Thu.Apr 27, 2023

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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:

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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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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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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 136
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Beyond the Basics of A/B Tests: Highly Innovative Experimentation Tactics You Need to Know

Speaker: Timothy Chan, PhD., Head of Data Science

Are you ready to move beyond the basics and take a deep dive into the cutting-edge techniques that are reshaping the landscape of experimentation? 🌐 From Sequential Testing to Multi-Armed Bandits, Switchback Experiments to Stratified Sampling, Timothy Chan, Data Science Lead, is here to unravel the mysteries of these powerful methodologies that are revolutionizing how we approach testing.

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Thanks to Google Cloud for Startups, HiBob, Quotapath, Spendflo, and Toplyne for Sponsoring SaaStr Annual 2023!

SaaStr

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.

Cloud 193

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Both Sides of the Partnership: Executing Lyft’s “Impossible” Ask

Andreessen Horowitz

If business partnerships are a high-stakes form of matchmaking, then the strategic partnership between Lyft and the automotive services giant Holman was something of an odd-couple proposition at the start. When first broached five years ago, the companies’ working styles … The post Both Sides of the Partnership: Executing Lyft’s “Impossible” Ask appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

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Dropbox lays off 16% of staff to refocus on AI, as sales growth slows

IT World

Facing a slowdown in revenue growth, cloud storage company Dropbox announced today that it is laying off 500 employees, or 16% of its workforce, mainly in order to be able to hire staff with AI expertise. Although revenue for the fourth quarter last year — the last quarter for which Dropbox reported earnings — was up by 5.8% year over year to $598.8 million, the company has experienced a slowdown in sales recently.

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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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Apple's inexorable plan to replace retail banking

IT World

At this point, Apple offers its users services to make purchases, transact sales, buy items on credit using a card, save money, a virtual currency, and to make small transactions over time at zero interest rates. It takes a tiny cut of cash from all these transactions. But even now the Apple Pay story is still just beginning. No one likes banks Think back to the financial crash, when an out-of-control banking sector set in motion a chain of events that left many people today poorer than they we

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How Investors & Strategic Buyers Evaluate Integrated Payment Strategies

Explore how integrated payment strategies impact investor and buyer evaluations. Payments are more than a feature — they’re a key to long-term success and market differentiation. They help SaaS companies offer seamless user experiences and efficient operations. Investors and strategic buyers assess these integrated payment strategies as a measure of a company's growth potential and sustainability.

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How Real Estate Agents Can Use Review Sites to Find New Business

Dubb

Whether you are a brand new real estate agent or have been serving your clients for decades, it is absolutely critical to be adaptable. What used to be a great way of finding new clients 20 years ago may be an unproductive strategy today. By contrast, a strategy that seemed irrelevant several years ago The post How Real Estate Agents Can Use Review Sites to Find New Business appeared first on Dubb Blog.

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Bosch to acquire TSI Semiconductor, invest $1.5 B post acquisition

IT World

The acquisition is part of Bosch’s strategy to tap into the rising demand for chips globally, especially in the automotive and electronics sector.

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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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How Do Crypto Futures Work and How Does It Differentiate from Margin Trading?

How To Buy Saas

Cryptocurrency trading is a rapidly growing industry with a wide variety of tools available on the market. Despite the high volatility and increased risk associated with the industry, traders are able to generate significant profits. Two popular trading tools in the cryptocurrency market are crypto futures and margin trading. In this article, we will discuss the basics of these trading tools and their differences.

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The Big Payoff of Application Analytics

Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.

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Convert More Leads with ChartMogul CRM

Chart Mogul

After years of using generic CRMs that are ill-suited for our product-led B2B SaaS model, we’re using ChartMogul CRM, the only CRM tailor-made for SaaS sales teams like us. We’re familiar with the problems modern SaaS companies face – we’ve spent the last 8 years helping them gain a better understanding of business dynamics with … After years of using generic CRMs that are ill-suited for our product-led B2B SaaS model, we’re using ChartMogul CRM , the only CRM tailor-made for SaaS sales te

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7 Best CRMs for Career Coaches

CloseSaaS

Are you a career coach? Then you need a CRM to help you manage leads, engage clients, and streamline your workflow. Here are the 7 best options.

