Pricing

🚀 SaaS Roundup #117: Stop making pricing decisions in a vacuum

This week: Some excellent pricing lessons from First Round Capital, a framework for improving product quality and a three-headed unicorn.

In SaaS Roundup, we comb through the noise to find you only the best SaaS-flavored reads of the week — just our top three.

You can also receive SaaS Roundup in your email inbox every Friday — just drop your email here and you’ll receive the next issue.


This week’s top reads

Pricing Lessons from Working with 30+ Seed and Series A B2B Startups

An interview with Tyler Gaffney, First Round Capital

“People get caught up behind the computer screen trying to figure pricing out, or doing a ton of benchmarking and research. Instead, they should be having conversations. All the answers are in your customers’ heads.”

Pricing is such a widely-discussed topic in SaaS, but First Round’s Tyler Gaffney would have us believe that many of us are still underestimating the value of pricing decisions, which are still largely made in a vacuum. This post is full of guidance, pitfalls and ways to get started down the path towards better pricing decisions. Read the full post


A guide to improving product quality in a SaaS environment

Oren Raboy, Totango

“Improving product quality is really hard. It becomes more manageable when you have a feedback loop that can direct you forward. We found it effective in improving product quality, and in gives us confidence in our progress and direction.”

Contrary to pricing, the topic of product quality is not at all widely discussed — that’s why this post from Oren at Totango really caught my eye. Oren has built a well-structured feedback loop which is focused on categorizing product defects and tracking them through to a resolution. Read the full post


Dropbox, the ultimate Mouse Hunter

Christoph Janz, Point Nine Capital

“…getting a hundred million dollars in ARR within around eight years is incredibly hard and extremely rare. Getting to more than one billion within the same timeframe is completely nuts. If the improbability of reaching a $1B valuation is epitomized by a unicorn, getting to $1B in SaaS revenues within eight years is as unlikely as seeing a unicorn with three heads.”

Dropbox was the fastest SaaS company to hit $1B in ARR, and according to its S-1 filing over 70% of paying users are on an individual (rather than business) plan. It’s great to see Christoph’s take on the components of Dropbox’s success, especially after some of the IPO dust has settled. Read the full post


That’s all for this week! Don’t forget you can still receive upcoming issues of SaaS Roundup in your email inbox. See you next Friday.

Ed Shelley

Former Director of Content

@Mr_Ed

industry newsletter SaaS Roundup