sutton020

I've been thinking about a "DOs and DON'Ts" article geared towards early-stage SaaS founders and upcoming SaaS founders for a little while now. I thought it would be a good idea to summarize what I've learned about SaaS in the last few years and put it into a format like this. Problem is, it's a very large topic, and if I try to make it as broad, deep and well-written as I'd like it to be I'll never do it. I don't have  sixkidsandafulltimejob.blogspot.de like Benchmark's Michael Eisenberg , but three little kids, about 25 angel investments and Point Nine  keep me pretty busy too. So what I'm going to do now, I'll apply Eric Ries to blogging, and in the spirit of release-early-and-iterate-fast I'll just get started with something. It's an experiment and I don't know yet what the result will be – how many DOs I'll end up with and if I have enough time to work on the series in a timely manner at all. But Reid Hoffman said...

If you've read my last blog post  I still owe you a small PS. I mentioned that while I was writing the post I've learned two surprising things, so here goes. (Caveat: I usually try to provide some useful advice in my blog. What I'm going to write now doesn't have any practical value so feel free to skip it.) Number 1:  Do you know where the term "grandfathering" comes from? Maybe it's just my illiterateness and you're yawning but I had no idea that the term, which describes such a nice thing in the context of business and politics today, goes back to such a horrible concept: The concept originated in late nineteenth-century legislation [...], which created new literacy and property restrictions on voting, but exempted those whose ancestors (grandfathers) had the right to vote before the Civil War. The intent and effect of such rules was to prevent poor and illiterate African American former slaves and their descendants from voting, but without denying ...

If you're running a SaaS startup it's likely that sooner or later you'll want to increase your prices. The reason is simple: It's impossible to find the perfect pricing right off the bat, so most startups launch with a pricing scheme that's on the low end to make sure that they don't scare away potential customers. "In the beginning, err on the side of being too cheap", was also one of the tips that I gave in my previous blog post about SaaS pricing . Now let's say 12 or 18 months have gone by, you've acquired your first couple of hundreds of customers, you've added lots of features and made your product better and better. By now you also have a better feel for what your customers are willing to pay, maybe supported by A/B tests with different prices or customer interviews, and you want to increase your prices.  There are a number of questions that you'll have to answer: Do you want to keep the pricing model and just increase the amount...