TechEmpower SaaS

MARCH 4, 2024

Generative AI is revolutionizing how corporations operate by enhancing efficiency and innovation across various functions. Focusing on generative AI applications in a select few corporate functions can contribute to a significant portion of the technology's overall impact. Key Functions with High Impact Generative AI is revolutionizing sales by enabling dynamic pricing and personalized customer interactions, boosting conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

So clearly AI is rapidly changing the way we do sales, but how will it all shake out? Over in the contact center and post-sales space, we can already see 20%+ of customer support execs been routinely replaced by AI. But what about the more personal sales side? AI SDRs have taken off more quickly than AI AEs (although personally, I suspect more value will be in AI SEs and AEs that can answer my deep product and pricing questions instantly, without games).

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Tom Tunguz

APRIL 3, 2024

The average American attention span has fallen from 150 seconds in 2004 to 75 seconds in 2012 to 47 seconds in 2023 - a 5-6% annual rate of decline. Year Avg American Attention Span (sec) CAGR 2004 150 - 2012 75 -6% 2023 47 -5% How does this compare to these blog posts? In 2013, the average reader dwelled on this site for 47 seconds. Today, it’s 33 seconds, a 3.6% decline - which is a bit better !

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Clouded Judgement

JUNE 14, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now Is Seat Based Pricing Dead? If AI delivers on its promise, it may spell the end of the SaaS business model as we know it. Historically, cloud software businesses charged a recurring fee based on the number of users of their software - the SaaS model.

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Speaker: Tamara Fingerlin, Developer Advocate

Apache Airflow® 3.0, the most anticipated Airflow release yet, officially launched this April. As the de facto standard for data orchestration, Airflow is trusted by over 77,000 organizations to power everything from advanced analytics to production AI and MLOps. With the 3.0 release, the top-requested features from the community were delivered, including a revamped UI for easier navigation, stronger security, and greater flexibility to run tasks anywhere at any time.

Data

SaaStr

DECEMBER 31, 2024

So I caught up the other day with the CTO of a leading SaaS company with tens of thousands of customers, growing quickly. AI is all over their homepage and website and comms. I asked him about a particular use case for AI, and his answer shocked me a bit: Honestly, our AI is basically still in beta. Its rolled out to about a tenth of the customers we plan to, and the uses cases are pretty simple today.

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AI CTO Hire Sales Hiring CTO 329

USIO

JULY 1, 2024

In the competitive world of Software as a Service (SaaS), generating recurring revenue is essential for sustainable growth. While many strategies involve significant investments in marketing, sales, and technology, there are also effective methods to boost recurring revenue that require minimal financial outlay. Here are three ways SaaS organizations can create recurring revenue without spending a dime. 1.

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Payments SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 306

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2024

So we’ve covered HubSpot more than any other SaaS leader on this 5 Interesting Learnings series, in part because so many of us use HubSpot ourselves, and in part because its metrics and use cases are so like many of the apps we build and sell ourselves. They recently did an Analyst day though that had some more great data that I thought was super interesting, and worth a deep dive. 5 More Interesting Learnings then: #1. 75% of Customers Are Onboarded By Partners Partners don’t just

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SaaStr

OCTOBER 23, 2024

In 2006, BILL CEO and Founder René Lacerte set out to define a category around financial operations for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Needless to say, he succeeded. At SaaStr’s AI Summit during the SaaStr Annual , René chatted with SaaStr CEO and founder Jason Lemkin about how BILL has reached half a million customers and $1.3B in revenue.

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Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

Q1 earnings season for cloud businesses is now behind us. The 62 companies that I’ll discuss here (which is not an exhaustive list, but is still comprehensive) all reported quarterly earnings sometime between April 24th – June 10th. In this post, I’ll take a data-driven approach in evaluating the overall group’s performance, and highlight individual standouts along the way.

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Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

Speaker: Alex Salazar, CEO & Co-Founder @ Arcade | Nate Barbettini, Founding Engineer @ Arcade | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO @ Aggregage

There’s a lot of noise surrounding the ability of AI agents to connect to your tools, systems and data. But building an AI application into a reliable, secure workflow agent isn’t as simple as plugging in an API. As an engineering leader, it can be challenging to make sense of this evolving landscape, but agent tooling provides such high value that it’s critical we figure out how to move forward.

