TWIS #7- Events

This is your last opportunity to enter the draw for a pass to the SaaS University in Dallas/Ft. Worth January 26-28 worth $995.00.

As I’ve said before- the SaaS University is one of the only places to actually learn about the business of SaaS and there are some fantastic people presenting- so if you’re transitioning to SaaS, or just looking to grow your SaaS business, this is a must attend event and I’m delighted to be able to get a pass for readers.

To enter and get access to some of the best SaaS knowledge- email me jp@justinpirie.com with the subject “SaaS U Dallas”. I’m going to draw the pass this week and I’ll email everyone who enters the discount code. As normal- I’m going to give priority to people how can actually attend so please make that clear on your entry.

TWIS #7

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a brilliant night and heads aren’t too sore this morning

I think 2010 should be the year of actionable metrics and I’ll keep trying to share with you best practice and insight.

To kick 2010 off with Matt Breznia (who wrote- No one cares about your stupid little startup- 5 tips to make them care) posted The 4 Metrics of User Acquisition and the Customer Bulls Eye where they measure:

For any user acquisition channel – PR,virality, advertising, search engine marketing – we measure success on four key metrics:  engagement, virality, profitability & scalability. I visualize each customer acquisition channel as a dart on a dartboard.   Our goal is to optimize those channels so they each hit the bull’s eye.  We are also always searching for more channels to throw at our dart board.

We’ve made systems and dashboards to track and a/b test our user acquisition funnel.  We do this for each of our user acquisition channels.

For each channel we can A/B test over 50 landing pages.  Then for each channel and landing page combination we can see how many installs we got and what the conversion rate was to install (Scale), the percentage of users active in the last 7 and last 30 days (Engagement), how many new users these installs generated through our in-application invitation systems (Virality),  what percentage of these users converted to Xobni Plus and how much we paid for one of these users (Profitability), along with several other intermediary steps to each of these objectives.

We can take several groups of users (all from the same channel) and show them different messaging on a landing page, and see the resulting effects on scale, virality, engagement, and profitability.  Or, we can run one channel at a loss simply because those users are highly viral.  This reminds me of my optimal control research from grad school, except instead of optimizing on robot speed, accuracy and energy consumption, we are optimizing on scale, virality, engagement, and profitability.

1. Virality

We are adding more and more methods by which users are telling each other about Xobni through product interactions.  Right now we only track two.  The next generation of our tracking system will have over 10 viral inputs.

2. Engagement

We record other engagement metrics beyond the active user count – like clicks per user per day, searches per users per day, etc – however right now we review these metrics in one-off manner.  I’d love to add them to our dashboard.  It’d be fascinating (and useful) to know that a user acquired with a banner ad on Facebook make 5 times as many clicks/day on our premium upsells as a user acquired through twitter.  And, I’d love to know that I can increase the number of clicks to 7 if I send these users through a landing page that messages heavily on our premium product’s features.

3. Profitability

As previously discussed, Xobni Plus is just one of 5 revenue streams that will be driving our business by the end of 2010.  We’ve already announced Xobni with Salesforce and Xobni for Blackberry.  We’ll need to add these new revenue driving products to our dashboard and I’m excited to have the new ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) to play with.

4. Scale

This is where the creativity of an artist and the tenacity of a hunter intersect.  We are always searching for new darts to throw at our dartboard.

Some food for thought for SaaS marketing metrics… In an early version of his post- he gave a screenshot of their actual dashboard which has now disappeared I’ve asked him where it’s gone…

I’m doing my best to scout out SaaS metrics for you so I read this Techcrunch post on Evernote with interest:

The more interesting numbers are the number of active users over the past 30 days, which has also doubled to 700,000 from 360,000 since last May. Those users have created a total of 76 million notes, up from 36 million in May. But most importantly, the number of premium paid subscribers has gone from about 14,000 in May to 35,000. Premium members get more storage and features for $45 a year. The conversion rate for premium subscribers is also going up. Evernote is converting 4.9 percent of monthly active users to premium accounts, up from a 3.75 percent conversion rate seven months ago.

Unlike most apps, which see sharp drop-offs after only a few months, the longer someone stays on Evernote, the more likely they are to but a premium subscription. In the first month after signing up, about 50 to 60 percent of people drop off and only 0.5 percent sign up for a premium membership. But after the first month, retention stabilizes, and by the time people are using Evernote for 12 months, the conversion rate becomes 2 percent, and 6 percent for those on the service for 18 months (and that’s counting all those drop-offs in the first few weeks, the conversion rate for active users 18 months out is 20 percent). This pattern in conversion rates makes sense, since users are basically storing their memories in Evernote and the more they do that the more valuable it becomes to them. ” You can use it for free,” says Libin, “but we want people to use it forever, so that your memories in Evernote become the most valuable thing you have, period.” (Emphasis added- Ed).

Looking at those metrics on Evernote reminded me of this old but brilliant Andrew Chen post on Freemium:

Key idea #1: There’s Consumer freemium, and there’s Enterprise freemium

Key idea #2: Freemium playbook has already been written

And in particular:

Key idea #3: Freemium products face common design challenges

As a corollary to having a playbook of different tactics, you might also imagine that Freemium products must have similar design challenges as well. In particular, the biggest question of freemium is:

When does Free stop and Premium start?

On one hand, if you give away too much, then your conversion rate from free-to-paid ends up being too low. This means that people are too easily satisfied with your product, and have no reason to convert to being a paid user.

On the other hand, if you force the user to premium too early, then you lose out as well. They may not give your product a chance, and move on to something else, before they start down the path of converting to a premium user. Similarly, the free segment of your audience can help drive distribution and virality, and without that group, it becomes much harder to get meaningful amounts of traffic. (Emphasis added- Ed)

The economics of free are getting harder and harder to ignore. Hidden in the comments was this gem (Andrew again):

I don’t think doing Freemium is a matter of whether or not you can afford it. My view is, creating and supporting the Free product is like a marketing expense to drive usage of the Premium product. The question is whether or not you’d rather spend your marketing dollars there versus buying ads or building out a big sales team.

It’s investing in your customers so in return they invest in your interface. Simples!

Phil Wainewright continues his brilliant, original thinking this week with Cloud Delusions at the turn of the decade:

• Amateur cloud
• Firewall jealousy
• Fool’s cloud
• Isolated multi-tenancy
• Half-aaSed applications

My favourite delusion:

Firewall jealousy. A related delusion is to put more trust in your own organization’s security measures than in those of a cloud provider’s — even if the cloud provider employs many more security staff in round-the-clock shifts, has significantly more security expertise and operates much better processes based on the highest level of best practice. This ‘not my firewalls’ mentality — a variation on ‘not invented here’ — is especially egregious if your so-called ‘on-premise’ computing is actually off-site at some non-descript colocation center shared with an unknown number of other organizations.

