Operations

Earlier this year, we asked top early stage investors for their opinions on the future of accelerators and their answers stood in stark contrast to their views on the rest of the market. While they were optimistic on the general state and future of the early stage market (although the Series A crunch worried many), their outlook on accelerators was overwhelmingly bearish. Image via Q1 2015 Sentiment Index Report – Download for Free Here After receiving funding from accelerators, companies often receive their next round of funding from seed stage firms, the so called “Micro VCs”. Firms of this type had a record year of fundraising in 2014, meaning that plenty of capital is available in the market for companies at the stage. However, this doesn’t mean that the fundraising process is any easier for accelerator backed companies than it is for ones that haven’t gone through a program. In fact, because of the way perceptions are forming among later stage investors, it may be getting harder “There are too many incubators and that has hurt them all. Too many entrepreneurs think if they get into an incubator they have accomplished something. They haven’t. It’s a false sense of confidence. Call it incubator inflation.” – Mark Cuban in a 2014 Triangle Business Journal interview Last week in Montreal, our team attended AcceleratorFest, held a day before the well known StartupFest that draws in top entrepreneurs and investors from across the globe. Sustainability seemed to be on the minds of many at the event, with a panel focused on the topic as well as separate breakouts intended to help facilitate discussion among industry leaders around what approaches and platforms can help contribute to the long term success of a nascent accelerator. Related resource: The Top 16 Accelerators Powering Startup Growth 1. Understand what value you are adding to the companies entering your program The world and it’s high growth companies don’t need another one size fits all accelerator. This is something that was clear in our earlier survey of investors and also to conference attendees. Without a world class brand behind it (see: YCombinator) an accelerator with too wide of a focus will only end up getting second tier companies in their respective industries and verticals. 500Startups, whose Elizabeth Yin was a speaker at the conference, has carved out a successful niche by helping companies focus on product distribution and growth. They have done this by developing a strong set of subject matter experts and a quantifiable framework that companies follow throughout the program. (AARRR) Companies enter the 500Startups program knowing that they are going learn how to more effectively acquire customers and the firm delivers on it promise. Another example of this targeted approach is the Fashion Technology Accelerator. With offices in San Francisco, Milan, and Seoul, they are able to expose companies to the world’s hubs of high technology and high fashion, helping form valuable connections with suppliers, distributers, and technical talent. Related Reading: What is an Incubator? 2. Prioritize alignment among all of your key stakeholders One thing that is not often discussed is the importance of understanding the motivations (and performance) of everyone involved in your program – companies, LPs, mentors and your own team. Successful alignment comes from being able to successfully tell the story around the purpose of your firm as well as the performance of the companies in your programs. Your goals as an accelerator leader dictate the story you tell to the LPs funding your accelerator as well as to the companies you are targeting. Once companies are in your program, the focus shifts to empowering the founding teams to understand and tell the story around their key data. This helps increase the odds of success in post-program fundraising and supplies you with the information you need to keep your own backers engaged in your progress. Alignment from top to bottom (and bottom to top) drives sustainability. 3. Build a “Startup Compost” In the aforementioned panel on sustainability in the accelerator market, Sylvain Carle of Montreal-based accelerator Founder’s Fuel coined a new term to help program leaders understand how they should work most effectively with the companies in their programs that will inevitably fail. He calls it “Startup Composting”. Accelerators spend a lot of time (and money) educating founding teams and setting them up for future success. Unfortunately, that success often comes too far in the future for the accelerator to see much benefit. To run an effective “Startup Composting” program, it is crucial to understand exactly how all of your companies are performing (both while in the program and after) so that you can help teams understand when it may be time to pivot to a new business model or think about blowing things up and either starting fresh or joining forces with one of your other teams whose company is on a more likely path to success.