AI

FastSpring

NOVEMBER 27, 2024

In the SaaS industry, the checkout experience can make or break a sale. A seamless, localized checkout process is crucial for converting potential customers, especially in global markets. Focusing on these three key areas can help your SaaS business win more customers: Language. Payment methods. Currency display. FastSpring is a merchant of record that can help you easily grow your business internationally.

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Payment Methods Merchant Services SaaS Payments Payments 158

Buffer Resources

OCTOBER 3, 2024

Your social media success hinges on creating content that makes your audience tick. But.how do you even find content ideas that resonate? And how do you ensure you never run out of them? This article will share nine places to find content ideas — ensuring you never have to stare at an empty content calendar (wondering ‘what should I create?

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Payrix

DECEMBER 18, 2024

The world of Embedded Payments saw remarkable developments in 2024, shaping strategies and innovations across the industry. In a compelling discussion on PayFAQ: The Embedded Payments podcast, Ian Hillis hosted payments veterans Ella Aguirre and Michael Veatch to reflect on the past year. The conversation unpacked notable trends, challenges, and opportunities for software companies navigating this dynamic landscape. 4 key takeaways from Embedded Payments in 2024 Takeaway #1: Maturity in Embedded

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Payments Embedded Payments Merchant Services Payment Services 130

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

Over the weekend, I found myself in an hour-long conversation during my drive with an AI. We jumped from discussing Cooper Flagg’s basketball stats at Duke to comparing Carlo Rovelli and Brian Greene’s competing theories of physics to talking about the history of San Francisco. In a daring feat of economic analysis, I asked it to calculate if the after-tax returns of two ETFs were statistically significant & to compare the energy portfolios using the 13-Fs of a few hedge funds fo

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Artificial Intelligence AI Engineering Investment 185

Advertiser: ZoomInfo

AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.

AI

User Pilot

OCTOBER 10, 2024

Can you imagine what the ideal SaaS customer onboarding process looks like? When done well, it can be the difference between a user becoming a loyal customer or churning after the first week. That’s why we’ll go over what onboarding is in SaaS and analyze 8 onboarding examples from reputable SaaS companies to learn what they’re doing right (or wrong).

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Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 17, 2024

The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including: Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube Guy Yalif is a seasoned B2B SaaS executive with over 20 years of go-to-market experience. As the co-founder and CEO of Intellimize (acquired by Webflow), Guy brings a unique perspective from his journey through iconic companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Twitter, as well as his background in aerospace engineering.

Scale 101

Scale Engineering Acquisition Scaling 101

Kellblog

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

Sometimes. But make sure it’s not out of laziness or ignorance. Increasingly, you’ll hear the term “business outcomes” popping up in software marketing. While I initially loathed the phrase for its vagueness, over time I’ve come to believe that, much like the frequently abused word “ solutions ,” there is a right and a wrong way to use “business outcomes.” Let’s start with two examples.

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Marketing Business Finance Sales Hiring 138

Chart Mogul

OCTOBER 30, 2024

Account Management is a delightfully intricate balance of art and science. When I joined ChartMogul, I was tasked with building a new Account Management function from the ground up. As we all know, the SaaS ecosystem has changed dramatically over the last few years, and customer retention and expansion are becoming increasingly important for SaaS … Account Management is a delightfully intricate balance of art and science.

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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.

Payments

Blulogix

OCTOBER 22, 2024

By BluLogix Team Complex Pricing Models: How BluLogix Simplifies UCaaS Monetization Summary: Managing complex pricing models is a major pain point for UCaaS companies. From seat-based pricing to consumption-based and hybrid models, keeping track of various offerings and ensuring transparency for customers can be challenging. Learn how UCaaS providers can streamline their pricing strategies with advanced catalog management and flexible pricing tools and how you can reduce administrative overhead

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Pricing B2B Payment Features Subscription 110

SaaStr

OCTOBER 27, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What Are Some of the Most Common Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make Pitching VCs? I’ve invested almost $200m as part of SaaStr Fund / 2024. A few top mistakes founders make: #1. Not making cold email truly great. Don’t ask to pick someone’s brain, or coffee. Make the cold email so great, you’d want to invest based on just it alone. 2 Cold Emails I Funded For Millions #2.