Another brilliant blogger- Mike Dunham has written his predictions for 2010:

SaaS will continue to grow in acceptance and prevalence in the marketplace but – the term itself will fade in favor of “Cloud (insert your term).”

Real business value in SaaS will continue to improve, be better understood and measured more explicitly.

Service ecosystems will rise.

New services will focus less on “doing it all from day one” and more on their roadmap.

Integration requirements will drive standards for service-based communication and interaction.

End-user clients and platforms will continue to evolve and increase in their importance and differentiation.

Customer collaboration will become a more integrated and critical part of product management and business operations.

Agile will continue to grow in acceptance and will become the dominant approach for both development and business operations “in the cloud.”

There will be a growing awareness of the requirements and responsibilities implied by “mature services.”

SaaS vendors will stop trying to sell split versions.

Great presentation on how PBWorks used lean startup techniques (even though they didn’t know it!).

Eric Ries wrote a great post this week about Continuous Deployment for mission critical applications

Another release? Do I have to?
Most customers of most products hate new releases. That’s a perfectly reasonable reaction, given that most releases of most products are bad news. It’s likely that the new release will contain new bugs. Even worse, the sad state of product development generally means that the new “features” are as likely to be ones that make the product worse, not better. So asking customers if they’d like to receive new releases more often usually leads to a consistent answer: “No, thank you.” On the other hand, you’ll get a very different reaction if you ask customers “next time you report an urgent bug, would you prefer to have it fixed immediately or to wait for a future arbitrary release milestone?”

he goes on to say:

I want to directly challenge the belief that continuous deployment leads to lower quality software. I just don’t believe it. Continuous deployment offers three significant advantages over large batch development systems. Some of these benefits are shared by agile systems which have continuous integration but large batch releases, but others are unique to continuous deployment.

1. Faster (and better) feedback.
2. More automation.
3. Monitoring of real-world metrics.
4. Better handling of intermittent bugs.
5. Smaller batches.

For those of you who are new to continuous deployment, these benefits may not sound realistic. In order to make sense of them, you have to understand the mechanics of continuous deployment. To get started, I recommend these three posts: Continuous deployment in 5 easy steps, Timothy Fitz’s excellent Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day, and Why Continuous Deployment?

Let me close with a question. Imagine with me for a moment that continuous deployment doesn’t prevent us from doing staged releases for customers, and it actually leads to higher quality software. What’s preventing you from using it for your mission-critical application today? I hope you’ll share your thoughts in a comment.

Remember the new Startup Pyramid from TWIS#6- I’m not alone in thinking that not building in Customer Acquisition into the Product/Market Fit is bonkers- Venture Hacks thinks so too  It needs some more work- but we all have to have a holiday sometime :p While on Venture Hacks- they pulled out the best quotes from the Q &A with Sean Ellis. My favourite is “the product is half the marketing battle”- well I would say that wouldn’t I… I am a SaaS Product Guy!

Other posts:

• Worth a read are Appirio’s top posts of 2009.
• As is Peter Cohens thoughts on lead nurturing. Love the thought- “you can’t hurry love”.

Once again- a very happy new year to you all!

Justin

TWIS #6

TWIS Events:

SaaS University Dallas Pass and Discount code

The pass for TWIS readers for the SaaS University taking place in Dallas/Ft. Worth January 26-28 2010 worth $995.00. The SaaS University is one of the only places to actually learn about the business of SaaS and there are some fantastic people presenting- so if you’re transitioning to SaaS, or just looking to grow your SaaS business, this is a must attend event and I’m delighted to be able to get a pass for you.

One of my favourite “SaaS people” Jim Geisman is presenting- he is “Mr Pricing” and if you’ve got a pricing quandary- he is your man. He emailed me this sage advice after reading TWIS #4:

I looked at a couple of the pricing posts you referenced in TWIS #4… One dealt with what we call “the jaggies” — the discontinuities that occur when you hit the boundary of a tier break in a tiered discount schedule. It illustrates what happens when you do a discount schedule without plotting how much money you actually make and what the average cost to the customer really is.

Of course the way to eliminate the jaggies has been well known to every taxing authority in the world… You pay what you owe at the end of one tier and pay the marginal price when you are within the next tier. The total payment is then the sum of the end-of-previous-tier cumulative amount plus the volume in the tier paid at the in-tier discounted price.

The second post dealt with the different types of billing engines out there and how some charge per customer and some charge per transaction. One makes sense relative to the other depending on the breakeven point… This is something everyone who buys a cell phone plan knows. If you use very few minutes, pay on a per-minute basis so you pay what you use. If you use a predictable number of minutes then it often makes sense to commit to a block of minutes and get a lower per-minute price. (You will pay more in total but less on a per-minute basis.)

Brilliant stuff. To enter and get access to some of the best SaaS knowledge- email me jp@justinpirie.com with the subject “SaaS U Dallas”. I’m going to draw the pass early in January and I’ll email everyone who enters the discount code. As normal- I’m going to give priority to people how can actually attend so please make that clear on your entry.

TWIS #6

There have only been 5 TWIS’s, but it feels like a long old year! This year has been more challenging for more people than I can ever remember- I was still in school in the last major recession… I sincerely hope that 2010 brings better fortune for you all, whether that be health, wealth or happiness.

I had intended for TWIS #6 to be like a normal TWIS, but after reading all the posts preparing for this week, there was nearly no news and everyone is writing lists and suchlike- so I thought I’d join in the festive fun with a little look back into 2009 and forward into 2010 in TWIS style.

