AI, Second Time Startups and the Levers of SaaS Success: Day 2 at #SaaStrAnnual

Published in

Voice of the North

2 min readFeb 14, 2017

Following up to my Day 1 recap, here’s a breakdown of some of the major takeaways and lessons I learned on the second day of SaaStr Annual 2017.

AI: The New Platform for SaaS

Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint and Ludo Ulrich of Salesforce for Startups discussed the merits of AI and machine learning.

One of their main points was that the use of machine learning should be subtle — providing a magical moment that helps you be more efficient.

It’s also key that companies know the limits of AI and set expectations for the types of problem it can solve.

Companies using machine learning need to build trust with customers and treat it like an interpersonal relationship.

Former co-founder of Marketo Jon Miller opened up about what he’s doing the second time around with his startup Engagio.

Here are a few of the main takeaways Jon shared as he’s grown his second startup:

Define your core values eaerly — it will help with everything that follows
It’s good to have lots of money but the focus needs to be on operational excellence
Focus on bigger deals and enterprise sales earlier on
Don’t wait too long to ramp up outbound sales — it’s a muscle that’s hard to develop
You need a lot of self-confidence — as a founding CEO there’s a lot of doubt
Next to your spouse, investors are the biggest influence on your happiness so pick investors you can trust

Some of the main points I picked up on during David Skok’s talk were:

Design your funnel for the customers instead of designing it according to how you want them to behave
Bring your groups together (sales, marketing and product) to talk about the funnel and fix issues that you are seeing
Can you change the behavior of an SDR and not make it about selling? is there something immediate that the SDR can do?
Can you demonstrate your expertise in your product to create value for customers — something from the product side and not the marketing side i.e. HubSpot website builder

Looking for other #SaaStrAnnual roundups? Check out this one from my colleague Jamie (Keeley) Petten.