sutton020

Continuing my little series using the "minimum viable" approach , here is my 2nd DO for SaaS startups: Build the right team I've written about the topic before, so if you've read this post from early this year most of what I'm going to write now won't be new for you and you may want to skip this article. I'm going to assume that you want to build a modern SaaS solution for the "Fortune 5,000,000" – a great product that's easy to understand and so useful that it will almost sell itself. If your plan is to create a bloated piece of enterprise software with an ugly interface and make it up by hiring a large field sales force from the get-go you might succeed as well, but in that case please don't ask me for advice. :) Let's start with the founder team. If you want to build a great SaaS product that's (relatively speaking) easy to market and sell you will need domain expertise ,  UX/UI talent,  and  a great engineer who can code th...

Further to my post about my "1st DO for SaaS startups" (and again, in the spirit of releasing early and iterating fast) I'd like to touch on a few additional points with respect to the right market. Market size If you want to go big and build a large, successful company it's obviously important that your market is big enough. How big is big enough? Most large VCs would answer that the TAM of a SaaS company should be at least $1B. The thinking is, if it's a $1B market and you grab 5-10% of it and get a revenue multiple of 5-8x, the company will be worth $250-800M at exit. This is where large VCs start to get excited.  We as a small early-stage fund are a little more modest but we also want to see a clear potential for a $100M+ exit, which means there needs to be a clear potential to get to at least $10-20M in revenues. If you assume 5-10% market share, that means the TAM should be $100-400M at the minimum. Note that by TAM I mean your primary market. If there'...