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.

Generative AI 443

Generative AI AI CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 443

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

So Redpoint Ventures published some of the slides they recently presented to their Limited Partners (their own investors) here. There’s a ton of good data there, but this one slide stood out to me, because it was put together in a really clear fashion, better than other data sources I’ve seen. And what it says is that even though Seed stage investing remains arguably as strong as ever … Series A hasn’t bounced back.

AI 310

AI Pricing Investment Data 310

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 1, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now Shades of 2021 in Venture Markets Private markets are really starting to heat up, and I’m starting to see shades of 2021. Anything AI related has always been “hot,” but it has really hit a fever pitch in the last few months.

Cloud 311

Cloud AI Investment Metrics 311

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 11, 2024

The database is being unbundled. Historically, a database like Snowflake sold both data storage & a query engine (& the computing power to execute the query). That’s step 1 above. But, customers are pushing for a deeper separation of compute & storage. The recent Snowflake earnings call highlighted the trend. Larger customers prefer open formats for interoperability (step 2 & 3).

AI 267

AI Engineering Cloud Scaling 267

Speaker: Christophe Louvion, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NRC Health and Tony Karrer, CTO at Aggregage

Christophe Louvion, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NRC Health, is here to take us through how he guided his company's recent experience of getting from concept to launch and sales of products within 90 days. In this exclusive webinar, Christophe will cover key aspects of his journey, including: LLM Development & Quick Wins 🤖 Understand how LLMs differ from traditional software, identifying opportunities for rapid development and deployment.

Artificial Intelligence

FastSpring

MARCH 15, 2024

Todd Harris knows how to leverage effective video game marketing strategies to get games in front of players. As the former COO and Co-Founder of Hi-Rez Studios, he spent 15 years making games and marketing them to gamers — with the studio’s games reaching 150 million players. (At the time of writing, Hi-Rez’s 2014 release SMITE sits at #15 on Steam’s “Most played Massively Multiplayer games” list , with SMITE’s Steam page boasting 40+ million players.

Payment Methods 186

Payment Methods Marketplace as a Service Payment Solutions Payments 186

Sparktoro

MARCH 11, 2024

In the era of zero-click platforms, native content, and walled gardens, does anyone still send meaningful traffic to the open web? Is Google responsible for 50% of all traffic referrals? 75%? Is social media sending half what search does? A quarter? Less? Are the major platforms sending less traffic overall than they did a year ago?

Social Media 145

Social Media Data 145

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2024

So when I started writing venture checks in 2013, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I had a strong start: First was Pipedrive co-leading seed, then acquired for $1.5B cash Second was Algolia leading U.S. seed, now at $200m+ ARR and an IPO candidate Third was Greenouse/Parklet, acquired for $800m and now at $200m ARR Fourth was Salesloft, acquired for $2.5 Billion cash Fifth was Logikcull, acquired for $300m cash So it was a good start.

Investment 270

Investment Scale Churn SaaS 270

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 29, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now Q4 Earnings Summary This week wrapped up Q4 earning season. I’ll post a more fulsome recap later, but will give a short summary here. The TLDR for Q4 earnings is that “things aren’t getting worse, but not quite getting better yet.” The below chart shows the percentage of companies beating / missing consensus estimates (with the line chart

Cloud 278

Cloud Forecasting Subscription Payment Features 278

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 28, 2024

AI will transform software sales. Most of the discourse so far has focused on how AI upends the sellers’ worldview. But the buyers’ process will also evolve. When researching software, operational buyers & procurement teams alike will use AI to research different offerings. Typing “Compare Salesforce & Hubspot for a 10 person sales team. which is better?

AI 226

AI Software compliance Consulting 226

Speaker: Jamie Bernard

Success in product management goes beyond delivering great features - it’s about achieving measurable financial outcomes that resonate across the organization. By connecting your product’s journey with the company’s financial success, you’ll ensure that every feature, release, and innovation contributes to the bottom line, driving both customer satisfaction and business growth.

