Point Nine News

Rather than thinking about things you can't realistically change (sex/race), I would think about other things - e.g., is your company the sort of thing that VC's want to fund? And, do you really want VC?

If your business is VC-friendly, and you want to go on the VC ride, then yes, you should go for it. Even if you don't get funded, or even if funding doesn't go the way you want it to, you will learn a lot of interesting stuff and make a lot of good connections. I went through the VC cycle 2x in the first dot-com boom and learned a tremendous amount from it. (Including a lot of skepticism about whether or not VC is a good path for founders - it is absolutely not the only good path.)

This article does a reasonable job of helping identify which companies might be VC-compatible and which aren't:

https://medium.com/point-nine-news/the-rise-of-non-vc-compatible-saas-companies-47054f1f3b29

A bit of background in case you're interested:

I'm an investor excited about all kinds of geeky topics - dev tools, security, drones, hardware, machine learning...

I try to stay close to the latest developments in tech to understand what can be achieved with the technology today and what and how can that be translated into good products.

Last year, I already tried to "predict" what could be the evolution of deeper tech in 2016. I failed quite a lot...
This year, I'm trying again... but I would love to learn from the wisdom of the crowd.

In case you're curious:

1) My review of 2016
https://medium.com/point-nine-news/reviewing-18-geeky-predictions-for-2016-spoiler-alert-many-epic-fails-d8fd533ab855

2) My 2017 predictions
https://medium.com/point-nine-news/18-geeky-predictions-2017-edition-c78b9826d03f#.qwfq4eofg

Outstanding summary Patrick, was prepared for a piece of dry content marketing but many gold nuggets as usual!

I would add a couple of supplementals unique to 2018 for those of us raising capital in a SAAS or looking to liquidate:

1) The "SAAS Napkin" for 2018, a survey of ~50 Series A / Series B funded companies that have shared with regard to growth / churn / etc. Links here https://www.producthunt.com/posts/saas-funding-napkin-3 and explanation here https://medium.com/point-nine-news/what-does-it-take-to-raise-capital-in-saas-in-2018-204d0a46cb23

2) The fascinating rise of Private Equity companies as a liquidity / funding option outside of larger co Acquisition / VC money as observed by the founder of Pardot (~$100m exit to SalesForce) - https://davidcummings.org/2017/10/03/private-equity-as-the-saas-savior/

Marketing people actually know & plan for this. Check out this blog post about "The Lifecycle of Lead Generation Channels" [0].

It basically says, that any given channel starts out small and high-quality, so engaging is easy and credible. As it grows marketers have to be smarter and larger to stand out. Read it as a consumer, and they're basically talking about a scorched-earth loudness war for your attention.

[0] https://medium.com/point-nine-news/the-lifecycle-of-lead-generation-channels-eff1468d78c7

"Handful dozen of trial users... 0 paying users"

Don't forget that, for many successful SaaS:

-Landing page to trial conversion is in 5-10% range, and

-Trial to paying customer is 3-10%!

Also don't forget the statistical variance.

Source: https://medium.com/point-nine-news/monitoring-an-early-stage-saas-business-at-the-b2b-rocks-conference-in-paris-985018d20fdf

Different frameworks provide different pieces, a non exhaustive list:

Front end integrations (Slack, Skype etc)
NLP
Conversation state and context management
Automated knowledge/learning.

etc etc.

I'm in the middle of writing a blog post on this, but https://medium.com/point-nine-news/software-bots-c56aeedcfec3#.ye1z2am6u is a good piece to read