SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2023

Non-founder CEOs get fired all the time — and these days, are quitting more often than ever. Founder-CEOs getting fired seems rarer these days, though. Ubers and WeWorks aside. Two that would be hard to imagine happening today: Pushing Steve Jobs out of Apple. Pushing Sergey Brin + Larry Page “down” to bring in an Outside CEO. A few that we don’t hear about too much: Elon Musk pushing out the first CEO of Tesla.

Technical Review 247

Technical Review CTO SaaS Scaling 247

User Pilot

OCTOBER 26, 2023

What is software ROI and how to measure it? Why is important for business growth ? These are the main questions the article tackles, so if you’re after the answers, you’re in the right place! We also share benchmarks, important metrics to track, and best practices. Let’s get right to it. TL;DR Software ROI, or Return on Investment , represents the financial and business benefits of implementing a software application while factoring in the cost of the investment.

Outsourcing Services 105

Outsourcing Services Software Outsourced Development SaaS 105

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 23, 2023

Yesterday, both Google and Microsoft announced their earnings for their cloud businesses. 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. In the chart, it’s immediately evident that Mongo has seen dramatic increase in growth rate last quarter.

AI Search 309

AI Search AI Cloud Azure 309

Point Nine Land

OCTOBER 23, 2023

P9 Panel on Hiring Sales Leaders — Founders Summit 2023 “You are going to fire your first sales manager!” — A lesson too many founders learn the hard way. We recently hosted the Point Nine Founders Summit, featuring several panels and presentations from founders, CFOs, COOs, and sales execs on building early sales teams and hiring your first successful sales leaders.

Sales Hiring 125

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors Technical Cofounder 125

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Payments

Buffer Resources

OCTOBER 17, 2023

Most weeks, I stare blankly at my LinkedIn channel, wondering what on earth I should post. It's hard. Coming up with new content on a weekly or even daily basis isn’t just time-consuming, it can be infuriating. Fortunately, Buffer’s AI Assistant can help. But there’s a secret you need to know if you want to get the most out of it: adding the right prompts.

AI 127

AI Social Media Trends Engagement 127

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2023

We’re hiring at SaaStr!! We’ve got at least 6 roles open: Director of Email / Growth Marketing. Take over our complex email campaigns to drive event attendance and ticket sales, as well as our 4 weekly newsletters. VP/Director of Events. Own the Annual + Europa, or at least a big piece of them. Director of Sponsor Success. Make 50+ of our top 200 sponsors more successful and happy.

Sales Hiring 263

Sales Hiring Healthcare Growth Marketing Sales 263

FastSpring

OCTOBER 25, 2023

Q4 sales numbers usually outperform the rest of the year thanks to year-end holidays and their associated shopping cycles — but how much does that trend carry over into software and SaaS sales? And does it improve B2B sales too, or is it more just a B2C advantage? FastSpring serves as a merchant of record for over 3500 companies that use our platform every day to sell digital products globally.

SaaS Payments 135

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Software Review Merchant Services 135

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Last week, Office Hours hosted Oliver Jay, former CRO at Asana to talk about Avoiding the PLG Trap. More than 900 people registered for the event. The full recording is here or embedded below on the web. Oliver shared some trenchant insights about his experience leading the GTM teams to success. These are three of the lessons that stood out to me espcially managing the transition from product to sales-led growth (PLG -> SLG).

compliance 298

compliance Benchmarks Engineering Pricing 298

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 31, 2023

Why can’t we connect with 911 operators on FaceTime or WhatsApp, to easily share photos and videos from the scene? Why do we wait for an emergency vehicle to arrive at an accident site to understand what’s happening when drones can get there faster and provide “eye in the sky” perspectives for first responders en route? According to the FBI, a car is stolen every 23 seconds in the United States, and 40% are never recovered — a shockingly high number given all of the data and technology available

Artificial Intelligence 139

Artificial Intelligence Technology Banking Innovation 139

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.

Innovation

Buffer Resources

OCTOBER 4, 2023

I wanted to nail my personal brand on LinkedIn — but I had no idea where to start. Over the past few years, I’ve watched as the platform evolved from a job seekers' hub to a playground for entrepreneurs and creators looking to become industry authorities and drive sales. There’s no doubt doing so is incredibly powerful. LinkedIn is 277 percent more effective at generating leads than Facebook and Twitter.

