Visible Blog

For the past 3 years, we’ve been hard at work scouring the internet for content for our weekly newsletter: The Founders Forward. Over the course of building the Founders Forward, we’ve shared 1000s of articles and have gotten to know different VC thought leaders and influencers. Below, we’ve shared 11 of the VC thought leaders we learn from again and again. Do you follow anyone that we don’t have on our list? Shoot us an email to marketing@visible.vc or send us a tweet. We’d love to build out the list even more! Jason Lemkin Twitter Handle: @jasonlk Tweets About: All things SaaS with a focus on sales, investor relations, and scaling your business to $100M in Revenue. Follow if: You are a SaaS founder or operator with an interest in learning from someone who has scaled a business to $100M in revenue. Where to Start: 10 Great Questions to Ask a VP of Sales During an Interview, You Need to Fundraise 52 Weeks a Year. The 1-and-30 Rule. Brad Feld Twitter Handle: @bfeld Tweets About: The latest tech news for founders, venture capital, and his favorite resources/books for startup leaders and operators Follow if: If you’re interested in learning more about venture capital, learning from Brad’s portfolio companies, and lessons from his experience as the founder of Techstars and Foundry Group. Where to Start: Capital Should Follow Talent, Disagree and Commit Fred Wilson Twitter Handle: @fredwilson Tweets About: A stream of his thoughts and blog posts as the founder of Union Square Ventures with a recent focus on blockchain and crypto. Follow if: You’re interested in learning best practices for founders from one of the most successful VCs, or want to learn more about blockchain technology. Where to Start: The Valuation Obsession, Should Your Company be Profitable Semil Shah Twitter Handle: @semil Tweets About: A stream of his thoughts on individual startups, tips and advice for founders, and what he personally looks for in an investment. Follow if: You’re an early stage founder that has taken capital, or are getting ready to raise, and want to leverage the perspective of an early stage investor. Where to Start: A New VC Crop of Series A Firms, Paying Attention to Inbound Deal Flow Hunter Walk Twitter Handle: @hunterwalk Tweets About: Current events, his daily experiences as an investor, musings from his fund, and advice for founders. Follow if: You have an interest in the overall venture capital market and are curious about the day-to-day decisions a VC makes. Where to Start: What Do You Want From Me Besides Capital?, A Strong Cold Email Always Beats a Weak Warm One Liz Cain Twitter Handle: @elizabethjcain Tweets About: All things hiring and developing a proficient sales team drawing on her experience launching the BDR team while at NetSuite. Follow if: You are a startup founder or operator getting ready to build out a sales process, team, and hiring plan. Where to Start: How to Give Effective Performance Feedback: Frameworks and Best Practices, A Product-led Approach to Sales Christoph Janz Twitter Handle: @chrija Tweets About: A data-driven approach to SaaS investing across the industry, with a focus on European venture. Follow if: You are interested in learning more about the SaaS landscape from a macro perspective, or want to know what Europe’s top firm looks for in their investments. Where to Start: Five Ways to Build a $100M Business, Unsure How Much You Should Pay Yourself? Check out this Founder Salary Calculator Josh Elman Twitter Handle: @joshelman Tweets About: Product-focused tweets focused in the consumer space. Follow if: You are building a consumer-facing product and have questions for one of the leaders in the space—Josh is quick to respond to tweets. Where to Start: The Only Metric that Matters, Web Scraping vs. Doing the Work Ben Horowitz Twitter Handle: @bhorowitz Tweets About: His musings from being the name behind of the most successful VC funds in the world: Andressen Horowitz. Follow if: You want to learn startup and leadership advice from the author behind The Hard Things About Hard Things. Also doesn’t hurt if you’re a fan of rap. Where to Start: The Hard Thing About Hard Things, How to Tell the Truth Naval Ravikant Twitter Handle: @naval Tweets About: Thought-provoking ideas that not only challenge you as a founder, but as an individual. Follow if: You want to challenge your thought process, covering everything from venture capital and building a company to meditation and psychology. Where to Start: Build a Team that Ships, Bitcoin – The Internet of Money

