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Image Credits: Sezeryadigar / Getty Images
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Before Twilio had a market cap approaching $56 billion and more than 200,000 customers, the cloud-communications platform developed a secret sauce to fuel its growth: a developer-focused model that dispensed with traditional marketing rules.
Software companies that sell directly to end users share a simple framework for managing growth that leverages discoverability, desirability and do-ability — the “aha!” moment where a consumer is able to incorporate a new product into their workflow.
Data show that traditional marketing doesn’t work on developers, and it’s not because they’re impervious to a sales pitch. Builders just want reliable tools that are easy to use.
As a result, companies that are looking to create and sell software to developers at scale must toss their B2B playbooks and meet their customers where they are.
Attorney Sophie Alcorn, our in-house immigration law expert, submitted two columns: On Monday, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security decided not to cancel the International Entrepreneur Parole program, which potentially allows founders from other countries to stay as long as 60 months.
On Wednesday, she responded to a question from an entrepreneur who asked whether it made sense to sponsor visas for workers who are working remotely inside the U.S.
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week, and have a great weekend.
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
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Image Credits: PM Images / Getty Images
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Natasha Mascarenhas and Alex Wilhelm recently hosted Yext CFO Steve Cakebread and Latch CFO Garth Mitchell on an episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast.
In their discussion, “The morality and efficacy of going public earlier,” the group discussed the myriad paths startups are taking to go public and assessed the pros and cons of each method, and, importantly, the potential impacts on employees and business operations.
“I think when money’s chasing money, you don’t want to be the last guy holding the money. You want to be the chase,” said Cakebread.
Since Latch is currently going public via a SPAC and Yext followed a traditional IPO route a few years ago, the discussion is heavily weighted toward experience, not opinion.
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Image Credits: Westend61 / Getty Images
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Software startups that fail to reach product-market fit simply fade away, memorialized only by an inactive Twitter account and perhaps a stenciled sign in a now-vacant co-working space.
All product-led growth companies will reach the stage where their founders must figure out how to crack the code that allows them to vault to the next level and become a billion-dollar company. That’s where the “hamburger” go-to-market comes in.
The bottom bun is bottom-up GTM; the top bun represents enterprise sales. And your product? That’s the meat.
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Image Credits: Nigel Sussman
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Construction tech unicorn Procore Technologies this week set a price range for its impending public offering. The news comes after the company initially filed to go public in February 2020, a move delayed by the pandemic.
In March 2021, Procore filed again for a public offering, but its second shot ran into a cooling IPO market. The company filed another S-1/A in April, and then another in early May. This week’s filing is the first that sets a price for the Carpinteria, California-based software upstart.
But Procore is not the only company that filed and later put on hold an IPO to get back to work on floating. Kaltura, a software company focused on video distribution, also recently got its IPO back on track. Are we seeing a re-acceleration of the IPO market? Perhaps.
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Image Credits: Patcharin Saenlakon/EyeEm / Getty Images
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Family physician Bobbie Kumar lays out the golden rules to ensure your healthcare product, service or innovation is on the right track.
Rule 1: “It’s not enough to develop a “new tool” to use in a health setting,” Dr. Kumar writes.
“Maybe it has a purpose, but does it meaningfully address a need, or solve a problem, in a way that measurably improves outcomes? In other words: Does it have value?”
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Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
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Dear Sophie,
I’m the founder of an early-stage, two-year-old fintech startup. We really want to move to San Francisco to be near our lead investor.
I heard International Entrepreneur Parole is back. What is it, and how can I apply?
— Joyous in Johannesburg
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Image Credits: Nigel Sussman
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If you have heard of Better.com but really had no idea what it does, welcome to the club. Mortgage tech is like pre-kindergarten applications — it applies to a very specific set of folks at a very particular moment. And they care a lot about it. But the rest of us aren’t really aware of its existence.