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Clouded Judgement

NOVEMBER 18, 2024

Today ServiceTitan filed their initial S1 statement. A S-1 is a document companies file with the SEC in preparation for listing their shares on an exchange like the NYSE or NASDAQ. The document contains a plethora of information on the company including a general overview, up to date financials, risk factors to the business, cap table highlights and much more.

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Benchmarks Payments Payment Services SaaS Payments 299

FastSpring

OCTOBER 11, 2024

When you’re expanding your software business into new regions, industry benchmarking data can help you make better strategic decisions by answering important questions about business in the region. Here are the questions we sought to answer by analyzing anonymized subscription data for transactions across various Asian countries (excluding broader “APAC” regions like Australia, New Zealand, and Indonesia): How do customers in Asia’s growing markets prefer to manage their SaaS subscr

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Merchant Services SaaS Payments Benchmarks Payment Features 158

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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.

Payment Solutions

Buffer Resources

JULY 12, 2024

⚡ At Buffer, we’re committed to full transparency — which means building in public and sharing how our engineers work. You’ll find more content like this on our Open Blog here. We’ve all experienced it at some point — a change is deployed to an API and suddenly, clients stop working. User experience deteriorates, negative reviews start coming in, customer advocacy starts dealing with requests, multiple engineers start digging into the issue, and it quick

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Engineering Software Review User Experience Development 116

Payrix

NOVEMBER 19, 2024

In the latest episode of PayFAQ: The Embedded Payments Podcast, Ian Hillis speaks with Brad Pinneke , VP of Business Development at Payrix and Worldpay for Platforms, about one of the most important decisions software companies face today: choosing the right payments partner. With over 25 years of experience in the payments industry, Brad shares valuable insights into how vertical software platforms can benefit from Embedded Payments and what to consider when selecting a payments provider.

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Payments Embedded Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 130

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 20, 2024

2012 was the year of the Seedpocalypse. Also called the Series A Crunch, a fear gripped Startupland : raising a Series A. Two years later, this indigestible excessive bolus of fundraising rounds hit the Series B market & Series Bs became the most challenging round to raise. Whenever there are “too many” of fundraises of one type, the next round becomes the hardest to raise.

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AI Investment Startup Software 332

User Pilot

OCTOBER 19, 2024

According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index , with an ACSI score of 78.0, overall customer satisfaction in America was the highest it has ever been in Q1 2024. However, while some companies have managed to improve their customer satisfaction levels and benefit from it, many have not. In this article, we explore the concept of customer satisfaction – how to measure it, why it is important for your business, and how you can improve customer satisfaction levels.

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Business Underperforming Technical Team Customer Lifetime Value Systems Review 111

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Payment Solutions

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2024

Here’s an uncomfortable truth about SaaS companies: the majority of first-time VPs of Sales don’t make it past 12 months. As someone who has both succeeded and failed at making this critical hire, I can tell you that when it works, it’s transformative. When it doesn’t, it’s potentially catastrophic. A failed VP of Sales hire doesn’t just cost you immediate revenue—it creates a devastating ripple effect: You lose the second-order revenue (up to 6x the initial l

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Headcount 301

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2024

SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin recently sat down with HubSpot Chairman and co-founder Brian Halligan , who shared valuable insights on the current state of SaaS, evolving board meeting formats, and how AI is reshaping the industry. Here are the key takeaways from part 1 of this interview. Reflecting on Company Outcomes as a Founding CEO We started with Brian flipping the tables a bit and asking Jason a question to kick off the interview: “I know this is a podcast supposed to be interv

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2024

So the latest SaaS leader to cross $1B ARR is Klaviyo. Klaviyo dominates marketing in the Shopify ecosystem and in ecommerce, and just keeps on scaling. It was the only SaaS IPO on 2023. The only one! And at almost $1B ARR, it’s still growing a stunning 34% (!). In the words of founder CEO Andrew Bialecki: “There’s no downturn at Klaviyo.” 5 Interesting Learnings: #1. 110% NRR from 157,000 SMBs Yes, it can be done, 110% NRR from SMBs.

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