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Software as a service has been thriving as a sector for years, but it has gone into overdrive in the past year as businesses responded to the pandemic by speeding up the migration of important functions to the cloud. We’ve all seen the news of SaaS startups raising large funding rounds, with deal sizes and valuations steadily climbing. But as tech industry watchers know only too well, large funding rounds and valuations are not foolproof indicators of sustainable growth and longevity.

To scale sustainably, grow its customer base and mature to the point of an exit, a SaaS startup needs to stand apart from the herd at every phase of development. Failure to do so means a poor outcome for founders and investors.

As a founder who pivoted from on-premise to SaaS back in 2016, I have focused on scaling my company (most recently crossing 145,000 customers) and in the process, learned quite a bit about making a mark. Here is some advice on differentiation at the various stages in the life of a SaaS startup.

Launch and early years

Differentiation is crucial early on, because it’s one of the only ways to attract customers. Customers can help lay the groundwork for everything from your product roadmap to pricing.

The more you know about your target customers’ pain points with current solutions, the easier it will be to stand out. Take every opportunity to learn about the people you are aiming to serve, and which problems they want to solve the most. Analyst reports about specific sectors may be useful, but there is no better source of information than the people who, hopefully, will pay to use your solution.

The key to success in the SaaS space is solving real problems. Take DocuSign, for example — the company found a way to simply and elegantly solve a niche problem for users with its software. This is something that sounds easy, but in reality, it means spending hours listening to the customer and tailoring your product accordingly.

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It was August 2019, and the fundraising process was not going well.

My co-founder and I had left our product management jobs at New Relic several months prior, deciding to finally plunge into building Reclaim after nearly a year of late nights and weekends spent prototyping and iterating on ideas. We had bits and pieces of a product, but the majority of it was what we might call “slideware.”

When we spoke to many other founders, they all told us the same thing: Go raise, raise big, and raise now. So we did that, even though we were puzzled as to why anyone would give us money with little more than a slide deck to our names. We spent nearly three months pitching dozens of VCs, hoping to raise $3 million to $4 million in a seed round to hire our founding team and build the product out.

Initially, we were excited. There was lots of inbound interest, and we were starting to hear a lot of crazy numbers getting thrown around by a lot of Important People. We thought for sure we were maybe a week away from term sheets. We celebrated preemptively. How could it possibly be this easy?

Then in July, almost in an instant, everything started to dry up. The verbal offers for term sheets didn’t materialize into real offers. We had term sheets, but they were from investors that didn’t seem to care much about what we were building or what problems we wanted to solve. We quickly realized that we hadn’t really built momentum around the product or the vision, but were instead caught up in what we later learned to be “deal flow.”

Basically, investors were interested because other investors were interested. And once enough of them weren’t, nobody was.

Fortunately, as I write this today, Reclaim has raised a total of $6.3 million on great terms across a group of incredible investors and partners. But it wasn’t easy, and it required us to embrace our failure and learn three important lessons that I believe every founder should consider before they decide to go out and pitch investors.

Lesson 1: Build big before you raise big

In 2019, we were hunting for what some referred to as a “mango seed” — that is, a seed round that was large enough that it was perceptibly closer to a light Series A financing. Being pre-product at the time, we had to lean on our experience and our vision to drive conviction and urgency among investors. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t enough. Investors either felt that our experience was a bad fit for the space we were entering (productivity/scheduling) or that our vision wasn’t compelling enough to merit investment on the terms we wanted.

When we did get offers, they involved swallowing some pretty bitter pills: We would be forced to take bad terms that were overly dilutive (at least from our perspective), work with an investor who we didn’t think had high conviction in our product strategy, or relinquish control in the company from an extremely early stage. None of these seemed like good options.

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Google has selected 30 startups to receive a share of its $2 million Black Founders Fund in Europe, providing these companies with a spot of cash, some valuable cloud services and a bit of good old-fashioned networking among the Google crew.

The fund was announced last fall as part of a company-wide effort toward “building a more equitable future for everyone,” alongside grants and new sponsorships. More than 800 companies applied and Google interviewed 100 of them, ultimately winnowing that down to the 30 announced today.