Better.com, a venture-backed digital mortgage lender, announced this week that it will combine with a SPAC, taking itself public in the second half of 2021. The unicorn’s news comes as the American IPO market is showing signs of fresh life after a modest April.
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Image Credits: filadendron / Getty Images
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The pandemic forced many employees to begin working from home, and, in doing so, may have changed the way we think about work. While some businesses have slowly returned to the office, depending on where you live and what you do, many information workers remain at home.
That could change in the coming months as more people get vaccinated and the infection rate begins to drop in the U.S.
Many companies have discovered that their employees work just fine at home. And some workers don’t want to waste time stuck on congested highways or public transportation now that they’ve learned to work remotely. But other employees suffered in small spaces or with constant interruptions from family. Those folks may long to go back to the office.
On balance, it seems clear that whatever happens, for many companies, we probably aren’t going back whole-cloth to the prior model of commuting into the office five days a week.
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Image Credits: John Lund / Getty Images
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Ken Harlan, the founder and CEO of Mobile Fuse, writes about the perks and pitfalls of software development kits.
“The digital media industry often talks about how much influence, dominance and power entities like Google and Facebook have,” Harlan writes.
“Generally, the focus is on the vast troves of data and audience reach these companies tout. However, there’s more beneath the surface that strengthens the grip these companies have on both app developers and publishers alike.
“In reality, SDK integrations are a critical component of why these monolith companies have such a prominent presence.”
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Image Credits: Ray Massey / Getty Images
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“Search engine optimization, PR, paid marketing, emails, social — marketing and communications is crowded with techniques, channels, solutions and acronyms,” writes Dominik Angerer, CEO and co-founder of Storyblok, which provides best practice guidance for startups on how to build a sustainable approach to marketing their content.
“It’s little wonder that many startups strapped for time and money find defining and executing a sustainable marketing campaign a daunting prospect. The sheer number of options makes it difficult to determine an effective approach, and my view is that this complexity often obscures the obvious answer: A startup’s best marketing asset is its story.”
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Image Credits: Nigel Sussman
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The Exchange caught up with Appian CEO Matt Calkins after his enterprise app software company reported its first-quarter performance to discuss the low-code market and what he’s hearing in customer meetings. To round out our general thesis — and shore up our somewhat bratty headline — we’ve compiled a list of recent low-code and no-code venture capital rounds, of which there are many.
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Image Credits: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch
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Historically — and based on what we’re seeing in this fantastical filing — Bird proved to be a simply awful business. Its results from 2019 and 2020 describe a company with a huge cost structure and unprofitable revenue, per filings. After posting negative gross profit in both of the most recent full-year periods, Bird’s initial model appears to have been defeated by the market.
What drove the company’s hugely unprofitable revenues and resulting net losses? Unit economics that were nearly comically destructive.
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Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
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Dear Sophie,
My startup is in big-time hiring mode. All of our employees are currently working remotely and will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future — even after the pandemic ends. We are considering individuals who are living outside of the U.S. for a few of the positions we are looking to fill.
Does it make sense to sponsor them for a visa to work remotely from somewhere in the United States?
— Selective in Silicon Valley
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Image Credits: belterz / Getty Images
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Krish Subramanian, the co-founder and CEO of Chargebee, writes that while subscription business models are attractive, there are two major pitfalls: First, payment.
“Regardless of company size, there’s an ongoing need to convince customers to sign up long term,” Subramanian writes. “The second issue: How do businesses cover the funding gap between when customers sign up and when they pay?”
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Image Credits: Aimee Blasee
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Scott Lenet, president of Touchdown Ventures, asks how deal-makers should think about how to handle themselves when counter-parties attempt to change an agreement. “When is it OK to modify terms, and when should deal makers stand firm?” he asks.
“Entrepreneurs and investors should recognize that contracts are worth very little without the ongoing relationship management that keeps all parties aligned. Enforcement is so unusual in the world of startups that I consider it a mostly dead-end path. In my experience, good communication is the only reliable remedy. This is the way.”
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