Looking back- Appirio analysed their 2009 predictions coming up with a 7/10 for accuracy. Looking forward- I think Appirio’s 2010 predictions are worth pulling out in full:

“Customer success is the true measure of the cloud’s effectiveness,” said Ryan Nichols, head of cloudsourcing and cloud strategy for Appirio. “In 2009 we saw innovative enterprises such as Japan Post, Avon, and Starbucks demonstrate the business case for cloud computing. In 2010, that success will go mainstream.” Appirio’s 2010 predictions include:

1. Cloud developer community grows faster than open-source. Today’s vendor-specific developer communities will be complemented by a community dedicated to the general discipline of building applications on the cloud, disrupting existing on-premise developer communities. The combination will launch a new generation of ‘cloud developers.’
2. Cloud standards won’t (and shouldn’t) happen. The pace of innovation is so rapid in the cloud that the emergence of truly open cloud standards won’t yet be possible, except at the lowest levels of infrastructure. Traditional vendors will attempt to muddy the waters across layers and claim the ‘standards high ground’ with efforts like the Open Cloud Manifesto.
3. Cloud providers tackle lock-in. Platform lock-in remains one of the major concerns keeping CIOs from building applications on PaaS. In 2010 we expect to see major initiatives from cloud providers to overcome this objection, either revolutionary (e.g., Force.com supporting other languages) or evolutionary (e.g., application migration frameworks or platform ‘porting’ toolkits.)
4. Cloud integration will get an enterprise poster-child. Boomi and Cast Iron have had a fantastic 2009 and we expect one will land a major enterprise customer in 2010 that replaces on-premise integration technology with a cloud-based alternative.
5. Enterprise apps get Googled. Google’s investments in its cloud platform will transform Google Apps from a simple Exchange/Sharepoint replacement into a legitimate front end for enterprise applications (e.g., Google Web Toolkit, Secure Data Connector, and the Google Gadget Framework.)
6. Enterprise collaboration is a feature, not a business. Salesforce Chatter and Google Wave have shown the value of real-time collaboration that is seamlessly integrated with business applications. Standalone enterprise collaboration offerings will have difficulty competing.
7. Microsoft lets Azure cannibalize a global account. Microsoft has shown that it’s serious about Azure at this year’s Professional Developers Conference. We predict that Azure will cannibalize Microsoft’s on-premise footprint at a global account.
8. Cloud computing consolidation. With 2000+ providers, the cloud ecosystem is ripe for consolidation. Salesforce.com and Google are likely to continue with point acquisitions, but they won’t be alone. Having missed the first wave of innovation in cloud computing (and lacking any other on-premise technology to acquire) we expect Oracle to buy into the industry that Larry Ellison has dismissed as ‘water vapor.’ Maybe they’ll finally snap up NetSuite.
9. Global Systems Integrators will do nothing more than cloud marketing. The most innovative thing we expect from Accenture next year is a replacement for its Tiger Woods ad campaign.
10. The real innovation will be in the business of cloud computing, not the technology. Cloud providers will become dramatically easier to do business with (e.g., Amazon Spot Markets) and new business models will emerge to make the cloud more consumable (e.g., cloud insurance providers, cloud security auditors, cloud brokerages.)

2009 feels like the year SaaS finally got over the hype cycle and into the mainstream conciousness- and rebranded as cloud for good measure… I think it feels somewhat more comfortable where it’s sitting in the cloud ecosystem- the largest, most mature, value adding and highest margin part of the Cloud ecosystem. Covered in detail is TWIS #3.

Thinking about the aforementioned hype cycle- the slope of Enlightenment was steep this year- particularly the updated Bessemer Laws are essential reading. One of my personal highlights of 2009 was discovering Jason Calacanis and his weekly podcast This Week in Startups- to which I am totally addicted.  If you’re interested in Tech and Startups- it’s a must listen podcast. 2009 was the year I discovered the teachings of Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Sean Ellis and Dave McClure which has dramatically shifted my perspective on how to create and sell SaaS. I’ve been talking to lots of SaaS companies recently and one of the common problems I’m seeing is that they focus on having a “complete product” rather than a “minimum viable product“.  This feature rich approach means they lack focus on usability and Customer Acquisition. I’ve covered it before, but VentureHacks wrote a brilliant article on Sometimes the Feature is the Product.

Investors often dismiss startups with the refrain, “That’s a feature, not a product.” I do the same. They usually mean that the feature, by itself, will not be adopted by consumers — the value proposition is too simple or narrow. But sometimes the feature is the product. Was Twitter a feature or a product? Google? PayPal? They’re obviously products now. But before they were adopted by millions. Feature or product? Isn’t Twitter “just” the status message feature from Facebook? Isn’t Google “just” the search feature from Yahoo?

Sometimes the feature is the product

Companies need to focus on the market risk side of SaaS much more closely in 2010 than they have 2009 and that means making software easier to use and customer acquisition baked in. Thinking about Customer Acquisition- Forget the Tipping Point. Focus on Joe the Plumber is a brilliant reminder about Customer Acquisition.

“Duncan Watts from Yahoo thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That’s because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. ‘And nobody,’ Watts says wryly, ‘will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire.’”

Enter Joe the Plumber.

After working on numerous consumer web products and reviewing the data of hundreds of consumer web companies in my current role, I have come to appreciate Watts’ forest fire metaphor.  Most entrepreneurs are sure that they have the right idea and continue doing the same thing, sometimes for years, in the hope of hitting a tipping point.  ”Now that we have a product, we are raising capital for marketing,” is a refrain that I hear far too often. Most of today’s massive consumer web properties experienced exponential growth fairly shortly after launch.  A few thousand users over a few months is probably sufficient to find out it you have hit a nerve.  So forget the connectors.  Any average Joe will do once you find some dry timber.

So we need to Pivot, Pivot, Pivot until we find that right combination. The truth is not inside your building- it’s with your potential customers. They hold the key to your success in 2010. Remember when YouTube was a dating site? A great new Blog I’ve discovered recently is Giff Constable- his post on Validating your startup idea and initial customer development got me thinking again about Sean Ellis’s startup pyramid. I’ve been thinking and blogging that people don’t pay enough attention how they’re going to acquire customers so I propose an update to the pyramid: Include Customer Acquisition with Product / Market Fit:

I was wondering whether Economics need’s it’s own layer- I think it probably does- your thoughts please?

Giff also wrote a great post on What is your Customer Acquisition Strategy.

SaaS providers have a nasty habit of being secretive about their metrics- so I was delighted to see Neil Patel from Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics post about the effects of pricing on Crazy Egg.

In case you haven’t got to grips with Social Media yet- this was the best apology I’ve seen from a supplier all year.

About the only major news this week was Amazon’s Spot Pricing for EC2- you can now bid for resources in a Adwords style auction- the highest prices bid get the available resources until higher bids are received. This enables Amazon to increase the utilisation of their compute without compromising their core business. This is fantastic news for people who have batch processing needs and threatens to significantly reduce the cost of compute. I wonder if Amazon would open up a marketplace for compute- now that would be amazing!

