During Flowtown’s peak, I had TWELVE people reporting to me. That was on top of my own workload that I was responsible for delivering on. Talk about overwhelm. I was literally inundating myself with reports/metrics/managers that didn’t necessarily serve the growth of the company. Rule of thumb:

25%. That’s the magic number you gotta obsess over. At least when it comes to your trial to paid conversions. If you’ve yet to have a virtual drink clink with your team for hitting that benchmark…

Ever hear of a guy named David Sacks? He has a crazy gift. Essentially, he doesn’t know how to get involved in a startup and NOT have it turn into a billion dollar success story. We’re talking about… … Paypal (sold to ebay for 1.5B) … Yammer (sold to Microsoft for 1.2B) … dozens of companies he was an angel investor in (Airbnb, Facebook, Uber) He’s as close to a “tech oracle” as there is…

Leadpages used *this* strategy to scale their growth at a ridiculous rate. So did my company Flowtown. As well as a recent SaaS Academy client who hired an army of over two thousand “salesmen” to promote his accounting software… for free. If you haven’t caught on… We’re talking about strategic partnerships. Partnerships are one of the fastest and most efficient ways of scaling your software business. It’s essentially outsourcing your customer acquisition… and only paying a pre-negotiated  commission if the

I was recently working with a SaaS Academy client who had a serious churn problem. So serious that he was letting 18% of his accounts disappear without a fight. Couple that with skyhigh acquisition costs and flatlining expansion revenue… and let’s just say that this company was playing with some serious fire. “Scale” wasn’t a word you could use with a straight face. Make no mistake…

Have you ever tried to collect a case study only to find yourself stumbling over the “ask” before mercifully aborting mission? Yep. Happens to just about every SaaS founder. Even when we get epic results for our customers… … asking for a case study turns otherwise confident SaaS founders into the chess club captain trying to ask the head cheerleader out to prom. *awkwaaard* But it doesn’t have to be.

“Help me. Help you.” Nope… Not talking about that epic one liner from Jerry Maguire. I’m talking about the inner dialogue your customers experience whenever they try to refer your product to their tribe. One of the EASIEST ways to acquire a new B2B Saas customer is to have your current users refer you at scale. Just ask Dropbox ;-) Only problem is… most companies make that process painfully hard and complicated.

Has a customer ever punched you in the face? No? Has it ever felt like that? Every time I’ve had a customer sign-up, stick around for a few months, and cancel (aka churn) it sure feels that way. It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been building businesses, nothing frustrates me more than having a customer that I spent a ton of time, energy and money attracting, leave because we missed the mark. What's different about my approach is that I

Your product or service tells a story. It either tells one that’s clear and coherent, highlighting the challenges you’re most ready to solve for your ideal customer… Or it confuses them. The story you’re telling depends on whether you’re being thoughtful in the process, or building it blindly.   And the difference between the two has a massive impact on your prospect’s ability to buy from you.

Every startup wants to grow fast. And while there’s value in modelling the tactics and strategies that have fueled the rapid success of companies they look up to... There’s even MORE value in identifying the core, underlying principles that serve as the backbone for that success. Over the years, I’ve identified 5 core elements behind the perfect software business. I learned one of them directly from Jason Fried @ Basecamp.com when I visited Chicago to take his workshop over 10