Weekly Update on SaaS & VC

A few highlights from the week of 7/11

It was a soft week for SaaS with the WCLD SaaS index down 8% to $28.37.

Concerns about the economy are growing. The big question for SaaS is if economic weakness will translate into weaker earnings once earnings season kicks off late next month.

So far, there isn’t evidence of SaaS weakness. But if there’s a nasty recession, it will be be hard to avoid.

If there is SaaS weakness, bottom-up companies should be better positioned than their top-down peers. For the simple reasons that, on average, they make better products & better products will be less likely to suffer cutbacks in lean times.

Podcast recommendation of the week:

Jason Lemkin’s SaaStr podcast has an excellent AMA episode on scaling from 1 to 10m ARR.

Great advice on the challenge of working with a marketing agency at an early stage:

It doesn’t work when you’re like, “Hey, I don’t know sales, or I don’t know marketing, I’m going to hire this seemingly good looking agency or this seemingly good looking consultant on the internet.” I’ve never seen that one work.

I haven’t seen it work either.

Blog post recommendation of the week:

I didn’t have any standout reads this week, so let’s go to one from the Blog Post Hall of Fame.

This is a classic post from David Skok, a General Partner at Matrix Partners. He has a fantastic insight on the best way to add value:

Adding Value is often best done in an orthogonal way

For an early stage SaaS founder trying to sell to a prospect, this advice can be a major unlock. Prospects will be naturally skeptical of attempts to “add value” that are directly related to a SaaS company’s product. Yet adding value is critical to effective selling as it will help build credibility and create reciprocity with a prospect. The blog post gives great examples of how to execute on orthogonal value creation.