If you sign into Visible today, you’ll see an updated navigation. The changes we’ve made are small, but they will accomplish a couple key items: Make drafting, editing and sending Updates easier than ever Set the stage for some game-changing improvements & features to be delivered later this quarter. What, exactly, is changing? Update drafts are now in the sidebar. Instead of a couple clicks to get into an Update, you’ll be able get there with much more ease. We’ve fixed Settings, Metrics and Contacts to the bottom of the sidebar. We’ve also created a specific Sent Updates navigation item to quickly see the Stats of your previously sent Updates. Our aim was to have anything you are frequently creating, viewing or editing to be prominent, near the top of of the navigation, while features that you interact with less frequently to be positioned at the bottom. Tables—better late than never? The same tables you use in Dashboards can now be used in Updates! What seems like a simple feature from the outside was actually a complex user experience to nail. The team rallied and launched this feature, which many of you have requested. Thanks to Eugene (who is new on our product team) for tackling this! Feel free to contact us with any feedback or questions you have! Up & to the Right, -Mike & The Visible Team

Hiring is hard, and hiring for a startup is even harder. Especially in the early days, every hire you make is crucial. Adding the wrong person to your team can adversely affect the entire company in a big way, slowing you down and making it that much more difficult to reach your goals. When CB Insights analyzed the main reasons startups fail, team issues ranked at #3, above big issues like competition and poor business model. It’s little wonder that, year after year, State of Startups finds “hiring the right people” at the top of their list of concerns for startup CEOs year after year. One of the key ways to protect against making a bad hire is to run a formal hiring process for every role you fill. Below, you’ll find out why a formal process is so important, and how you can make it work, regardless of the stage you’re at. Why have a process? There are plenty of reasons you might be inclined to forego a set hiring process and follow your gut. Setting up a process is a lot of work. Following a traditional interview process might feel corporate, or more appropriate for companies much larger than yours. And executing on that process with candidate after candidate takes up valuable time, and you have a company to build. Here’s the thing—you need to be running an interview process. It drastically increases your chances of making the right hire, whether you’re adding employee number 5, 50 or 500. The time you lose running a formal process is nothing compared to the time you’ll lose if you make a bad hire. There are plenty of resources out there about how to structure your interview process, but most aren’t written with the startup leader in mind. Here are a few steps to follow to build and run a formal interview process amidst all of your competing priorities: Make everyone apply When you’re starting out, your network is the best place to find quality candidates. That means you’re going to meet people you want to hire in a lot of informal ways—from star events and happy hours to LinkedIn introductions. Here’s the thing, though: no matter how you’re introduced, eventually you need to make every candidate apply with a resume and answers to a few application or survey questions. You want everyone to begin on as even a playing field as possible. A lightweight applicant tracking system makes this easy, but you can also use a web form and a spreadsheet. Once your candidates have applied, you can use their resumes and answers to decide who you want to give more time to. Screen liberally With your formal applications in tow, set up a screener interview with every candidate that looks interesting. This should be a quick discussion—20 minutes at most—that gives you a sense of the person that you’re talking to. Keeping these conversations short allows you to talk with more people, and make sure that no one exceptional slips through the cracks. Interview sparingly This is where you can rely on your gut. If you aren’t excited about a candidate after the screener call, don’t interview them. An ideal interview takes at least an hour and typically includes more than one person at your company. That makes every interview you conduct a pretty expensive prospect, both in terms of cash and opportunity cost. Don’t interview anyone you don’t genuinely think you want to hire. Know what you’re looking for Before you conduct your longer interviews, you should make sure you know what you’re looking for. I generally advise making a list that includes the following items: Must-haves Any candidate you hire must possess these qualities, skills or experiences. You shouldn’t break these, so don’t put too many items under this category. Important These are qualifications or traits that are directly related to the role, but don’t disqualify someone if they don’t have them. This should be your longest list. Bonus points Qualifications or traits you don’t expect candidates to have, but could be a big help in the position, or to the company as a whole. After you’ve conducted each interview, measure the candidate against this list. It’s OK to hire someone who doesn’t check every box, and it’s even OK to choose a candidate who checks fewer boxes than another candidate you interviewed, but having the list before your interviews gives you something to measure against. If you deviate from it after the fact, you’ll be making an intentional decision. Don’t go it alone Finally, unless you’re a company of one, you shouldn’t be conducting final interviews alone. You need at least one other person in the room to provide a different perspective on each candidate, to help you debrief after interviews and deliberate on who to hire. I’ve never been on a hiring team that had unanimous impressions of a candidate—even when they all thought the candidate should be hired. A little perspective goes a long way. All of the above is a good outline for how a formal interview process can work at a startup. It may seem daunting at the start, but it will help you hire with confidence and increase the likelihood that you find the right candidate for each role you fill.