Each company will receive “up to” $100,000 in non-dilutive funding, and up to $120,000 in Ads grants and $100,000 in Cloud credits. (I’ve asked Google for more details on how the fund was divided, and if any company received this full amount. I’ll update if I hear back.)

They’ll also get access to Google’s entrepreneurial network, tech support and some other assets that don’t have hard numbers associated with them.

All the startups are led by Black founders, and 40% by women of color. One of the latter is Nancy de Fays, co-founder of LINE, which makes these cool battery-hub combos for the MacBook “Pro” that add a ton of ports and battery life and look sweet to boot. I’ve learned a lot chatting with her at trade shows, and regret that I do most of my work at a desktop so I don’t have an excuse to use one of the company’s gadgets.

In response to being selected for Google funding, de Fays penned a blog post exhorting corporations to throw their weight around in favor of social change, and for startups to lead the way in diversity and equity:

We buy values and standards more than we buy the product itself. We buy ideals of life more than the actual features. Putting the these two parameters in the equation – the capability of big corps to shout loud, and consumers’ receptiveness to brands values and messages – it does make sense to me that to drive such a society change, big companies should voice and convey strong messages.

Founders need to build diverse teams without falling into compassion fatigue. They must show empathy and respect and bring onboard the best talents. Period. They need to be outspoken about their values, convey a strong, global mindset and build their organisation around them. And if they find themselves scoring low on diversity along the way, they should question themselves on the why and act on it without doing charity.

It’s something of a counterpoint to the idea, also commonly expressed these days, that companies should be mission-focused and objective.

Here are the other 29 companies that Google will be giving a boost to (descriptions taken from the blog post):

Afrocenchix – Afrocenchix formulate, manufacture, and sell safe, effective products for afro and curly hair.AudioMob – AudioMob provides non-intrusive audio ads within mobile games.Augmize – Augmize builds risk models for property and casualty insurers using interpretable machine learning.Axela Innovation – Axela Innovations created a smart platform that joins up care services and puts the person receiving care at the center of the process.Bosque – Bosque is the first tech-enabled, direct-to-consumer plant brand in Europe with digitized inventory, AR tech, and on-demand access to vetted plant experts.Circuit Mind Limited – Circuit Mind is building intelligent software that fully automates the design of electronic circuit systems.Clustdoc – Clustdoc is client onboarding automation software used by organizations and teams around the world.Contingent – Contingent is an AI platform that proactively predicts, monitors, and manages supplier risk.Define – Define is a legal technology company that optimizes the contract drafting and reviewing process for lawyers, serving the world’s largest banks and consulting companies.Freyda – Freyda is digitizing the asset management industry by helping funds and service providers to become hyper-efficient in how they approach their data capture from documents.Heex Technologies – Heex Technologies provides AI-powered software and web services to development teams in data-intensive fields such as autonomous driving.HomeHero – HomeHero is an operating system for the house, making running a home simple and easy.Hutch Logistics – Hutch Logistics is a fulfilment and operating system for e-commerce brands.iknowa – iknowa is an end-to-end building and renovation platform for property owners and tradespeople.Kami – Kami empowers parents during family planning, pregnancy and childhood, allowing them to adapt and thrive through even the most difficult transitions.Kwara – Kwara makes building wealth together frictionless, by turning analog credit unions in emerging markets into modern digital banks.Lalaland – Lalaland uses AI to create synthetic humans for fashion eCommerce brands to increase diversity in retail.Modularity Grid – Modularity Grid is an AI platform that makes energy systems more efficient and resilient.Movemeback – Movemeback (often referred to as “the Linkedin of Africa”) is a global social professional platform, connecting people to opportunities, insights, and people they don’t have access to.Playbrush – Playbrush is the innovation leader in oral care, growing smart toothbrush subscriptions to foster better mouth and body health.Remote Coach – Remote Coach is a platform providing technology for personal trainers and fitness influencers to digitize and grow their businesses.Robin AI – Robin AI uses a combination of human and artificial intelligence to read and edit contracts.Scoodle – Scoodle is a platform for education influencers. Everyone has something they want to learn and something they can teach—we bring both sides together.Suvera – Suvera delivers a virtual care clinic for patients with long-term conditions in the UK.Syrona Health – Syrona is a digital health Company providing tracking, treatment, and management solutions for people with chronic gynecological conditions.Tradein – Tradein is a real-time scoring and prediction of business payment behavior and solvency.Vanilla Steel – Vanilla Steel offers a digital auctions platform for excess steel that provides sellers a simple inventory management process for excess material.Wild Radish – Wild Radish enables people who love food and cooking to engage in Michelin-quality, unique, cooking and dining experiences at home.Xtramile – Xtramile is a data-driven platform that delivers the right job to the right candidate anywhere online.

