading every weekday morning. Know what companies raised, who the new funds on the block are, and understand how developments in other stages of the private markets could impact your business. Why We Love this Newsletter Similar to StrictlyVC, we love Term Sheet because of the quick hits on news and the reliable data on funding and acquisition news. Growth & Marketing Newsletters TenSpeed Newsletter TenSpeed helps companies growth with content marketing and SEO. As they put on their website, “Every month, we share tactical advice on one topic, plus the best of our blog content and latest podcast episodes, all in one place. Take your content marketing efforts the extra mile by signing-up below.” Why We Love this Newsletter The teammembers at TenSpeed are total pros in all things content marketing. Their monthly newsletter comes full of indepth resources and guides to help take your content marketing to the next level. Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged Kyle Poyar is a partner at OpenView Ventures. Kyle has been a huge proponent of product led growth and uses his newsletter to share new learnings and insights from his own research and portfolio companies. Why We Love this Newsletter Kyle Poyar offers some of the best advice when it comes to product led growth for SaaS companies. The newsletter is full of strategic advice to help SaaS companies fuel growth. The Blend by The Juice The Juice is the world’s largest library of sales and marketing resources. As a team that curates the best growth content, their newsletter is full of their favorite takeaways and lessons in content marketing. Why We Love this Newsletter With a skilled team of marketers, the team at The Juice puts together great insights when it comes to all things content marketing. Design & UX Newsletters Sidebar A simple concept…the 5 best design links, in your inbox, every single day. No fluff, just a quick, easy way to receive a curated list of interesting articles, videos and projects about the world of design. Why We Love this Newsletter The Sidebar newsletter is a great daily newsletter to stay up to date with the best in design. The newsletter is simple and easy to digest. InVision Weekly Digest InVision is an indispensable tool for many designers, product people and marketers. With a subscription base of over 800,000 designers, the same can be said for their weekly newsletter, which shares useful tactics for creating better products and give a behind the scenes look at how some of the world’s best design teams bring ideas from concept to market. Why We Love this Newsletter As one of the most popular design tools, the team at InVision is full of insights and tactics that are useful to seasoned designers or founders doubling as a designer in the early days. One Design Company Weekly One Design Company is a Chicago-based design, strategy and development agency that puts out an awesome weekly email packed with fun links, food for thought and some of the most useful posts on design and development from around the web. Why We Love this Newsletter The One Design Company newsletter offers fun and insightful posts on design and development that will keep any designer engaged. Subscribe to the Visible Weekly Newsletter Today Building a startup is difficult. Turning to the resources, leaders, and peers that have been there before is a great way to learn on the fly. To stay up to date with what our favorite investors and founders are staying in the space, subscribe to the Visible Weekly. Related Resource: 10 Foodtech Venture Capital Firms Investing in Food Innovation We search the web for the best tips to attract, engage and close investors, then deliver them to thousands of inboxes every week.

If you are anything like our team here at Visible, you bookend your days at the office with StrictlyVC and the Mattermark Daily. Over time, both have proven to be extremely useful sources of startup content – StrictlyVC opens things up with the day’s funding news (and great interviews) and Mattermark closes things out with thoughtful pieces from investors and operators for the ride home. Related Reading: Business Startup Advice: 15 Helpful Tips for Startup Growth Mattermark’s founder, Danielle Morrill launched the newsletter almost 2 years ago aiming “to provide a weekly rundown of interesting events, data, and insights from the startup world”. It has since turned into a daily publication that has featured over 1500 different articles from founders and investors sharing tips and insight on everything from designing products to dealing with the difficulties of running early stage companies What the Startup World Writes About | Create infographics We utilized Import.io to comb through the Mattermark Daily archives and analyze the headlines of all of the articles from over 190 editions of the Daily. Not surprisingly, words like ‘Startup’ and ‘VC’ were among the most common while the remaining words on the list paint an interesting web of all the things people in the startup ecosystem (some would say echo-chamber) think about and discuss on a daily basis. Markets and Models | Create infographics Building a company is uncharted territory for first-time founders, people early in their careers and those entering new markets or exploring new business models. Luckily for advice seekers, especially those hoping to understand and grow SaaS or Mobile businesses, there was plenty of great content to choose from. 50 Shades of Green | Create infographics How can we raise, spend and eventually make money? How come you keep asking me for money…and why aren’t you a unicorn yet? These are some of the things that founders and investors, respectively, focused on as hundreds of posts throughout the Mattermark archives feature thoughts on raising funding, exit opportunities and everything that happens in between. People | Create infographics If there is one thing we learned with this exercise, it is that VCs have a bit of a tendency to talk about themselves. Some of it is navel gazing, sure, but most provide an interesting peek behind the VC curtain or words of advice for founders looking to raise money, make key hires or scale their businesses. PG & @pmarca | Create infographics It is no surprise, with the ubiquity of YCombinator and the continually growing relevance of A16Z, that Paul Graham and Marc Andreesen share the top spot for most mentioned individuals. Add that to the list of examples showing how much weight people in the technology industry place on the opinions of top investors. Women in Tech | Create infographics Women in technology, one of the most important issues facing the industry, featured heavily in Mattermark’s archive with a primary focus on profiles and interviews of women in technology leadership positions working to inspire the next generation of female CEOs, investors, hackers and painters. Companies | Create infographics People loved writing and reading about the companies that make up the technology world, either as examples to follow or in response to various controversies or product launches. The posts from the last couple years heavily feature companies leading the growth of the early stage ecosystem (Y Combinator, Angellist, A16Z), ones embroiled in controversy on their way to massive growth (Uber & Snapchat) and one-time darlings that have since fallen on harder, or at least less rocketshippy times (Square & Foursquare). Attention Grabbers | Create infographics Want to get into the Mattermark Daily? Your best bet is to go with a ‘How to” headline. The other apparent way in is by being Tren Griffin, whose posts on lessons learned from leaders in Technology (Sheryl Sandberg & Jeff Bezos) and Finance (Warren Buffett & Ray Dalio) offer instructive frameworks for how to make decisions and build better companies which at the end of the day is what most people in the startup universe care about.

