Startup PR for Dummies Public Relations (PR) is not a high priority for most early-stage startups. If you keep in mind how many different hats founders have to wear in the early days to build a product, get customers, hire a team and raise money, you’ll understand why. However, I’ve seen plenty of founders miss out on PR opportunities like a funding announcement due to mistakes that would have been easy to avoid. That’s sad because startups can benefit from media coverage in multiple ways. Coverage by the right publications can generate inbound leads from potential customers. Good PR can als ..read more

At the SaaStr Europa conference in Paris a couple of weeks ago I sat down with Joaquim Lecha, the CEO of our portfolio company Typeform, to talk about “Freemium at Scale”. Founded and headquartered in Barcelona, the company launched a free version of its service seven years ago. During our conversation Joaquim revealed that this free service helps drive 180,000 monthly signups, and about 3% of those signups convert into paying users who are billed anywhere from €25 to €70 per month, depending on the plan they choose. In other words, Typeform is effectively leveraging a free version of its ..read more

Back in 2014, I wrote a post titled “Five ways to build a $100 million business”. If you haven’t seen it yet, the central idea of the article was to look at how many customers you need, for a given ARPA, to get to $100 million in annual revenue and what this might mean for your sales and marketing strategy. That post went kind of viral, which led us to create a follow-up piece, an infographic, a poster (which you can order here), and a PlayPlay video. What did I learn from that experience? First, if you want to write a killer blog post, it helps if you take a difficult question and simplify it ..read more