
10 Laws of Building a Saas Company - 51 minute webcast - jkopelman
https://admin.acrobat.com/_a13852757/buildingasuccessfulsaasco/
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jwilliams
Summary if you don't have 50mins to spare is available at their website:

<http://www.bvp.com/saas/default.aspx>

Addition information on some of the laws that you don't get from the website:

1\. They say there is a white paper on CMRR, but I couldn't find it. The
presenter has a summary on his blog though: [http://cracking-the-
code.blogspot.com/2007/07/saas-business-...](http://cracking-the-
code.blogspot.com/2007/07/saas-business-metrics-why-do-they-need.html)

4\. Separate Hunters from Farmers - Rule of thumb, every one additional $ of
CMRR is a $ of bonus.

5\. Focus your Business Development on Business Service channels, not IT ones.
You need to partner with ADP, E&Y - not IBM, Oracle, etc. As this is a new set
of partners, it is not easy to ramp up.

6\. Part of what being good at online marketing means is automation,
integration, using technology to make this work well.

8\. Rule of thumb: Need more than $2Mill of CMRR before 2nd datacenter.... How
this works High-Availability wise I'm not sure. Apparently SalesForce.com was
single datacentre until post-IPO.

9\. SaaS isn't software, it's a Service. So you need to Monitor, Gather
Feedback and Benchmark your Service as a Service.

10\. "Be prepared to cross the desert". SaaS requires R&D and sales expense up
front. You need enough invesment to fund 4+ years of runway. SaaS companies
have historically raised average $30-65mill before IPO. That said, capital
costs are coming down, but it's still a big number.

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ojbyrne
I waited 30 seconds, and the Camtasia thingie was at "2% loaded." Thus
demonstrating rule number one about SAAS - users have an itchy back button.

~~~
jwilliams
It also breaks another law and resizes your browser window.

