March, 2024

article thumbnail

Using Generative AI to Drive Corporate Impact

TechEmpower SaaS

Generative AI is revolutionizing how corporations operate by enhancing efficiency and innovation across various functions. Focusing on generative AI applications in a select few corporate functions can contribute to a significant portion of the technology's overall impact. Key Functions with High Impact Generative AI is revolutionizing sales by enabling dynamic pricing and personalized customer interactions, boosting conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

article thumbnail

Clouded Judgement 2.29.24 - Shades of 2021

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 Shades of 2021 in Venture Markets Private markets are really starting to heat up, and I’m starting to see shades of 2021. Anything AI related has always been “hot,” but it has really hit a fever pitch in the last few months.

Cloud 314
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Redpoint: Seed May Still Be Strong, But There’s No Bounce Back at Series A. And the AI Premium is 3x.

SaaStr

So Redpoint Ventures published some of the slides they recently presented to their Limited Partners (their own investors) here. There’s a ton of good data there, but this one slide stood out to me, because it was put together in a really clear fashion, better than other data sources I’ve seen. And what it says is that even though Seed stage investing remains arguably as strong as ever … Series A hasn’t bounced back.

AI 303
article thumbnail

Why Databases Won't Charge for Storage in the Future

Tom Tunguz

The database is being unbundled. Historically, a database like Snowflake sold both data storage & a query engine (& the computing power to execute the query). That’s step 1 above. But, customers are pushing for a deeper separation of compute & storage. The recent Snowflake earnings call highlighted the trend. Larger customers prefer open formats for interoperability (step 2 & 3).

AI 278
article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

Apollo.io’s Under-Utilized Features

Predictable Revenue

This blog delves into Apollo.io's lesser-known features, like lead scoring and email sequencing, beyond its well-known capabilities. The post Apollo.io’s Under-Utilized Features appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

Revenue 147

More Trending

article thumbnail

Celebrating History, Embracing Progress: International Women’s Day 2024

FastSpring

Every year on March 8th, the world unites to celebrate International Women’s Day (IWD). It’s a day to acknowledge the incredible achievements of women, reflect on the challenges they still face, and recommit ourselves to building a future where equality truly reigns. At FastSpring, we know this day didn’t blossom overnight. It’s a culmination of decades of struggle, resilience, and unwavering determination.

article thumbnail

Clouded Judgement 3.29.24 - Q4 Earnings

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 Q4 Earnings Summary This week wrapped up Q4 earning season. I’ll post a more fulsome recap later, but will give a short summary here. The TLDR for Q4 earnings is that “things aren’t getting worse, but not quite getting better yet.” The below chart shows the percentage of companies beating / missing consensus estimates (with the line chart

Cloud 281
article thumbnail

The Investments Where I’m Going to Lose All My Money

SaaStr

So when I started writing venture checks in 2013, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I had a strong start: First was Pipedrive co-leading seed, then acquired for $1.5B cash Second was Algolia leading U.S. seed, now at $200m+ ARR and an IPO candidate Third was Greenouse/Parklet, acquired for $800m and now at $200m ARR Fourth was Salesloft, acquired for $2.5 Billion cash Fifth was Logikcull, acquired for $300m cash So it was a good start.

article thumbnail

AI in the Hands of Software Buyers

Tom Tunguz

AI will transform software sales. Most of the discourse so far has focused on how AI upends the sellers’ worldview. But the buyers’ process will also evolve. When researching software, operational buyers & procurement teams alike will use AI to research different offerings. Typing “Compare Salesforce & Hubspot for a 10 person sales team. which is better?

AI 239
article thumbnail

How Clinic Sense Reduced Churn and Unlocked More Revenue

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.

article thumbnail

Who Sends Traffic on the Web and How Much? New Research from Datos & SparkToro

Sparktoro

In the era of zero-click platforms, native content, and walled gardens, does anyone still send meaningful traffic to the open web? Is Google responsible for 50% of all traffic referrals? 75%? Is social media sending half what search does? A quarter? Less? Are the major platforms sending less traffic overall than they did a year ago?

article thumbnail

How to Make AI Your Writing Sidekick for Content Marketing

The Moz Blog

Tasmin shares her tips on how to make AI your content marketing sidekick. Optimize every step of the process, from generating ideas to crafting headlines and simplifying your writing.

article thumbnail

FastSpring Support and Subscription Management Continue to Impress SocialBee

FastSpring

SocialBee , a social media management platform and SaaS based in Romania, first started using FastSpring in 2018. Co-Founder and Chief Executive Bee Ovi Negrean has used the word “flawlessly” to describe how FastSpring’s merchant of record use case has worked for SocialBee (more on that below!). After adopting FastSpring as their merchant of record, SocialBee even saw 2x year-over-year growth in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) after their first year with FastSpring.

article thumbnail

Clouded Judgement 3.22.24 - ERR vs ARR and the Conundrum of AI Revenue Streams Today

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 ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) vs ERR (Experimental Runrate Revenue) ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) is one of the most popular SaaS (Non-GAAP) metrics. However, it’s also one of the most loosely used metrics, and is frequently misused.

AI 187
article thumbnail

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

article thumbnail

The 6 Most Common Mistakes Founders Make When They Are Just Starting to Scale Revenue

SaaStr

Dear SaaStr: What are The Most Common Mistakes Founders Make When They Are Just Starting to Scale Revenue? Let me list some of the ones I see most often going from say $1m to $10m in ARR: Chasing the Shiny Penny. One of the biggest mistakes I see after $1m in trying to enter new market segments, new verticals, where you have zero traction. It’s one thing to invest in an area where only 5% of your business is today.