Software Stack for Investors Every week our team collectively talks to hundreds of investors and startups. We frequently hear about the tools they are using and the tools they would love to have. We also get a lot of people asking for our opinion on what CRM they should be using or wondering what Investor Y is using for their back office. Over time we’ve saved all of these data points and have created the tech investing “software stack”. It buckets various products into categories such as CRM, Databases, Back Office, etc. Find it below! Please note: the logo sizes or hierarchy don’t reflect company size, performance, etc. Want the PDF version? You can download it here. Think we missed something and want to see it added? Mention us and the post at @VisibleVC

For people involved in the world of startups, determining what content sources to trust and what outlets to read can be a daunting task. Tech blogs, company blogs, VC blogs, Medium. Add to that the fact that people at early-stage companies tend to wear multiple hats and are looking for tips and tactics to help them excel in all of their roles and it seems like the firehose of information never stops. So how do you separate the signal from the noise and make sure you aren’t spending all of your time finding good stuff to read instead of taking action on the learnings? Related Resources: Our 15 Favorite Newsletters for Startup Founders, 6 More Great Startup Newsletters, How To Write the Perfect Investor Update (Tips and Templates) Startup newsletters are a great place to start and we have put together a list of some of our favorites to help you spend less time browsing for content and more time learning from peers and others with something interesting and important to say. Industry News & Curated Reading Lists First Round Review Whether your job is to build product, make sales, build community or do just about anything else that comes with building an early-stage company, you will find the First Round Review extremely useful. By using stories from First Round portfolio companies, the First Round review shares valuable lessons and does so with high production quality. Why We Love this Newsletter We love the First Round Review because of the first-hand stories. The team surveys and interviews the best leaders in the space to uncover stories and strategies to help startups at any stage grow. SaaS Weekly from Hiten Shah Hiten Shah is the founder of CrazyEgg and KISSmetrics (and now a startup podcast co-hosted with Close.io’s Steli Efti) so he know’s his stuff when it comes to growing a SaaS business. In his weekly newsletter, Hiten organizes SaaS focused content by category for easy reading no matter one’s job title or expertise. Why We Love this Newsletter Hiten offers a great look into the SaaS world by drawing on his own experiences from building some of the most successful Saas companies. Related resource: 11 Top Industry Events for SaaS Startups Benedict Evans’ Newsletter As Benedict Evans, a Partner at a16z puts it, the newsletter (delivered every Sunday) covers interesting developments in tech and mobile (globally) along with commentary on what it means for the market. Why We Love this Newsletter Benedict Evans is a bonafied thoughtleader in the space and offers good insights into the market in general as well as macro trends. Work-Bench Enterprise Weekly With links, events, and funding rounds focused specifically on the sector, the Enterprise Weekly – produced by venture fund and startup community Work-Bench out of New Your City – gives you everything you need to stay up to speed on the world of enterprise tech. Why We Love this Newsletter The Work-Bench Enterprise Weekly newsletter covers all things related to the enterprise world. They offer resources and insights as well as recent news and fundings in the space. The Visible Weekly Newsletter We search the web for the best tips to attract, engage and close investors, then deliver them to thousands of inboxes every week. We share everything to help founders succeed — everything from fundraising to mental health. Subscribe here. Why We Love this Newsletter We might be bias (as the Visible Weekly is our newsletter!) but we pride ourselves on curating the best content from investors and founders in the startup space to help founders grow their business. The Founder Playbook by Hustle Fund As put by the team at Hustle Fund, “The Founder Playbook is all about tactics. Specifically, tactics around fundraising and growing your startup. We cover things like: What metrics you should know before you pitch an investor How to grow an audience when you don’t even have a product yet And how to write a kickass cold email” Why We Love this Newsletter The team at Hustle Fund are well rounded in all things growth and fundraising. The Founder Playbook is full of some of our favorite fundraising tips as well as growth strategies for early stage startups. The Hustle The Hustle is full of trending topics in the tech space. While not the strategic advice that other newsletters on this list offers, The Hustle offers compelling stories and trends in the space. Why We Love this Newsletter The Hustle has the scoop on some of the most insightful, and entertaining, stories in the tech space. By having a pulse on the space, you’ll be able to better understand macro trends. Startup Funding & Venture Capital Newsletters CB Insights High-quality, data-driven insight into what is happening in the world of early-stage funding and company building, always delivered with a bit of an edge and a dash of humor. The CB Insights Newsletter is packed with sector specific research, breakdowns on emerging markets and companies, and insight into how the early-stage market is transforming. Why We Love this Newsletter The CB Insights is full of data-driven stories written with a level of humor. The daily newsletter is packed full of data, stories, and trends in specific sectors. StrictlyVC Interviews, funding updates, news on key personnel developments at top companies. StrictlyVC gives you a concise daily rundown of everything that you need to know about what is happening in the startup and venture world. Why We Love this Newsletter StrictlyVC is our go-to newsletter when it comes to news with startup fundings and acquisitions. The daily newsletter highlights any new fundings, acquisitions, and hits on major stories. Term Sheet While Term Sheet, from Fortune’s Dan Primack, tends to focus more on the growth stage and private equity markets, it is still a crucial bit of reading every weekday morning. Know what companies raised, who the new funds on the block are, and understand how developments in other stages of the private markets could impact your business. Why We Love this Newsletter Similar to StrictlyVC, we love Term Sheet because of the quick hits on news and the reliable data on funding and acquisition news. Growth & Marketing Newsletters TenSpeed Newsletter TenSpeed helps companies growth with content marketing and SEO. As they put on their website, “Every month, we share tactical advice on one topic, plus the best of our blog content and latest podcast episodes, all in one place. Take your content marketing efforts the extra mile by signing-up below.” Why We Love this Newsletter The teammembers at TenSpeed are total pros in all things content marketing. Their monthly newsletter comes full of indepth resources and guides to help take your content marketing to the next level. Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged Kyle Poyar is a partner at OpenView Ventures. Kyle has been a huge proponent of product led growth and uses his newsletter to share new learnings and insights from his own research and portfolio companies. Why We Love this Newsletter Kyle Poyar offers some of the best advice when it comes to product led growth for SaaS companies. The newsletter is full of strategic advice to help SaaS companies fuel growth. The Blend by The Juice The Juice is the world’s largest library of sales and marketing resources. As a team that curates the best growth content, their newsletter is full of their favorite takeaways and lessons in content marketing. Why We Love this Newsletter With a skilled team of marketers, the team at The Juice puts together great insights when it comes to all things content marketing. Design & UX Newsletters Sidebar A simple concept…the 5 best design links, in your inbox, every single day. No fluff, just a quick, easy way to receive a curated list of interesting articles, videos and projects about the world of design. Why We Love this Newsletter The Sidebar newsletter is a great daily newsletter to stay up to date with the best in design. The newsletter is simple and easy to digest. InVision Weekly Digest InVision is an indispensable tool for many designers, product people and marketers. With a subscription base of over 800,000 designers, the same can be said for their weekly newsletter, which shares useful tactics for creating better products and give a behind the scenes look at how some of the world’s best design teams bring ideas from concept to market. Why We Love this Newsletter As one of the most popular design tools, the team at InVision is full of insights and tactics that are useful to seasoned designers or founders doubling as a designer in the early days. One Design Company Weekly One Design Company is a Chicago-based design, strategy and development agency that puts out an awesome weekly email packed with fun links, food for thought and some of the most useful posts on design and development from around the web. Why We Love this Newsletter The One Design Company newsletter offers fun and insightful posts on design and development that will keep any designer engaged. Subscribe to the Visible Weekly Newsletter Today Building a startup is difficult. Turning to the resources, leaders, and peers that have been there before is a great way to learn on the fly. To stay up to date with what our favorite investors and founders are staying in the space, subscribe to the Visible Weekly. Related Resource: 10 Foodtech Venture Capital Firms Investing in Food Innovation We search the web for the best tips to attract, engage and close investors, then deliver them to thousands of inboxes every week.

If you are anything like our team here at Visible, you bookend your days at the office with StrictlyVC and the Mattermark Daily. Over time, both have proven to be extremely useful sources of startup content – StrictlyVC opens things up with the day’s funding news (and great interviews) and Mattermark closes things out with thoughtful pieces from investors and operators for the ride home. Related Reading: Business Startup Advice: 15 Helpful Tips for Startup Growth Mattermark’s founder, Danielle Morrill launched the newsletter almost 2 years ago aiming “to provide a weekly rundown of interesting events, data, and insights from the startup world”. It has since turned into a daily publication that has featured over 1500 different articles from founders and investors sharing tips and insight on everything from designing products to dealing with the difficulties of running early stage companies What the Startup World Writes About | Create infographics We utilized Import.io to comb through the Mattermark Daily archives and analyze the headlines of all of the articles from over 190 editions of the Daily. Not surprisingly, words like ‘Startup’ and ‘VC’ were among the most common while the remaining words on the list paint an interesting web of all the things people in the startup ecosystem (some would say echo-chamber) think about and discuss on a daily basis. Markets and Models | Create infographics Building a company is uncharted territory for first-time founders, people early in their careers and those entering new markets or exploring new business models. Luckily for advice seekers, especially those hoping to understand and grow SaaS or Mobile businesses, there was plenty of great content to choose from. 50 Shades of Green | Create infographics How can we raise, spend and eventually make money? How come you keep asking me for money…and why aren’t you a unicorn yet? These are some of the things that founders and investors, respectively, focused on as hundreds of posts throughout the Mattermark archives feature thoughts on raising funding, exit opportunities and everything that happens in between. People | Create infographics If there is one thing we learned with this exercise, it is that VCs have a bit of a tendency to talk about themselves. Some of it is navel gazing, sure, but most provide an interesting peek behind the VC curtain or words of advice for founders looking to raise money, make key hires or scale their businesses. PG & @pmarca | Create infographics It is no surprise, with the ubiquity of YCombinator and the continually growing relevance of A16Z, that Paul Graham and Marc Andreesen share the top spot for most mentioned individuals. Add that to the list of examples showing how much weight people in the technology industry place on the opinions of top investors. Women in Tech | Create infographics Women in technology, one of the most important issues facing the industry, featured heavily in Mattermark’s archive with a primary focus on profiles and interviews of women in technology leadership positions working to inspire the next generation of female CEOs, investors, hackers and painters. Companies | Create infographics People loved writing and reading about the companies that make up the technology world, either as examples to follow or in response to various controversies or product launches. The posts from the last couple years heavily feature companies leading the growth of the early stage ecosystem (Y Combinator, Angellist, A16Z), ones embroiled in controversy on their way to massive growth (Uber & Snapchat) and one-time darlings that have since fallen on harder, or at least less rocketshippy times (Square & Foursquare). Attention Grabbers | Create infographics Want to get into the Mattermark Daily? Your best bet is to go with a ‘How to” headline. The other apparent way in is by being Tren Griffin, whose posts on lessons learned from leaders in Technology (Sheryl Sandberg & Jeff Bezos) and Finance (Warren Buffett & Ray Dalio) offer instructive frameworks for how to make decisions and build better companies which at the end of the day is what most people in the startup universe care about.

