We do work to pay attention to competitors and be inspired by them, but it is a fact that the customer-centric way is at this point a defining element of our culture.

by Jeff Bezos.

It’s easier than you think…

Here is the formula:

1. Take the # of employees the SaaS company has, as reported on LinkedIn’s Company profile for that company.
2. Multiply by $150,000 if well-funded. $200,000 if modestly funded.

And that’s the company’s revenues. All done.

via How to Figure Out Your Competitors’ Revenues.

I briefly bumped into Joel Spolsky and met him in-person for the first time last week. He was at my favorite coffee shop, Sightglass, having coffee with a mutual friend. I bought him his coffee. I did it simply because the posts he has written on his blog over the years are a treasure trove of evergreen content. When searching for answers to my questions about SaaS or scaling software businesses I end up finding a blog post or two of his.

He wrote a post in 2004 that is still very relevant today, it’s about segmentation and how to price your software. Here’s how he breaks down the 3 options for pricing your software:

Software is priced three ways: free, cheap, and dear.

• Free. Open source, etc. Not relevant to the current discussion. Nothing to see here. Move along.
• Cheap. $10 – $1000, sold to a very large number of people at a low price without a salesforce. Most shrinkwrapped consumer and small business software falls into this category.
• Dear. $75,000 – $1,000,000, sold to a handful of rich big companies using a team of slick salespeople that do six months of intense PowerPoint just to get one goddamn sale. The Oracle model.

All three methods work fine.

Read the rest on Joel’s blog.

My friend, Om Malik, shares his thoughts on entrepreneurship inspired by a conversation with Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare. Here are some short quotes from his post:

• Founders live to capture lightning in the bottle: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but we still keep trying. [Tweet This]
• Building things that are different, inventing the future and creating a real business is a long and often very lonely slog. [Tweet This]
• Sorry guys, entrepreneurship isn’t a lifestyle, it is life. [Tweet This]
• This spectacle of technology has attracted fake messiahs, and every day I see this mockery of entrepreneurship. [Tweet This]

Read the rest on the GigaOM blog.

• Hardware
• Software
• Apps
• Services

via Mobile’s Hierarchy of Needs.

My co-founder, Neil and I learned a ton from Omniture throughout the years. Here are 7 of our most important lessons learned:

1. Best Product ≠ Biggest Company
2. Sales is the quickest way to grow a software company.
3. The more you integrate the higher your lifetime value.
4. Mindshare = sales
5. If you can’t beat them, buy them.
6. It’s better to have short term pain and long term gain, than it is to have short term gain and long term pain.
7. Location matters.

via QuickSprout.

1. Evergreen content
2. Social whales
3. Don’t get bored

via How Andrew’s blog grows.

I’ve always been interested in how to motivate others. Elliot Nash breaks it down in a simple way:

Everything is easy when the mystery is removed. Everything.

via Igniting motivation in others.

How to think before your communicate:

The next time you have a question for a coworker, try writing it out as if they were 1000 miles and 3 time zones away – even if they’re sitting right next to you. You might surprise yourself with the answer.

via Embracing slow time by Jason Z. of 37signals.