Sat.Apr 22, 2023 - Fri.Apr 28, 2023

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The Top Bootstrapped SaaS Companies Ever: Atlassian, Mailchimp and Qualtrics

SaaStr

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.

SaaS 245
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Software Spending Growth Will Accelerate by 40% in 2023, But it Doesn't Feel that Way

Tom Tunguz

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.

Software 256
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Navigating the High Cost of AI Compute

Andreessen Horowitz

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.

AI 143
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Communicating Your Value in a Challenging Economy with Gavin Page

Predictable Revenue

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.

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From Start to Scale: Driving Growth Through Seamless Payments Implementation

Speaker: Michael Veatch, Senior Director, Implementations & Ella Aguirre, Director of Solution Consulting

Embedding payments can be a transformative step for software companies looking to enhance their platform capabilities, boost customer satisfaction, and drive long-term growth. However, the success of payments hinges on a single thing: implementation. Drawing on real-world insights and experiences, payments implementation experts Michael Veatch and Ella Aguirre will explore actionable strategies that can lead to a transparent, friction-free launch and mitigate potential challenges like technical

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Don’t Say Ending ARR

Kellblog

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?

Scale 137

More Trending

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The Essential Guide to In-App Onboarding in 2023

User Pilot

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.

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New Research: Dark Social Falsely Attributes Significant Percentages of Web Traffic as “Direct”

Sparktoro

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.

Data 145
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Capture, Categorize, Create: A System for Capturing Your Ideas and Using Them To Create Content

Buffer Resources

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.

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Three ways customer success can support product management to everyone’s benefit

ChurnZero

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.

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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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Hunter.io Review

The Daily Egg

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.

Business 298
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At the Top SaaS Companies, Founder-CEOs Own ~15% at IPO. And Most Co-Founders Are Not Equal (And That’s OK). UPDATED

SaaStr

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:

SaaS 241
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Microsoft's Billion Dollar AI Business

Tom Tunguz

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.

AI Search 197
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Clouded Judgement 4.28.23

Clouded Judgement

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

Cloud 130
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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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Communicating Your Value in a Challenging Economy with Gavin Page

Predictable Revenue

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.

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How to Create Urgency in Sales. When There Really Isn’t Any.

SaaStr

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.

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ChatGPT learns to forget: OpenAI implements data privacy controls

IT World

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.

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How the U.S. Can Rewire the Pentagon for a New Era

Andreessen Horowitz

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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Straight Facts About PayFacs: What Every ISV Should Know

Speaker: Pete Uselman, Director of Partner Experience at Wind River Payments

Many software companies are exploring PayFac-as-a-Service providers in an effort to drive more embedded payments revenue and gain greater control over the customer experience. But there are nuances in a PayFac relationship that often get downplayed – nuances that can impact the risk and resource responsibilities of software providers. In this webinar, integrated payments veteran, Pete Uselman discusses the following: What is a PayFac?

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Hello, ZEO! with Stéphane Dierick, Senior Client Manager

Zuora

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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Dear SaaStr: Is it OK to Modify the Standard SAFE Form?

SaaStr

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

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Schools look to ban ChatGPT, students use it anyway

IT World

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.

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Investing in Pinecone

Andreessen Horowitz

With the inflection of large language models (LLMs), we’re witnessing a paradigm shift in software development and the computing industry as a whole. AI is happening and a new stack is forming before our eyes. It’s like the Internet all … The post Investing in Pinecone appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

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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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Announcing: Proration Preview API

FastSpring

Looking to leverage FastSpring’s subscription capabilities and want to try out the preview API for yourself? Sign up for a demo or check out our free trial. Already a FastSpring seller and want to enable the Proration Preview API for your store? Or, do you just want to get into the technical details of the new Proration Preview API? Everything you need to know can be found in our product documentation and API documentation.

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5 Interesting Learnings from Squarespace at $1 Billion in ARR

SaaStr

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.

Scale 222
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EU closes in on AI Act with last-minute ChatGPT-related adjustments

IT World

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.

AI 121
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How to Analyze Customer Data In SaaS? [Methods & Examples]

User Pilot

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.

Data 93
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Buyer’s Guide: Finding The Best Payment Provider For Your Software

Choosing the right Embedded Payments partner can feel overwhelming. This comprehensive buyer’s guide simplifies the process by breaking down seven key criteria to consider, from platform technology to security and growth potential. Learn how to assess partners that align with your goals, offer personalized support, and drive long-term success. This guide equips software companies with the insights to make confident, informed decisions that enhance customer experience and fuel business growth.

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Investing in Radiant

Andreessen Horowitz

Most people don’t know that nuclear energy — a clean, carbon-free energy source — accounts for 20% of electricity in the United States and over half of its carbon-free electricity. However, while large nuclear reactors are often (erroneously) villainized — … The post Investing in Radiant appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

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5 Customer Marketing Strategies Guaranteed To Grow Your Business with Tara Robertson, CMO at Bitly (Pod 654 + Video)

SaaStr

The customer marketing journey in SaaS is like rock climbing minus the risk of potential death. But you’re falling, dodging, climbing, and hoping to scale the top of a mountain. Jason Lemkin, CEO and Founder of SaaStr, said, “How much do you talk about Customer Marketing? Be honest. It’s the #1 thing SaaS companies do the least of, that they should be doing far more of.

Scale 204
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Amazon, Facebook, Twitter on EU list of companies facing DSA content rules

IT World

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.