Raising a Seed round is an incredible accomplishment. For many startups, it’s also the start of a long journey. As more companies get funded at the Seed stage, the competition for Series A capital is growing. In fact, if you are lucky enough to raise a Seed round, your chance of raising a second round is roughly 48%. Outside of the essentials, like finding product-market fit, scaling revenue, and building a repeatable customer acquisition process, there are plenty of other important things to consider as you get ready to raise a Series A. We’ve laid out 3 of them below. Tracking Metrics & Financial Planning David Cummings, investor and company founder, has found that most Seed stage founders don’t track enough metrics on a weekly basis. Having a grasp of key financials and metrics will become vital when courting potential investors past the Seed stage. David suggest starting with the 9 metrics below: Cash on hand Weekly burn rate Monthly recurring revenue New customers Lost customers Marketing qualified leads Sales demos Active sales opportunities Customer net promoter score (NPS) To make things easier, we’ve turned those 9 metrics into a Google Sheet template you can access here. Building the Team Building a strong team is arguably just as important as your initial product and customer acquisition process, as it’s often a key factor investors look at when deciding to invest. As Mark Suster, Founder of Upfront Ventures, puts it, “about 70% of my investment decision of an early-stage company is the team. My rationale is simple: everything goes wrong and only great teams can respond to competitors, markets, funding environments, staff departures, PR disasters and the like.” Having a small team that covers every major function of a business allows Seed stage companies to iterate quickly while staying capital efficient. As the team continues to grow, the fingerprints of these original team members will be all over the company culture. Not only does a strong team increase your likelihood of raising capital, the early days of hiring are a blueprint for your company culture and structure as you grow. Engaging Outside Stakeholders Seed stage founders are pulled in every conceivable direction. On top of building a product, building a team, and creating a repeatable sales process, founders at the Seed stage must also manage their outside stakeholders—both initial investors and the ones they hope to bring on board. As Ari Newman, Partner at Techstars, says, “Financing is not a dot, it is a line and it is part of your job as a founder and a business leader to keep the capital coming in.” Engaging potential investors can often draw you away from your day-to-day tasks, so it is important to have a clear process in place, just as you would with a marketing or sales lead. Courting potential investors can’t be a founder’s full time job, so adding process and structure will help protect your time. For founders who are ready to fundraise, we built a Fundraise Tracking Tool, which helps ensure you can track your prospective investors as simply as possible. Once you have them organized, sending a quick email update every month or so will pay dividends as you get deeper in the fundraising process. The move from Seed to Series A isn’t an easy one. It requires founders, and the teams behind them, to level up quickly. Paying attention to the above items will help ensure you and your team are set up for fundraising success. Ready to start nurturing potential investors as you ramp up for a Series A fundraise? Start a Visible trial to send quick and beautiful investor updates here.

Contact and Account Objects in Salesforce The Visible product team just updated our Salesforce Integration. We now support the Contacts and Accounts objects in addition to the already existing Leads and Opportunities objects. If you need a refresher on Salesforce, you can read more in our knowledge base. Contact us to send us any feedback or questions. Up & to the right, -Mike & The Visible Team.