Feels like we’ll be hearing from most of these folks again. You can find out more about Google’s startup programs here.

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Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse, but Elizabeth Ruzzo says she experienced it firsthand after telling a doctor that she suffered from suicidal ideation after taking birth control pills.

Ruzzo’s doctor told her there was no connection between birth control and self-harm, but she decided to stop taking the pill to see if her mental health improved. When it did, Ruzzo grasped the disconnect between women’s unique hormonal makeup and blanket-statement practices from medicine today.

Her realization led her to found Adyn Health, a startup that proactively helps women make health decisions that complement their hormonal state and background. The company started with, of course, helping people pick more personalized birth control.

Ruzzo is part of a group of growing entrepreneurs who are betting that hormonal health is the key wedge into the digital health boom. Hormones are fluctuating, ever-evolving and diverse — but these founders say they’re also key to solving many health conditions that disproportionately impact women, from diabetes to infertility to mental health challenges.

Many believe it’s that complexity that underscores the opportunity. Hormonal health sits at the center of conversations around personalized medicine and women’s health: By 2025, women’s health could be a $50 billion industry, and by 2026, digital health more broadly is estimated to hit $221 billion.

Still, as funding for women’s health startups drops and stigma continues to impact where venture dollars go, it’s unclear whether the sector will remain in its infancy or hit a true inflection point.

The future is proactive

Ruzzo views Adyn as a precision medicine startup. Its main product is an at-home test that tracks hormone levels, assesses genetic risk for specific side effects, and then gives recommendations for which birth control methods best suits the customer with the fewest side effects.

By Ruzzo’s estimates, 98% of sexually active women use birth control for 30 years of their life. That sort of lifetime value proposition made the company look like a sweet deal to founders, and Adyn raised a $2.5 million seed in April 2021 in a round co-led by Lux Capital and M13.

The moonshot, though, is using that as a way to become a trusted partner in a woman’s life, helping understand baseline hormone levels throughout those 30 years.

“My hope is that we can use precision medicine approaches, including looking at genetic markers to identify reliable diagnostic criteria, that can remove that uncertainty and pain and diagnostic odyssey that people have to go through,” Ruzzo said.

If Adyn becomes a trusted partner with teenage women, it could reach a point where it can detect changes in hormone levels over time.

“The hormone reference ranges that are used [in labs] are too broad to be personalized, let alone prescriptive,” she said. “And so what we’re hoping to do is correct for things that we know affect hormone levels like age, weight, ethnicity and compare you to your own expectations.”

If the first wave of digital health was a company like Ro, which answers consumers when they have a condition such as erectile dysfunction or hair loss, the second wave will look more like Adyn, which helps consumers navigate their health before getting diagnosed with a condition or experiencing issues.

The industry standard is still to wait for consumers to realize they have a condition, and then go to the doctor to manage their symptoms or look for a cure. A new startup that recently graduated from Y Combinator is finding its way into hormonal health through that angle.

One-tenth of all women are impacted by a hormonal condition

Veera Health is a startup that wants to help women in India manage polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS. The hormonal condition can cause irregular periods, infertility or gestational diabetes in women, as well as acne, weight gain and excessive hair growth. Plus, PCOS is far from rare, impacting one in 10 women.

Simplified, a marketing-focused design software looking to take on Canva, has raised $2.2 million in seed funding led by Craft Ventures. Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra and Todd Goldberg, former Uber CPO Manik Gupta, Pelican Ventures’ Ajay Yadav (also Roomie founder), Form Capital, 8Bit Capital, Early Grey Capital, GFR Fund, MyAsia VC and others participated in the round.

