SaaStr
APRIL 25, 2023
Dear SaaStr: What is the most inspiring bootstrapped SaaS out there? Atlassian is worth $40B today, pretty darn impressive. The founders owned 78% at IPO. Very impressive. The combo? Utterly epic pic.twitter.com/oN5vm3y4Ii — Jason Be Kind Lemkin (@jasonlk) April 19, 2023 In SaaS, I nominate 3 for The Best Bootstrappers Ever. First, Atlassian.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 23, 2023
Software spending in 2024 should rise 12%, increasing from 9% last year according to Gartner. Overall spending will rise from $4.4t to $4.6t. Why doesn’t it feel that way? Devices will be the only category to decline. CDW, a $20b distributor of software & hardware, announced earnings last week & their results echoed these. CDW has a significant government & education business.
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Andreessen Horowitz
APRIL 27, 2023
Source: Midjourney The generative AI boom is compute-bound. It has the unique property that adding more compute directly results in a better product. Usually, R&D investment is more directly tied to how valuable a product was, and that relationship is … The post Navigating the High Cost of AI Compute appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.
Predictable Revenue
APRIL 26, 2023
Gavin Page joins Collin Stewart on the Predictable Revenue Podcast to discuss the changes that have occurred in sales development and how to communicate your value in a challenging economy. The post Communicating Your Value in a Challenging Economy with Gavin Page appeared first on Predictable Revenue.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
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Kellblog
APRIL 23, 2023
As long as the country’s in a censorship mood , I figured that I could jump on the bandwagon and propose that we ban discussion of one of my pet-peeve SaaS metrics: ending ARR. Wait, but aren’t you the guy who said that if you only knew two things about a SaaS company and needed to value it, one would be ending ARR and the other would be its growth rate?
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
User Pilot
APRIL 23, 2023
What’s in-app onboarding? What are different onboarding types? How’s web mobile app onboarding different from web app onboarding? These are some of the questions we answer in the article. We also look at The characteristics of good onboarding, Best practices, Mistakes to avoid, Some excellent examples of its implementation, And tools you can use to deliver outstanding onboarding experiences for your users.
Sparktoro
APRIL 27, 2023
When site owners and marketers log into their analytics tools to determine how visitors discover and reach their properties, they expect accurate information. Unfortunately, that data is often massively flawed. SparkToro partnered with Really Good Data in a recent experiment to drive 1000+ visits across 11 major social networks and observe how Google Analytics categorized these referrals.
Buffer Resources
APRIL 26, 2023
We’re in an era where if you are trying to create a personal brand online or share your work, you do that by creating content — and creating content is a fantastic way to build your brand, make new connections, and level up your knowledge. When you add it all up, though, it can be a lot of content to create, even with the right tools in place.
ChurnZero
APRIL 27, 2023
The respective directors of the customer success team and the product team were really going at it. The meeting we were in was supposed to be a forum where the two teams could trade notes and collaborate on the product roadmap. Yet, there wasn’t a whole lot of teamwork going on—participants were simply talking past each other. Customer success would attest something like “If we don’t build this feature for this customer, they won’t renew.
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.
SaaStr
APRIL 27, 2023
I was curious the other day how many of the recent Cloud and SaaS IPOs had founders that were equal co-founders from an equity perspective. That was how I was brought up (the first start-up job I had, the founders were equal shareholders). And I generally thought that 50:50 was the default, albeit with many exceptions. Well, I was wrong. Only 4 of the most recent ~30 SaaS/Cloud IPOs I looked at had equal founder ownership at IPO, Atlassian, Pagerduty, and (close enough) MongoDB and Amplitude:
The Daily Egg
APRIL 28, 2023
Hunter.io finds email addresses to help you connect with people on your business radar. This simple yet potent tool can find contacts. The post Hunter.io Review appeared first on The Daily Egg.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 25, 2023
I’m watching public company earnings to identify early trends in the software market to inform startups’ plans for 2023. Yesterday, Microsoft & Google announced earnings. Amazon, Cloudflare, & Mongo announce later this week. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) & Microsoft Azure had strong quarters with about 28% annual revenue growth each.
IT World
APRIL 26, 2023
OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed firm behind the groundbreaking ChatGPT generative AI system, announced this week that it would allow users to turn off the chat history feature for its flagship chatbot, in what’s being seen as a partial answer to critics concerned about the security of data provided to ChatGPT. The “history disabled” feature means that conversations marked as such won’t be used to train OpenAI’s underlying models, and won’t be displayed in the history sidebar.
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
SaaStr
APRIL 27, 2023
Dear SaaStr: How Do I Create Urgency in Sales. When There Really Isn’t Any? Creating urgency is an art. Most founders are great “middlers”. They are great at explaining not just what the product does, but what it can do to solve your problems. No one is better than a founder at this. And then … the deal often never quite closes. The prospect got interested, took the call and the meeting, but … didn’t ask for a contract.
