Restaurant owners have a lot of responsibilities and a wide array of skills to handle those responsibilities. That said, building a website isn’t usually within that skill-set. That’s where BentoBox comes in. The company, which helps restaurant owners quickly build full-featured websites for their restaurants, has just closed a $4.8 million Series A funding round. The round was led… Read More

 Hinge Health, a startup originally founded out of London but that has since moved its headquarters to San Francisco, is on mission to “digitize the delivery of healthcare”. Beginning with musculoskeletal (MSK) disorders, the company is combining wearable sensors, an app, health coaching and peer support to remotely deliver physical therapy and behavioural health for chronic conditions. Read More

With leading tech giants like Alphabet, Apple, and Amazon focusing more on artificial intelligence (AI), the sector is attracting much funding. According to CB Insights, over 550 startups using AI as...

___

Mikko has steadily built an excellent SaaS company from Finland and is now expanding into the US as well. Read on for more. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey....

___

 Poland has worked diligently over the past decade to become an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Once home to businesses focused primarily on app design and outsourcing, social, societal, and economic pressures forced the country’s brightest to start building for themselves. And they did. I’ve covered Polish startups for almost a decade, first on TechCrunch and then on a new blog I… Read More

 Fundraising is a stressful process. You do all you can to impress prospective investors by honing the story, optimizing key metrics and making your company look as attractive as possible. But before you decide the amount of money you raise and the type of investor you want on board, you must decide the kind of relationship you intend to have with your new partner. Read More

 Uber SVP of Leadership and Strategy Frances Frei is optimistic about the future of Uber, despite the allegations of sexual harassment, greyballing and an executive accessing a rider’s medical records. In fact, Frei wears an Uber t-shirt every day and plans to wear one every day until every single one of Uber’s 15,000 employees feels proud about wearing one. Read More

 How many times have you been in an Uber or Lyft and wanted a few Advil, or a 5-hour Energy? While some enterprising ridesharing drivers occasionally try to sell essentials (or non-essentials like tablets and digital cameras), there really isn’t a structured way to facilitate this… until now. Enter Cargo, a startup that wants to turn drivers’ vehicles into little mobile shops. Read More

 Drones are a threat to both military and public safety, whether flown by a terrorist or just a reckless pilot. SkySafe’s radio wave technology can detect and stop rogue drones from entering unauthorized areas like military bases, stadiums, prisons and airports. Read More

 Slidebean, the app that wants to take on Prezi and PowerPoint, is launching version 3.0 of the service on the heels of an $850K seed round from CaraoV. The idea behind Slidebean is relatively simple. Presentations/decks are a fact of life for many professionals, but creating those presentations isn’t as simple as inputting the information you want. More often than not, professional… Read More

 Unless you literally wear a mask all the time, it is almost impossible to completely avoid cameras and face recognition technology. Not only is this a privacy concern, but it also presents a potential liability for companies that need to protect personal data. D-ID, a startup currently taking part in Y Combinator, wants to solve the problem with tools that process images to make them… Read More

 PebblePost, a startup that uses online data to target consumers with printed mail, has raised $47 million in a combination of equity and debt. That includes the $15 million, RRE Ventures-led Series B that the company announced in February. The equity portion of the funding has been expanded to $20 million, with another $27 million coming from a loan facility from Horizon Technology Finance, plus… Read More

 Dynamic Yield, which uses machine learning to help online marketers personalize customer experiences on their site, has added $9 million to its Series C, bringing it to a new total of $31 million. Its new investors are DTCP (Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners) and La Maison. Read More

 The Luma was a compelling product when it was announced back in late-2015 — we even went so far as declaring the WiFi-extending home mesh system, “fun.” That descriptor doesn’t really apply the startup’s new offering, and indeed, Luma Guardian feels a bit out of left field for the networking hardware-maker. The system is a lot of things rolled into one: a VPN… Read More

 In episode two of Founder’s Corner, Gina Bianchini, the founder and CEO of Mighty Networks, joins host and Omidyar Network partner Shripriya Mahesh to discuss her mission of empowering people to connect around their passions, and pulls back the curtain on how she runs the business and manages her days as CEO. Read More

 The TechCrunch Summer Party is a thing of tradition and we hope you can make it out this year. As in years past we’ll gather on the spacious grounds of August Capital in Menlo Park and enjoy an evening of cocktails and the spirit of entrepreneurship. The deck around August Capital’s office is large but cannot hold all of Silicon Valley, so tickets are very limited and released on… Read More

I've been working in the software industry for over 25 years. Pretty much my entire professional career (if you don't count that stint as a night clerk at Red Roof Inn).