Simplified is aimed directly at marketers, who are inevitably responsible for generating an enormous amount of content across a variety of channels. The platform uses machine learning to automate as much of the content creation process as possible, including copy, imagery, format and sizing, and more.

For example, a marketer could be looking to post an inspirational quote on social media. They can designate that the content is meant for social media, run a search for inspirational quotes and ask the system to automatically provide an appropriate background. From there, the user can tweak whatever they’d like, like typeface or image cropping, and instantly publish.

Simplified also features collaborative tools that let teams share work and assets across the organization, as well as integrations with stock photo and video services.

The general principle here is to take what has already become a simplified process, through products like Canva, to the next level through machine learning and GPT3.

According to founder KD Deshpande, it’s all about scale. While it may be easier than ever to create a single piece of content, there is still the matter of volume. Simplified looks to speed up the process of content creation using its machine learning automation algorithms.

This comes in the midst of a massive evolution of the design space over the past several years, with players like InVision, Figma and Canva leading the charge in providing fresh, new design tools that meet the demands of a new generation of designers and design-oriented organizations.

 

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The agriculture sector is ripe for technological improvements, but beyond satellite-based crop management and bees-as-a-service, the actual people who work in the fields should be benefiting as well. Ganaz, empowered by a $7 million A round, aims to change how people with little documentation and no bank account get paid and send money with a modern workforce stack that embraces low tech as well.

Growers — that is to say, the companies that own and operate the fields and sell the crops — are under pressure from multiple directions as wages rise, regulations increase and willing workers dwindle. They need to save money to make money, but they can’t do so by paying less; in addition to being cruel to a marginalized class of people, it would only exacerbate the labor shortage in the sector.

There are plenty of companies out there that help save costs by automating things like payroll and onboarding, but the agriculture business has some unique limitations.

“It’s still operating like it’s the ’80s,” explained Ganaz founder and CEO Hannah Freeman. The number one service these workers rely on is check cashing or payday loans, and fees from these, currency exchange, ATM fees and remittances eat up a significant portion of each paycheck. “The workforce in our world definitely doesn’t have corporate email and rarely uses personal email. They have trouble downloading and using mobile apps, don’t use usernames. But they’re very conversant in WhatsApp and SMS — so you have to kind of know how to build for them.”

The ecosystem has parallels to other regions that have stuck with older, cheaper technologies instead of adopting the latest and most expensive tech. Entire markets in Africa and South America, for instance, run on text-based commerce taking place on aging and unreliable infrastructure.

Ganaz has opted for a hybrid approach. The company’s platform offers several services on both the worker and employer side.

Onboarding and basic training can be done simply and intuitively for people who may not be highly literate, via tablets loaded with apps that also operate offline. The most common alternative seems to be file folders served out of a crate in the back of a pickup — that’s not a dig, it’s just what has made sense for years for this highly fluid, distributed workforce.

Payment and balance checks all happen over SMS or WhatsApp with workers, but for sensitive information they are shunted to a web app; similarly, integrated remittance partnerships are coming that will keep things simple and reduce fees.

On the employer side, the workers and all their vital stats and documents are tracked centrally in the kind of interface companies have grown to expect. And Ganaz works as an intermediary to send text alerts and questions.

So far Ganaz has 75 employers signed up, one of which is a Costco supplier group, and all told around 175,000 workers on the platform. Their ARR and user count both approximately tripled year over year, so they’re clearly on to something.

The company has tempered its rapid growth with designation as a public benefit corporation, which emphasizes the intention to do more than grow shareholder value. I asked about the tension between needing to show a profit and working in the service of a marginalized group.

“This keeps me up at night,” admitted Freeman. “We try to make sure to set ourselves up to be true to our mission. That means the folks we hire, our board of directors… we want to make sure we’re empathizing and honoring the trust we’ve built with people.”

That includes investors as well, and Freeman noted that the company ended up going with Trilogy as lead for this round partly because of that firm’s experience with Remit.ly.

For instance, Freeman noted, while it would be easy to juice profits by bumping ATM fees, that directly harms the people they’re trying to help. Instead, when they issue their payroll Mastercard later this year, that will allow workers to skip the check cashing step and its fees, and then Ganaz gets a share of the normal card transaction fee. “We can be equally successful that way,” said Freeman, and it doesn’t just replace another predatory structure.

