The Business of SaaS
Best Practices for Staffing Support
How We Hire and Why When scaling a software company, where does your focus in hiring go? Typically software developers, quality assurance engineers, sales, and other roles that expand your feature and client set. Putting the same hiring efforts into expanding and developing your client support staff is likely lower…
5 Things You Should Expect from Tech Support
Good technical support is crucial to running a successful SaaS business, which is why it can be scary to commit to embedded BI when that also means committing to their Support team. To help you understand what to expect from your future (or current) BI provider’s support team, we put…
A SaaSy Introduction to Lean UX
Lean UX, sister discipline to the agile development method, is user experience design and usability testing for fast-paced software teams. UX designers build flowcharts, construct wireframes, and conduct user research to help teams design new product features. A UX designer working with an agile team would do all these things while adhering to…
5 Characteristics of a SaaS-Focused BI Application
There are hundreds of business intelligence (BI) solutions on the market, but not all of them are well suited to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) environment. Some are intended as standalone products, others designed for on-premises (“on-prem”) deployment, and still others built for use by individual consumers rather than whole businesses. As a SaaS…
Virtues of the Client Advisory Board Meeting
Going Beyond the User Conference The user conference (UC) is ubiquitous among SaaS providers, but comparatively few companies hold additional Customer/Client Advisory Board (CAB) meetings. This, in my opinion, is a missed opportunity. Both events give customers the opportunity to network, share resources, and bring new information back to their…
A Software Company’s Podcast Marketing Playbook
Two years ago, with a scant six months of content marketing experience under my belt and absolutely no background in radio or audio production, I recorded my company’s first-ever proprietary podcast episode. I wrote about why in part one of this series. Here, though, I’d like to focus on how we got started so…
Which Analytics Do You Really Need?
Descriptive? Diagnostic? Predictive? Prescriptive? Here’s how to design your own analytics agenda. Originally published with Entrepreneur. A Boeing 787 aircraft generates half a terabyte of data on an average flight. That’s an enormous amount. Though it’s filled with meaningful insights, the sheer quantity can make it seem like an endless…
Endowment Dollars for Data: An Ad Hoc Reporting Case Study
Originally published with Dataversity. The vast majority of knowledge workers utilizing Business Intelligence via their hub SaaS application, regardless of vertical, will likely never build their own reports from scratch. According to Eckerson Group’s “A Reference Architecture for Self-Service Analytics” (2016), 90% of knowledge workers in an organization use BI…
Why We Started A Business Podcast
Originally published with Software Business Growth. Last year, with a scant six months of content marketing experience under my belt and absolutely no background in radio or audio production, I recorded my company’s first-ever proprietary podcast episode. I’d found myself conducting lots of interviews and getting bogged in all the transcription…
The Hard Thing About Hiring Software Engineers
Finding the best developer talent means treating the hiring process like a marketing funnel and a process that can be patched.