Back in the late 1900s, when you sold software, you sold software. What your company produced was a large set of properly aligned bits (software). You then got those bits to your customers somehow (floppy disk, DVD, FTP, whatever). And, then those customers installed those bits on a computer of their choosing and if all went well, they'd get some value out of it. But, that wouldn't always happen. Often, they'd fail to ever install it and get it working. Or fail to learn it. Or fail to use it properly. Basically fail to get the value expected -- or the value promised, or sometimes any value. Ironically, the higher the purchase price was, the lower the chances of seeing success. History is replete with multi-million dollar software purchases that never saw the light of day. As an entrepreneur, this pains me. Most start software companies to make money, they start companies to solve problems.

Now, fast-forward to today. It's 2017. Many software companies are now Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. What they produce is the same as before: A large set of properly aligned bits (software). Only now, instead of shipping those bits off to the customer somehow, they "host" those bits on the customers behalf and off the benefit of that software as a service.

Makes sense, right?

Now, naive folks that are new to SaaS often make the mistake of thinking they're still selling software. They're not. Because...

If you're in the SaaS business, the only way to survive in the long-term is not to just deliver software. It's to deliver success. You have to actually deliver the benefit that the software is promised to provide. And, if the customer fails to get that benefit then you have failed. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.

The reason for this new bar is relatively straight-forward. Back in the old days, you got paid for your software upfront and though you wanted your customer to succeed, and maybe even labored to help them succeed, if they didn't succeed, well, such was life and you moved on. Today, if the customer doesn't succeed, they cancel. In a month, in a quarter, in a year -- but eventually, they cancel. And, more likely than not, if they cancel, you've lost money. The math won't work.

So, to survive and thrive in the long-term, you can't sell software, or even access to software, you have to sell -- and deliver -- success.

Let me give you a concrete example and some lessons learned from my company, HubSpot, which provides marketing/sales software. HubSpot is a textbook SaaS company. We're about 10 years old, and we're now public [NYSE:HUBS].

Here's what we invest in (because it works):

1. Onboarding. If you help customers get started with your product, they are more likely to do so. Ideally, your software is so simple and intuitive and easy that customers just get up and running and succeed on their own. But, if you have a relatively broad or sophisticated product, customers will often need help. In those cases, onboarding works.

2. Education. HubSpot has HubSpot Academy, which is a team that helps educate people on inbound marketing. Interestingly, they don't just invest in HubSpot customers, they educate the broader marketing industry.

3. Community. HubSpot hosts inbound.org, an online community built for marketers. It allows them to find the best content (curated by the community itself), discuss topics of interest, post jobs and find jobs. It acts as the premier professional network for marketers. The community has over 200,000 members now.

So, why does HubSpot spend millions of dollars educating and supporting marketers? It's simple. because we've realized that our success depends on the success of our customers.

We've learned and accepted that we're building a "Success as a Service" company.

Confession: For the past several months I've been furiously coding away on a new project as part of HubSpot Labs. It's called GrowthBot. It's a chatbot for marketing and sales people -- and anyone looking to grow a company (like startup folks).

The launch has gone well, and my bot is currently happily handling thousands of messages. Things like "show me companies in california that use HubSpot" and "who are the top influencers about landing pages". GrowthBot can answer most of these, and thousands of others. So, overall, it's been a good day.

But, anytime bots come up in conversation (no pun intended), especially with media folks, people seem to frequently wander into the "are bots going to replace humans?" arena. Some wonder "will this bot cause people to lose their jobs?" I can't speak for all bots, but for GrowthBot, the short answer is no.

I'll explain with a visual:

The way I like to think about it is not, Human vs. Bot, but Human + Bot. The bot amplifies what you can do. The bot is an exponent.

It's not smart enough to write a blog post -- but it can tell you what posts about a particular topic people are sharing. You just ask: "what are the top posts this week on product marketing?"

It's not smart enough to automatically run a campaign to drive traffic to your website -- but it can answer questions about how your website traffic is doing. "How was organic traffic to the site last month?" And the bot also tells you how that compares to the prior month. You can compare results year-over-year (Yes, June is a slow month, but is this June slower than usual?)

It's not savvy enough to close a deal for you, but it can help you find potential customers by asking: "show me law firms in Boston that use Google Apps". (Assuming you're trying to sell SaaS software to law firms and are looking to find firms that are modern enough to use Google Apps).

So, you're still doing the creative, meaningful work.   GrowthBot is just making you better, stronger, faster. It gives you access to information you may not have had access to before. It can surface insights that you may not have come up with on your own.

By the way, it's completely free and easy-peasy to try out. Nothing to download. Nothing to install. No forms to fill out. No credit card required.

Just head over to http://growthbot.org and say hello. I'm not saying it is guaranteed to get you a promotion, but you never know. It may just put that small spring in your step and data in your head.