After the cards the plan is to automate remittances, so a user can easily choose to send money to their family in a way that minimizes handling fees and so on. And there will be other options, accessible via text, to choose where money goes if not to the card.

Ganaz’s main market is the U.S. and Mexico, since the agriculture business and workforce are both largely binational, but there are other targets on the horizon. First, though, the company wants to solidify its position and feature set here. “There’s no breakaway winner yet, so we want to be that winner,” said Freeman.

The $7 million round also had participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders’ Co-op, Taylor Ventures, AgFunder and Techstars. Rapid expansion and aggressive pursuit of the roadmap are next up for Ganaz.

“We are conscious of both the huge opportunity ahead of us to digitize billions of dollars in payroll, as well as the responsibility to build inclusive, low-cost, wealth-building tools for workers,” said Freeman.

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VC funds Frst and Fabric Ventures are teaming up to create Le Crypto Fellowship. With this program, the two firms want to find the next 10 crypto entrepreneurs in France. And they think they might foster the most promising crypto startups if they don’t have any preconceived idea and team yet.

As Pierre Entremont from Frst writes in a Medium post, there are a lot of opportunities if you want to build the next crypto success, but few entrepreneurs are actively looking at this space.

“Nearly all crypto developers and entrepreneurs are already rich and therefore don’t step up their ambition,” he writes.

Blockchain development and DeFi projects are nearly always open source. Learning resources are available for free around the web. So it’s not that hard to get started and build a prototype, but you have to get started. Frst and Fabric Ventures think they can create the right framework to incentivize the next generation of entrepreneurs.

If you get accepted into the program, the two VC firms will hand you €100,000 in exchange for 7% of your company. Basically, this should cover one year of salary for one person in France with a salary of €50,000, €21,000 in employer contributions and €29,000 in expenses. You can be based in another country as long as it’s in the same time zone and you incorporate your company in France.

This way, you get to play around and think about an ambitious idea without feeling any financial pressure. You’ll join a Discord channel with other fellows and you’ll attend weekly Zoom meetings during the first few months. After that, Fabric Ventures and Frst partners will schedule regular office hours with you to check in on your progress.

If you end up creating a proper company and taking your idea to the next level, the fellowship may later ask to invest an additional €700,000 for a 20% stake in the company.

Candidates can apply until June 15. Le Crypto Fellowship isn’t looking for people who already have an idea or are only available part-time. But if you want to join as a team of two or three, you can. Instead of €100,000, you’ll get €200,000 or €300,000. Working as a team will probably help you remain motivated over the long haul.

This isn’t the first startup mentoring program. The Thiel Fellowship is arguably the most well-known. But Le Crypto Fellowship doesn’t limit itself to college dropouts and has a different focus. It’s going to be interesting to see if it pans out and if the VC firms will have a second, a third and a fourth batch down the road.

What happens to technology companies with slowing growth and a rising focus on profitability before they reach behemoth scale? How much does the market value hypergrowth?

Just because a technology startup has a hot start, that doesn’t mean it will grow quickly forever. Most will wind up somewhere in the middle — or worse. Put simply, there is a larger number of tech companies that do fine or a little bit worse after they reach scale.

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But what every investor hopes for is the hot company that can keep growth alive even after reaching material scale, running through walls, competitors, economic headwinds and anything else that comes its way. Those companies don’t end up worth a few hundred million, or a billion, but can end up valued in the dozens of billions or more.

In reverse, tech companies — even those with strong gross margins — with slipping growth can see their multiples compress rapidly. Then, the vultures circle.

Which explains some of the news we’ve seen recently in the market. As Dropbox comes under fresh pressure from external parties, joining its erstwhile rival Box in the public-market growth penalty box, we’re seeing companies like Braze, Gong, Shippo and others rip ahead with rapid-fire funding rounds or public brags about their growth.

While the differential between the two groups is clear, it’s still worth exploring in more detail. Let’s talk about the growth dividend. Or, if you’d prefer, the existential cost of growth deceleration.