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Apr 27 – Customer Success Jobs

SmartKarrot

Role: VP of Customer Success Location: Buffalo-Niagara Falls Area, United States Organization: The Leadership Agency As a VP of Customer Success, you’ll promote account expansion and implementations. Embrace ambiguity while advancing the process. Help with the customer lifecycle’s design, implementation, and optimisation. Set up a tracking system and operational KPIs so that the CS team can be held responsible for engagement results, customer happiness, and customer growth.

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In-App Surveys Guide for Collecting Valuable Feedback

User Pilot

How do you create in-app surveys that give the user sentiment insights you need to build valuable products? This is the key question we focus on in the article. We kick off by discussing the benefits of in-app surveys and exploring their different types. Next, we move on to in-app survey best practices, check out some great survey examples, and finally, look at the best tools for the job.

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6 Reasons Why Your Integrated Payments Strategy Could Fail

If you're in the software industry grappling with integrating payments into your business model, understanding where others have stumbled can be a game-changer for your revenue goals. Discover 6 key reasons behind the struggles many face. The challenge goes beyond the technicalities of integrating a payment system; it delves into the strategic oversight of revenue shares, negotiations with payment providers, and the full exploitation of potential revenue streams.

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Scale Your Note-Taking Game With AI Notetakers: Say Good Bye to Traditional Methods!

SmartKarrot

A business needs to keep track of all the critical data and insights to stay ahead of competitors. Note-taking is the perfect way of doing it, but you already know that as the VP or director. However, traditional methods do not work well in today’s scenario. Those methods may result in errors and inaccuracies and can be time-consuming. Businesses can use AI note-taking tools to streamline the process and generate reliable results.

Scale 10
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The Ultimate Guide to Customer Feedback for SaaS Companies

User Pilot

Customer feedback is like a window into your customers’ minds. It allows you to understand their pain points, needs, and desires so that you can build better products that satisfy genuine market demands. In this article, we explore the: Most common types of feedback, Top ways to collect actionable feedback, Best practices to follow, And, leading software that’ll get the job done.

Scale 94
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How to pick the best content services platform for your business

IT World

Enterprise content management (ECM) , an umbrella term for the processes and tools that organizations use to capture, store, secure, retrieve, and manage business data in its many forms, is dead. So declared Gartner in 2017. Companies still needed to manage all that content, of course, but vendors were adopting a new approach that required new terminology, the research firm said.

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Are Pendo Surveys Worth It? (+ Better Alternatives)

User Pilot

Pendo is best known for its state-of-the-art analytics features. As a product adoption platform, it also offers survey functionality to collect customer feedback. How good are Pendo surveys though? That’s the main question we discuss in the article. To be more specific, we analyze the survey functionality, look at its strengths and limitations, share Pendo’s pricing, and explore alternative tools that might do a better job than Pendo surveys.

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Monetizing Analytics Features

Think your customers will pay more for data visualizations in your application? Five years ago, they may have. But today, dashboards and visualizations have become table stakes. Turning analytics into a source of revenue means integrating advanced features in unique, hard-to-steal ways. Download this white paper to discover which features will differentiate your application and maximize the ROI of your analytics.

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UK expected to offer $1.25 billion for nation's semiconductor industry

IT World

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is reportedly about to follow in the footsteps of the US and several European governments by announcing a funding package designed to build up the country’s domestic semiconductor industry, according to a report this week from Politico. While the exact amount of the funding could change, according to Politico’s sources, a topline figure of £1 billion ($1.25 billion) is expected.

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Frictionless Customer Onboarding: A Step-by-Step Guide for SaaS

User Pilot

If your new users drop off a lot while onboarding, it’s likely because you’re not practicing frictionless customer onboarding. Seamless onboarding flows are game changers. They lead to increased user engagement and activation while helping to retain customers in the long run. Read on to learn more about frictionless onboarding and how to implement it for your SaaS.

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Net Promoter Score: The Complete Guide to NPS SaaS

User Pilot

In the world of software-as-a-service (SaaS), customer satisfaction is paramount to the success of any business. One metric that has become increasingly popular in measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). In this complete guide to NPS SaaS, we will dive into what NPS is, how it works, and why it’s important for SaaS companies to incorporate it into their customer feedback strategies.