Business Planning for the New Year It’s resolution season, which means many of us are making declarations about how many books we’ll read or how many pounds we’ll lose this year. The ball descends on December 31, and on January 1st—or maybe January 2nd, depending on our hangover level—we set out to make our resolutions a reality. Here’s a stat that isn’t too encouraging: 80% of those resolutions will fail by February. It’s so bad that some psychologists actually suggest starting your resolutions on February 1. A major contributor to that failure rate is the lofty nature of most resolution goals. Goals are best when they’re broken down into smaller steps that are more attainable and achievable. Instead of setting out to read 25 books this year, for instance, it’s better to aim at reading 2 books a month. Or—even better—read for 20 minutes every weekday. The end result is about the same, but the path you take to get there has incremental steps that make the goal easier to accomplish. So what does this have to do with annual planning? Well, if you’re doing it right, you’ve already set your business goals for 2019. But, if closing out Q4 and the blur of holidays got in the way, you may be sitting down this week or next to write out your 2019 goals. And my advice is: don’t. What I mean is, don’t try to write lofty, year-long goals. For many of the same reasons that most resolutions fail, most businesses miss the mark on their annual goals by year’s end. In fact, businesses fare even worse than resolution-writers: 90% of senior executives told The Economist they fall short of annual goals. This is especially true in the startup world, where the rapid pace of change means the goals you have today may not even be relevant six months from now. So instead of focusing on big annual goals, focus on themes. What themes will drive the focus of your business this year? Themes should align with your overall vision, and can be anything that is important to where you want to go. You want something that isn’t so vague that it’s meaningless, but also isn’t so specific that it’s essentially a goal with a different name. One of the current themes here at Visible is “Time to Value.” We’re asking ourselves how we can ensure that we are having a positive impact on our customers’ businesses as soon as they start using the product. Once you have your themes, then you can start creating monthly and quarterly goals that line up with them. Themes, then, become the lenses through which you can prioritize your efforts. If an initiative doesn’t line up with one of your themes for the year, you’ll reevaluate whether it’s really worth doing. Our “Time to Value” theme is informing everything from our product roadmap to our marketing efforts. So, instead of setting big annual goals that you aren’t likely to reach anyway, consider choosing themes instead. If you choose them well, they’ll last a whole lot longer than your New Year’s resolutions do. Related Resources: How to Write a Business Plan For Your Startup

Leveraging your existing network and investors is a great way to kick off a new fundraise. Below is a quick template to share with your current investors announcing your fundraise and asking for introduction to other prospective investors.

In the opening episode of Season 2 of the Powderkeg podcast, Mike Preuss, our CEO, and David Hall of Rise of Rest discuss fundraising between the coasts and how startups can leverage stakeholder reporting to power their business. In this episode with David Hall and Mike Preuss, you’ll learn: Key similarities and differences between non-coastal tech hubs (9:17). An experienced investor’s high-level work and life advice for entrepreneurs (15:46). The benefits that thorough stakeholder reporting can provide for every startup (22:51). How to build a talented team and loyal customer base between the coasts (33:38). Proven strategies for nurturing healthy founder-investor relationships(37:33). How founders and investors should approach fundraising in non-coastal cities(49:16). Give it a listen below or using this link. Enjoy!

“How should I prepare for an investor pitch?” This is a question we hear a lot, both from first-time entrepreneurs and from founders who have raised before. There is no shortage of advice available on how to prep for a pitch meeting. Here’s the problem: if you’re asking that question at the pitch stage, you’re already too late. Most of the time, your first meeting with an investor isn’t a pitch. Instead, it’s a coffee, or a cocktail, or an introduction at an event. Often, it’s not a meeting at all—it’s an email conversation. You know the saying, “you only get chance to make a first impression?” This is especially true for investors. While there’s an awful lot of emphasis put on preparing for a pitch, an investor is going to form opinions about you based on your first interaction, well before the pitch takes place. Here are 5 questions you should answer before that first interaction to help make sure your first impression is a good one. What do they invest in? This is an easy one. You need to make sure the business you’re pitching is in line with the type of business the investor likes to invest in. If an investor only funds B2B SaaS products, don’t try to pitch her on your mobile game company. Investors often like to get involved in industries and markets they understand, which is why most investor portfolio companies share a common thread. Make sure you understand what that thread is for every investor you talk to. How do they invest? This question comes with several straightforward sub-questions. What is their typical check size? Do they like to lead rounds, or simply participate? How hands-on do they like to be? Knowing an investor’s MO for the practical details of an investment will help you plan your raise and ensure you’re not wasting each other’s time. You can start to figure this out by doing a little digging on Crunchbase, reading some press releases, and asking around. What is their background? Even if you’re talking to a large VC, you need to understand the individual(s) you’ll be working with. What about their background or experience suggests they could add value to your business? Have they worked with a particular audience or vertical that lines up with someone your business helps? Did you go to the same college? Investors want to know that you’re not looking to get funded by anyone with a checkbook. Being able to make personal connections, or speak to why you want them involved, will help you catch their interest and start building a relationship. What do they care about? Answering this question will do two things. First, it’ll help you determine whether or not a particular investor will be a good fit for your company. We believe you should do due diligence on every investor you bring on board, and this is a good early step toward that goal. Second, it will help you know what to emphasize about your company that will catch their interest. Different investors focus on different things. While some may care about the founding team or the long-term vision, others are more concerned with revenue growth or the total addressable market. Browsing an investor’s public channels, especially things like Twitter, Medium, Quora, and interviews, is a great place to start. What do you want? This is probably the most important question to answer before meeting an investor: what is it you want from them? Even if an investor is interested in your company, they need something to respond to. It’s best to not only have a clear ask in mind, but to also understand what alternative options they might offer (and know which of those options would be acceptable to you). If you can answer each of these questions before you meet with an investor, you’ll not only make a good first impression, but you’ll put yourself in a much better position to get the outcome you want. Research thousands of investors with Visible Connect:

