Andreessen Horowitz

FEBRUARY 7, 2024

It’s impossible to talk about new technology without talking about human flourishing — every new technology from the plow to the microchip has typically been followed by a period of newfound wealth for consumers in the form of cheaper goods, improved productivity, and longer, healthier lives. In many ways, the most financially average person in our modern society experiences daily luxuries that history’s Pharaohs and Caesars could not imagine: instant communication, broadcast television, global

AI 139

AI Travel Technology Communication 139

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 4, 2024

As we’ve been researching the AI landscape & how to build applications, a few design patterns are emerging for AI products. These design patterns are simple mental models. They help us understand how builders are engineering AI applications today & which components may be important in the future. The first design pattern is the AI query router.

AI 308

AI Artificial Intelligence User Experience Engineering 308

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What’s Your Best Advice for Struggling Entrepreneurs? Having struggled a lot myself in the early days several times … just a few thoughts to summarize my learnings: 1. Get help & upgrade the team. This is the #1 thing you can do to move the needle. Don’t be ashamed to ask for help. Especially if you are struggling.

Startup 302

Startup Investment Product Marketing Revenue 302

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now Are Forward Estimates Going Up? Going in to this earnings season I expected a big driver of stock price performance to be how 2024 full year estimates change pre / post earnings. Since the macro feels more “stabilized” it felt fair to assume “are numbers going up or down” to be the question most correlated with stock price performance.

Cloud 198

Cloud Pricing Startup Revenue 198

Advertisement

Simplify omnichannel payments with a solution that unifies every channel through your platform. By integrating front-end systems like online, mobile, and in-store payments with robust back-end infrastructure, you can deliver a seamless payments experience without the need for heavy engineering. Omnitoken technology enhances security by tokenizing card transactions for reuse, enabling merchants to drive cross-selling opportunities.

Payment Solutions

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 7, 2024

fs Builds features developer-built projects showing step-by-step examples, code snippets, and advice on how to approach building with FastSpring. The goal of this series is to not only help you build with FastSpring, but also to inspire you with new and unique ways to leverage FastSpring’s systems to best serve your company. As always, our support and sales engineering specialists are available to help if you need assistance along the way.

Payment Features 142

Payment Features Subscription Merchant Services Payment Methods 142

Nimble - Sales

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

This Valentine’s Day, let’s celebrate a different yet essential aspect of our professional lives: networking! Successful businesses thrive on networks of relationships that are built over time, which are crucial for sparking new opportunities, forming partnerships, and driving growth. We’ve connected with industry experts who have shared their insights and personal takes on how effective […] The post Heartfelt Connections: The Power of Relationships in Business Success ap

Business 130

Business 130

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

We’re entering a new pricing environment for software: AI vs non-AI. It’s only happened in the last few weeks. Recent earnings have pushed some of the most important companies to all-time highs. Company Performance Confluent 34% Cloudflare 21% ServiceNow 20% Microsoft 14% This dynamic doesn’t favor everyone. Theory created a public market AI index to track software companies who have significant product plans or current AI businesses.

Startup 264

Startup AI Software Pricing 264

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2024

So most of you can probably infer from funding posts and press releases just how much B2B funding is going into GenAI startups. But exactly how much? Sapphire Ventures has the latest data. In 2023: GenAI funding was up a stunning +271% (!) But overall, B2B VC funding was down -36% 2024 seems to be pretty much the same. Top SaaS VCs are investing 80%+ in AI-first startups: This is where the VC frenzy is right now.

AI 295

AI B2B Startup Investment 295

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 16, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now January Green Shoots A couple key software players have given us commentary in their Q4 earnings report (quarter ending December) that January (the first month of Q1) saw some green-shoots. Could this be the sign of a slow rebound?

Cloud 164

Cloud AWS Metrics Subscription 164

Advertisement

ClinicSense is a SaaS platform that supports over 7,000 massage therapists who use it for appointment management, payments, scheduling, marketing activities and more. Despite having a relatively low payment failure rate, the company discovered that the failures disrupted the customer experience. This often led to churn as customers decided to cancel or abandon their account, preventing ClinicSense from realizing the full lifetime value (LTV) of its users.

Payments

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 22, 2024

Ready to join the game industry’s premier professional event? If so, join FastSpring at Game Developers Conference 2024 at Booth S1931! We’d love to talk with you in person! Join us at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from March 18-22nd, for an extraordinary event dedicated to continually defining market innovations and providing insight into the future of games.