Using Software for Customer Success After a year with Visible, we’ve changed up a few pieces to work best with our team and to help scale. It’s interesting to see, over time, how the platforms change Checkout my updates below each section in Red. Something that makes me throw money at people/products/services, is the experience I have with them. Over the past several years, I have noticed the little things companies do for their customers, and own employees, to increase satisfaction via experience. What most people don’t see/understand/have patience for, are the platforms used to provide the service and experience. A great example of this is the ‘legacy’ US banking technology (which I could rant your ear off about as much as architectural facts of buildings along the Chicago river) that manages your account. This system, graciously provides the ‘awkward phone silence’ when a rep is waiting to access your account, going through level upon level of access to view your details. Over time, they have learned to fill this void with trivial conversation/up sell, to make you feel comfortable, and feel like a person who is valued. Building a smooth customer experience is not easy, so I’m going through the important factors of what [a non-engineer] calls their ‘full stack’ to provide great customer experience & service. Monitor: Customer usage is key, tracking your customer’s usage allows you to segment specific users for engagement, testing, up-selling, advocacy, etc. Monitoring usage is also one of the key pieces of information to prevent the all-commanding ‘churn’. Platform: We take this data from our back-end and plug it into our CRM (HubSpot) to filter, segment, identify, assign, etc. We also use Intercom to monitor users for ‘automated’ engagement with a personal voice. Analytics: When you’re scaling, you’re gaining lots and lots of users from your targeted funnels, and then some. Product managers are important in making sure you’re exceeding customer needs and continuing to build the envisioned features, versions, etc. Marketing managers need a ways to identify the best funnels of customer conversion and best ‘cost per acquisition’ price. Having an analytics management product allows them to find the sweet spots and make your user base grow, and stick, like crazy. Customer Success pulls these analytics to further monitor and segment users. Platform: We’re still looking at best fits, but some good ones are RJMetrics, MixPanel, and KissMetrics. Ideally will have this connected in or around our CRM. CRM: Email is something I want to get away from as fast as possible when working with customers. Yes I do sound insane, but what I mean is the traditional email platform (gmail, outlook, whatever Apple mail is called) because there is no good way to mange the customer’s account (and expectations) easily and quickly (Streak is making a hybrid that looks interesting). A good CRM makes all the difference in keeping customers engaged and happy as well as managing a team of account managers. This also keeps Sales and Account Managers from asking too many questions, creating breaks in service, on-boarding, experience, and team happiness (you know what I’m talking about). Platform: HubSpot’s new CRM is pretty slick and customizable, we’re eager to keep customizing it to fit exactly how our business model defines our customers. Engagement/Voice: This section is probably one of the most interesting and emerging of recent years. In times of past, being able to create engagement or a voice inside your software (who is old enough to remember Clippy) you would need a designer and front end developer to hash out several iterations until you had enough and waited to raised more money and hire people to complete this task. Engaging customers keeps them happy while on your app, makes them a sticky user or what I learned as a “Happy Prisoner”. This starts with the welcome, goes through on-boarding, and continues as the ‘Voice’; providing valuable content from specific triggers, advising on product/industry specific news, and providing education through knowledge base, blog, or even surveys (check out an amazing project by Brett @ Visible, the Early Stage Confidence Index for Investors). Platform: We currently use Intercom for our Engagement and Voice, we haven’t found a perfect solution for an on-boarding wizard, we’ll update when found. Incident Management/Customer Management: Most people know this part as your standard customer service platform, having a service like Zendesk to manage your inflow of customer queries and conflicts. There has been a movement away from this as an ‘additional’ product with Intercom or having it hosted in your CRM (stay tuned to see my future post “Why Account Managers should not use their email app”). The important parts are being able to reply quickly, collect customer response data, create reporting, and make better decisions (something that Intercom is currently lacking). Platform: Zendesk is known as a major player here, but others are Desk.com, Happy Fox, Fresh Desk, and Help Shift. Knowledge/Education: The tool to help scale and educate, and even more is to create advocates and emerge as an industry leader (more on this in Advocacy). You want to have something that provides easy searching, great UI, syncs really easy to your app, and is super simple to maintain (non-devs will manage this). Platform: Still looking for a