Operations

A psychology professor and director of Resilience Research at the Appalachian Center, Dr. Sherry Hamby says that sharing stories of personal struggles can make you more resilient and other people more empathetic. Business leaders have also learned that sharing company growth stories can build an emotional connection that helps attract and retain customers, talent, and investors. There is endless content for telling a compelling story to your customers and team. However, we’ve found investors are often left out of the storytelling framework. We set our sites on two business greats that have become synonymous with using investor letters as a powerful storytelling platform; Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos. Stay Focused on Your North Star Apart from the desks made of doors, trendy sunglasses, and HQ2, Jeff Bezos has become identified with his original 1997 shareholder letter. To this day, Amazon still includes a copy of the 1997 shareholder letter with each annual letter. So what sets it apart and makes it arguably the most famous shareholder letter to date? According to Tomasz Tunguz, Amazon’s competitive advantage started the day their first shareholder letter was published. Jeff has since remained focused on their “North Star”; customer obsession. Bezos has been able to center every annual letter around their “customer obsession” and simply changes the narrative and storyline. In 1997, it started with e-commerce and saving customers time & money, “Today, online commerce saves customers money and precious time. Tomorrow, through personalization, online commerce will accelerate the very process of discovery. Amazon.com uses the Internet to create real value for its customers and, by doing so, hopes to create an enduring franchise, even in established and large markets.” Almost 20 years later, when announcing Amazon Web Services had reached $10B in Revenue. Bezos found a way to align the differing brands and bring back to focus their customer obsession: “They (Amazon.com and AWS) share a distinctive organizational culture that cares deeply about and acts with conviction on a small number of principles. I’m talking about customer obsession rather than competitor obsession, eagerness to invent and pioneer, willingness to fail, the patience to think long-term, and the taking of professional pride in operational excellence. Through that lens, AWS and Amazon retail are very similar indeed.” As Bezos has said himself, “You can have the best technology, you can have the best business model, but if the storytelling isn’t amazing, it won’t matter. Nobody will watch”. Whether sending investor Updates on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis find your “clarity of purpose” and use that to build a theme to your company’s story. Bring Out Humanity and Trust Not only is he one of the greatest business minds, the Oracle of Omaha is often regarded as one of the greatest storytellers in business. Just like Bezos, Warren Buffett has turned his annual shareholder letters into a platform for fueling investment and interest in their business. While Buffett most certainly covers all financial housekeeping he has turned Berkshire’s letters into a platform that builds trust and lets investors (and potential investors) into Berkshire’s decision making and culture. Often filled with everyday language, unique stories, and a sense of humor, Buffett has been able to humanize Berkshire and create a sense of trust with investors. The $87B man has even gone as far to call himself “dumb” in his letters, just as one of your friends or co-workers might. Sure, it might be easier to step outside the norm when your company is valued near $500B but it is never too early to start bringing out the “human side” and building a relationship of trust with potential investors. What’s Your Story? Engage prospects, customers, investors, employees, and other stakeholders with Visible. You just need a business email account to get started.

