October, 2023

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SaaS CEOs That Go The Distance, To IPO … Tend To Be Founder-CEOs (Updated)

SaaStr

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.

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How to Measure Software ROI For SaaS Products

User Pilot

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.

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AI Reaccelerating Cloud Growth

Tom Tunguz

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 312
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The 9 Worst Sales Mistakes Founders Should Avoid

Point Nine Land

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.

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The Next Evolution in Subscriptions and Recurring Payments

Rise to the next level of recurring revenue. Discover how recurring payments are reshaping industries beyond simple subscriptions, driving a $1.5 trillion market. Learn the crucial strategies for building scalable, secure, and seamless recurring payment infrastructure to boost customer retention and fuel growth.

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50 AI Prompts for Better Social Posts

Buffer Resources

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 132

More Trending

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Is a Bigger Booth Worth it at Top Industry Events? Surprisingly — Our Data Says Yes. Really Worth It.

SaaStr

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 317
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Flaticon Review

The Daily Egg

Whether you’re a designer busy creating work presentations or you’re crafting sleek websites and mobile apps, you understand the importance of icons. The post Flaticon Review appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Mobile 290
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The PLG Trap : Lessons Learned from Oliver Jay, former CRO at Asana

Tom Tunguz

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).

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Why You Need FULL Funnel CRO Right Now

FastSpring

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.

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Is Your Test Automation Keeping Up With Your Codebase?

Codebases evolve rapidly, and your test automation should keep pace. However, many teams struggle with brittle scripts and growing test debt, which hinder delivery and increase risk. This guide illustrates how engineering leaders leverage AI to enhance the resilience and scalability of testing. You will discover how AI can automatically generate and maintain test cases, adapt to changing applications, and identify high-risk areas before problems reach production.

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Clouded Judgement 10.13.23 - 2024 Budget Expectations

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 August Inflation Update We got August inflation this week, here’s where it came in: Headline CPI 3.7% YoY vs +3.6% consensus and +3.7% YoY in Aug Core CPI 4.1% YoY vs +4.1% consensus and +4.3% in Aug Morgan Stanley CIO Survey Morgan Stanley came out with their quarterly CIO survey, and I wanted to highlight some points they made.

Cloud 176
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The Final Chapter of My First Startup

Sparktoro

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 145
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Dear SaaStr: What does a US-Based SaaS company Need to Know Before Expanding into Europe?

SaaStr

Dear SaaStr: What does a US-Based SaaS company Need to Know Before Expanding into Europe? Let me simplify it all to 4 simple pieces of advice: For most U.S. companies: Start marketing, supporting and talking to European customers as a distinct segment once you have 10 of them. If you can get 10, you can (of course) get 100. It’s OK to let the first 10 find you, though.

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Salespanel Review

The Daily Egg

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
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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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Gas Gas Revolution

Tom Tunguz

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.

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2Checkout vs. Stripe vs. FastSpring: Comparing Payments, Taxes, and Platform Features (+ Pricing)

FastSpring

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 160
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Clouded Judgement 10.20.23 - Hyperscaler Q3 Preview

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 10Y Keeps Climbing The 10Y hit 5% this week, which sets a new high water mark. In general economic data has continued to come in strong (a data point suggesting inflation could stay sticky, and the economy can absorb rates staying higher for longer).

Cloud 167
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How to Scale Nuclear Power

Andreessen Horowitz

Nearly all of our electricity is generated from heat powering a steam turbine. Historically, this energy conversion has been achieved through burning wood or fossil fuels. However, while these sorts of reactions release a large amount of chemical energy, they are nothing compared to the energy of a nuclear reaction. Here is the specific energy, or the amount of energy (megajoules) per kilogram, in common fuel types.

Scale 28
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5 Ways You Can Win Faster with Gen AI in Sales

Incorporating generative AI (gen AI) into your sales process can speed up your wins through improved efficiency, personalized customer interactions, and better informed decision- making. Gen AI is a game changer for busy salespeople and can reduce time-consuming tasks, such as customer research, note-taking, and writing emails, and provide insightful data analysis and recommendations.

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Pitchbook: VC Returns Are at a 10+ Year Low

SaaStr

So according to Pitchbook, which collects a massive amount of VC data, VC funds themselves hit a 10+ year low in paper returns this past quarter. In fact, returns plummeted to -20% (!) Yes, that’s as bad as it sounds. And this is a big deal, because VC’s own investors, “Limited Partners” or LPs, are under pressure here as a result.

Cloud 309
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800.com Review

The Daily Egg

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 289
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Top 10 Trends in Data & AI at the Impact Summit

Tom Tunguz

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 281
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Cyber Weekend Benchmarking Data: 2023 SaaS and Software Holiday Spend Report

FastSpring

Q4 sales numbers usually outperform the rest of the year thanks to year-end holidays and their associated shopping cycles — but how much does that trend carry over into software and SaaS sales? And does it improve B2B sales too, or is it more just a B2C advantage? FastSpring serves as a merchant of record for over 3500 companies that use our platform every day to sell digital products globally.

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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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Clouded Judgement 10.27.23 - Cloud Giants Report Q3 '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 Q3 ‘23 Not a great signal for software this week from the Cloud Giants (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud)…After Q2 (3 months ago), the tone from the Cloud Giants around optimizations was largely: optimizations have started to ease, and net new workloads have picked up.

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9 New Instagram Features and How to Use Them

Buffer Resources

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 143
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My Startup Doesn’t Have a Free Trial or Freemium Option. Should We Change This?

SaaStr

Dear SaaStr: My Startup Doesn’t Have a Free Trial or Freemium Option. We require payment right away. Should we change this? Free trials and freemium options work well — if you can support them well. Ask yourself: Can someone deploy your app in minutes? If they can, does it work well self-deployed? Or does it need a ton of data in it to work well and show value?

Startup 306
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AIContentfy Review

The Daily Egg

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 287
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Apache Airflow® Best Practices: DAG Writing

Speaker: Tamara Fingerlin, Developer Advocate

In this new webinar, Tamara Fingerlin, Developer Advocate, will walk you through many Airflow best practices and advanced features that can help you make your pipelines more manageable, adaptive, and robust. She'll focus on how to write best-in-class Airflow DAGs using the latest Airflow features like dynamic task mapping and data-driven scheduling!

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The Impact of Anti-trust on M&A in Startupland

Tom Tunguz

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.

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Announcing: Digital Invoicing Updates and Tax Exemptions for B2B Transactions in Japan

FastSpring

Looking to leverage FastSpring’s Digital Invoicing for your SaaS or gaming business? Sign up for a demo or check out our free trial. When you’re dealing with global sales, taxes are a necessary part of everything you do. For many SaaS companies, being able to accurately apply tax exemptions across the globe is a vital step for accuracy in quotes as well as reporting when tax time comes around.

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Clouded Judgement 10.6.23 - Fed Projections

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 Implied Fed Funds Rate The 10Y got up to 4.9% this week before settling back to 4.7% yesterday. We’ve had quite a shift in rates over the last couple weeks, so I wanted to share some charts that show rate predictions over the next couple years.

Cloud 157