Scaling 268
article thumbnail

The Vector Computer Company

Tom Tunguz

If you were to watch three videos on YouTube Shorts - one on Italian cooking, one on chess openings, & a third on crypto trading, YouTube Shorts’ recommendation algorithm combines the video descriptions with your dwell time. Watching the osso bucco video to its end would trigger more Italian cooking specialty videos in your feed. We believe every LLM-based application will need this capability.

article thumbnail

Email is the Most Consistent, Reliable Marketing Channel on the Web and I Can Prove It

Sparktoro

This is a very short post to say: If you’re not investing in your own email marketing list, you’re making a bad choice. Social media engagement rates have plummeted the last 15 years. Ad engagement, too. Google CTRs have fallen massively the last decade with the rise of zero-click searches.

article thumbnail

Investing in Tennr

Andreessen Horowitz

An enduring promise of new technologies is to find ways to increase human productivity. Software and robotics, for example, have always presented immense potential to automate repetitive mundane tasks that humans perform, freeing them up to do more valuable work. In the last few decades, we’ve made meaningful progress toward this goal, and the first generation of robotic process automation created some massive companies, such as UiPath.

article thumbnail

15 Modern Use Cases for Enterprise Business Intelligence

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?

article thumbnail

Celebrating Excellence: Jon Tewes Receives the Q4 2023 Springie Award

FastSpring

Working at FastSpring means having a true commitment to fostering a culture of recognition and appreciation, where we all feel valued and encouraged to contribute our best. The Springie Award, our quarterly Peer-to-Peer appreciation award, exemplifies this commitment, providing a platform for employees to recognize their colleagues’ exceptional contributions.

article thumbnail

Clouded Judgement 3.15.24

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 Q4 ‘23 Earnings Summary Preview We’re almost through Q4 ‘23 earnings season with just a few stragglers left to report (Braze, nCino, Sprinklr). I’ll put together my standard deeper dive quarterly review, but wanted to share some high level summary charts today.

Cloud 164
article thumbnail

Dear SaaStr: For High Dollar Vertical SaaS, Does The First VP of Sales Need Domain Expertise?

SaaStr

Dear SaaStr: If you were hiring a head of sales for a high-priced, niche B2B SaaS product, would you focus on general B2B SaaS sales experience or on market/customer knowledge, assuming it will be very difficult to find a candidate with both? This is the scenario when the trade-off is the most acute. Imagine you are selling a $100,000+ product and you yourself as CEO/founders have limited knowledge selling to the customer base.

article thumbnail

The Opposite of a Good Idea is a Good Idea

Tom Tunguz

For those of us who love logic, the paradoxical title of this post should catch your eye, just as it did mine. In Alchemy , the founder of a major brand agency describes the way many of the major consumer companies in the world created brands. We call it breaking out : a double entendre which means both growing faster than competitors but also in a different way than their competition.

Branding 212
article thumbnail

Prepare Now: 2025s Must-Know Trends For Product And Data Leaders

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.

article thumbnail

Where Web Users Spend Time vs. Where Traffic Referrals Originate

Sparktoro

“Most of our site’s traffic comes from Google, so most of our digital marketing efforts and spending should be on Google, too.” – An absolutely terrible way to invest in marketing On Monday of this week, I published a comprehensive look at how traffic flows on the American web.

article thumbnail

More Than a Trend — 5 Crucial Ways This Untapped Service is Changing Marketing

Entrepreneur - SaaS

SaaS is not just about convenience; it's a smart move that helps businesses save on IT costs and focus more on their main operations instead of dealing with complex software issues.

Trends 129
article thumbnail

Putting Data in a Corner: LLMs and Financial Services Data

Andreessen Horowitz

Nobody puts Baby in a corner — especially if Baby happens to be fragmented financial services data. Historically, the key to building a successful financial services data company has been to extricate and analyze valuable but difficult-to-access resources like public filings, diligence materials, research reports, conference call notes, and news. Now, with the advent of large language models, such previously shackled information might soon be easily and widely available to everyone, ushering in

Data 126
article thumbnail

Clouded Judgement 3.8.24 - 2024 Guides

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 2024 Guides - Are they Conservative? So far we’ve got a number of full year 2024 guides. Overall, companies are not guiding above current consensus (median guide is 0.2% below consensus). Is this just companies guiding conservatively, to set up the year for beat and raises?

Cloud 164
article thumbnail

Launching LLM-Based Products: From Concept to Cash in 90 Days

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.

article thumbnail

What Are The Odds You Get Acquired Within 5 Years for a Good Price? Around 1%-1.5%

SaaStr

So Carta put out some recent data I found very useful on how many startups raise another round, and how many sort of quietly wind down, in the first 5 years or so after being founded (from 2018 to early 2024): Almost none IPO’d in the first 5 years, but that just makes sense. It takes at least 8-10 years, on average, to IPO these days. And half the Seed stage startups had shut down by Year 5.

Pricing 259
article thumbnail

What Happens When AI Performance Asymptotes?

Tom Tunguz

In the past, the bigger the AI model, the better the performance. Across OpenAI’s models for example, parameters have grown by 1000x+ & performance has nearly tripled. OpenAI Model Release Date Parameters, B MMLU GPT2 2/14/19 1.5 0.324 GPT3 6/11/20 175 0.539 GPT3.5 3/15/22 175 0.7 GPT4 3/14/23 1760 0.864 But model performance will soon asymptote - at least on this metric.

AI 190
article thumbnail

Embrace the High-Level Individual Contributor: How to Hire for This Unconventional Role

Sparktoro

I’m SparkToro’s VP Marketing and here’s how I spent a recent afternoon: I sifted through our Google Analytics dashboard. I was looking for our most popular pages and copying them into a spreadsheet so that we can keep track of what needs to be updated for the public launch of SparkToro V2.

Marketing 131