If you are a CEO or other company leader, I have a challenge for you: spend the next 8 weeks writing Friday notes to your team. You don’t have to send them on Fridays, and they don’t actually have to be written—I’ve seen video updates work very well, too—but you do have to send one to all of your employees, every week, for the next 8 weeks. If you haven’t done this kind of thing before, I guarantee you’ll be pleased with the results. Ben Horowitz wrote that “perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.” Put another way, the CEO sets the tone for company communication. If you communicate intentionally, openly, and predictably, odds are the rest of your team will, too. What’s in a note? A Friday Note can be just that: a note. It doesn’t need to include a in-depth report on company progress or deep philosophical insight. In fact, I’d argue an approach like that could be counter-productive. Instead, share what’s at the top of your mind for the week and why, plus some words of encouragement or additional thoughts. What are you excited about? Where would you like to see improvement? What have you been reading lately? If you’re sending the note via email, keep it under a page. If it’s a video, two minutes or less. Your note should be easy to digest. If you have additional thoughts, save them for the following week. Most importantly, take a tone that is as personal as you’re comfortable with. Your team likely gets enough official communication from you and other org leaders, so something more conversational will be refreshing. What you’ll get in return It’s easy to forget that with the title of CEO comes a degree of unapproachability. The larger and older your company, the more this is true. A weekly note to the entire team, presented without much varnish, helps you connect with your employees on a more human level than they may be used to. In a previous role, I worked with the CEO to compose Friday notes for the team’s ~120 employees. He got responses every week. Some were straightforward, to the tune of “thanks for writing this!” but others offered more, like an employee’s thoughts on the subject at hand, or even questions or comments about unrelated matters. Either way, the note started a dialogue that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Finally, a weekly note gives you a chance to evangelize your vision. Your team may have heard it at an annual All-Hands or in a quarterly call, but supporting that vision with regular reminders is a great way to ensure that everyone keeps working toward it. If you need help getting started, we have a great weekly note template in our resources section. Otherwise, just give it a shot this week and see what happens. I promise it’ll be worth your time.

