4. Separate Hunters from Farmers - Rule of thumb, every one additional $ of CMRR is a $ of bonus.
5. Focus your Business Development on Business Service channels, not IT ones. You need to partner with ADP, E&Y - not IBM, Oracle, etc. As this is a new set of partners, it is not easy to ramp up.
6. Part of what being good at online marketing means is automation, integration, using technology to make this work well.
8. Rule of thumb: Need more than $2Mill of CMRR before 2nd datacenter.... How this works High-Availability wise I'm not sure. Apparently SalesForce.com was single datacentre until post-IPO.
9. SaaS isn't software, it's a Service. So you need to Monitor, Gather Feedback and Benchmark your Service as a Service.
10. "Be prepared to cross the desert". SaaS requires R&D and sales expense up front. You need enough invesment to fund 4+ years of runway. SaaS companies have historically raised average $30-65mill before IPO. That said, capital costs are coming down, but it's still a big number.
http://www.bvp.com/saas/default.aspx
Addition information on some of the laws that you don't get from the website:
1. They say there is a white paper on CMRR, but I couldn't find it. The presenter has a summary on his blog though: http://cracking-the-code.blogspot.com/2007/07/saas-business-...
4. Separate Hunters from Farmers - Rule of thumb, every one additional $ of CMRR is a $ of bonus.
5. Focus your Business Development on Business Service channels, not IT ones. You need to partner with ADP, E&Y - not IBM, Oracle, etc. As this is a new set of partners, it is not easy to ramp up.
6. Part of what being good at online marketing means is automation, integration, using technology to make this work well.
8. Rule of thumb: Need more than $2Mill of CMRR before 2nd datacenter.... How this works High-Availability wise I'm not sure. Apparently SalesForce.com was single datacentre until post-IPO.
9. SaaS isn't software, it's a Service. So you need to Monitor, Gather Feedback and Benchmark your Service as a Service.
10. "Be prepared to cross the desert". SaaS requires R&D and sales expense up front. You need enough invesment to fund 4+ years of runway. SaaS companies have historically raised average $30-65mill before IPO. That said, capital costs are coming down, but it's still a big number.