October, 2024

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Why Lifetime Value is Relevant Again in Software

Tom Tunguz

Budget cuts followed interest rate hikes in 2022. By late 2023, more than a year of financial scrutiny had challenged many publicly traded software companies. However, 2024 has been a tough year again. Net dollar retention for publicly traded software companies fell from 113% on average to 108%, a five percentage point drop. 1 80% of publicly traded companies saw their NDR wilt again in 2024.

Software 297
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Approaching Half a Million Customers: How to Win in SMB with BILL CEO and Founder René Lacerte

SaaStr

In 2006, BILL CEO and Founder René Lacerte set out to define a category around financial operations for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Needless to say, he succeeded. At SaaStr’s AI Summit during the SaaStr Annual , René chatted with SaaStr CEO and founder Jason Lemkin about how BILL has reached half a million customers and $1.3B in revenue.

SMB 312
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How To Do “Sales as a Service” with Debra Senra

Predictable Revenue

On this episode, we’re joined by Debra Senra, a two-time guest, to discuss the changing landscape of sales proposals in 2024. The post How To Do “Sales as a Service” with Debra Senra appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

Sales 130
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Breaking Into Asia? Benchmarking Data and Insights on SaaS Subscriptions in Asia

FastSpring

When you’re expanding your software business into new regions, industry benchmarking data can help you make better strategic decisions by answering important questions about business in the region. Here are the questions we sought to answer by analyzing anonymized subscription data for transactions across various Asian countries (excluding broader “APAC” regions like Australia, New Zealand, and Indonesia): How do customers in Asia’s growing markets prefer to manage their SaaS subscr

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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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How to Find Unlimited Content Ideas for Social Media in 2024

Buffer Resources

Your social media success hinges on creating content that makes your audience tick. But.how do you even find content ideas that resonate? And how do you ensure you never run out of them? This article will share nine places to find content ideas — ensuring you never have to stare at an empty content calendar (wondering ‘what should I create?

More Trending

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8 SaaS Customer Onboarding Examples to Learn From

User Pilot

Can you imagine what the ideal SaaS customer onboarding process looks like? When done well, it can be the difference between a user becoming a loyal customer or churning after the first week. That’s why we’ll go over what onboarding is in SaaS and analyze 8 onboarding examples from reputable SaaS companies to learn what they’re doing right (or wrong).

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6 Of The Most Common Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make Pitching VCs

SaaStr

Dear SaaStr: What Are Some of the Most Common Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make Pitching VCs? I’ve invested almost $200m as part of SaaStr Fund / 2024. A few top mistakes founders make: #1. Not making cold email truly great. Don’t ask to pick someone’s brain, or coffee. Make the cold email so great, you’d want to invest based on just it alone. 2 Cold Emails I Funded For Millions #2.

CTO 320
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Mastering account management in B2B SaaS

Chart Mogul

Account Management is a delightfully intricate balance of art and science. When I joined ChartMogul, I was tasked with building a new Account Management function from the ground up. As we all know, the SaaS ecosystem has changed dramatically over the last few years, and customer retention and expansion are becoming increasingly important for SaaS … Account Management is a delightfully intricate balance of art and science.

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Easy Cross Border Transactions With FastSpring as Your MoR

FastSpring

Selling internationally can get complicated very quickly if you’re trying to manage cross border payments yourself. Foreign exchange rates, regulatory rules, payment systems, various bank accounts, establishing entities in different countries, and tax collection and remittance are just a few of the concerns you’ll need to stay on top of as your business expands into more countries and regions.

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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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How to Add a Link to an Instagram Story (+ Examples to Inspire You)

Buffer Resources

This is probably going to age me, but remember when adding a link to an Instagram Story required you to have at least 10,000 followers? Thankfully these days, it's a whole lot easier with Instagram's link sticker — and you can use it no matter how many followers you have. It's well worth doing, too, particularly if you want to monetize your work on Instagram.