Clouded Judgement
APRIL 28, 2023
Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Hyperscalers Report - With a Massive Headfake! What. A. Week! AWS (Amazon), Azure (Microsoft), and Google Cloud (Google) all reported this week. Quick recap below: AWS (Amazon): $85B run rate growing 16% YoY (last Q grew 20%) Azure (Microsoft): ~$60's billion run rate (estimate) growing 31% YoY (last Q grew 38%) Google Cloud (includes GSuite): $30B run rate growing 28% YoY (la
Predictable Revenue
APRIL 26, 2023
The past few years have been a rollercoaster ride for everyone, especially those in […] The post Communicating Your Value in a Challenging Economy with Gavin Page appeared first on Predictable Revenue.
Andreessen Horowitz
APRIL 28, 2023
We are in the early stages of a generational defense cycle that requires unconventional thinking and tools. The invasion of Ukraine highlights this evolution: comparatively low-cost weapons, from drones to precision artillery, are leveraging cutting-edge networks, like SpaceX’s Starlink, to … The post How the U.S. Can Rewire the Pentagon for a New Era appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.
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SaaStr
APRIL 26, 2023
Squarespace produces amazing websites for SMBs — we are a big customer at SaaStr. And that’s powered it all the way to a $1B run-rate with 28% EBITDA. Self-serve products can and should be quite profitable at scale. But it’s also a story of hitting some limits on TAM, and growth has slowed to 10% at $1B ARR. And subscriber growth of only 3%. 5 Interesting Learnings: #1.
IT World
APRIL 25, 2023
School districts throughout the US and abroad have banned chatbot use on their networks and devices over fears students will use generative AI tech to hand in unauthentic and potentially plagiarized work. Universities and their professors are also wringing their hands about how to deal with artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT that students can use to write papers or generate exam answers.
Sales Hacker
APRIL 25, 2023
If you’re a salesperson, you have to learn about your buyer. That’s a given. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. And too often, I see salespeople taking the quick and lazy path on discovery calls — the path that alienates and annoys the very prospects they’re trying to win over. You might call this discovery , but it’s actually more like scoping — that is, determining the scope of the eventual job.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 28, 2023
Quickly connect Calendly and Close directly so you can access more data, schedule meetings faster, and automate more of your sales process.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo customers aren’t just selling — they’re winning. Revenue teams using our Go-To-Market Intelligence platform grew pipeline by 32%, increased deal sizes by 40%, and booked 55% more meetings. Download this report to see what 11,000+ customers say about our Go-To-Market Intelligence platform and how it impacts their bottom line. The data speaks for itself!
SaaStr
APRIL 26, 2023
Dear SaaStr: Is it OK to Modify the Standard SAFE Form? There’s an issue I see blow up several times now as an investor. It’s when a founder takes a so-called standard SAFE … and modifies it, and doesn’t really tell the investors it is sent to. Here’s what I’ve seen over the years: Removing antidilution protection Converting to last round security, not next round Converting to common, not next round security / preferred No premium / no return if company acq
IT World
APRIL 28, 2023
The European Parliament is set to formalize its position on what could be the world’s first set of regulations for AI by a major legislative body, as EU lawmakers reached a provisional political agreement on Thursday. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have been debating the content of the EU's AI Act and have agreed on compromise amendments, with a few last-minute adjustments pertaining to generative AI.
User Pilot
APRIL 26, 2023
Why is it important to analyze customer data? Because it’s one of the best ways to improve customer retention and grow faster in SaaS. In this article, we cover: What customer behavior analysis is and why it’s important. 6 ways to collect and analyze customer data. What the best customer data platform is for SaaS companies. TLDR; Customer data analysis is the process of collecting and analyzing data to identify trends and better understand customers.
Zuora
APRIL 26, 2023
Hey, world—say Hello, ZEO to Stéphane Dierick. This series follows the unique stories of our people, whom we call ZEOs, […] The post Hello, ZEO! with Stéphane Dierick, Senior Client Manager appeared first on Zuora.
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SaaStr
APRIL 27, 2023
SaaStr events couldn’t happen without our partners, and we wanted to give a special shout-out to some of our newest sponsors for SaaStr Annual 2023. At the 9th ever SaaStr Annual, ~200 of the best and hottest companies on earth will go BIG as partners/sponsors. Join these incredible companies to experience all the value of SaaStr! Startups are solving the world’s important challenges with agility, innovative technology, and determination.
IT World
APRIL 25, 2023
The EU Commission has announced 19 large online platforms and search engines that will face new content moderation rules under the Digital Services Act. The legislation, passed last year, introduced a specific regime for Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs), all of which have more than 45 million users in the EU.
User Pilot
APRIL 26, 2023
Building awesome user onboarding experiences requires a great deal of effort when starting from scratch. So we’ve collected onboarding UX examples from other companies to inspire you! Here are 17 user onboarding examples to help you create great user onboarding flows. TL;DR Onboarding UX is the design choices and the layout of the onboarding experience to help produce an excellent onboarding experience.
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