Merchant Services 138

Merchant Services Development Payment Services SaaS Payments 138

Andreessen Horowitz

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

The biotech industry is built on one of the cleanest go-to-market strategies in existence: if you make a safe drug that really works, patients are likely to receive it and payors are likely to pay for it. This simplicity is of course shrouded in the complexity of biology, and demands that biotech companies thoughtfully de-risk existential concerns throughout the drug development lifecycle.

Development Team Review 125

Development Team Review Technical Review Finance Systems Review 125

Buffer Resources

FEBRUARY 26, 2024

Timing can make or break many things: heating leftover pizza in the microwave, delivering a punchline for a joke, booking Era’s Tour concert tickets — and it’s no less important when it comes to the best time to post on Twitter.  The social media platform now known as X is evolving, but the factors you should consider if you’re looking to grow your following have largely stayed the same.

Social Media 123

Social Media Engagement Leadership Metrics 123

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2024

Last week, Reddit filed their S-1 to go public. At least 10% of their revenue - about $60m - comes from selling data to train Large Language Models. Reddit’s data sales revenue will likely be much more than 10% by the end of the year. Quoting directly : We expect our growing data advantage and intellectual property to continue to be a key element in the training of future LLMs.

Artificial Intelligence 262

Artificial Intelligence Business Model Business Travel 262

Speaker: David Warren and Kevin O’Neill Stoll

Transitioning to a usage-based business model offers powerful growth opportunities but comes with unique challenges. How do you validate strategies, reduce risks, and ensure alignment with customer value? Join us for a deep dive into designing effective pilots that test the waters and drive success in usage-based revenue. Discover how to develop a pilot that captures real customer feedback, aligns internal teams with usage metrics, and rethinks sales incentives to prioritize lasting customer eng

Revenue

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Recently at Pavilion’s CEO Summit, SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin, took the stage to do something. a little bit different. Typically on SaaStr.com, we try to focus our content on mistakes to avoid, lessons learned and how to scale faster, but for the CEO Summit, Jason addressed the audience with what’s most top of mind for him at the start of 2024. “I really think we are in a new world as managers and as leaders,” Jason said to kick things off. “2023 was nuts,

Sales Recruiting 283

Sales Recruiting Trends Sales Hiring Software Review 283

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now Cloud Giants Report Q4 ‘23 Two quotes from the Amazon and Microsoft earnings call really stood out to me this week. Amazon on AWS : “…customers are continuing to shift their focus towards driving innovation and bringing new workloads to the cloud.

Cost optimization & reporting 164

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Azure AWS 164

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 26, 2024

A lot of big changes around direct-to-consumer options in the games industry have been going on in the past few months. For example: The settlement between U.S. States and Google. A ruling in favor of Epic in Epic Games v. Google. The Supreme Court rejecting appeals from Apple and Epic. Apple’s most recent announcement of policy changes skirting around the new DMA rules.

Payment Methods 130

Payment Methods Payment Solutions Payments SaaS Payments 130

Andreessen Horowitz

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

The traditional clouds (AWS, GCP, and Azure) are getting dated. They continue to be the standard for the vast majority of cloud workloads, of course, but they are built around a set of operational practices that were more relevant a decade ago. Lately, we’ve seen the rise of a number of hosting platforms that are better aligned with modern development practices.

Investment 123

Investment GCP(Google Cloud Platform) AWS Azure 123

Advertisement

Large enterprises face unique challenges in optimizing their Business Intelligence (BI) output due to the sheer scale and complexity of their operations. Unlike smaller organizations, where basic BI features and simple dashboards might suffice, enterprises must manage vast amounts of data from diverse sources. What are the top modern BI use cases for enterprise businesses to help you get a leg up on the competition?

Enterprise

The Moz Blog

FEBRUARY 19, 2024

Nothing could be worse for a business than existing customers thinking you no longer exist. With millions of Google Business Profile websites being shut down, Miriam Ellis outlines your options for a free/cheap replacement site, with tons of tips for making a strong 1-page presence.

Business 120

Business 120

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 15, 2024

The Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) launched on January 12, about a month ago. On the first day, investors bought $655m & nearly $2b in the first three days. Since then, the figure has swelled to $4.6b. It’s not a fair comparison but for fun, we can compare the Bitcoin interest to the largest technology IPOs for a sense of scale. Company IPO Date Raised $B Facebook May-12 $16.0 Uber May-19 $8.1 Snap Mar-17 $3.9 Airbnb Dec-2 $3.5 Snowflake Sep-2 $3.4 DoorDash Dec-2 $3.4 Lyft Mar-19

Finance 224

Finance Technology Scaling 224

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What Is The Best Indicators of Product Market Fit at an Early Stage SaaS B2B Startup? This is a rough metric, but I’d say from experience working closely with 25+ SaaS companies … if you aren’t growing > 10% a month after $10k in MRR or so … then you don’t yet have product-market fit. Not yet at least. One way or another, every reasonably fast-growing SaaS company hits double-digit growth, for a while.