This post is Part II or II of our storytelling series. You can find our first post, “Connecting Dots to Tell Your Story” here. The same principles that Pixar uses to craft their hit movies like Finding Nemo and Ratatouille can be applied to your own investor updates and pitch. Awesome right? I recently attended SaaStr and had the chance to see Jason Katz the Chief Storyteller at Pixar and Peter Arai the CEO & founder of Prezi talk about the 3 Parts of Visual Storytelling. Part 1 – Takeaway Message What is the message you want to leave with your audience? For finding Nemo it is faith vs fear, but the same concept can be applied for business. At Visible we encourage you to lead with your true north KPI followed by a big ask. Afterall, Investor Updates are most valuable for the company. Leverage your stakeholders to help make introduce to ideal customers, provide guidance on your go-to-market strategy or source new candidates. With each update you have the chance to leave your stakeholders with a takeaway message, don’t squander it! Part 2 – Structure and Visuals How do you structure the visual elements to enhance your story? This could be through framing, data visualizations and more. In addition, your story should follow a structure of beginning, middle and end. Combing structure & visuals can have a profound impact on delivery your key takeaway. Bonus points if you use the same comparable metrics for each update. One of my favorite posts around data visualization is, “Remove the legend to become one”. This chart: Is actually the same chart as this one with the same underlying data. (Make sure to check out the post to see how to get here!) Proper visuals can make all of the difference right? Part 3 – Delivery The final part of visual storytelling comes down to delivery. With your stakeholder updates you want to get your message across as efficiently and effectively as possible. You shouldn’t create more work for your stakeholders to get your key takeaway message. This is why we make it so our customers can control the delivery of their updates through being rendered in email, to PDF, web and Slack. Great so now we know the 3 parts of visual storytelling but what value can that have on my business? Well it turns out…a pretty big one. I recently saw Stephen Day from Navidar present at an offsite around M&A, specifically around how to get the best price for you company. He broke it down into this brilliant and simple equation: Price = Value + (Compelling Story + Competitive Process)^Evoking Emotion To break this down. Value is the fundamental value of your business. This could be a discounted cash flow analysis to find your valuation. Related resource: Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) Analysis: The Purpose, Formula, and How it Works However, you can clearly see how your story and ability to evoke emotion can generate a much higher price than your fundamental one. This doesn’t just apply to valuation. This can be the pricing of your own product or service as well. The best brands are the best storytellers and they typically elicit the highest price. Craft your own framework and tell your story. Sign up to Visible today to get started. Up & to the right, Mike & The Visible Team

Weekly All Hands Team Email Template There is no doubt that All-Hands Meetings can be a powerful tool to drive culture, share accomplishments, and break down company performance. However, as Ray Gillenwater, CEO of SpeakUp, put it: “Taking time to get the entire company into a live session is an expensive and risky proposition. It says quite a bit about leadership’s attitude. Namely, we value people in this organization enough to invest in: Keeping everyone informed of major company updates. Ensuring everyone is emotionally connected to the company’s goals. Listening to the team’s (preferably unfiltered) feedback and questions.” With that being said, it is vital to formalize your All-Hands process and make sure you are doing everything in your power to make sure you are properly utilizing the entire organization’s time. Below you will find an Update template intended to share before your next All-Hands in preparation for your meeting or share after to summarize the meeting. The template is largely based off of Square’s Town Hall meetings and is broken into 3 major categories — The Team, Mission & Goals, and Agenda & Questions.

In an ideal world every company would be able to host a “Quarterly Business Review” for every customer. In reality, QBRs are generally reserved for your “higher touch clients” (read: top tier), as they should be. With that being said, there are easy steps (outside of an in-person meeting) you can take to nurture your lower contract size customers to build a strong relationship and avoid churn. Who knows? They might even blossom into a “top tier” customer. We suggest checking out the articles below if you’d like to learn more about QBRs: The Essential Guide to Quarterly Business Reviews from Gainsight Eight Tips for Nailing Your Next Quarterly Business Review Presentation from Forbes Scaling QBRs Traditionally, QBRs are in-person and bring in the executives from both companies. This is great, and ideal, for large enterprise deals. But when you’re a high growth company sending executives across the country is most likely not feasible. With that being said, a quick quarterly Update on the past, present, and future of your business relationships can be a valuable tool. More than ever, consumers care about quality, transparency, customer support, convenience, cause and usability. The same is starting to become true in the business world. While it is nice to get buy-in from management, employees have more power and discretion when it comes to choosing their tech stack. By sending quick quarterly reports or Updates, Customer Success Managers and end users can build a strong personal relationship and strengthen ties throughout the organization. Our QBR Update Template Below you will find our Update Template to send to your clients on a quarterly basis. The template is broken into 5 separate sections; general health, 90 day highlights, benchmarking, usage, and the future. The template is intended to show your company’s value, start a conversation, and get in front of potential issues. Keep in mind, this template is not intended to be a “one size fits all”. QBRs are a great way to show the value that your product or offering is adding to their business and are a great chance to add “your own spin”. If you’d like us to drop the template into your Visible account feel free to shoot us a message to support@visible.vc and we would be happy to do so.

