SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2025

Because while the payment problem was solved, the marketing side of mobile commerce remained broken. Weaponize Customer Success Align on specific metrics Build education systems Create community Drive organic growth 3.

Technical Review 258

Technical Review Payment Solutions Scale Payment Services 258

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

Growing up on construction sites with parents in the industry, he developed an intuitive understanding of the challenges contractors face daily. Procore has developed several innovative approaches to achieve this: Construction Boot Camp: Every new employee, regardless of role, goes through a two-week immersion in construction.

Construction 248

Construction Scale SaaS Travel 248

SaaStr

MARCH 16, 2025

3 Unexpected Learnings from Datadog’s Marketing Playbook Press relations and analyst activities often contribute almost nothing to the bottom line – Datadog found that many “standard” marketing activities didn’t actually drive customer acquisition or revenue, despite their visibility. The problem?

Scale 232

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Marketing 232

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 21, 2021

Developer tools and business-to-developer companies are among some of our favorite category of startup. Developer documentation is one of the differentiators in developer community building efforts. and the latest evolution in developer documentation. Building and scaling developer and user education.

Development 253

Development Scale Education Acquisition 253

Tom Tunguz

MAY 10, 2019

If a majority of bookings come from expansion, then the business develops an incredible sales efficiency. To get a better sense of the sales and marketing performance, the sales efficiency should be calculated on new logo acquisition solely, unless the sales and marketing teams exert significant effort in the expansion motions.

Development 270

Development Sales Acquisition Retention 270

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2020

Q: What was the biggest acquisition failure or missed opportunity by a company? If you want to own the developer relationship, you own Github. The post What was the biggest acquisition failure or missed opportunity by a company? It’s hard to really force rank a list, especially of deals you don’t know about.

Acquisition 249

Acquisition Technical Review Scale Cloud 249

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 20, 2024

GitHub, founded in 2008, is a leading platform for software development and version control that has made waves since 2018 with its AI Copilot. Copilot is a code completion tool so developers utilize it by starting to type code, and the copilot offers the rest of that coding suggestion based on the prompt.

Scale 258

Scale AI Scaling Marketing 258

SaaStr

APRIL 28, 2025

After Meraki’s acquisition by Cisco, Sekar and several colleagues founded Samsara in 2015 to bring modern technology to physical operations industries that were still using antiquated systems. This cross-pollination effect accelerated product development in unexpected ways.

Scale 257

Scale Transportation Scaling SMB 257

Clouded Judgement

JULY 2, 2025

In Figma, designers work alongside developers, product managers (“PMs”), researchers, marketers, writers, and other non-designers who, in the three months ended March 31, 2025, made up two-thirds of our more than 13 million monthly active users. My note: Their products here are Figma Design and Figma Draw.]

Benchmarks 196

Benchmarks Data Software Review AI 196

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 19, 2025

” One strategy is to acquire : the rationale Salesforce gives for the Informatica acquisition. Unlike the previous software era where SORs built platforms on top of themselves to develop broader ecosystems (in Salesforce’s case Veeva & Vlocity ), the AI shift does seem to be more defensive.

AI Search 165

AI Search AI Acquisition Startup 165

SaaStr

JULY 3, 2025

✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) July 1, 2025 The Adobe Acquisition That Got Away Remember when everyone mocked Adobe for “overpaying” at $20B? The synergies would have made it a stellar deal, especially given Figma’s expansion beyond designers – 30% of users are now developers. Otherwise I won’t get invited.”

161

161

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

Price low to minimize adoption friction, grow quickly, and then move up-market after developing broad adoption. Skimming is less common in the software world because few startups develop a product at launch that will be accepted by the most sophisticated customers (and those willing to pay prices that generate the greatest margin).

SaaS Payments 283

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 283

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

This inefficiency stemmed from the high costs associated with maintaining sales development representatives (SDRs), customer success managers (CSMs), and account executives. Apollo’s sales-led approach was proving unsustainable, spending one dollar to acquire just eighty cents of revenue.