Product Marketing 277

Product Marketing B2B Startup Marketing 277

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 23, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now Rule of X Meritech and Bessemer both recently did an analysis that looked at the Rule of 40 and asked the question “what if growth / profitability shouldn’t be treated equally in the Rule of 40?” The Rule of 40 looks at the sum of a companies growth rate and FCF margin (or some other profitability metric like EBIT margin) and says that the sum s

Cloud 154

Cloud Metrics Subscription Payment Features 154

Speaker: Jay Allardyce, Deepak Vittal, and Terrence Sheflin

As we look ahead to 2025, business intelligence and data analytics are set to play pivotal roles in shaping success. Organizations are already starting to face a host of transformative trends as the year comes to a close, including the integration of AI in data analytics, an increased emphasis on real-time data insights, and the growing importance of user experience in BI solutions.

Trends

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

About this series: fs Builds features developer-built projects showing step-by-step examples, code snippets, and advice on how to approach building with FastSpring. The goal of this series is to not only help you build with FastSpring, but also to inspire you with new and unique ways to leverage FastSpring’s systems to best serve your company. As always, our support and sales engineering specialists are available to help if you need assistance along the way.

Payments 130

Payments Payment Solutions B2B Payment Features 130

Buffer Resources

FEBRUARY 22, 2024

You’ve probably received dozens of spammy, impersonal direct messages (DMs) in your social media inboxes that you never bothered replying to. Think messages from people who misspell your name, are clearly looking to sell you something you don’t need, or are just copy-pasting text en masse.  It’s little wonder that DMs get a bad rap, and most tend to shy away from sending them.

Social Media 119

Social Media Underperforming Technical Team Engagement B2B 119

Totango

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

To make it to the Super Bowl, a football team must have two things: a strong defense and a strategic offense. The defense maintains a good field position and prevents the opposing team from scoring points, while the offense orchestrates smart plays to gain additional yards and score points. Similarly, to be successful, an enterprise needs to be able to prevent churn and increase revenue growth.

Retention 111

Retention Underperforming Technical Team Software Review Churn 111

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 24, 2024

The Community Source licenses may be the future of open source software. With closed-source software, the code isn’t shared outside the company that wrote it. Open-source code is freely available to examine & use. Open-source companies like Elastic ($13b), Confluent ($10b), MongoDB ($33b) have been phenomenally successful. Along the way, many of them have changed their licenses to shield themselves from copycats.

Government 210

Government Compensation Development Technology 210

Speaker: Christophe Louvion, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NRC Health and Tony Karrer, CTO at Aggregage

Christophe Louvion, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NRC Health, is here to take us through how he guided his company's recent experience of getting from concept to launch and sales of products within 90 days. In this exclusive webinar, Christophe will cover key aspects of his journey, including: LLM Development & Quick Wins 🤖 Understand how LLMs differ from traditional software, identifying opportunities for rapid development and deployment.

Artificial Intelligence

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 19, 2024

Dear SaaStr: Is It Normal for a Founder CEO to End Up With Just 10% Equity? Yes. Roughly speaking, this is what generally will happen after 3 rounds of traditional venture capital. If the company sells 15–20% in each round, and 15–20% is reserved for employees, that typically will leave 15–25% for the founders in total. Q4 2023 Median primary round dilution: ⚪️ Seed: 19.9% ?

Venture Capital 270

Venture Capital Acquisition SaaS Leadership 270

Casey Accidental

FEBRUARY 22, 2024

This essay was co-created with Dan Hockenmaier. In marketplace businesses, the network is the product. If you’re not growing both supply and demand, the product generally isn’t getting better over time. And your network effects which compound organic growth are not getting better, and probably getting worse. Most marketplace founders and leaders intuit this over time, so they obsess over growth metrics.

Payments 116

Payments SaaS Payments Scale Payment Methods 116

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 15, 2024

Thanks to Tony Markov for contributing to this article! If you’re not sure how to sell an app direct to consumer (D2C) outside the app stores — or if you’re looking for a new way to monetize your mobile app or game — you may be wondering what options you have. Steep fees from platforms like the Apple App Store and Google Play can understandably cause game developers and app creators to look beyond the convenience and ubiquity of traditional app marketplaces, but restrictions from the platform pr

Payment Methods 124

Payment Methods Payment Solutions Merchant Services Payment Services 124