You can look at adding an investor to your company in one of two ways; simply a source of capital, or a partner to help you grow your business. As Sangram Vajre, Founder of Terminus, puts it, “Finding a VC firm is almost like finding a co-founder. Any due diligence that you would do to add a co-founder you should do when adding a VC partner.” If you opt to find a VC that you can count on to add value outside of capital, it is your job as a founder to ensure you’re adding the proper partner. Due diligence is a part of the funding process that all founders are expected to complete. You can flip this process on its head by asking the same of your potential investors. Related resource: Startup Due Diligence: What Every Founder Needs to Prepare For While it does not need to be a formal process, you can follow the investor due diligence checklist below to confirm you can rely on your new investors as a business partner: Tell them what you’re up to. Be transparent. The key to a strong relationship with any business partner starts with open and honest communication. To get things started on the right foot, you’ll want to be transparent as possible with potential investors that you are performing due diligence. As an added bonus, if they’re helpful and open to the idea, that is probably a good sign of future communication, transparency, and help you’ll receive. A quick Google search. As most research goes, a quick Google search is a great place to start. Check out their LinkedIn, Twitter, Crunchbase, and other social profiles. Ideally, most of this research would be done before you’ve emailed a potential investor, but here are a couple of simple things to keep in mind: Location – Where are you located? Do you need local investors? Or maybe you are looking for connections and networks in strategic geographies. Industry Focus – What type of company are you? Where should your future investors/partners be focused? e.g. If you’re a B2B SaaS company don’t waste your time with marketplace-focused investors. Mark Suster suggest that it is best to prioritize investors with companies in your space. Stage Focus – What size check/round are you raising? e.g. If you’re raising a $1M seed round avoid a firm What is their financial status? One of the less obvious steps when evaluating a potential investor is finding where their funds are coming from. While most funds are made up from larger institutions like pension funds, endowments, family offices, corporations, etc. it is never a bad idea to look into the venture fund’s limited partners. Don’t be surprised to find VCs that keep their LPs names under wraps but if they are open and willing to share this information that can be a good indicator of an open relationship. Talk to other founders in their portfolio. Arguably the most important step in performing due diligence on your investors is talking with other founders in their portfolio. Ask the other founders what it has been like to work the investor, where they’ve brought the most value, how they’ve handled disagreements, etc. Investors will likely give you a list of contacts to reach out to but don’t be afraid to reach out to other founders outside of their references. If you have any investors already in your network ask them about the reputation of your new investor or any experiences they’ve had in the past. Related Resource: Startup Fundraising Checklist Do their values & culture match? As a founder, you own the values of your business. It is your duty to keep your ethics and moral framework in tact as you continue to add partners. As Brock Benefiel, author of Flyover Startups, put it, “Pitching investors is a trust exercise all of its own. You’re almost always sharing proprietary information in an investment deck and almost never securing a NDA to prevent potential VC vultures from flying away with your secrets. If you’re willing to easily hand over precious data points and secret product information, you’ve earned the right to demand investors take your code of ethics seriously.” At the end of the day, your investors goal is to generate returns. By using a quick due diligence checklist it can be an easy way to ensure both parties will get the most value from your new relationship. Are you ready to get your fundraising process started? Sign up for a free Visible trial to start emailing and nurturing potential investors.

Throughout the fundraising process countless documents and data points are being shared. Different investors will have different preferences. Below, we share our favorite posts for sharing documents, decks, and data while fundraising Our Favorite Posts for Sharing Documents, Decks, and Data What Should You Send a VC Before Your Meeting? — Mark Suster Mark Suster, Managing Director at Upfront Ventures, offers his take on what founders should send before, during, and after a meeting with investors. 6 Things Founders Should Expect During Venture Due Diligence — Alex Iskold Alex Iskold, Managing Partner at 2048 Ventures, shares 6 things that investors will expect during the due diligence process and how you should properly share them over. 16 Startups Metrics — Andreessen Horowitz The team at Andresseen Horowitz explain what 16 metrics they find to be most valuable from their portfolio and what they mean for investors. The Startup Metrics Potential Investors Want to See On the Founders Forward Blog we share the general metrics potential investors will look into during a fundraise. Well they may vary when it comes to industry investors will often want to see growth, a growing market, and strong unit economics. How to Make a Compelling Pitch Deck — Jean de la Rochebrochard Jean de la Rochebrochard, Partner at Kima Ventures, studies successful pitch decks and lays out the keys to creating and sharing a compelling pitch deck.

Why Product-Led Growth? According to OpenView Labs, Product-Led Growth is “a go-to-market strategy where the product is central to how these companies acquire, convert, expand and retain users. This allows companies to forgo spending large sums on traditional marketing and sales activities. Instead, they rely on the products themselves to supply a pipeline of satisfied users to convert to paying customers.” Implementing a Product-Led Growth strategy offers companies unique financial and operating advantages that allow quick scalability, economic efficiency, and ultimately more efficient growth. Dropbox is a great example of a company that does this well. They generate double the revenue of their closest competitor, but spend a lower share of that revenue on sales and marketing. This can largely be attributed to their product-led growth strategy. At Visible, we’ve centered our growth around our product for a few years now and were able to implement the strategy on our business side by using Product Qualified Leads. What are Product Qualified Leads? If you’ve built a great product, chances are your culture—knowingly or not—is centered around putting the product first. As Liz Cain of OpenView puts it, “You live to serve your customer, to make a product that delights and excites… You don’t want your company aligned around a boiler room, ‘always be closing’ sales culture.” At Visible, we started to implement a product-led approach with our sales and marketing efforts by using Product Qualified Leads. Product Qualified Leads are prospects using some version of your current product who take some sort of qualifying action. Typically this happens during a trial or freemium experience. The exact definition of a PQL will vary greatly from product to product. For example, Slack knows a customer is more likely to close when they hit 2,000+ messages. We have our own product actions we keep our eye on. Outside of standard demographic and sales information, we use a point system to weigh the following product actions: Connect a data source Create a chart Invite other users Create an Update We know once someone on a trial sends an Update, they are more likely to become a paying customer, so we weigh that above all other actions. This leads us to take an “Update-centered” approach to our product and messaging during a user trial. Once someone on a trial has reached a point threshold based on our product criteria, we’ll change their status and try to move them toward conversion. For example, if they’ve connected a data source and created a chart, how do we get them to distribute that chart using Updates? The PQL framework has continued to be fluid for us since we implemented it roughly 2 years ago. Testing and iterating the approach is crucial and something we continue to do. Not only has a PQL approach led to more efficient growth, but also to improvements in the product, sales, marketing, and customer success aspects of our business. While product-led growth might not be for every business, there are learnings that can translate across all businesses. Using PQLs is a great way to start and evaluate what your users and customers truly value about your product. Ready to learn more about product-led growth? Check out the 2018 SaaS Expansion Benchmarks report we created in partnership with OpenView Labs.