Scale 156

Scale Scaling Outsourced Development Sales 156

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2025

True Platform Flexibility : Rather than pre-built solutions, Monday.com offers building blocks that organizations can configure for any workflow, from marketing campaigns to software development and HR processes. In fact, neither are seeing any slowdown in their net new customer acquisition rate. Whats your excuse again?

SMB 267

SMB Scale Education AI 267

User Pilot

MARCH 30, 2025

But is your mobile user acquisition strategy strong enough? There are many ways to approach each, so lets go over nine of the most effective strategies for mobile user acquisition: 1. Integrate product-led growth in your acquisition strategy I said earlier that you shouldnt rely on your product alone to attract mobile users.

Mobile 66

Mobile Acquisition Software Review Social Media 66

SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2025

Their product is generating an impressive 45% of developers’ code on average. Beyond their code assistant, they’ve developed Windsurf AI, an agentic IDE allowing non-technical users to build applications – accelerating productivity even further. In AI especially, deployment success is everything.

Sales Recruiting 230

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AI 230

SaaStr

MAY 2, 2025

After attending Dreamforce, their team conducted an internal hackathon focused on Agent Force, developing five high-impact use cases that are now dramatically affecting the company’s financials. This suggests a mistake in not integrating acquisitions more aggressively from the beginning. Top 4 Mistakes Marc Made 1.

AI 237

AI Enterprise Scale Airlines 237

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 4, 2023

The total quantity of acquisitions demonstrated greater resilience shrinking by 56%, while the median acquisition value tumbled from $81m to $22m (-72%). A $22m median M&A price implies most of these transactions were acquihires - acquisitions that value a company for its team. US venture-backed M&A fell from $34.6b

Startup 327

Startup Marketing Acquisition Technology 327

FastSpring

JANUARY 9, 2025

How you can pursue these strategies to drive more profitability for your games, while developing a more meaningful relationship with your players. We work with big, wonderful mobile developers like Ninja Kiwi that make games like Bloons Tower Defense, folks like BoomBit, Hutch, and a bunch of other great developers and publishers.

Payments 165

Payments Mobile Payment Methods Revenue 165

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Developers act, think, and behave differently than your average customer. As an API-first company, WorkOS focuses on selling primarily to developers. Doing Business with Developers. Developers haven’t typically been the buyers in enterprise software, so why should you build for developers?

Outsourced Development 207

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 207

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 17, 2024

Highlights: (5:22) The power of customer intimacy in product development. (15:41) The post GTM 126: Reverse Engineering the Founder Journey: From Scaling Twitter Ads to $650M, 20 Years Operating, and a Webflow Acquisition | Guy Yalif appeared first on GTMnow. The challenges and rewards of founding and growing a startup for nine years.

Scale 99

Scale Engineering Acquisition Scaling 99

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 22, 2022

The behavioral patterns in web3 differ driven by anonymity, communication patterns on discord and telegram, and the consequences of using tokens as user acquisition, as governance votes, and currency. Ad Networks educate users about new projects while providing revenue to Publishers, application developers and content publishers.

Blockchain 355

Blockchain Marketing Advertising Government 355

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2025

Consider Buyer Reputation – Research the acquirer’s track record with previous acquisitions and their M&A experience. Amazon’s acquisition of PillPack illustrates this perfectly: they saw value in both the complex software systems and innovative packaging that could transform their healthcare ambitions.

Technical Review 197

Technical Review Software Review Development Team Review Sales Hiring 197

Stax

JUNE 18, 2025

Vertical SaaS companies often focus on developing solutions for complex or underserved industries that have typically been ignored by bigger software companies. these software companies are able to develop deep expertise in those niches. This increases conversions and ROI and lowers the customer acquisition cost. through 2034.

