January, 2024

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Make Hay When the Sun Shines : Liquidity in Startup Exits

Tom Tunguz

Companies aren’t bought. They’re sold. Hang around startups & venture capital long enough, & you’ll hear this aphorism. It means it’s much easier to sell a company when there’s plenty of demand. In any given year, there’s an 82% chance the value of startup liquidity will change by more than 77% - both up & down.

Startup 236
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Venture Backed or Bootstrapped? There’s a Third Way. Just Raise One Round.

SaaStr

There’s so much debate on social media and elsewhere on bootstrapped vs VC. Bootstrapped you maintain control, and the unit economics. But many see it as so much harder. And it’s almost always longer. VC can let you go faster, but it can become an addiction. And the dilution all-in generally ends up being 60%-70% by the time you approach an IPO.

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The American Dynamism 50: AI Edition

Andreessen Horowitz

From the last mile to low Earth orbit, solar fields to the battlefield, artificial intelligence is redefining our barometer for progress. Thus, this year’s American Dynamism 50 — a16z’s annual spotlight on 50 groundbreaking tech companies advancing the national interest — all harness AI to fulfill their missions.

AI 143
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10 Standard UCaaS Features + 7 Cutting-Edge Capabilities

The Daily Egg

Successful organizations know that the more interconnected their communication channels are, the better they can perform overall. With UCaaS (Unified Communications as. The post 10 Standard UCaaS Features + 7 Cutting-Edge Capabilities appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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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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Our First Fixathon: How We Squashed 44 Bugs in One Week

Buffer Resources

Buffer, as a company, closes the last week of the year every year, and historically, as an engineering team, we’d do a code freeze for the week before we’re closed so nothing broke heading into the holidays. (Pretty smart of us.)  This year, we did something different, and it still worked out. We used the last week of the year as a “fixathon” for our whole engineering team.

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The Fastest Growing Software Sectors in 2024

Tom Tunguz

The fastest growing software category in the public markets is security. Data follows. Security companies as a group average 29% expected revenue growth in 2024, compared to 23% for Data (or DaaS which stands for data-as-a-service). Fintech & SaaS (horizontal) average ten percentage points fewer expected growth. Anticipation of this growth propels multiples.

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Look, No VC Wants to Fund a Startup With So-So Growth. Except Maybe Your Existing Investors.

SaaStr

Ok some of this post I’d hope would be blindingly obvious. But it isn’t, so I’m going to try to help by being brutally direct: No VC on Planet Earth Wants to Invest in a Startup with Mediocre Growth None. No one. I can’t tell you how many emails a week a month that go something like this: “It’s been a challenging year with 30%-50% growth, but with some funding, we can grow much faster next year!

Startup 312
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Forget Support — Optimize for Full Funnel Customer Success

FastSpring

With years of experience at managing customer success (CS), Jake Dipple knows how important it is to foster collaboration between businesses and their customers. And at a company like Sideways 6 — whose product is an idea management software to help organizations engage people and foster innovation — that emphasis on collaboration gets even louder. Jake, Head of Customer Success for Sideways 6, explains that the current trend is to measure their success through the customer’s success, with CS be

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8 IVR Survey Tips: Get Vital Feedback Instead of Noise

The Daily Egg

IVR surveys are a set of pre-recorded automated questions customers can answer via voice or phone keypads. Aside from the benefits IVR. The post 8 IVR Survey Tips: Get Vital Feedback Instead of Noise appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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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.

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Why 2023 Was AI Video’s Breakout Year, and What to Expect in 2024

Andreessen Horowitz

This post has been adapted from a thread from a16z Partner Justine Moore on X. Follow Justine on X for more analysis and observations. 2023 was a breakout year for AI video. At the start of the year, no public text-to-video models existed. Just 12 months later, dozens of video generation products are in active use, with millions of users worldwide creating short clips from text or image prompts.

AI 134
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Clouded Judgement 1.26.24 - Q4 Earnings Season Kicks Off

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 ServiceNow Kicks Off Q4 Earnings Season ServiceNow kicked off Q4 earnings season on Wednesday (they are almost always the first software company to report), and I thought I’d dig in to see if they left any clues for what we should expect for the broader software market.

Cloud 164
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Open Source Models : What Can We Determine from Download Patterns?

Tom Tunguz

Open source models have become a critical part of the AI landscape. I was curious about the trends in the open source ecosystem, so I analyzed HuggingFace data on the top 300 open source models, both by overall usage & also the top of the trending list. Open source models are governed by open source licenses. Similar to regular open source software, Apache & MIT dominate the licenses by model count. 76% of the top models choose one of these licenses.

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Gartner: 2024 Will be Tougher Than We Thought, But We’ll Still Cross $1 Trillion in Software Spend

SaaStr

So Gartner is cutting back its growth projections for this year a bit. It was previously projecting a 13.8% spend in software spend in 2024 to over $1 Trillion. It’s now cutting that back a bit to 12.7% growth in 2024, basically flat with 2023. But that’s still a lot of growth. To over $1 Trillion in software spend worldwide — for the first time ever.

