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Constrained by a limited budget while seeking to grow as quickly as possible, startup founders must decide how to balance growing their engineering teams with their sales & marketing teams. To help inform those decisions, I’ve benchmarked the relative sizes of the sales and engineering teams of the 36 publicly-traded SaaS companies from founding to IPO, typically 7 years later.

The graph above shows the average Sales & Marketing allocation in turquoise and Research & Development investment in red. In the early years of these startups, sales and marketing salaries consumed about 90% of revenues and slowly fell to 45%. Engineering commanded 50% of revenue, which also declined over time as revenue increased and more of that revenue was harvested as profit or re-invested elsewhere in the business.

In almost every industry, startups and venture capital included, content marketing has become an essential tool for growth. Over the past four years, I’ve developed infrastructure, analyses and processes to help this blog grow from just a few visitors per month to nearly a hundred thousand today, achieved a Twitter follower quarterly growth rate of 20% and built a mailing list of close to one thousand readers. In this post, I’ve detailed are the strategies, software and techniques I use. This is the architecture diagram for the blog.

Twitter is the first form of communication that changes depending on who is using it. Like the telephone, the fax, email, Twitter enables all types of communications: friendly banter, customer support requests, news syndication and public service announcements to name a few.

But Twitter imposes a three new wrinkles that set it apart as a new form of communication. First, the recipients of a tweet are knowable but never really known. One could sift through a list of Twitter followers but never understand who they are, if they pay attention to tweets, why they follow an account, or what agenda they have. Followers might include close friends, business acquaintances, customers, strangers and Justin Bieber - or any combination.

I’ve always wanted to read a newspaper like The Daily Prophet from Harry Potter, a daily with animated images and with articles that respond to the reader.

Last week, the Guardian, the world’s third-most widely read paper, published NSA Files: Decoded which explores the many different points of view on the NSA’s information collection efforts. As you scroll down, senators and attorneys and experts begin briefing you. Interactive data charts invite you to explore trends and embedded documents beg you to dig deeper.

In 2013, growth trumps all other considerations. For the average 2013 venture backed tech IPO, half of the startup’s enterprise value is explained by its growth rate, while none of it is explained by profitability.

The market has spoken and startups have responded. Of the 25 IPOs I surveyed, both pending and completed, only 20% are profitable. On average, these startups operate at about -20% net income margins but are growing at 162% annually.

In 2008, iGoogle represented 20% of traffic to Google. Seven years later, the mobile phone is the home screen of choice for a billion people. iGoogle is dead. Mobile killed it.

The typical mobile phone user checks their phone 110 times per day. I suspect iGoogle’s most avid users visited about 10 times daily. By that math, mobile home screens generate an order of magnitude more engagement. If Google or any company wants to provide the home screen to those billion people, that home screen must be a mobile app.

Quietly mentioned in yesterday’s press conference about Google’s Android update is a new feature that will change the way people use their mobile phones, search deep-linking. With KitKat, Google is applying its world-class crawling and search technology to the content and data within mobile applications.

Quoting from the Verge,

A search for a restaurant will offer a link directly to that restaurant page in the OpenTable app if you have it installed, allowing you to set up a reservation. Or a recipe search will bring you to the result directly inside of the AllRecipes app — rather than the mediocre mobile website.

Every SaaS business suffers from churn. If churn isn’t managed properly, the lost revenue from churned customers offsets new revenue and the business flat-lines or suffers negative revenue growth. I’ve seen startups employ three patterns for offsetting churn: acquiring new customers faster, upselling existing customers to buy more software, or structuring pricing to grow with customers.

Each strategy requires different levels of investment but achieves similar results. These strategies are often deployed in addition to a customer success team, which require their own investment.

How do you validate an idea for a software startup before the product is built? Last week, a founder of a SaaS business and I were wrestling with this problem. It’s a question without a universal answer. After a while, we came up with quick and dirty rule of thumb for his business. Can he hit his quota?

Suppose this founder wasn’t the founder, but the first inside sales hire for the startup. His annual quota would be around $300k or about $25k per month. He would likely commit to a four month quota ramp, needing to reach of 25% of quota ($6k) in the first month, 50% in the second ($12k) and so on.

There’s a perptual and roaring debate in Startupland about the ideal founding team. Should the ideal team be entirely computer scientists? How important to success is having an MBA/business person? What about the stories of billionaire dropouts?

To answer that question, I’ve aggregated the academic backgrounds of 30 of the top startups of the past few years and analyzed the make up of each of those founding teams.

Above is a chart comparing the number of “billion” dollar startups by the total number of founders and the share of technical founders.