In other news:

• Google is to acquire Docverse- the company that enables you to sync Microsoft Office to and from Google Docs.
• Wondering about Valuations- here are some metrics (from Oct 09)
• I don’t feel so bad about not having an MBA
• If you don’t get Marketing Automation- then this is a good primer
• Google Apps wins LA City- only 34,000 users….

This week has rather run away with me- I was intending to publish earlier this week and use Jan 1 to set the new TWIS time- but here it is

For those that celebrate Christmas- I wish you a very happy one and for those that don’t I wish you happy holidays!

Here’s to a fantastic 2010!

Justin

p.s. we went through 15,000 members this week!

TWIS Events:

SaaS University Dallas Pass and Discount code

We’ve secured for TWIS readers a pass for the SaaS University taking place in Dallas/Ft. Worth January 26-28 2010 worth $995.00. The SaaS University is one of the only places to actually learn about the business of SaaS and there are some fantastic people presenting- so if you’re transitioning to SaaS, or just looking to grow your SaaS business, this is a must attend event and I’m delighted to be able to get a pass for you.

To enter- email me jp@justinpirie.com with the subject “SaaS U Dallas”. I’m going to draw the pass early in January and I’ll email everyone who enters the discount code. As normal- I’m going to give priority to people how can actually attend so please make that clear on your entry.

TWIS – erm actually Last week in SaaS

Writing about the Telegraph Media Group in last week’s TWIS reminded me of this excellent post byAppirio which I think is worth revisiting- Do your most strategic apps belong in the cloud?

In the past, the only way for a company to maintain control of their business process was to completely own the technology supporting the process.  The rationale was that a company’s most strategic, differentiating processes are unique and therefore have to built by the company either from scratch or by heavily customizing packaged applications.  This also meant owning the entire technology stack supporting the process and the application.  So, while the intent was to create differentiated processes that were agile and differentiating, the reality has become that the technology stack is an albatross around the IT team’s neck that prevents them from moving as quickly and as efficiently as they would like to.

The result in terms of budget and activity was something like this:

Cloud computing changes the decision process completely.  No longer do companies face a choice between relinquishing all control of their business process for cost savings or dealing with the high costs and complexity of supporting an entire software stack.

Platforms like Force.com and Google App Engine give companies a way to control the parts of the stack that matter most, the application and business process layer and abstract away the management of the infrastructure.  This means that the IT team can focus their energies on driving innovation and supporting the business.

The potential result is something like this:

And that’s roughly what Paul Cheesbrough was saying- Now 50% of their budget is on innovation rather than just 5%. The cloud doesn’t just cost less- it enables us to focus on innovation and delivering competitive advantage rather than struggling to retain the status quo.

One of the Bessemer Laws authors, Philippe Botteri posted his presentation about SaaS metrics from Dreamforce to his blog in addition to an updated SaaS benchmarking study, both of which are worth a read. Thinking about revenue growth- group member Joel York wrote a nice post on SaaS Sales Acceleration: Seven Proven Strategies to Increase Sales Velocity:

Delivering on the promise of low total cost of ownership, the price of SaaS is often an order of magnitude lower than the price of licensed enterprise software. This low price point creates enormous pressure on volume. Reaching profitability may require a new customer every week, every day or even every minute! Increasing sales velocity is the essence of the SaaS business challenge.
At each stage of the buying process, your SaaS prospect will encounter adoption costs and risks that reduce your sales velocity. I like to compare this to scaling a cliff where adoption costs are measured by the height of the cliff and adoption risks are measured by the difficulty of the climb.

It’s all about Customer Acquisition Costs! If you’re thinking about reducing your Customer Acquisition Costs- then virality is essential. David Skok wrote an excellent post this week on Lessons Learned- Viral Marketing which is well worth a read and includes practical steps and downloadable spreadsheets to produce your own viral models.

I hope I didn’t jinx Reuven Cohen’s visit to the Cloud Conference in Israel- as the visit for him didn’t exactly go as planned…

Stepping off the airplane last Tuesday at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport I knew I was in for a memorable business trip. As I left the airplane I was greeted by a young female Israeli government official who seemed to recognize me by sight. This was to be my first indication of what was to become a very interesting few days in Israel

The next part caught me by surprise, remember this is supposed to be a short (72hour) trip to Israel. A young woman tells me that as an Israeli citizen I have two conditions before I can leave: First I can’t leave the country without permission from the dept of Interior and must get an Israeli passport. When I asked how long she tells me several weeks. Then the best part, secondly I must report for my Israeli military service in a place called Tiberias not far from Jordan and Syria on western shore of the Sea of Galilee as soon as possible. When I said again that I was just visiting, the official indicated that I was now officially in the Israeli defense forces (IDF).

Nice!

Andrew Chen wrote a brilliant post this week for all you product people- introducing Minimum Desirable Product:

Minimum Desirable Product is the simplest experience necessary to prove out a high-value, satisfying product experience for users (independent of business viability)

I’ve always thought there was something missing from Eric Ries’s Minimum Viable Product for SaaS, as it didn’t seem to take into account the desirability needed to win and retain customers.

Andrew goes on to say:

This also relates very much to Marc Andreessen’s definition of product/market fit, which he defines in purely market “pull” terms and not based on business ideas or viability. You could view the the Minimum Desirable Product as the simplest product that has a credible shot at providing that product/market fit.

Examples of MVP versus MDP
Let me make some quick distinctions about sites that might be Minimum Viable Products, but perhaps not Minimum Desirable Products, and vice versa.

• If you build a really viral social network that is profitable but has terrible user churn – you have built an MVP but not an MDP.
• If your profitable dating site gets lots of users to buy subscriptions at $20/month, but none of them find hot dates they were promised, you have built an MVP but not a MDP.
• If you build a magic box that spits out money whenever you hit a button, that is certainly desirable but not viable at all.
• If you create an amazing board game that your friends and family love and are addicted to, but you can’t get a game company to distribute it, you have created an MDP but not an MVP.
• If you have created a website with 20M+ uniques/month where people can tell each other what kind of sandwich they are eating, that has probably passed the desirability test but not the viability test.

Food for thought methinks….