Using Software for Customer Success After a year with Visible, we’ve changed up a few pieces to work best with our team and to help scale. It’s interesting to see, over time, how the platforms change Checkout my updates below each section in Red. Something that makes me throw money at people/products/services, is the experience I have with them. Over the past several years, I have noticed the little things companies do for their customers, and own employees, to increase satisfaction via experience. What most people don’t see/understand/have patience for, are the platforms used to provide the service and experience. A great example of this is the ‘legacy’ US banking technology (which I could rant your ear off about as much as architectural facts of buildings along the Chicago river) that manages your account. This system, graciously provides the ‘awkward phone silence’ when a rep is waiting to access your account, going through level upon level of access to view your details. Over time, they have learned to fill this void with trivial conversation/up sell, to make you feel comfortable, and feel like a person who is valued. Building a smooth customer experience is not easy, so I’m going through the important factors of what [a non-engineer] calls their ‘full stack’ to provide great customer experience & service. Monitor: Customer usage is key, tracking your customer’s usage allows you to segment specific users for engagement, testing, up-selling, advocacy, etc. Monitoring usage is also one of the key pieces of information to prevent the all-commanding ‘churn’. Platform: We take this data from our back-end and plug it into our CRM (HubSpot) to filter, segment, identify, assign, etc. We also use Intercom to monitor users for ‘automated’ engagement with a personal voice. Analytics: When you’re scaling, you’re gaining lots and lots of users from your targeted funnels, and then some. Product managers are important in making sure you’re exceeding customer needs and continuing to build the envisioned features, versions, etc. Marketing managers need a ways to identify the best funnels of customer conversion and best ‘cost per acquisition’ price. Having an analytics management product allows them to find the sweet spots and make your user base grow, and stick, like crazy. Customer Success pulls these analytics to further monitor and segment users. Platform: We’re still looking at best fits, but some good ones are RJMetrics, MixPanel, and KissMetrics. Ideally will have this connected in or around our CRM. CRM: Email is something I want to get away from as fast as possible when working with customers. Yes I do sound insane, but what I mean is the traditional email platform (gmail, outlook, whatever Apple mail is called) because there is no good way to mange the customer’s account (and expectations) easily and quickly (Streak is making a hybrid that looks interesting). A good CRM makes all the difference in keeping customers engaged and happy as well as managing a team of account managers. This also keeps Sales and Account Managers from asking too many questions, creating breaks in service, on-boarding, experience, and team happiness (you know what I’m talking about). Platform: HubSpot’s new CRM is pretty slick and customizable, we’re eager to keep customizing it to fit exactly how our business model defines our customers. Engagement/Voice: This section is probably one of the most interesting and emerging of recent years. In times of past, being able to create engagement or a voice inside your software (who is old enough to remember Clippy) you would need a designer and front end developer to hash out several iterations until you had enough and waited to raised more money and hire people to complete this task. Engaging customers keeps them happy while on your app, makes them a sticky user or what I learned as a “Happy Prisoner”. This starts with the welcome, goes through on-boarding, and continues as the ‘Voice’; providing valuable content from specific triggers, advising on product/industry specific news, and providing education through knowledge base, blog, or even surveys (check out an amazing project by Brett @ Visible, the Early Stage Confidence Index for Investors). Platform: We currently use Intercom for our Engagement and Voice, we haven’t found a perfect solution for an on-boarding wizard, we’ll update when found. Incident Management/Customer Management: Most people know this part as your standard customer service platform, having a service like Zendesk to manage your inflow of customer queries and conflicts. There has been a movement away from this as an ‘additional’ product with Intercom or having it hosted in your CRM (stay tuned to see my future post “Why Account Managers should not use their email app”). The important parts are being able to reply quickly, collect customer response data, create reporting, and make better decisions (something that Intercom is currently lacking). Platform: Zendesk is known as a major player here, but others are Desk.com, Happy Fox, Fresh Desk, and Help Shift. Knowledge/Education: The tool to help scale and educate, and even more is to create advocates and emerge as an industry leader (more on this in Advocacy). You want to have something that provides easy searching, great UI, syncs really easy to your app, and is super simple to maintain (non-devs will manage this). Platform: Still looking for a