Management

FastSpring

MARCH 8, 2024

SocialBee , a social media management platform and SaaS based in Romania, first started using FastSpring in 2018. Co-Founder and Chief Executive Bee Ovi Negrean has used the word “flawlessly” to describe how FastSpring’s merchant of record use case has worked for SocialBee (more on that below!). After adopting FastSpring as their merchant of record, SocialBee even saw 2x year-over-year growth in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) after their first year with FastSpring.

Merchant Services 142

Merchant Services Payments Subscription Payment Features 142

Andreessen Horowitz

MARCH 26, 2024

An enduring promise of new technologies is to find ways to increase human productivity. Software and robotics, for example, have always presented immense potential to automate repetitive mundane tasks that humans perform, freeing them up to do more valuable work. In the last few decades, we’ve made meaningful progress toward this goal, and the first generation of robotic process automation created some massive companies, such as UiPath.

Investment 130

Investment Healthcare AI Business Model 130

Sparktoro

MARCH 3, 2024

This is a very short post to say: If you’re not investing in your own email marketing list, you’re making a bad choice. Social media engagement rates have plummeted the last 15 years. Ad engagement, too. Google CTRs have fallen massively the last decade with the rise of zero-click searches.

Social Media 138

Social Media Marketing Advertising Engagement 138

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What are The Most Common Mistakes Founders Make When They Are Just Starting to Scale Revenue? Let me list some of the ones I see most often going from say $1m to $10m in ARR: Chasing the Shiny Penny. One of the biggest mistakes I see after $1m in trying to enter new market segments, new verticals, where you have zero traction. It’s one thing to invest in an area where only 5% of your business is today.

Scaling 266

Scaling Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Market Segmentation 266

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Discover what B2B SaaS needs to know to become a Payment Facilitator. This guide includes: Earning Revenue from Payments Bank Sponsorship, Underwriting Risk Requirements In depth Descriptions of Staff Requirements Detailed Timeline Itemized Cost List Case Study And more!

SaaS Payments

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 22, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) vs ERR (Experimental Runrate Revenue) ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) is one of the most popular SaaS (Non-GAAP) metrics. However, it’s also one of the most loosely used metrics, and is frequently misused.

AI 183

AI Revenue Cloud Technical Advisors 183

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 17, 2024

If you were to watch three videos on YouTube Shorts - one on Italian cooking, one on chess openings, & a third on crypto trading, YouTube Shorts’ recommendation algorithm combines the video descriptions with your dwell time. Watching the osso bucco video to its end would trigger more Italian cooking specialty videos in your feed. We believe every LLM-based application will need this capability.

Artificial Intelligence 210

Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning AI Engineering 210

FastSpring

MARCH 4, 2024

Working at FastSpring means having a true commitment to fostering a culture of recognition and appreciation, where we all feel valued and encouraged to contribute our best. The Springie Award, our quarterly Peer-to-Peer appreciation award, exemplifies this commitment, providing a platform for employees to recognize their colleagues’ exceptional contributions.

Merchant Services 138

Merchant Services Interviewing Engineering Onboarding 138

Entrepreneur - SaaS

MARCH 25, 2024

SaaS is not just about convenience; it's a smart move that helps businesses save on IT costs and focus more on their main operations instead of dealing with complex software issues.

Trends 129

Trends Marketing Software SaaS 129

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Explore various models of Embedded Payments, uncovering their benefits, drawbacks, and impacts on customer experience. Gain valuable advice for evaluating and implementing the best payment strategy for your business needs. This concise overview equips software companies with the insights needed to optimize their payment ecosystems effectively. Download today to learn more!

Payments

Sparktoro

MARCH 20, 2024

I’m SparkToro’s VP Marketing and here’s how I spent a recent afternoon: I sifted through our Google Analytics dashboard. I was looking for our most popular pages and copying them into a spreadsheet so that we can keep track of what needs to be updated for the public launch of SparkToro V2.

Marketing 130

Marketing 130

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2024

Dear SaaStr: If you were hiring a head of sales for a high-priced, niche B2B SaaS product, would you focus on general B2B SaaS sales experience or on market/customer knowledge, assuming it will be very difficult to find a candidate with both? This is the scenario when the trade-off is the most acute. Imagine you are selling a $100,000+ product and you yourself as CEO/founders have limited knowledge selling to the customer base.

