SaaStr

APRIL 27, 2024

Why do founders leave after their companies are acquired? There are many nuanced answers, but in the short and medium term, it’s incentives. Acquirers use 3 incentives to get founders to stay: Sticks. If you leave, you lose X% of the consideration. Acquirers try to put 30%-40% of the founders’ consideration at risk, if they can get away with it. This sort of works, but it leads to “rest-and-vest” behavior if not thoughtfully combined with Carrots (next point).

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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

APRIL 26, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now Azure Report - Cloud Infra Looks Good! Microsoft kicked off earnings season with a bang! For software, all eyes were on Azure - which grew 31% YoY (ahead of expectations closer to 29%). What was arguably more impressive (and a better indicator of what’s to come for the rest of infrastructure software than overall Azure growth) was the Azure growth excluding

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Payrix

APRIL 24, 2024

Andy Meadows, the Head of Partner Success at Payrix joins host Ian Hillis to continue their conversation about building a successful Embedded Payments strategy. As the last episode of a four-part series on the topic, Andy and Ian tackle how software companies can minimize attrition and why it’s important to the payments conversation. Did you miss Parts 1-3?

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Speaker: Conrado Morlan

In this engaging and witty talk, we’ll explore how artificial intelligence can transform the daily tasks of product managers into streamlined, efficient processes. Using the lens of a superhero narrative, we’ll uncover how AI can be the ultimate sidekick, aiding in decision-making, enhancing productivity, and boosting innovation. Attendees will leave with practical tools and actionable insights, motivated to embrace AI and leverage its potential in their work. 🦸 🏢 Key objectives:

AI

FastSpring

APRIL 17, 2024

Ready to join the leading conference for B2B SaaS founders, operators and investors from pre-seed to series C? If so, join FastSpring at SaaStock USA 2024 at Booth S5! We’d love to talk with you in person! Join us at the Palmer Events Center, in Austin, TX, from May 13th to 15th, for an extraordinary event dedicated to all things SaaS. Since 2016, SaaStock has helped more founders, investors, and operators connect, learn, and grow than any other SaaS conference globally.

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SaaStr

APRIL 21, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What Are The Top 5 Things I Should Know Before Starting a SaaS Startup? My Top 5: It will take you at least 24 months to really get anywhere. Everyone mentally budgets 10–12 months. It’s never enough. At least, not to get enough paying customers from Code Zero. A little more here: [link] A co-founder not equally committed will blow up on you, and best case, is a disaster you will have to clean up later.

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Tom Tunguz

APRIL 30, 2024

Amazon announced their earnings yesterday. Like Microsoft & Google, Amazon’s Web Service business is seeing a surge of growth, up from 13% annual to 17% annual growth (16% when excluding the leap year). Aside from the overall growth of these clouds increasing, the massive investment in CapEx data centers, power plants, and GPUs is stunning.

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Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

Q4 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 Jan 24th – March 27th. 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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Buffer Resources

APRIL 11, 2024

Think nonprofits and Silicon Valley startups have nothing in common? Think again. I started my career working in a nonprofit setting, and now I’m a fractional marketing director for nonprofits. From higher education to arts and literacy organizations, I’ve seen it all.  As a tech writer and editor, I’ve also steeped in the “rocket fuel” of the startup world.

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Data

FastSpring

APRIL 16, 2024

Offering a frictionless checkout experience is essential for digital transaction conversion rates. Today, we’re excited to announce new payment method improvements available on the FastSpring platform: Apple Pay Pix Preferred Payment Method Apple Pay: Seamless Transactions Within the Apple Ecosystem As Apple Pay adoption continues to grow, incorporating Apple Pay into payment options becomes an essential part of your digital strategy.

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Payment Methods Payments Payment Services PayPal 156

Sparktoro

APRIL 3, 2024

It’s an exciting, relieving, high-anticipation day for all of us at SparkToro. Today’s launch—which we call “V2″—is the culmination of more than a year of work, including a complete rebuild of the infrastructure and data sources for our product.

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SaaStr

APRIL 15, 2024

Dear SaaStr: A Big Tech Co Launched a Competitive Product. How Can I Tell How Serious They Are About It? In SaaS at least, I’ll give you one metric that is fairly reliable: How many dedicated sales professional do they have, just 100% selling the competitive product? If it’s none yet, it’s an experiment. If they’ve just made a “Head of” hire, it’s an experiment, but one that is getting budget.

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Tom Tunguz

APRIL 28, 2024

What drives the acquisition market of startups? It’s the big deals. In the last decade, the total number of venture backed software M&A by count has remained relatively constant. The black line shows the linear trend across US venture backed companies with disclosed values of $50m or more. The average & median counts by year total 58 & 55 respectively.

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Acquisition Venture Capital Startup Software 255

Speaker: Speakers: Robin Eissler, BoosteHub & Cory Benn, PracticeSuite

Join us for an exclusive session with Robin Eissler from BoosteHub and Cory Benn from PracticeSuite as they reveal their secrets to leveraging payments within their SaaS platforms. Discover how they seamlessly switched from Stripe to Usio and created more stickiness by offering more solutions. Learn how they increased their company valuation by up to 300% and generated over $700,000 in additional revenue.