good fit here, most Knowledge Base systems are normally packaged with Customer Management, so we want one piece of the package without paying for the whole thing. Advocacy/Marketing: Creating a strong following of users brings a company from ‘cult-like following’ to ‘industry leader/expert’ (Product Hunt is an amazing example). We started with content on our Twitter page and have now pushed forward with our Blog. We’re pushing through great side projects to continue our vision to bring visibility between investors and company founders. Platform: We’re using Buffer to manage our social media posts and have our blog hosted on WordPress Over time, we expect to change a few platforms, build internal tools, and condense the amount of 3rd party applications we use to keep our customers happy. I will say that a secret sauce for a non-technical operator is Zapier (saved this for the readers who actually made it this far into my ‘essay’) which makes me scale my processes like never before.

At Visible, we talk every day with founders and early-stage investors from around the world and have found a few key themes emerge in our discussions: Founder frustration with investors who don’t deliver on their promises – the connections they say they will make and the expertise they say they will offer Investor frustration with founders who go off the grid, only to emerge and make “asks” when it is too late to save a project or company Blame being placed by people on both sides of the table instead of analyzing the root cause of the relationship breakdown Fortunately, the venture platform model (also called network or community model in some places) has become more and more pervasive, indicating an increasing desire by investors to put more “walk” behind their value-add “talk” and a desire by companies to work with investors that embrace this strategy. The success of firms like First Round and Andreessen Horowitz, in both returns and mindshare, is a testament to this trend. For the uninitiated, Frontline VC’s Kim Pham recently wrote a great primer on the subject. At its core, the venture platform model is focused on helping companies and investors get back to building businesses by using transparency as a tool (TaaT) to unlock growth that would have otherwise not been possible. In many ways, it means proactively opening the network communication bottlenecks that can prevent strong venture communities from coming into existence organically. Companies want engaged investors and investors want to stay up to date on a company’s progress in order to make good on the expertise and connections they promised prior to wiring the money. So if both sides understand the importance of keeping lines of communication open and subscribe to the idea of the venture platform model as a way to accelerate growth, why is the ball still being dropped time and time again? Not realizing that habits form early – in companies and in their relationships with investors Term sheets are signed, money is wired and the company building can begin in haste. Unfortunately, a lot of investors and founders forget to set up front expectations for how the relationship will work apart from “please help me return capital to my LPs”. When there are one or two investors on a cap table, inbound requests don’t seem so daunting. When you raise your seed round and add 6 more investors, then a Series A with 3 others, the inbound requests become extremely distracting and pull you away from things like product, sales and hiring. Spending a few minutes each month putting together your investor updates can help you get some of that time back. Better yet, they tend to gain momentum as positive reinforcement – in the shape of more intros from the network and expertise assistance from investors – starts pouring in. Thinking it is too late to start When investors see a portfolio of 10, 20, 50 companies across multiple funds it can be easy to start thinking that things, from a portfolio communication perspective, are too far gone. They prefer to “wait for the next fund or accelerator class” to get started which sounds a lot like the way people who need to get back to the gym sound after their new years resolution wears off. Biting off little pieces – again, same principle as getting back in shape – is a great way to start. As an investor you have inbound requests to meet your companies and outbound desires to make the right introductions. Having all of your key investment data in one place pays huge dividends by saving time and mental overhead and truly leveraging the power of the network you have built up. The oft-used proverb about the best time to plant a tree comes to mind here. Visible: More time for more important things That means less time spent copy and pasting messages to three four or different investors. It means not having to dig through a Dropbox, email and Excel each time someone needs info on one of your portfolio companies. It means getting back to the business of building businesses. If you need some inspiration, our reading list is a great place to start. We’ve collected some of the best advice from around the investor community and continue to update it as new posts and content roll in (Note: everything you see there – reporting metrics, templates, etc. can be setup and tracked quickly and easily through Visible). If you have any questions about getting started, feel free to get in touch.