Sometimes in this industry- we can become fixated on something- like multi-tenancy for example. Phil Waineright wrote an excellent post reminding us that SaaS is so much more than just multi-tenancy:

When evaluating a cloud platform, rather than starting with multi-tenancy, I’d suggest buyers check through the following list of questions:

• Will it remain capable of sustaining high-bandwidth connectivity with all of your customers, suppliers, employees and other stakeholders, even at times of unexpected peak load?
• Will it stay up-to-date with every new technology development (opportunity or threat) that emerges in the global Web ecosystem over the next days, weeks, months and years — without ever making you wait for your own implementation to catch up with the state-of-the-art?
• Can you choose to participate in a community of other platform users, exchanging information and perhaps extensions and add-ons, all referencing — and ready to run on — the same shared infrastructure?
• Will it give you freedom to connect to the widest potential range of third-party services available in the global Web, and to connect to the most popular of them over a shared integration infrastructure instead of having to custom-build your own?
• Will you be able to access limitless capacity on-demand to meet all your computing needs and still only pay for what you use?
• Will your provider monitor usage in real-time and continuously tune platform performance to ensure the infrastructure remains as secure, responsive and cost-effective as possible?

Matt Brezina (co-founder xobni) wrote a great post and accompanying presentation this week- No one cares about your stupid little startup- 5 tips to make them care. My xobni install got updated a couple of days ago and it’s really nice to see xobni offering a clear revenue / upgrade model within the app. It’s just really annoying that I like and want the paid features…

There was an interesting discussion in the Group about identity management in the cloud and the seeming rise of Facebook, Twitter and Google as identity providers is validated by TechChrunch this week, as Facebook has 60 million people a month using it’s connect identity service.

More than 80,000 websites and devices (including iPhone and Xbox) have implemented Facebook Connect since it launched in December 2008, says Beard. And more than 60 million Facebook users use Facebook Connect each month. And it’s not just a lot of small sites using the product. Two-thirds of comScore’s US Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have implemented Facebook Connect. And some of these sites are even bigger than Facebook (perhaps not for long though).

None of those seem overly business oriented to me (unless you use Google Apps).

Salesforce.com continues to charge ahead in the Enterprise 2.0 collaboration space, this week with the acquisition of GroupSwim.  Ben Kepes had earlier written a nice review of GroupSwim here.

Social media was alive this week with ERP related news because of the various SAP conferences happening. My favourite (video) post was- “Is on-premise ERP obsolete?”.

Amazon this week launched a EC2 cost comparison spreadsheet just in case you need help comparing traditional computing to the Cloud.

Microsoft, although on the back foot at the moment in regards to Cloud Computing are starting to put some impetus behind their efforts- shown this week by the joining of the Windows Server and Azure teams.

This change reflects the alignment of our resources with our strategy, and represents a natural evolution for Microsoft as the Windows Azure business moves from an advanced development project to a mainstream business…

Google Docs is leading the way once again- by allowing users to download all their documents at once so users can get their data out, as well as in.

In the group- there have been some great discussions- I’m particularly please that people are using the search function to revive old topics. Activity has really picked up in the jobs section- do go and check it out if you’re looking for one

I hope you’re enjoying TWIS- I’ve had some great emails from readers this week but I’m still keen to hear your feedback- I’m always available jp@justinpirie.com

As we roll into Christmas- the last TWIS of the year is going to be next Monday, 21st December. I’m then going to have a week off and start the new year publishing on Friday mornings- as that was the most popular day from your feedback.

Have a great week.

Justin

p.s. Did you spot the album cover from Pink Floyd’s Obscured by Clouds

Events- I’ve got a fantastic pass to give away to TWIS readers which I’ll announce next week.

TWIS- albeit late (I’ve been away all week for meetings and a conference)

Josh Koppelman from First Round Capital wrote an absolutely brilliant post this week- “Let’s just add in a little virality”.

I then ask them, “So, how are you going to acquire customers.”  And that’s when it happens.  That’s when I realize that they’ve spent all their time focusing on the product/site, and aren’t nearly as innovative when it comes to their customer acquisition plans.  They view marketing as something they can “bolt on” afterwards.

The most disappointing answer is when they say “Oh, we’ll just make it viral.”  As if virality is something you can choose to add in after the product is baked – like a spell checker.  Let’s imagine the conversation at the marketing department of the wireless phone companies.  “Let’s see.  Should we spend $4 Billion on advertising this year…or should we just make it viral?”….

Customer acquisition (also called distribution) is the number one challenge facing consumer web properties.

I love that post- it reinforces everything I’ve been saying for ages about how important it is to consider Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) at the ground floor when designing a SaaS product. With the consumerisation of business software- this is especially relevant to SaaS and not just consumer sites.  (Disclaimer- I worked for a First Round funded company this summer)

That post reminds me of the Startup Pyramid – Sean Ellis wrote the post weeks ago and I’ve been wondering how to fit it in here:

You should measure your product/market fit as soon as possible because it will significantly impact how you operate your startup. If you haven’t reached product/market fit yet it is critical to keep your burn low and focus all resources on improving the percentage of users that say they would be very disappointed without your product. Avoid bringing in VPs of Marketing and Sales to try to solve the problem. They will only add to your burn and likely won’t be any better than you at solving the problem. Instead, you (the founders) should engage existing and target users to learn how to make your product a “must have.” Sometimes it is as simple as highlighting a more compelling attribute of your product – but often it requires significant product revisions or possibly even hitting the restart button on your vision. For more on getting to product/market fit, I recommend reading Marc Andreesen’s full post via archive.org (it has been removed from his blog).

Personally, I think CAC should also be designed into that bottom layer- the “foundation” of the pyramid so to speak- Product/Market fit & Acquisition. Remember- its fine to “be crappy” and to “fail fast, fail often” because linear improvements yield non-linear results. Ash Maurya is blogging about implementing lean techniques and it’s well worth a read if you’re looking for practical ways to improve your app. This post on how he’s implementing Dave McClure’s AAARR metrics in his app is excellent.

This post over at Venture Hacks resonated with me, as recently I’ve seen people try and overcomplicate their SaaS offerings by focusing on features rather than the UI and CAC.

A lot of the people I’ve been speaking to recently have been broadly in the Enterprise 2.0 (E20) space- and I thought this guide for successful implementations over on CloudAve could be utilised by SaaS providers to think about enabling their customers path to success.

There is an undeniable trend towards mobile which I don’t think we, in SaaS, can ignore. I’ve been an iPhone fan for over a year but I’m taking more and more interest in Android since v2 and the Droid. Brian Davis over at brands create customers wrote a brilliant post Google Android: brand disruptor—and creator.

Google Android is a free, highly-capable and customizable smartphone operating system that intends to change the game in mobile brands. It’s designed to compete with the iPhone as a smartphone platform, and it’s ready for apps, Google Androidtweaks, skins and other enhancements by any company desiring a smartphone market presence. By being “free,” Android dramatically lowers the cost of entry into the smartphone market, the fastest growing and most profitable wireless sector. Thanks to Google, a new set of players can enter the smartphone arena, each one building a brand based on its own implementation of Android.