good fit here, most Knowledge Base systems are normally packaged with Customer Management, so we want one piece of the package without paying for the whole thing. Advocacy/Marketing: Creating a strong following of users brings a company from ‘cult-like following’ to ‘industry leader/expert’ (Product Hunt is an amazing example). We started with content on our Twitter page and have now pushed forward with our Blog. We’re pushing through great side projects to continue our vision to bring visibility between investors and company founders. Platform: We’re using Buffer to manage our social media posts and have our blog hosted on WordPress Over time, we expect to change a few platforms, build internal tools, and condense the amount of 3rd party applications we use to keep our customers happy. I will say that a secret sauce for a non-technical operator is Zapier (saved this for the readers who actually made it this far into my ‘essay’) which makes me scale my processes like never before.

At Visible, we talk every day with founders and early-stage investors from around the world and have found a few key themes emerge in our discussions: Founder frustration with investors who don’t deliver on their promises – the connections they say they will make and the expertise they say they will offer Investor frustration with founders who go off the grid, only to emerge and make “asks” when it is too late to save a project or company Blame being placed by people on both sides of the table instead of analyzing the root cause of the relationship breakdown Fortunately, the venture platform model (also called network or community model in some places) has become more and more pervasive, indicating an increasing desire by investors to put more “walk” behind their value-add “talk” and a desire by companies to work with investors that embrace this strategy. The success of firms like First Round and Andreessen Horowitz, in both returns and mindshare, is a testament to this trend. For the uninitiated, Frontline VC’s Kim Pham recently wrote a great primer on the subject. At its core, the venture platform model is focused on helping companies and investors get back to building businesses by using transparency as a tool (TaaT) to unlock growth that would have otherwise not been possible. In many ways, it means proactively opening the network communication bottlenecks that can prevent strong venture communities from coming into existence organically. Companies want engaged investors and investors want to stay up to date on a company’s progress in order to make good on the expertise and connections they promised prior to wiring the money. So if both sides understand the importance of keeping lines of communication open and subscribe to the idea of the venture platform model as a way to accelerate growth, why is the ball still being dropped time and time again? Not realizing that habits form early – in companies and in their relationships with investors Term sheets are signed, money is wired and the company building can begin in haste. Unfortunately, a lot of investors and founders forget to set up front expectations for how the relationship will work apart from “please help me return capital to my LPs”. When there are one or two investors on a cap table, inbound requests don’t seem so daunting. When you raise your seed round and add 6 more investors, then a Series A with 3 others, the inbound requests become extremely distracting and pull you away from things like product, sales and hiring. Spending a few minutes each month putting together your investor updates can help you get some of that time back. Better yet, they tend to gain momentum as positive reinforcement – in the shape of more intros from the network and expertise assistance from investors – starts pouring in. Thinking it is too late to start When investors see a portfolio of 10, 20, 50 companies across multiple funds it can be easy to start thinking that things, from a portfolio communication perspective, are too far gone. They prefer to “wait for the next fund or accelerator class” to get started which sounds a lot like the way people who need to get back to the gym sound after their new years resolution wears off. Biting off little pieces – again, same principle as getting back in shape – is a great way to start. As an investor you have inbound requests to meet your companies and outbound desires to make the right introductions. Having all of your key investment data in one place pays huge dividends by saving time and mental overhead and truly leveraging the power of the network you have built up. The oft-used proverb about the best time to plant a tree comes to mind here. Visible: More time for more important things That means less time spent copy and pasting messages to three four or different investors. It means not having to dig through a Dropbox, email and Excel each time someone needs info on one of your portfolio companies. It means getting back to the business of building businesses. If you need some inspiration, our reading list is a great place to start. We’ve collected some of the best advice from around the investor community and continue to update it as new posts and content roll in (Note: everything you see there – reporting metrics, templates, etc. can be setup and tracked quickly and easily through Visible). If you have any questions about getting started, feel free to get in touch.