Payments

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 5, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now Hype Rounds vs Fundamental Rounds The show Silicon Valley is one of my favorites - just so many nuggets of humor in that show. A favorite clip of mine is when Russ Hanneman is talking about how pre-revenue businesses are the best kind of businesses.

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Cloud Scale Revenue Pricing 154

Buffer Resources

APRIL 22, 2024

Unique circumstances will forever mark the first half of the 2020s, but those alone won’t capture the decade's legacy. A layer deeper, we see how the events accelerated new trends that shape our world today, like the rise of solopreneurship. A solopreneur is any business driven exclusively by one person. Modern solopreneurs commonly run their businesses, at least in some part, through the Internet.

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Social Media Scale Growth Hacking Headcount 123

FastSpring

APRIL 4, 2024

As an experienced sales and GTM leader, John Eitel has more than witnessed how product-led growth (PLG) has affected the tech and SaaS space in the last few years — he and his teams have been up close and personal with how PLG increased in popularity as a sales strategy. “I think there was a time of, ‘ Everybody should be doing it; why aren’t you doing it?

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Scale Sales Payment Methods Merchant Services 151

The Moz Blog

APRIL 2, 2024

Using Google Tag Manager effectively first requires a comprehensive understanding of how it works and what it can be used for. This introductory guide to GTM will clear up any confusion or fears you had about using the tool, arming you with all the knowledge you need to get started.

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Management 120

Speaker: Ian Hillis, SVP of Growth at Payrix and Worldpay for Platforms

Join us for an exclusive webinar hosted by Ian Hillis, SVP of Growth at Payrix and Worldpay for Platforms, where he’ll explore the significant impact of embedded finance on the software industry! This session is designed to provide you with the strategic insights needed to navigate the future of SaaS successfully, all while gaining a deeper understanding of how these trends can enhance your competitive edge, boost revenue, and deepen customer loyalty.

Finance

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What Do You Do When Your Startup is Not Growing Anymore? First, be honest about why. You can blame it on macro issues if you want, but if growth has radically decelerated, it’s likely because you are less competitive than you were before. You probably have fallen out of product-market fit, partially or entirely. Be honest. And go close those feature gaps, and get back to being ahead of the competition — not behind.

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Startup B2B Metrics Product Marketing 277

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 21, 2024

In “Do software companies actually have good margins?”, Benn Stancil makes a case for a counterintuitive point : Software companies are much less profitable than they might seem. Why? Because the research & development costs associated with software should be part of their cost of goods sold. Software companies don’t invest once in R&D & then sell copies of the software as we did in the 90s on CDs.

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Software Business Construction Government 231

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 19, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now Rubrik IPO Update This week Rubrik launched their IPO with an initial pricing range of $28 - $31 / share. This range represents roughly a $6B valuation at the midpoint ($29.50 / share), with a ~6.5x NTM revenue multiple.

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Cloud Scale Subscription Payment Features 138

Buffer Resources

APRIL 9, 2024

“Work smarter, not harder” has always been one of my favorite phrases. But now that I’ve entered my working-mom-of-a-toddler era, it’s taken on a whole new meaning. I only have so many hours in a day, and if I want to have any semblance of free time, I need to make the most of them.  Enter: these AI productivity tools, all of which help me streamline, automate, and optimize as much as possible.

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AI Search AI Social Media ChatGPT 124

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FastSpring

APRIL 17, 2024

Ready for an immersive exploration of the pressing real-world challenges confronting the gaming industry? If so, join FastSpring at GamesBeat Summit 2024! We’d love to talk with you in person! Join us at the Marina del Rey Marriott, in Los Angeles, CA, on May 20th and 21st, for an extraordinary event dedicated to all things video gaming. This year’s theme is Resilience and Adaptation, where we will all delve into the strategies needed to adapt and thrive.

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Merchant Services Payment Services Payment Methods Payment Facilitation 131

Chargebee

APRIL 18, 2024

Chargebee’s London-based user conference, beelieve, hummed with excitement as it united trailblazers and innovators from the subscription and revenue growth sector. A standout moment was the “beelievers” awards, honoring visionary leaders and organizations shaping the subscription landscape’s future. Let’s explore the winners in each category, highlighting their exceptional contributions to efficiency, transformation, retention, revenue growth, and leadership.

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Innovation Leadership Subscription Payment Features 116

SaaStr

APRIL 22, 2024

So this is the time of the year when founders step down. Often quietly. Folks recover a bit from the end-of-year push, reflect, and sometimes … decide it’s time to bring in someone new. A CEO to take things to the next level. Etc. And even more of us think about it. Heck, I’ve thought about it several times over the years. I always try to talk founders out it handing over the reigns.

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Tom Tunguz

APRIL 22, 2024

On Friday May 3rd at 9:30 Pacific time, Office Hours will host Jordan Tigani, CEO of MotherDuck. Jordan’s path through data starts with being the founding tech lead on Google Big Query to SingleStore’s Chief Product Officer to MotherDuck’s CEO. He wrote the Big Data is Dead , explaining that a power law applies to most companies’ data.

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Data Innovation Cloud Marketing 226

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