And the best bit- no 6 week app store approval process. Great for SaaS innovation. Time to think about developing for Android.

This week Bessemer made another smart move hiring a “Designer In Residence” from Mint.com reiterating the focus for SaaS on User Interfaces. I’d love to be working with them as my VC right now if I were in the market for one.

I don’t know whether you’ve been following the Google vs. Newspapers debate, but something about it strikes me as relevant to SaaS providers struggling to find the path to revenue. What do you think? While on Google- Gears has long been a great way to enable offline access for browsers. Google announced a couple of weeks ago it’s sunsetting Gears as the features have been included within the HTML 5 specification. HTML 5 is something that’s going to be on the radar for a little while now- but this lifehacker post is a great start in getting to understand what it means.

Still on lifehacker and Google- there’s a great guide there for how to get started with Chromium OS.

Back to SaaS- I found this great guide to model pricing discounts as volume scales looking at dropbox, basecamp and freshbooks. (via @lincolnmurphy) While on pricing- there was a nice piece on affordable subscription billing services by Chad Glendenin. Lack of Aria and Zuora noted.

We gave away 4 conference passes last week to group members for Business Cloud 9 and the Cloud conference in Israel. Tom Cogswell at Sift was generous enough to give me a pass to the Business Cloud 9 too and it was great to meet some group members in person.

There were quite a few interesting people there and a couple of things really stuck with me. First was Paul Cheesbrough (@paulcheesbrough) who said that the Cloud has enabled the Telegraph Media Group (a big newspaper in the UK) to totally shift their IT budget. Before the cloud, they spent 95% of their budget on maintaining the status quo. With the cloud they’ve been able to move 50% of their IT budget to innovation or enablement.

The other interesting thing was the Oracle SVP Anthony Lye said “Customers no longer trust vendors”. OK, they might not especially trust Oracle, but that’s a shift we’re all seeing in marketing technology.

I couldn’t resist posting this story- “The cloud ate my homework”

TWIS is going to be published on Sunday/Monday until Christmas then I was thinking about moving it to Friday mornings- what do you think?

In the Linkedin SaaS group:

• Exploration of SaaS Channels- Is there scope for solution companies to offer direct B2C SaaS solutions and Resellers and Distributors: what does cloud computing platforms such as Windows Azure mean to them?
• Payments as a Service?
• Loads of SaaS Jobs

TWIS Events

Last week’s giveaway for the Cloud conference in Israel was so successful that they’ve given us two more passes! The speaker lineup still looks fantastic and I’m gutted not to be there.

On the flipside we’ve got two tickets for next week’s Business Cloud 9 Summit in London on the 2nd to give away- worth £295.00 each. Marc Benioff (CEO Salesforce) is doing a videocast and Zach Nelson (CEO Netsuite) amongst others are speaking. Parker Harris (Salesforce co-founder and EVP Technology) will be in person and on the panel taking questions. If you watched any of the dreamforce coverage last week you’ll have seen Parker launch all the new products on stage. I can’t wait.

To enter, email me- jp@justinpirie.com with either “Cloud Israel” or “Cloud 9” as the subject. I’m going to give preference to people in country who enter and draw on Monday.

TWIS

Last week I wasn’t sure about what the Google Chromium OS meant for us in SaaS, but I actually think it’s an incredibly positive play for us- essentially it is a super lightweight OS (boots in 7 seconds) which is designed to use the internet with no local storage. That means that it can’t install any software or store anything locally and I think the SaaS segment is perfectly positioned to take advantage of this. Because the OS is so lightweight, the devices are going to be much cheaper, easier to use, less complicated to support, use less energy and pay no “Microsoft tax”. Google has such a strong brand I can foresee companies using it where employees don’t do complex tasks and it could push SaaS adoption even further. TechChrunch has an interesting perspective on it.

On Wednesday- I went to the launch of Eurocloud UK- thanks to Phil Wainewright for organising. What surprised me was the amount of debate around whether SaaS should fit into the “Cloud” definition. Personally, like I said last week, I’ve come round to it and I think Bessemer segmented it really nicely in this diagram:

For me it boils down into 3 simple concepts:

• Software on demand (SaaS)
• Platform on demand (Paas)
• Compute on demand (IaaS)

The nice thing for us in the SaaS space, is that we’re in the biggest market ($21B in 2012), with the most maturity, value add and margin. A vendor at the front of the room at EuroCloud (who I couldn’t identify) said that they’re prospects understand “Cloud” much better than “SaaS” and it’s helping them close business faster. Anecdotal, but maybe something we should all be thinking about?

Also- I’ve posted this before but Appiro’s Interactive Cloud Ecosystem map might help you get to grips with the various categories and space better.

There was too much to include this in last week’s TWIS, but this Sandhill article on how to execute on Bessemer’s laws is excellent. Tell me if you’re getting fed up with me referencing Bessemer, but it seems to me like they’re one of the only sources giving away excellent knowledge backed up by credibility. One of their associates, Sarah Tavel called this knowledge sharing, Bessemers “Freemium” model.

I’ve been having quite a few conversations recently about twitter- a common quote being “I don’t get twitter- why is it relevant to me, SaaS and B2B in general?” So I wrote a post about it for you.

Generally speaking, I really don’t like “Top 10 predictions for next year” type blogs- but I took exception to this one, because I think the Marketing Automation space is so important to us in SaaS. As I mentioned in my twitter and social media post earlier today, buyers are changing how they buy software. They are better informed and look at different sources. You can no longer count on them registering on your website and speaking to sales. They’ve probably read a blog post online and asked people on twitter. If you’re not getting involved with that conversation, you’re letting sales pass you by and your CAC is going to be higher.

Stuart Wheldon wrote a great post entitled SaaS, social media and the economics of smart buyers and included this helpful diagram:

Marketing Automation is a great way to get involved with the conversation and to develop automated, scalable processes for nurturing leads. The foundation of nurturing is content- sending your prospects great content at the right time is key to educating the buyer to include your product in their selection.

With that in mind, my Group Member of the week is Mark Gibson. Mark is a regular contributor to the group and specialises in SaaS Sales and Marketing- but what really interested me, was that Mark delivers consulting in the UK on a product called Hubspot. He’s at the front line with his customers and sees the results. Mark was saying that in SaaS we need to more closely align sales and marketing in SaaS and that echo’s what Steven Woods said in the post from above:

11) Measuring the Revenue Engine:

As the above trends evolve in 2010, marketers will begin to develop their ability to predict revenue trends well in advance of sales, by measuring and analyzing the overall revenue funnel. Marketing leaders who can do this will become among the most strategic executives at the board room table.