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Complex Pricing Models: How BluLogix Simplifies UCaaS Monetization

Blulogix

By BluLogix Team Complex Pricing Models: How BluLogix Simplifies UCaaS Monetization Summary: Managing complex pricing models is a major pain point for UCaaS companies. From seat-based pricing to consumption-based and hybrid models, keeping track of various offerings and ensuring transparency for customers can be challenging. Learn how UCaaS providers can streamline their pricing strategies with advanced catalog management and flexible pricing tools and how you can reduce administrative overhead

Pricing 110
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What is Customer Satisfaction: Importance for Business Success + How to Improve

User Pilot

According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index , with an ACSI score of 78.0, overall customer satisfaction in America was the highest it has ever been in Q1 2024. However, while some companies have managed to improve their customer satisfaction levels and benefit from it, many have not. In this article, we explore the concept of customer satisfaction – how to measure it, why it is important for your business, and how you can improve customer satisfaction levels.

Business 111
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5 More Interesting Learnings From HubSpot at $2.4 Billion in ARR

SaaStr

So we’ve covered HubSpot more than any other SaaS leader on this 5 Interesting Learnings series, in part because so many of us use HubSpot ourselves, and in part because its metrics and use cases are so like many of the apps we build and sell ourselves. They recently did an Analyst day though that had some more great data that I thought was super interesting, and worth a deep dive. 5 More Interesting Learnings then: #1. 75% of Customers Are Onboarded By Partners Partners don’t just

SMB 317
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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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How M&A Fosters Innovation

Tom Tunguz

Recently, Thomas Laffont of Coatue highlighted a non-obvious impact of the M&A slowdown after this preamble : “Ironically and I think somewhat perversely one of the byproducts of constraining big companies from buying small companies is it hurts small companies. This point is clear & straightforward. Less demand for an asset decreases price. 2023 & 2024 are two of the three lowest in the last 12 years in both activity & value across the ten largest strategic software buyers

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Cyber Weekend Benchmarking Data: 2024 SaaS and Software Holiday Spend Report

FastSpring

It’s almost time again for Cyber Weekend, and November sales spikes aren’t just for holiday gifts and physical goods — SaaS and software companies also benefit from this annual increase in sales. Once a single Black Friday shopping day, deals expanded to encompass the following Cyber Monday, with the entire weekend now referred to as Cyber Weekend. And between the Cyber Weekend halo effect, major global holidays, and end-of-year budget spends, sales in November and Q4 are stronger than other tim

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How to Craft a Winning About Us Page: 10 Real Examples for Creators and Small Businesses

Buffer Resources

Call me strange, but the About Us page is one of the first web pages I visit after discovering a brand or a creator. I want to know the people behind the curtain — their core values, the company’s origin story, and brand identity. Turns out, I’m not alone: A study by HubSpot found 31 percent of participants saying that an About Us page is one of the most important elements of a business website.

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GTM 119: Design Products Backwards From GTM: Lessons from Scaling to $1B+ with David Knight

Sales Hacker

David Knight is the Co-founder and CEO of Avarra, an AI-powered platform that simulates human-to-human interactions to accelerate sales onboarding and training. With over 30 years of experience scaling companies from tens of millions to billions in revenue, including WebEx and Proofpoint, David brings a unique perspective on the intertwined nature of product and go-to-market.

Scale 117
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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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How to Build and Improve Your Product Analytics Strategy

User Pilot

While “use data to drive decision-making” sounds obvious, there’s a HUGE gap between saying it and doing it well. So, how do you get started with product analytics ? In this article, we’ll talk about: What product analytics is and why you need a solid strategy. Key steps to build and improve your product analytics strategy. How to apply actionable metrics to different SaaS business stages.

Strategy 105
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The State of SaaS Go-to-Market with Theory Ventures General Partner Tomasz Tunguz

SaaStr

When Marc Benioff started Salesforce, he codified the sales playbook. Then Mark Roberge , former Hubspot CRO, wrote The Sales Acceleration Formula with deep insights into quota structures. For the subsequent ten years in software, we’ve optimized every little bit of how we sell it. But today, it’s different because the kinds of software we sell aren’t the same.