A Weekly Email Template for Marketing Leaders Marketing is one of the most measurable aspects of a business. With vast data points, it is important to hone in on what truly matters and rally your team behind those key metrics. This week, we have put together an Update template intended for marketers to “report up”. Whether that be a marketing representative to manager or manager to executive, our Marketing template is intended to be standardized across the team to keep everyone moving in the same direction. Key Metrics Keep in mind the metrics in the template are suggestions and can be tailored to your organization’s needs. Some of our favorite marketing metrics include Customer Lifetime Value, Customer Acquisition Cost (check out this video to use formulas to create CAC in Visible), and these 5 metrics for “reporting up”. TL;DR A quick recap of any major milestones, concerns, and figures from the last period. Always a good idea to piggyback off of any product updates, metrics, projects, concerns discussed at previous meetings/updates. Now Content and Campaigns Include a brief section of any campaigns, content, and emails published from the past week. The goal here is to keep everyone in the loop and ultimately lead to conversations and improvements. Funnel Review A funnel is a quick way for all parties to quickly digest your marketing conversions and inbound marketing efforts. The metrics used in a funnel can be customized to any business as well. Make note of any interesting leads or trends that have noticed over the previous period. Customer Stories Reflect on the past period and share any relevant quotes from customers; good and bad. What is going well? What is not working? Feedback to certain emails? etc.

“Most organizations still believe in the perfect sales and marketing delineation: This is where marketing generates leads for sales, sales development reps then qualify these leads, to create opportunities that salespeople hopefully turn into revenue… The new reality is that sales and marketing are continuously and increasingly integrated. Marketing needs to know more about sales, sales needs to know more about marketing, and we all need to know more about our CUSTOMERS.” – Jill Rowley – Founder, #SOCIALSELLING As the modern buyer continues to become more informed it is more important than ever that your sales and marketing teams are aligned. It is vital that companies share the right information, at the right time, to the right person. At the end of the day, the marketing teams role is to enable sales to close more deals. A good place to start? Consistent and clear communication between sales and marketing. This week, we put together an Update template for marketers to share with their team, managers, etc. and most importantly the sales team. The template is intended to be shared on a regular basis and lead to conversations to improve different aspects of your pipeline. If you’d like us to drop the template into your Visible account feel free to shoot us a message to support@visible.vc and we would be happy to do so. Key Metrics “Enablement means something different in every company,” Katie MacDonald, global sales onboarding and enablement manager at Optimizely, said. Find the metrics that are relevant to your team and continue to share and reiterate. Get your team behind the data and constantly communicate with the sales team to find areas for improvement. Keep in mind, our template has popular sales enablement metrics in place but can be changed to your organization needs. The team at Hubspot suggests using Lead-to-Customer as your North Star. Last Week’s Efforts Include a brief section of any campaigns, content, and emails published from the past week. The goal here is to keep everyone in the loop and ultimately lead to conversations and improvements. Is always useful to include any success stories from reps or potential customers from the past week to help make sure everyone is getting the most out of new content. This Week’s Efforts A quick breakdown of content and changes for the upcoming week. Briefly highlight the goal of the content and where/when it should be used. Most importantly – leave a place for the sales team to offer feedback and share the sentiment from the buyers they have been talking to.

Engage Your Team With This Weekly Sales Report At a high-growth startup, sales operations and processes can often take a back seat to closing deals and growing the business. Regardless of the resources you have available, it is vital to be able to “self-manage” and lay the groundwork for a strong sales process and culture. With that being said, we put together an Update Template that can be used by the first sales hire or by a team of 100 BDRs. Check Out the Template Here >>> Keep in mind the metrics in the template are suggestions and can be tailored to your organization’s needs (check out these 3 other metrics to track) . With that being said, there are a few things to keep in mind when putting together a reporting template for your sales team: Acknowledge the report, good or bad, to give your reps the motivation to send reports moving forward. Build a cadence with your individual reps and keep updates succinct as well as comparable (make sure to share the same metrics in every report). Just do it! Get feedback and iterate. Make sure to send over feedback to continue to tailor the format and content.

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.