SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2023

Non-founder CEOs get fired all the time — and these days, are quitting more often than ever. Founder-CEOs getting fired seems rarer these days, though. Ubers and WeWorks aside. Two that would be hard to imagine happening today: Pushing Steve Jobs out of Apple. Pushing Sergey Brin + Larry Page “down” to bring in an Outside CEO. A few that we don’t hear about too much: Elon Musk pushing out the first CEO of Tesla.

Technical Review 250

Technical Review CTO SaaS Scaling 250

User Pilot

OCTOBER 26, 2023

What is software ROI and how to measure it? Why is important for business growth ? These are the main questions the article tackles, so if you’re after the answers, you’re in the right place! We also share benchmarks, important metrics to track, and best practices. Let’s get right to it. TL;DR Software ROI, or Return on Investment , represents the financial and business benefits of implementing a software application while factoring in the cost of the investment.

Outsourcing Services 96

Outsourcing Services Software Outsourced Development SaaS 96

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 23, 2023

Yesterday, both Google and Microsoft announced their earnings for their cloud businesses. I’ve been tracking the growth rates of these companies and product lines for the last 18 months to develop a broad gauge of enterprise buying patterns after the downturn. In the chart, it’s immediately evident that Mongo has seen dramatic increase in growth rate last quarter.

AI Search 285

AI Search AI Cloud Azure 285

Point Nine Land

OCTOBER 23, 2023

P9 Panel on Hiring Sales Leaders — Founders Summit 2023 “You are going to fire your first sales manager!” — A lesson too many founders learn the hard way. We recently hosted the Point Nine Founders Summit, featuring several panels and presentations from founders, CFOs, COOs, and sales execs on building early sales teams and hiring your first successful sales leaders.

Sales Hiring 124

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors Technical Cofounder 124

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Payment Solutions

Buffer Resources

OCTOBER 17, 2023

Most weeks, I stare blankly at my LinkedIn channel, wondering what on earth I should post. It's hard. Coming up with new content on a weekly or even daily basis isn’t just time-consuming, it can be infuriating. Fortunately, Buffer’s AI Assistant can help. But there’s a secret you need to know if you want to get the most out of it: adding the right prompts.

AI 130

AI Social Media Trends Engagement 130

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2023

We’re hiring at SaaStr!! We’ve got at least 6 roles open: Director of Email / Growth Marketing. Take over our complex email campaigns to drive event attendance and ticket sales, as well as our 4 weekly newsletters. VP/Director of Events. Own the Annual + Europa, or at least a big piece of them. Director of Sponsor Success. Make 50+ of our top 200 sponsors more successful and happy.

Sales Hiring 267

Sales Hiring Healthcare Growth Marketing Sales 267

FastSpring

OCTOBER 12, 2023

Dave Gowans loves that testing allows opinions and preconceptions about conversion to be set aside in favor of numbers and measurability. And what is one of the key conversion factors he uses those numbers to measure? Love. As wild as that sounds, it makes perfect sense. Dave, Founder and Director of Conversion at conversion optimization agency Browser to Buyer , explains that there are two fundamentals underlying the research his agency does for clients: barriers and motivators.

Payment Methods 167

Payment Methods SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payments 167

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Last week, Office Hours hosted Oliver Jay, former CRO at Asana to talk about Avoiding the PLG Trap. More than 900 people registered for the event. The full recording is here or embedded below on the web. Oliver shared some trenchant insights about his experience leading the GTM teams to success. These are three of the lessons that stood out to me espcially managing the transition from product to sales-led growth (PLG -> SLG).

Benchmarks 264

Benchmarks compliance Engineering Pricing 264

Sparktoro

OCTOBER 26, 2023

I’ve told this story only once before. Never in writing. Never on video. My voice was shaky and I barely stumbled through it. But with a few years of distance I think I’m finally ready. Here goes… For 17 years I had one job.

Startup 141

Startup 141

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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

Buffer Resources

OCTOBER 4, 2023

I wanted to nail my personal brand on LinkedIn — but I had no idea where to start. Over the past few years, I’ve watched as the platform evolved from a job seekers' hub to a playground for entrepreneurs and creators looking to become industry authorities and drive sales. There’s no doubt doing so is incredibly powerful. LinkedIn is 277 percent more effective at generating leads than Facebook and Twitter.

Branding 139

Branding Social Media Underperforming Technical Team Engagement 139

The Daily Egg

OCTOBER 6, 2023

Acquiring customers is a challenge. If you can use sales and marketing data to help you tell which products attract a potential. The post Salespanel Review appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Sales 290

Sales Data Marketing 290

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What’s The Best Way to Get Traction After We Have A Few Paying Customers? Answer: try everything that just might work, even a little bit. Then: double down on anything that works even a little. That may sound obvious, but what I mean is, most start-ups scale roughly the same way after $1m-$2m in ARR or so, at a given price point. But they often get to $1m ARR different ways, and especially to the first $100k in ARR.

Scale 266

Scale Sales Hiring Growth Hacking Content Marketing 266

FastSpring

OCTOBER 13, 2023

If you’re currently using 2Checkout or Stripe to sell digital goods or SaaS but are considering switching — to the other, or to other options such as FastSpring — you may be wondering whether there are substantial differences between the platforms and their services. In fact, there are some major differences when comparing 2Checkout vs. Stripe vs. FastSpring.

Payments 118

Payments Payment Services Payment Methods Merchant Services 118

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

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 26, 2023

In 2021, Amazon announced they had reduced prices on Amazon Web Services 107 times since launch. This drop in prices has grown AWS into a $90b revenue business in 17 years. As storage & compute became less expensive, the economic viability of new use cases became increasingly apparent & developers built software on the cloud. The same cost-reduction phenomenon is occurring with blockchains, though it’s not nearly as well publicized.

