sutton020

Following my post about electronic signing I'd like to describe another area that we'd like to invest in. It's not a specific idea this time, rather a category of startups that we're very interested in: Industry-specific SaaS solutions I talked about the topic before when I wrote about  "The land of a thousand niches" and touched on it in my "1st DO for SaaS startups" . There are several reasons why we're so excited about vertical SaaS solutions. * Focusing on a specific vertical simply allows you to build a better product for the industry that you're after. Whereas a generic product needs to be the lowest common denominator for different types of customers, a vertical solution can be tailored exclusively to the needs of your specific target audience. By the same token, a vertical focus also allows you to tailor your messaging to one target group. Take our portfolio company Clio as an example. Look at their website and think about how m...

[Update 12/20/2013: I have extended the dashboard to include multiple pricing tiers and annual subscription plans. Check it out here .] [Update 01/17/2015: There's a new company called ChartMogul ( which we invested in ) which makes it easy to get a real-time dashboard similar to the template below. Check it out! ] Over the last few years I've helped quite a lot of SaaS startups to create or fine-tune their KPI dashboards. While every situation is a bit different there's also a lot of overlap, which made me think that it would make sense to publish my template (not without polishing it a bit). I hope other SaaS startups will find it useful, and it will also make it easier for us to communicate what KPIs we're looking for when we talk to SaaS entrepreneurs. Not surprisingly the dashboard looks quite similar to the financial planning sheet that I've posted some time ago. Below are two Excel screenshots, and   here is the Google Docs version . If you prefer the Excel...

Inspired by Paul Graham’s “Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund” post of a few years ago I’d like to start a series of posts about ideas that I find exciting and that we at Point Nine would be very interested in investing in. Here's the first one. Electronic signing I’m a huge, huge fan of electronic signing. Whenever I have to sign a document and I’m getting a “Please eSign...” email I rejoice because it saves me the hassle of printing, completing, signing, scanning and emailing the signature pages (don’t get me started on snail-mailing paper copies with original signatures!). This is of course especially true if you’re traveling and don’t have access to printers constantly. Apps like SignEasy and SignNow , which target the “signer” and let you e-sign PDF documents from your iPhone, are a pretty good solution and can be a live-safer if you’re sitting in a cab and have to sign an important document. Products like EchoSign , DocuSign , RightSignature and HelloSign , which are geared t...