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The Premise of a New S-Curve in AI

Tom Tunguz

Since July , have you noticed how much better your AI model has become? Measuring them is hard to do. All we can do is quantify the vibe : is this one better than that one? Elo is a score that measures how often one model wins against another, as judged by a human. Which model answers the prompt : “Describe the differences in texture between a Pink Lady and a Macoun apple” better?

AI 282
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Discover FastSpring’s Recipe Docs: Simplifying Implementation for Users

FastSpring

At FastSpring, we’re always striving to provide our users with the best tools to enhance their FastSpring experience. One of the features that has been quietly revolutionizing the way our users interact with Store Builder Library (our JavaScript library), our APIs, and our webhooks is Recipe Docs. If you haven’t had a chance to explore it yet, let me show you why this feature is so powerful and why it’s quickly becoming a favorite among our users.

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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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The 7 Best Competitor Analysis Tools (+ Their Alternatives)

Buffer Resources

They say comparison is the enemy of joy, but I’d argue comparison — when done right — can be one of the core ingredients of social media success. It can help you understand what makes your audience tick and what not to do. Here’s a list of the seven best competitor analysis tools to help you get detailed data on your rivals, analyze trends they use, and get a wholesome picture of competitor performance — benchmarked against yours.

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Billing System Migration: How to Nail It?

Subscription Flow

Billing system migration is the process of replacing your existing billing system with a new one. Companies opt for this process to adopt new tools, and upgrade their functionality. Billing system migration is painstaking without a proper plan in place. Some of the pitfalls that come with unplanned billing migration are faulty revenue reporting, data duplication, and customer churn.

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11 Onboarding Gamification Examples to Engage & Retain Users

User Pilot

Onboarding gamification is the key to transforming a dull process into an engaging one. When the process feels complicated, it becomes easy for a new user to lose interest before they experience the true value of your product. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Gamification onboarding and the right user onboarding software can turn your product experience into something enjoyable.

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6 Of The Most Common Mistakes I See First Time SaaS Founders Make

SaaStr

What are the most common mistakes I see first time SaaS founders make? Second-time SaaS founders make other mistakes. They think they know more than they do. They spend too much. They often struggle to do things a new way. First-time founders have many positives. But they also make mistakes we tend not to make with experience. Here’s what I see most often, the Top 6 Mistakes First Time SaaS Founders Make: Incomplete understanding of business model, and how it will scale.

Scale 312
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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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GTM 118: 5 Must-Try PLG Tactics to Accelerate Growth with Kyle Poyar

Sales Hacker

Kyle Poyar is the Co-Founder and Operating Partner at Tremont, with over 8 years of experience at OpenView where he became a leading voice in the product-led growth (PLG) movement. Kyle shares his insights on the inevitability of PLG in an AI-driven future and reveals must-try tactics to accelerate growth using a PLG approach. Discussed in this Episode: Why PLG is becoming inevitable, especially with the rise of AI in software Creative ways companies can build out their PLG motion How social pro

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Trends in the Post-Modern Data Stack

Tom Tunguz

On Monday, at TC Disrupt Colin Zima CEO of Omni , Jordan Tigani CEO of Motherduck , Daniel Svnova CEO of Superlinked & Toby Mao CTO of Tobiko Data who are leading the evolution of the Post Modern Data Stack discussed the trends they are seeing. Here are some of the themes & predictions from the group. Customers are excited about new architectures that significantly reduce cost.

Trends 248
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29 Scroll-Stopping Instagram Post Ideas to Fill Your Content Calendar

Buffer Resources

Part of being successful on Instagram — whether you're a creator or a small business — means posting consistently. But what happens when you run out of ideas? It happens — which is why it never hurts to get inspired by the great work other creators and brands are doing on Instagram.  Here are 29 great Instagram post ideas, with real-life examples, to cure your writer’s creator’s block.