February, 2024

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How AI Will Usher in an Era of Abundance

Andreessen Horowitz

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
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AI Design Patterns

Tom Tunguz

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 337
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Sapphire Ventures: GenAI Funding is Up 271%. Everything Else? Down -36%

SaaStr

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.

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Clouded Judgement 2.9.24 - Dilution Dilution Dilution

Clouded Judgement

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 201
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State of AI in Sales & Marketing 2025

AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.

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FastSpring at Game Developers Conference 2024!

FastSpring

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.

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Copywriting for Outbound with Joel Graber

Predictable Revenue

Collin hosts Joel Graber from Modern Outbound, for a chat for salespeople and marketers looking to refine their approach. The post Copywriting for Outbound with Joel Graber appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

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The Sudden Repricing of Startups in Early 2024

Tom Tunguz

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 315
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7 Things to Do When You’re Struggling

SaaStr

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 321
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Clouded Judgement 2.16.24 - Jan Green Shoots + CPI

Clouded Judgement

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 167
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5 Ways to Improve Revenue from Integrated Payments

Speaker: Pete Uselman, Director of Partner Experience at Wind River Payments

Most integrated payments providers share a percent of the payment revenue with their software partners. But, oftentimes, that revenue share is only a fraction of the true income potential software providers can realize. If you want to maximize income opportunities from your payments program, check out Wind River Payments’ webinar-on-demand.

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fsBuilds: Offloading WooCommerce Checkout & Subscriptions to FastSpring (Video)

FastSpring

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.

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The Anatomy of Addictive Content

The Moz Blog

Discover the art of crafting irresistible content that grabs your readers' attention and guides them seamlessly toward conversion

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Pioneering Prosperity: The Advantages in Digital Disbursement Strategies

USIO

In the fast-paced world of digital transactions, businesses are constantly seeking innovative solutions to enhance efficiency and control over their financial operations. One such trailblazer in the realm of digital disbursement is Usio Akimbo Card , offering a revolutionary approach that goes beyond the ordinary. Let’s delve into the uncharted advantages that come with embracing Akimbo Card digital disbursement strategies.

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One of the Biggest Public Offerings in 20 Years

Tom Tunguz

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

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How to Achieve High-Accuracy Results When Using LLMs

Speaker: Ben Epstein, Stealth Founder & CTO | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO, Aggregage

When tasked with building a fundamentally new product line with deeper insights than previously achievable for a high-value client, Ben Epstein and his team faced a significant challenge: how to harness LLMs to produce consistent, high-accuracy outputs at scale. In this new session, Ben will share how he and his team engineered a system (based on proven software engineering approaches) that employs reproducible test variations (via temperature 0 and fixed seeds), and enables non-LLM evaluation m

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64% of You Are Growing Your Sales Teams in 2024

SaaStr

So layoffs still fill the headlines in 2024. Even now. I thought we’d be behind them by now, that the cuts were sort of a one-off. But now everyone is focused on getting more and more efficient. To $300k-$400k+ per employee at scale. So cuts continue. But don’t the headlines obscure what’s really happening, because they tend to shout out quieter trends.

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Clouded Judgement 2.2.24 - Cloud Giants Report Q4 '23

Clouded Judgement

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.

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How a Lack of Direct-to-Consumer Options Hurts Players

FastSpring

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.

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How to Create a Decent One-Page Local Business Site in the Face of the Google Website Shutdown

The Moz Blog

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 140
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SaaS Essentials: Failed Payment Solution Guide

For SaaS businesses, improving retention is one of the easiest and most effective ways to drive revenue and profits. With a clear link between failed payments and customer churn, having a robust failed payment recovery solution isn’t optional—it’s essential. Achieving your retention goals starts with the right solution.

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Heartfelt Connections: The Power of Relationships in Business Success

Nimble - Sales

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
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The Secrets to Building Vibrant Communities in Web3 Open-Source

Tom Tunguz

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.

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CRO Confidential: Bringing Product-Led and Sales-Led Growth Together For Go-To-Market Success with Giancarlo Lionetti, CRO of Zapier

SaaStr

In this latest episode of CRO Confidential , Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with the CRO of Zapier, Giancarlo Lionetti (GC), to chat about Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Go-To-Market (GTM). Everything from hiring on the GTM side to layering in a sales-led motion into PLG. Before joining Zapier, Giancarlo was at Atlassian as a technical sales lead before moving to DropBox as a Senior Director of Growth and Monetization, and was CMO at Confluent – so he

Scale 321
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Clouded Judgement 2.23.24 - Rule of X

Clouded Judgement

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 157
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An Omnichannel Payment Solution––Without the Complexity

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.

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fsBuilds: Automate B2B Quotes & Payments by Integrating Salesforce and FastSpring (Video)

FastSpring

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 158
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3 Types of Content Gap Analysis to Outrank Your Competitors

The Moz Blog

Explore 3 types of content gap analysis to help you find high-quality content ideas, monitor your competitors, and beat their SERP rankings.

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Top 12 information security recommendations for software companies with Embedded Payments

Payrix

Information security is absolutely paramount in today’s digital world, particularly in the payments industry. Jack Tsigankov, Director of IT and Information Security at Payrix and 17-year industry veteran, recently shared some of his wisdom on the subject as a guest on the PayFAQ Embedded Payments podcast. Here are a few highlights you don’t want to miss.

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What If LLMs Change the Business Model of the Internet?

Tom Tunguz

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.

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Usage-Based Monetization Musts: A Roadmap for Sustainable Revenue Growth

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

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The Thing Is, Maybe 10%-15% of Venture-Backed Startups Are Still Running the 2021 Playbook. In 2024.

SaaStr

Reaching social media, tech press, and blog posts you’d think everything was about efficiency. Heck, the 5 Interesting Learning series on SaaStr is all about efficiency. And for many in SaaS, especially those that sell mainly to startups and tech, it’s often been a rough 2 years. With no more funding coming, and growth way down. So can you pay less these days?

Startup 320
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What Founders Must Do Before Their First Sales Hire with Mia Murphy

Predictable Revenue

Collin sat down with Mia Murphy from Tontine.ai, to discuss her transformative journey through the sales landscape. The post What Founders Must Do Before Their First Sales Hire with Mia Murphy appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

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How to Sell a Mobile App or Game Outside App Stores

FastSpring

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