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 CTO Hire AI 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 348

AI Pricing Investment Data 348

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 317

Cloud AI Investment Metrics 317

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 299

AI Engineering Cloud Scaling 299

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

FastSpring

MARCH 7, 2024

Every year on March 8th, the world unites to celebrate International Women’s Day (IWD). It’s a day to acknowledge the incredible achievements of women, reflect on the challenges they still face, and recommit ourselves to building a future where equality truly reigns. At FastSpring, we know this day didn’t blossom overnight. It’s a culmination of decades of struggle, resilience, and unwavering determination.

Systems Review 158

Systems Review compliance Finance Leadership 158

Payrix

MARCH 20, 2024

In a market shaped by fierce competition, emerging technologies, and dominating customer expectations, B2B software companies have evaluated many angles of differentiation to keep the attention of their customers. Among the most recent strategies proving successful for software companies is Embedded Payments. In fact, a recent report from IDC estimates that by 2030, 74% of global digital payments will be processed through platforms owned by non-financial institutions, including software companie

Payments 147

Payments Embedded Payments Payment Services Payment Solutions 147

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 333

Pricing Acquisition Startup Education 333

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 284

Cloud Forecasting Payment Features Subscription 284

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 293

AI Software compliance Consulting 293

Speaker: Ben Epstein, Stealth Founder & CTO | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO, Aggregage

When tasked with building a fundamentally new product line with deeper insights than previously achievable for a high-value client, Ben Epstein and his team faced a significant challenge: how to harness LLMs to produce consistent, high-accuracy outputs at scale. In this new session, Ben will share how he and his team engineered a system (based on proven software engineering approaches) that employs reproducible test variations (via temperature 0 and fixed seeds), and enables non-LLM evaluation m

Artificial Intelligence

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 151

Merchant Services Payments Subscription Payment Features 151

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

The Moz Blog

MARCH 28, 2024

Explore a decade of Google's ever-evolving algorithm, revealing over 30,000 changes and a surge in updates, as we delve into the intricate dance between human-driven decisions and machine learning's influence on search rankings.

Machine Learning 142

Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 142

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 327

Investment Scale Churn SaaS 327

Advertiser: ZoomInfo

Savvy B2B marketers know that a great account-based marketing (ABM) strategy leads to higher ROI and sustainable growth. In this guide, we’ll cover: What makes for a successful ABM strategy? What are the key elements and capabilities of ABM that can make a real difference? How is AI changing workflows and driving functionality? This Martech Intelligence Report on Enterprise Account-Based Marketing examines the state of ABM in 2024 and what to consider when implementing ABM software.

Enterprise

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 190

AI Cloud Revenue Technical Advisors 190

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 262

Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning AI Engineering 262

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 148

Merchant Services Interviewing Engineering Onboarding 148

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 137

Social Media Marketing Advertising Engagement 137

Advertisement

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

The Moz Blog

MARCH 1, 2024

It's no surprise that in 2024, the main theme that we're going to see is how to manage SEO in an AI landscape. Crystal shares her top SEO tips to navigate this.

AI 142

AI Management 142

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

So Michael Ho did an analysis here of Carta valuation data in a way that IMHO visualizes in a way so many founders miss. And misunderstand. At the end of the day, the top SaaS companies IPO and end up trading at “standard” ARR multiples. Today, on average that’s about 6x. Not great, but it is what it is. But they don’t start there. Seed rounds can’t really be done at 6x ARR typically.

Revenue 325

Revenue AI Startup Investment 325

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 167

Cloud Software Review Payment Features Subscription 167

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 248

AI Azure ChatGPT Benchmarks 248

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Simplify omnichannel payments with a solution that unifies every channel through your platform. By integrating front-end systems like online, mobile, and in-store payments with robust back-end infrastructure, you can deliver a seamless payments experience without the need for heavy engineering. Omnitoken technology enhances security by tokenizing card transactions for reuse, enabling merchants to drive cross-selling opportunities.

Payment Solutions

Buffer Resources

MARCH 7, 2024

Spent $20,000 on a research report only to spin up a landing page, send an email blast, and publish a few press releases?  Unsurprisingly, you barely got any reach or leads for your report. That’s the old playbook. These days, B2B companies are taking a social-first approach to distributing their reports, irrespective of their audience. In this guide, we’ll explain why social media channels are perfect for B2B report distribution and break down examples of distribution done we

Social Media 132

Social Media Sales Recruiting Merchant Services AI Search 132

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 133

Investment Marketing Data 133

The Moz Blog

MARCH 20, 2024

From new European local SERPs and the GBP site shutdown to a grab bag of Google developments, Miriam Ellis recaps Q1 2024 local SEO news so you won’t miss a thing!

Development 141

Development 141

SaaStr

MARCH 14, 2024

So RevenueCat (where I was fortunate enough to be the first investor) now is the embedded mobile subscription API for 30,000 (!) mobile apps, across 290,000,000 subscribers and $6.7 Billion in tracked revenue. So they do have interesting data. Their 2024 State of Subscription Apps Report is out , and here were my top learnings: #1. 70% of Mobile Subscription Apps Now Offer Free Trials, At Least in Part.

Mobile 322

Mobile Subscription Payment Features Pricing 322

Speaker: David Warren and Kevin O'Neill Stoll

Transitioning to a usage-based business model offers powerful growth opportunities but comes with unique challenges. How do you validate strategies, reduce risks, and ensure alignment with customer value? Join us for a deep dive into designing effective pilots that test the waters and drive success in usage-based revenue. Discover how to develop a pilot that captures real customer feedback, aligns internal teams with usage metrics, and rethinks sales incentives to prioritize lasting customer eng

Revenue

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 167

Cloud Payment Features Subscription Revenue 167

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 239

Branding Software Sales 239

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