Much has been written about the benefits of organizational transparency, but some startup founders are still slow to adopt it in their businesses. It is awfully hard for an employee, investor, or advisor to add value to a business when they’re left in the dark. At the same time, however, it is vital to be thoughtful when deciding which information to share. Transparency can be a double-edged sword. Too much transparency can lead to confusion, whereas too little can lead to distrust and a failure to align your team and stakeholders. Outside of the value-add from your current stakeholders transparency can be a catalyst for building trust and attracting top capital, talent, and customers. Here are 3 things to keep in mind when embracing transparency at your company. Sharing without context is dangerous Data without context is dangerous. While it may be easy to say, “I shared a dashboard with every in the company, I’m being transparent!”, that can lead to confusion, questions, and more answers. Sharing a revenue dashboard without including your monthly burn or spending does not provide much context for anyone consuming the data. Des Traynor, the CEO and founder of Intercom, claims that mastering transparency has been one of the toughest lessons he has had to learn as a CEO. As Des puts it, “Transparency is some sort of spectrum. I think one thing that people over-engineer for is ‘let’s let everyone have access to absolutely everything and somehow magically assume that you’re going to understand it all on how we think about everything all the time.’ That’s just not how it works, unfortunately.” Keep it consistent One of the key benefits of being transparent is building trust. One of the easiest ways to destroy this benefit is by constantly changing up or hiding information. If you’ve been sharing certain financial metrics, then unexpectedly stop sharing the same data or change the context it is in, it will create questions and can sow distrust in your stakeholders.  Joel Gascoigne, the CEO of Buffer, has had to deal with the burdens of sharing the negatives throughout the process. Often regarded as one of the most transparent companies, Buffer went through a round of layoffs that were a surprise to most of the organization. As Joel puts it, “I don’t feel that we fully lived up to our value of transparency, specifically to share early in order to avoid a big revelation later.” The Range of Transparency Transparency is not a “one size fits all” approach. In the workplace, people will tell you transparency means different things to different companies. At the end of the day, transparency is about arming your stakeholders with the information they need to add the most value to your business. On one end of the spectrum, you have companies like Buffer who is often considered one of the first to embrace radical transparency. Joel Gascoigne, CEO of Buffer, shares everything from a live feed of new MRR to salaries for their employees. Other companies, like Structural, share a weekly note from the CEO. The “Friday Note” is a quick way to keep everyone in the loop and rallied behind the same vision. It is a simple way to engage employees but avoid any of the confusion that may come with sharing granular financials and strategic decisions. No matter how transparency takes shape at your company, it is vital to arm your stakeholders with the information they need to add value to your business. Create a plan, stick to it, and give everyone the context they need to succeed. Interested in learning more? Check out our other resources for embracing a transparent culture at the Founders Forward Blog.