I think we’ll see a trend in 2010 where marketing is going to become much more quantitative and much less qualitative. Using Marketing Automation tools, Marketers are going to much more closely predict revenue and have much more control over the funnel. I wonder whether 2010 will become the year when Marketing becomes much more target / bonus driven too?

Mark took me on a tour of Hubspot, which I have to admit I haven’t done in a long time, but I was really impressed with their additions in social media, namely twitter, facebook and Linkedin Answers integration. I think it’s a really good entry level product for someone who wants to start in Marketing Automation. I really like Hubspot’s overall look and feel and it’s something marketing could get to grips with easily. For me, I think I’d prefer a more advanced product like Eloqua where you can customise the nurturing based on what the prospect is doing, i.e. their digital body language not just time based.

The other thing I liked about Mark, was he is part of the “nail it before you scale it” school of sales and marketing. Too many times I’ve seen companies increase headcount before they properly understand why customers buy and the “messaging architecture” is in place to support scaling as Mark calls it. It’s similar to what Mark Leslie founder of Veritas called the Sales Learning Curve:

The time it takes to achieve cash flow breakeven is reasonably independent of sales force staffing. It is, instead, entirely dependent on how well and how quickly the entire organization learns what it takes to sell the product or service while incorporating customer feedback into the product itself. Because the entire organization has to come up to speed, hiring a large initial sales staff does not speed up the time to breakeven, it simply consumes cash more quickly.

Mark is originally an Aussie and spent 12 years in the Valley and now lives in Scotland…(great for golfing apparently). I guess we’re kindred spirits really, since I live in Bristol… I really enjoyed my time on the phone with Mark, and I want to thank him for his contributions to the group. His blog is here.

Ironically, the founder of Hubspot, Dharmesh Shah wrote a really good review of a pricing book including how they initially priced hubspot. If you don’t want to make the same mistakes they did, then reading the post is well worthwhile. Even better than that you can get the ebook version free here.

I’m going to be at Business Cloud 9 this week, I always like meeting group members- so don’t hesitate to reach out to me. If you want this delivered to your inbox in its full HTML then subscribe here or via RSS here.

In other news:

• My penchant for metrics, Bruce Cleveland wrote a good post on why SaaS companies should keep their customer acquisition costs to less than one year to preserve cash.
• Microsoft reveals they have 300,000 servers in their Chicago datacenter (yes 300 thousand). They clearly care about scaling their online services.
• Andrew Chen wrote a great summary on adding usability to Agile. Especially useful if you want to “Fail Fast, Fail Often” a la Eric Ries.
• Joe Pulizzi wrote his content marketing tips for next year (the foundation of Marketing Automation/lead nurturing).
• A great list of VC bloggers by number of subscribers- you should be reading them if you’re looking for funding. My favourites are Fred Wilson (#2) and Mark Suster (#39).
• Fun post on competitive advantage “”S**t, that’s not fair!” When does a competitive advantage matter most?”
• Detailed post on MS Azure

In the Group:

• What apps are suitable for the cloud?
• Configuration Management in SaaS
• ROI in SaaS?

There are also loads of SaaS specific jobs in the jobs section- so check them out.

We also went over 14,000 members this week

Thanks to everyone in the group for all your great contributions, and as ever, if you want to reach out to me, please do

Events:

In keeping what I promised- only promoting events that directly benefit you, the members of this group (Linkedin SaaS group)- we’ve got a conference pass to give away to the World Cloud Computing Summit which takes place on December 2^nd and 3^rd in Israel. There are some really great people there- including Microsoft, Amazon and IBM, as well as Reuven Cohen, Bessemer and Dani Shomron (a member of this group). The agenda is here.

To get in the draw all you have to do is tweet: “@justinpirie I’d like to see xyz speak at #igt09 and I’d like to win a ticket. Thanks @igtcloud” – insert who you’d like to see speak instead of xyz!

Personally- I’d like to see Bessemer, although I do wonder how Reuven is CTO of a company and manages so many tweets and blog posts… Everyone who enters the draw will get a discount code in case you don’t win. If you don’t want to go- please thank @igtcloud for the pass and discount.

Back to TWIS:

It’s been a really busy week for SaaS, with Microsoft PDC and Salesforce Dreamforce competing for the headlines, or so I thought…. Virtually none of the news I’ve read has any real analysis on Azure, just that it’s going live Jan 1 in six countries and it’s going head to head with Google and Force. This should be massive news, but are we a little weary- especially as the SLA’s offered are so poor that we have little opportunity to go PaaS???

Yes Customer, we can give you 99.9% uptime… More on Azure next week I suspect.

Salesforce, is on the other hand going gangbusters on the PR- but a little background for you… Enterprise 2.0 (yes a catchy title) is starting to get interesting- Hutch Carpenter wrote a great piece over at cloudave earlier on the week which set’s the scene on E2.0:

“The integration of collaboration, increased findability, social networking and crowdsourcing into core enterprise activities requiring defined workflows, specific user sign-offs, results measurement and role-based access.”

E2.0 was the big news at Dreamforce- integrating social media into the Salesforce DNA, with twitter and facebook integration deep into the suite and a new social platform called chatter. Think tweet-to-case and you’ve got the idea.

Chatter is like an internal version of twitter and facebook for your company which also integrates with facebook and twitter. Appriro covers it in detail if you’re interested here. I’ve been stewing on it for a day or two and haven’t really had a chance to form an opinion. What are your thoughts? As I was writing this- Mark Fidelman posted this about their problems selling social/E2.0 to enterprise. Maybe Salesforce will actually drive adoption, even if it is a me-too product?

There seems to be more and more momentum to integrating SaaS into cloud- so please don’t shoot me if you think I’m interchanging the between the two, too liberally. Bessemer overlaid the various cloud layers (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) really beautifully in the laws last week but I thought that Appriro splits them really well as part of their “cloud ecosystem”, and how SaaS fits into it- as applications  (by @appirio_ryan and @troyangrignon)

I’ve used people’s twitter names where possible so you can get social (or just stalk them if you’re not down with the kids in the whole social networking thingy). Thinking about Social networking, my guest editor this week was Peter Cohen, and he was echoing Mark Fidelmans findings on social media in the enterprise- there’s a real lack of understanding (weariness?) out there. Peter’s got a great SaaS Marketing Blog BTW.