Software 286
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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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Introducing our Open Salary System: Reflecting on a Decade of Transparent Salaries at Buffer

Buffer Resources

Buffer has been in business for 13 years now, and we’ve had transparent salaries for 10 of those. This means that for over a decade, all Buffer salaries have been publicly viewable, and we’ve shared our approach to salaries and the formula we based them upon openly. We’ve maintained transparent salaries through significant market (and world) changes and through ups and downs in our performance as a business.

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Squaretalk Review

The Daily Egg

Squaretalk offers a budget-friendly, adaptable, and intuitive cloud communication platform to enhance your sales and support teams’ performance and productivity. Its vast. The post Squaretalk Review appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Cloud 285
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The Future of Prosumer: The Rise of “AI Native” Workflows

Andreessen Horowitz

Few people love the software they use to get things done. And it’s no surprise why. Whether it’s a slide deck builder, a video editor, or a photo enhancer, today’s work tools were conceived decades ago — and it shows! Even best-in-class products often feel either too inflexible and unsophisticated to do real work, or have steep, inaccessible learning curves (we’re looking at you, Adobe InDesign).

AI 130
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Convince Your Boss to Send You to MozCon 2024 [Plus Bonus Letter Template]

The Moz Blog

MozCon is one unforgettable experience that lives and grows with you beyond just the days you spend attending the conference. Read more to find out how to pitch MozCon to your boss.

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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?

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Dissecting Delegation: Diving Deep on The Missing B-School Class

Tom Tunguz

Last Friday’s post about delegation called The Class Missing from Business School, spurred a deluge of great advice from readers. There was a recurring theme when delegating: Identify the time-consuming & repetitive tasks by coloring or labelling your calendar, or calculating at the end of the week or month. Record a video/Loom/Scribe* detailing the process.

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Fake Multi-Product vs. Real Multi-Product

SaaStr

So one thing that’s changed radically in SaaS over the past few years if everyone has realized to truly scale, you need to be multi-product. Sometimes by as early as $20m ARR, sometimes by as late at $200m ARR, or later. But net net, the average public SaaS compay has 35,000 customers. So once you cross 3,500, let alone 10,000 — you’re starting to saturate most B2B markets.

Scale 281
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Introducing our Open Salary System: Reflecting on a Decade of Transparent Salaries at Buffer

Buffer Resources

Buffer has been in business for 13 years now, and we’ve had transparent salaries for 10 of those. This means that for over a decade, all Buffer salaries have been publicly viewable, and we’ve shared our approach to salaries and the formula we based them upon openly. We’ve maintained transparent salaries through significant market (and world) changes and through ups and downs in our performance as a business.

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What is TCP and Why Is It Too Reliable for Making Calls?

The Daily Egg

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is a transport layer network protocol that is essential to how computers communicate. It’s commonly used for sending. The post What is TCP and Why Is It Too Reliable for Making Calls? appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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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.

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New year, new CS: 2023 recap and what’s to come in 2024

Totango

As we kick off 2024, it’s time to reflect on the past year and look forward to what the future holds for customer success. It’s been an exciting journey, marked by significant milestones and a ceaseless effort to support our customers in achieving their goals. Now, as we step into a new year, we’re witnessing an evolution of customer success, and there’s a new and improved Totango to help enterprise business leaders deliver business results and drive customer outcomes.

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The Present and Future of Link Building OKRs: What Success Looks Like

The Moz Blog

Link building plays a crucial role in your SEO campaigns and overall business success. Setting OKRs can help you implement the best link-building strategies and achieve your SEO goals.

Strategy 126
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The 10x Salesperson

Tom Tunguz

The 10x programmer - engineers whose prodigious productivity and perspicacity change the arc of a business. But what about a 10x AE? A salesperson who books 10x more business than their next closest peer. 10x engineers use their knowledge of technology to achieve astounding feats. Why wouldn’t the same idea apply to sales? With AI, we will start to see sales outliers who meaningfully outperform & break quota expectations.

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A Low Burn Multiple is Great. But — It Doesn’t Mean You Won’t Run Out of Money.

SaaStr

David Sacks classic post on Burn Rate Multiple is A+ and a key metric for every venture-backed startup. It simplifies a lot of complexity into one metric. That if you’re venture-backed, yes, you do have money to spend (and burn). But the best burn less each month than they bring in in new bookings and revenue (a Burn Multiple of 1x or less).

Startup 271
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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.

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Zero-Click Content: What It Is and Why You Should Create It

Buffer Resources

Picture this: you spend hours working on a piece of content only to direct your sizeable social media audience to it and get a fraction of your typical engagement. That’s not an unusual challenge, especially as platforms focus on keeping you engaged within the container of whatever app you’re on. It’s why every social media app has text, photo, and video formats with varying levels of focus.

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How To Set Up IVR Payment Without Storing Credit Card Data

The Daily Egg

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) payments allow customers to handle purchases and pay bills by interacting with an automated system. This means your. The post How To Set Up IVR Payment Without Storing Credit Card Data appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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The One Question to Ask Before You Blow Up Your Customer Success Team

Kellblog

Thanks to Frank Slootman , blowing up customer success (CS) teams is quite in vogue. “We don’t believe companies should have a separate customer success function. The first thing we did when Frank joined Snowflake was we blew up the customer success function. You are either going to do support, sales, or professional services. Customer success is not accountable for anything.” — Mike Scarpelli , Snowflake CFO “The alternative strategy is to declare and constantly reinforc