Merchant Services 167

Merchant Services SaaS Payments Payment Services Payments 167

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2022

When a business is ready to scale, a startup ought to develop an organizational roadmap. Managers of paid acquisition, organic acquisition, and marketing operations/systems report to the head of demand generation. In much the same way, CEOs architect the organization that builds, markets, sells, and supports the product.

Startup 361

Startup Acquisition Product Marketing Scaling 361

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 23, 2023

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. ” Microsoft’s presence in the developer ecosystem continues to astound. They’ve crossed the mark 2 years early.

AI Search 312

AI Search AI Cloud Azure 312

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 6, 2022

PLG companies spend comparable amounts on sales & marketing (S&M) to SLG companies, but they spend more on research & development (R&D). The chart above shows the combined Sales & Marketing + Research & Development Costs divided by revenue. This should bring PLG sales efficiency closer to SLG figures.

Headcount 344

Headcount Market Research Acquisition Education 344

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 9, 2021

Bill.com had to develop a network that today has millions on vendors processing bills and payments on it. Bill.com bought Divvy for $2B+, but the whole category of next-gen spend management software for SMBs wasn’t really practical before the relatively recent development of true virtual credit cards. #6.

SaaS Payments 62

SaaS Payments Payments Payment Services Scale 62

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

” – Colin Jones, CRO Emeritus at Wiz You may have seen the news that Google is making its biggest acquisition — by far — of Cloud and SaaS security leader Wiz for a stunning $32 Billion (!). ” This distributed structure created intentional communication patterns that might not have developed in a single office.

Scale 176

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales Recruiting 176

SaaStr

MAY 6, 2024

Don’t bother too much with trying to get “corporate development” or the M&A team’s attention. M&A is usually driven by either the CEO, for game-changing acquisitions, or a functional SVP, to accelerate something in her functional area. That’s not their job. Instead, they implement it.

Acquisition 278

Acquisition Development Investment Business 278

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 16, 2021

Tokens are the paid customer acquisition channel of web3. By analyzing how web3 companies invest tokens, we can calculate the cost of customer acquisition (CAC) for a crypto company. Typical enterprise software companies spend approximately 7-15% of their enterprise value on customer acquisition. L1 Web3 companies spend 29-95%.

Venture Capital 274

Venture Capital Blockchain Acquisition Benchmarks 274

Predictable Revenue

NOVEMBER 15, 2023

Collin Stewart discusses the emerging trends in sales recruitment with Brisa Renteria, CEO of Improved Growth The post Rethinking Sales Talent Acquisition with Brisa Renteria appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

Sales Recruiting 130

Sales Recruiting Acquisition Sales Trends 130

Predictable Revenue

MARCH 5, 2025

The post The Role of Being Social in Customer Acquisition with Courtney Krstich appeared first on Predictable Revenue. You dont need the perfect product from day one to turn an idea into a business. You need constant validation, adaptation, and execution.

Acquisition 130

Acquisition Revenue Business Development 130

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 12, 2023

Salesforce barely budged, perhaps an indicator of how labor-intensive the business is or how much the revenue growth has been through acquisition (Slack, Mulesoft, & Tableau). The data suggests revenue per employee growth is zero dring product development. RPE for the top 3 grew at 13-16%.

Software Review 331

Software Review Trends Revenue Software 331

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 27, 2022

The Pocus/FRC survey highlights three revealing developments in the SaaS landscape. After all, what business wouldn’t want to adopt a new, efficient customer acquisition channel? SDRs (sales development reps) qualify these leads, much the way they might for marketing qualified leads or outbound sales qualified leads.

Acquisition 316

Acquisition Startup Technology Development 316

SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2025

Conversion rates on design handoffs increased 60% because the AI anticipates developer needs during the design process. I’ve watched dozens of companies spend 6-12 months trying to upskill engineers who fundamentally don’t believe in AI-first development. Workflow transformation that creates new value.

AI Search 167

AI Search AI Technical Review CTO Hire 167