The Traditional “Fundraising Funnel” In the past, we’ve discussed how one can easily draw parallels between fundraising and a traditional sales & marketing funnel. Just as a sales & marketing funnel can take different forms, so can your fundraising funnel. Generally, we’ve laid out the “fundraising funnel” in 3 simple steps: Attracting and adding investors (leads) to your top of the funnel on a regular basis. Nurturing and moving those investors through the funnel with the goal of adding them as investors (customers) or engaging them for a future round. Building strong relations with your investors to convert them to promoters, evangelists, or future funders (customer success). Since “Account Based Marketing” has taken over marketing blogs, events, and discussions we’ve laid out how to apply ABM to your fundraising efforts. What is Account Based Marketing Account Based Marketing, according to Marketo, is “An alternative B2B strategy that concentrates sales and marketing resources on a clearly defined set of target accounts within a market and employs personalized campaigns designed to resonate with each account.” In the sales & marketing world, implementing ABM tends to be a costly endeavor, but there are also countless benefits: clear ROI, focus on key accounts, personal and optimized, sales alignment. Terminus, a leader in ABM software and originators of #FlipMyFunnel, use ABM to flip a traditional funnel on its head like so: Terminus defines the 4 stages of the flipped funnel below: Identify – Start with the best-fit. Generally guided by an ICP; Ideal Customer Profile. Expand – Focus on people in the same roles. Find contacts within the companies that you’ll engage during the sales & marketing process. Engage – Right content, right channel. Use the most engaging and targeted form of content to target your contacts and accounts. Advocate – Turn customers into fans. Your marketing team should do everything in its power to ensure customer success by retaining accounts and keeping them happy. How to Apply it for #AccountBasedFundraising We were fortunate enough to pick Sangram Vajre’s, Chief Evangelist at Terminus, mind about using a flipped funnel approach to fundraising. When asked how a founder might apply ABM to fundraising, Sangram said, “The flip my funnel approach can be applied so many more ways than an account-based marketing approach. From a fundraising perspective, lets say your a B2B company in the marketing space. Start by looking at the top 10 companies that have raised money in the last 12 months and who they have raised from and start building your list from here. By starting with a priority list of targeted VCs you won’t have to explain the market and field unqualified inbound interest. As long as you know who your target audience it will really help you solidify where to spend your time.” As a founder himself, Sangram used the flipped funnel approach when fundraising. At Terminus, Sangram and the team had a list of over 100 investors and were flooded with inbound interest from angels and other firms. By limiting the list to ~10 investors they were able to do in-depth research and make sure their visions aligned when they set out to fundraise. Finding the right VC firm can be an integral part of your company’s success and can be started by defining your values and narrowing your list of investors by their visions, experience, and portfolio. In the words of Sangram, “Finding a VC firm is almost like finding a co-founder. Any due diligence that you would do to add a co-founder you should when adding a VC partner.” Identify Start your fundraising process by identifying key “accounts” (read: investors) that are strategic fits for you business. Keep in mind things like location, industry focus, stage focus, other investments, and deal velocity. We suggest developing an “Ideal Investor Profile” to define what investors you’ll want to target during the fundraising process. Expand Find the exact partner or decisionmaker you’ll want to communicate with during your fundraise. Larger firms often have different partners that handle different stages, industries, etc. If there is an advocate and thought leader for your industry within a firm, make sure to add them to your list as well. Unlike the sales & marketing “expand” stage, you’ll likely be able to expand externally from the investment firm as well. Firms decide to pass for a number of reasons, but they also offer a large network. They may be able to make intros to other investors in a similar position, and those investors may be ready to pull the trigger on an investment. Engage Dripping content to your targeted potential investors during the fundraise process is critical. Even if you’re not trying to actively close capital, you should constantly be nurturing and engaging potential investors. We have found it best to send out a short update on the state of the business and industry on a monthly basis. Share a promising metric or two showing strong growth in the business and highlight any significant wins/improvements. Advocate Once you’ve landed an investor, it is vital to form a strong relationship and turn them into your company’s biggest champion. Just as you use customer success to keep your customers happy, you should be intentional about building relationships with your investors and keep them happy, too. Your investors should be your company’s biggest advocate, but that will only be true if you’re top-of-mind for them. Make sure that relationship is strong, and good things will follow. By turning your current investors into advocates you’ll be able to call on them to help fill the top of your funnel with qualified investors from their network. Or better yet, they’re the first people you can go to when you need more capital in your business. There is no definitively correct way to run a fundraising process, so flipping the traditional funnel on its head and using an “account based” approach can be an interesting strategy. If you’re ready to start engaging potential investors and turning them into advocates, sign up for a free trial of Visible here.