Peter also had some interesting observations from a panel discussion hosted by the Mass Tech Leadership Council on SaaS and Cloud. On the panel were CIO’s of very large corporates and what really struck me from his observations were these CIO’s were really pro SaaS. Yes- pro SaaS. Now, when a traditionally licensed app comes up for upgrade or renewal, their default choice is to move to SaaS, and only don’t move if it’s not worth the pain of migrating.

The second thing that struck me from his observations was how much importance the CIO’s place on the UI- yes the UI. They want a UI that is easy to use because it makes their users happier, more productive, plus training and support costs less. That to me reinforces how important Dave McClure’s AARRR metrics are for success- EVEN in the enterprise. More in last week’s TWIS.

Thinking about metrics from last week- I discovered this excellent post by Eric Rees on Vanity metrics:

“The only metrics that entrepreneurs should invest energy in collecting are those that help them make decisions. Unfortunately, the majority of data available in off-the-shelf analytics packages are what I call Vanity Metrics. They might make you feel good, but they don’t offer clear guidance for what to do.”

In other news:

@beaker wrote a thoughtful post on IaaS and PaaS- I think he’s totally right and the focus from IaaS providers need to be on systems and management. Silent Lucidity: IaaS — Already A Dinosaur? The Evolution of PaaSasaurus Rex… I guess if IBM are telling their customers to “Just do it” on IaaS then it’s time for the earlyvangelists to move on…

I’m sure Monday morning had many of the clouderati choking on the breakfast with the announcement that AT&T are getting into providing cloud services. (If you’ve never tried using AT&T then read this ) I guess that’s why one of their VP’s posted this article on use cases for cloud on Sunday.

Mike Dunham’s thoughts from last week’s discussion have stayed with me when looking at this post about Microsoft’s cloud offerings. Do you agree with this post that MS could be the GM of software?

Linkedin didn’t deliver all of last week’s TWIS- in case you missed it’s here. Because of that- our featured member of the week is Christina Pappas again- TWIS profile here. A new one next week

I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s TWIS- it’s been hard this week to keep it to a sensible length- I’ve carried over a few things for next week and will sleep on a few other things- might even collect some thoughts for a blog post… If you want to catch me- I’ll be in London on Wednesday for the launch of Eurocloud – free ticket here. I’m looking forward to meeting Phil Waineright (@philww) in person after reading his blog for ages. Otherwise I’m @justinpirie on twitter or contact me via my blog.

Have a great weekend!

Update: Yes- Google Chrome OS has launched- video here.

Hi All
Since we last wrote to you, the group has gone from strength to strength. We’ve not only grown massively (over 13k members now) but some of the discussions have been brilliant!

All the growth however, is not without its issues and as the group grows the temptation to spam grows with it… The main point of contention seems to be the discussions, because they get emailed out every day to our members and people see it as an easy way to market themselves. As moderators we’ve been working harder to remove irrelevant posts and I hope you’ve noticed the improvements! If you’ve previously unsubscribed to our daily digest- maybe it’s time to think about re-subscribing???

I wanted to say a couple of things about discussions- as that is where as moderators we are spending most of our time. I think the most important thing to remember is that joining an existing discussion is much more powerful than starting a new one for several reasons. Firstly, all the people who have already commented get an instant email and because they’ve already commented they are much more likely to read and respond to your comments- which is the whole purpose of social media- connecting people. Use the search to find relevant discussions to learn and comment on.

Also while on discussions, people seem to be posting links to content elsewhere without any real reason for starting a discussion. I think the quid pro quo for posting links to discussions is that it needs to be accompanied by some analysis and provoke a discussion- especially if it’s your own blog! I guess the flaw is that Linkedin isn’t integrated with anything else…

Between writing the first draft of this email and posting it to you, we’ve seen a couple of really interesting things. Today, Scobleizer wrote a brilliant post on why we need controls to keep the conversation relevant- worth a read at http://bit.ly/1w8LSX We want to keep improving the group and we’re looking for your input and suggestions on how to do it.

In line with what Scobleizer wrote- we’ve been thinking about starting a weekly newsletter or digest to highlight the good stuff happening in the group and important developments elsewhere in SaaS. It would be a place for aggregating and human filtering / analysing content rather than the overload of information we’ve all become used to. It would be great if it could be group/community driven too. Our initial thoughts for inclusion are:

• The week’s best discussions in the group (in case you missed it)
• The week’s important developments in SaaS with some good blog posts to read (if you’re too busy to get through your rss reader)
• Upcoming Events (including relevant webinars)
• Featured members

Anything else missing? Thoughts?

For those of you on twitter- we’ve created two lists for us- one on SaaS and the other on Cloud Computing. They are at http://twitter.com/justinpirie/saas and http://twitter.com/justinpirie/cloud If you want to be added to the list- tweet me something like “hey @justinpirie, I want to be included in the SaaS or Cloud Twitter list.” It’s going to take some time to get through all the responses so please bear with me.

Lastly- we have had for some time the ability to have sub-groups and have created ones for partnerships and webinars. If you want to host a specific topic within the SaaS community- we’ll help you set up a group and promote it.

This is your group and we want your feedback!

Agostino, Henrik and Justin

Agostino Paganini – http://www.linkedin.com/in/agostinopaganini
Henrik Gammelgaard – http://www.linkedin.com/in/henrikg
Justin Pirie – http://www.linkedin.com/in/justinpirie

photo credit: woodleywonderworks

It’s been long overdue- trying to find the time and brainspace to work on improving the SaaS Linkedin group I help manage- http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=122612

The problem is, that when you have a bunch of busy people in charge of something, it’s really tough to find the space and time to collaboratively move things forward. It’s the same for many organisations and people (normally committees). Well, I’m pleased to say, I’ve done it, I’ve written a proposal to make some improvements to the SaaS group and sent it off to my esteemed colleagues for their feedback.

With that in mind, I’ve been wondering who does the product management at Linkedin for groups because there are some improvements that are desperately needed… I heard from another group manager that we’ll be able to approve posts before they are public soon, but there are still loads of things that need doing if groups are to remain valuable and managers are able to cope. At the moment managing 13,000 users could be a full time job with no reward, and we’re only a top 250 group! I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a top 10 group!

Doyle Slayton wrote a brilliant post on the subject- 6 Ways to Improve LinkedIn Groups outlining what he thinks needs to be done- and I completely agree with him. The sooner we can have robust, collaborative management features, the sooner we can return value back to our users and get rid of the spammers.

Oh well, enough wishful thinking for one day!