Grow or die

The news this week that Dropbox has attracted an activist shareholder should not have been a surprise. Its former rival Box is in the midst of a long-running struggle with an activist investor of its own. (More here.)

Boston-based Realtime Robotics this morning announced a $31.4 million round. The funding is part of the $11.7 million Series A the company announced all the way back in late 2019. Investors include HAHN Automation, SAIC Capital Management, Soundproof Ventures , Heroic Ventures, SPARX Asset Management, Omron Ventures, Toyota AI Ventures, Scrum Ventures and Duke Angels.

Realtime is one of a number of startups building control on top of industrial robotics. Specifically, the startup looks to help companies deploy systems with limited programming, offering adaptable controls that work for multiple systems at once.

This round, which nearly doubles the company’s existing funding, will be used to accelerate its product development and extend its offering to more markets, globally. It comes as interest in robotics have ramped up amid the global pandemic.

“This investment by some of the world’s leading manufacturers and automation providers stands as a testament to our ability to dramatically improve the value proposition for robotic implementations,” CEO Peter Howard says in a release. “Having already realized early deployment success, a broad spectrum of customers and partners are working closely with us to refine features and user experiences, readying our technology for rollouts in their engineering, factory and warehouse operations.”

The company’s offerings serve a wide range of different industrial robotics tasks, including pick and place machines, packaging and palletizing boxes.

 

Would you like to work with private equity and venture capital funds?

There are relatively few jobs directly inside private equity and venture capital funds, and those jobs are highly competitive. However, there are many other ways you can work and earn money within the industry — as a consultant, an interim executive, a board member, a deal executive partnering to buy a company, an executive in residence or as an entrepreneur in residence.

Venture capitalists often have an operations background. However, historically most private equity professionals were former investment bankers and other finance professionals. Then private equity players gradually realized that value cannot be created through financial engineering alone. A BCG study of 121 investments found that operational improvement drives 48% of value creation in PE-backed companies. PE funds now almost always require an upgrade in management and change management teams if necessary.

Not surprisingly, the tighter your relationship with the firm, the more money you will earn:

At Versatile VC, we’ve used all these models. We are soon launching Founders’ Next Move, a selective, free community for founders researching their next move, which will be a key tool for working with outside talent.

The simplest path forward is to identify funds in your industry of expertise and reach out. You can explore all of the models below with them. First, start by identifying the firms that invest in companies that you’ve worked with. Then, more broadly, look for investors in the industries in which you have expertise. You can identify institutional investors through one of multiple online databases:

All investors	Private equity	Venture capital
Preqin (free demo) Grey House (free demo) S&P Global Market Intelligence Pratt’s Guide Thomson One	PitchBook (free trial) PrivateEquityFirms.com (free trial) Eurekahedge	AngelList (free) CrunchBase (free) PWC MoneyTree (free) VentureDeal (free trial) Asian Venture Capital Journal (free trial)

Let’s take a look at the different ways you can work with the investment community.

Expert networks

Expert network firms source subject matter experts from various domains and pair them with clients seeking topical or industry insights. They typically charge clients up to $1,200 per hour, and pay the expert $100 to $500 an hour. I founded Circle of Experts, an expert network that I sold to Evalueserve.

The expert network industry has grown an average 4.5% annually between 2015 and 2020, its market size topping $1.3 billion in 2020. While the major clients were initially hedge funds and private equity firms, consulting firms now comprise 32% of total demand for expert network services.

Inex One, an expert network marketplace, has compiled a list of 80 expert networks, summarized in the graphic below:

The largest expert networks include: GLG, which accounts for approximately 50% of the industry’s revenue; AlphaSights is the second biggest generalist expert network; Guidepoint services six major categories of clients globally across several industries; and Third Bridge hires and retains talent to “democratize the world’s human insights and upend the traditional research model.”

Other notable expert networks include Atheneum Partners, Coleman Research Group, Dialectica, ENG, Lynk Global, Mosaic, PreScouter, ProSapient and Tegus. There are also expert networks with sector or geography specialization. For example, SERMO is a global social media network for physicians to exchange knowledge and share challenging patient cases, and Clarity.fm connects startups to experts in building new businesses.