Blockchain 226

Blockchain AWS Pricing Innovation 226

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 31, 2023

Why can’t we connect with 911 operators on FaceTime or WhatsApp, to easily share photos and videos from the scene? Why do we wait for an emergency vehicle to arrive at an accident site to understand what’s happening when drones can get there faster and provide “eye in the sky” perspectives for first responders en route? According to the FBI, a car is stolen every 23 seconds in the United States, and 40% are never recovered — a shockingly high number given all of the data and technology available

Artificial Intelligence 137

Artificial Intelligence Technology Banking Innovation 137

Buffer Resources

OCTOBER 18, 2023

Instagram is one social media platform that is evolving at a rate of knots. Remember when all you could do on Instagram was share oversaturated images of your food? (Love you, Lo-Fi filter.) Now the social network lets you do everything from broadcasting to your followers to creating your own stickers with AI , with a host of new features only hitting the Meta-owned app in the last few months.

AI Search 138

AI Search Social Media AI Subscription 138

The Daily Egg

OCTOBER 5, 2023

When you need inbound telephone capabilities to help you appear like a larger professional company to customers, the 800.com business phone number. The post 800.com Review appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Business 288

Business 288

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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

SaaStr

OCTOBER 9, 2023

So a question for the ages of marketers — is a bigger booth worth it? I had my doubts after 9 years of SaaStr Annuals. I assumed they’d all perform kind of the same. But, I was wrong. The data: Qualified Leads this year ranged from 95 at lowest-yielding of almost 200 sponsors, to 1597 at the top — a wide range But on average, each Gold got 207 Qualified Leads Next up?

Data 263

Data Investment Branding Marketing 263

Sparktoro

OCTOBER 17, 2023

Today, Google’s search results still look (mostly) like lists of snippets and links, e.g. But, plenty of search marketers and industry observers suspect we’re in the closing days of this format, and the future holds something closer to how AI-tools like ChatGPT and Bard answer user-inputted prompts, e.g.

AI Search 136

AI Search AI ChatGPT Marketing 136

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 22, 2023

On November 8th, I’ll share my 10 Top Trends in Data & AI at the IMPACT Summit. Last year, I covered 9 topics: Cloud data warehouses will process 75% of workloads by 2024. Data workloads segment into in-memory, cloud data warehouse, & cloud data lakes. Metrics layers unify the data stack. LLMs change the roles of data engineers. WASM becomes an essential component of web applications.

Trends 222

Trends AI Data Cloud 222

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 4, 2023

This article is the third of four installments in our new series, How Fintech Companies Can Simplify Their Funding Strategy. Read part 1 on Choosing the Right Funding Structure here. Read part 2 on Trade-offs Across Terms here. In this series, we have explored a variety of funding options for startups looking to launch a new financial product as well as terms to consider when negotiating your first warehouse facility.

Outsourcing Services 129

Outsourcing Services Software Review Scale Banking 129

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

Buffer Resources

OCTOBER 23, 2023

The beauty of short-form video is that it allows anyone to become a creator. With a phone and the Internet, you can start growing a platform for yourself. The other side to this, however, is that the bar for quality has been reduced, and you’ll need to put in extra effort to see meaningful growth.  This is as true for YouTube Shorts as for any other platform.

Social Media 134

Social Media Trends Branding Engagement 134

The Daily Egg

OCTOBER 9, 2023

Website owners have an option: create AI content, or employ human writers and editors. Although the idea of taking advantage of artificial. The post AIContentfy Review appeared first on The Daily Egg.

AI 278

AI 278

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What Does A Salesperson Need To Do To “Earn Your Business”? Solve my problem. Just truly solve my problem. The beauty to sales in SaaS is as sales professionals, for the most part, you aren’t selling a commodity or a fungible product. You can’t just go down the street, or to another website, to get a better deal on the Ford F-150.

Business 261

Business Pricing SaaS Sales 261

Point Nine Land

OCTOBER 25, 2023

Sharing our mental model on gen AI in SaaS Over the past twelve months, like many others, I’ve been diving deep into generative AI and its implications for SaaS companies, as well as what it means for us as early-stage SaaS investors. I’ve already shared some of my thoughts before (e.g., here , here , here , and here ), and Louis Coppey summarized his learnings exploring GPT/LLMs in this great post.

Generative AI 122

Generative AI AI Artificial Intelligence Startup 122

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

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 30, 2023

The Federal Trade Commission’s focus on technology has transfigured the M&A market for startups. The Google anti-trust lawsuit & Amazon anti-trust cases may stifle those companies’ ability to acquire startups for significant sums. Facebook has faced a similar suit for illegal monopolization, which resulted perhaps indirectly in the divestment of two of its more recent acquisitions.

Acquisition 230

Acquisition Startup Pricing Technology 230

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 13, 2023

If one thing is certain about generative AI, it’s that no one knows exactly how it will play out from a product or user experience perspective. Which interfaces will win out? Which tasks will be augmented by large language models (LLMs), and which ones will be completely upended by them? How will creative AI models change our expectations of what we can do with computers?

Generative AI 128

Generative AI Artificial Intelligence AI Enterprise 128

Buffer Resources

OCTOBER 16, 2023

Thanks to ever-changing social media algorithms and the ever-growing list of platforms that make them, it’s easier than ever to become a creator. However, because anyone can become a creator, there’s also more noise than ever for your potential audience to cut through. So, while it’s great (and ideal) to build a platform off your personality, it’s not the most realistic method.

Social Media 130

Social Media Venture Capital AI Search Banking 130