Sales Hiring 267

Sales Hiring Sales SaaS B2B 267

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 15, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now Q4 ‘23 Earnings Summary Preview We’re almost through Q4 ‘23 earnings season with just a few stragglers left to report (Braze, nCino, Sprinklr). I’ll put together my standard deeper dive quarterly review, but wanted to share some high level summary charts today.

Cloud 161

Cloud Software Review Subscription Payment Features 161

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 7, 2024

For those of us who love logic, the paradoxical title of this post should catch your eye, just as it did mine. In Alchemy , the founder of a major brand agency describes the way many of the major consumer companies in the world created brands. We call it breaking out : a double entendre which means both growing faster than competitors but also in a different way than their competition.

Branding 201

Branding Software Sales 201

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The complexity of financial data, the need for real-time insight, and the demand for user-friendly visualizations can seem daunting when it comes to analytics - but there is an easier way. With Logi Symphony, we aim to turn these challenges into opportunities. Our platform empowers you to seamlessly integrate advanced data analytics, generative AI, data visualization, and pixel-perfect reporting into your applications, transforming raw data into actionable insights.

Data

Buffer Resources

MARCH 19, 2024

You could be making the most attention-grabbing, helpful, entertaining videos — if you’re not leveraging the power of YouTube SEO, you’re leaving views on the table.  YouTube is effectively the video version of its parent company, Google, so the way users discover videos on the social media platform is a lot like how they search for something on the search engine.

Social Media 125

Social Media Engineering Trends Engagement 125

Andreessen Horowitz

MARCH 22, 2024

Effectively monetizing any new technology is a race to capture market share while still giving yourself room to grow your business. But the stakes are much higher with generative AI: though it promises to deliver unprecedented value to businesses, it can also be very expensive to serve to each incremental customer. At the growth stages in particular, founders need to be mindful of their unit economics and margins.

Generative AI 123

Generative AI AI B2B Pricing 123

Sparktoro

MARCH 13, 2024

“Most of our site’s traffic comes from Google, so most of our digital marketing efforts and spending should be on Google, too.” – An absolutely terrible way to invest in marketing On Monday of this week, I published a comprehensive look at how traffic flows on the American web.

Investment 129

Investment Marketing Data 129

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2024

So Carta put out some recent data I found very useful on how many startups raise another round, and how many sort of quietly wind down, in the first 5 years or so after being founded (from 2018 to early 2024): Almost none IPO’d in the first 5 years, but that just makes sense. It takes at least 8-10 years, on average, to IPO these days. And half the Seed stage startups had shut down by Year 5.

Pricing 258

Pricing Acquisition Startup Education 258

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

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 8, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now 2024 Guides - Are they Conservative? So far we’ve got a number of full year 2024 guides. Overall, companies are not guiding above current consensus (median guide is 0.2% below consensus). Is this just companies guiding conservatively, to set up the year for beat and raises?

Cloud 161

Cloud Revenue Subscription Payment Features 161

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 2, 2024

In the past, the bigger the AI model, the better the performance. Across OpenAI’s models for example, parameters have grown by 1000x+ & performance has nearly tripled. OpenAI Model Release Date Parameters, B MMLU GPT2 2/14/19 1.5 0.324 GPT3 6/11/20 175 0.539 GPT3.5 3/15/22 175 0.7 GPT4 3/14/23 1760 0.864 But model performance will soon asymptote - at least on this metric.

AI 185

AI Azure ChatGPT Benchmarks 185

Buffer Resources

MARCH 28, 2024

Witnessing a crisis unfold on social media can often feel like observing a storm from the comfort of your home; there’s a profound sense of relief in being safe indoors, yet it’s hard not to feel concerned for those who aren’t, hoping they are well-prepared. While some individuals might be taught crisis management theory at school when studying business management, marketing, or communications, the reality of a brand crisis is very different from the textbooks.

Social Media 122

Social Media Branding Banking Communication 122