Branding 138

Branding Social Media Underperforming Technical Team Engagement 138

The Daily Egg

OCTOBER 6, 2023

Acquiring customers is a challenge. If you can use sales and marketing data to help you tell which products attract a potential. The post Salespanel Review appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Sales 278

Sales Data Marketing 278

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What’s The Best Way to Get Traction After We Have A Few Paying Customers? Answer: try everything that just might work, even a little bit. Then: double down on anything that works even a little. That may sound obvious, but what I mean is, most start-ups scale roughly the same way after $1m-$2m in ARR or so, at a given price point. But they often get to $1m ARR different ways, and especially to the first $100k in ARR.

Scale 262

Scale Sales Hiring Growth Hacking Content Marketing 262

Sparktoro

OCTOBER 26, 2023

I’ve told this story only once before. Never in writing. Never on video. My voice was shaky and I barely stumbled through it. But with a few years of distance I think I’m finally ready. Here goes… For 17 years I had one job.

Startup 124

Startup 124

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Revenue

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 26, 2023

In 2021, Amazon announced they had reduced prices on Amazon Web Services 107 times since launch. This drop in prices has grown AWS into a $90b revenue business in 17 years. As storage & compute became less expensive, the economic viability of new use cases became increasingly apparent & developers built software on the cloud. The same cost-reduction phenomenon is occurring with blockchains, though it’s not nearly as well publicized.

Blockchain 263

Blockchain AWS Pricing Innovation 263

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 13, 2023

If one thing is certain about generative AI, it’s that no one knows exactly how it will play out from a product or user experience perspective. Which interfaces will win out? Which tasks will be augmented by large language models (LLMs), and which ones will be completely upended by them? How will creative AI models change our expectations of what we can do with computers?

Generative AI 127

Generative AI Artificial Intelligence AI Enterprise 127

Buffer Resources

OCTOBER 23, 2023

The beauty of short-form video is that it allows anyone to become a creator. With a phone and the Internet, you can start growing a platform for yourself. The other side to this, however, is that the bar for quality has been reduced, and you’ll need to put in extra effort to see meaningful growth.  This is as true for YouTube Shorts as for any other platform.

Social Media 128

Social Media Trends Engagement Branding 128

The Daily Egg

OCTOBER 5, 2023

When you need inbound telephone capabilities to help you appear like a larger professional company to customers, the 800.com business phone number. The post 800.com Review appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Business 278

Business 278

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Payments

SaaStr

OCTOBER 9, 2023

So a question for the ages of marketers — is a bigger booth worth it? I had my doubts after 9 years of SaaStr Annuals. I assumed they’d all perform kind of the same. But, I was wrong. The data: Qualified Leads this year ranged from 95 at lowest-yielding of almost 200 sponsors, to 1597 at the top — a wide range But on average, each Gold got 207 Qualified Leads Next up?

Data 259

Data Investment Branding Marketing 259

Point Nine Land

OCTOBER 25, 2023

Sharing our mental model on gen AI in SaaS Over the past twelve months, like many others, I’ve been diving deep into generative AI and its implications for SaaS companies, as well as what it means for us as early-stage SaaS investors. I’ve already shared some of my thoughts before (e.g., here , here , here , and here ), and Louis Coppey summarized his learnings exploring GPT/LLMs in this great post.

Generative AI 122

Generative AI AI Artificial Intelligence Startup 122

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 22, 2023

On November 8th, I’ll share my 10 Top Trends in Data & AI at the IMPACT Summit. Last year, I covered 9 topics: Cloud data warehouses will process 75% of workloads by 2024. Data workloads segment into in-memory, cloud data warehouse, & cloud data lakes. Metrics layers unify the data stack. LLMs change the roles of data engineers. WASM becomes an essential component of web applications.

Trends 260

Trends AI Data Cloud 260

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 4, 2023

This article is the third of four installments in our new series, How Fintech Companies Can Simplify Their Funding Strategy. Read part 1 on Choosing the Right Funding Structure here. Read part 2 on Trade-offs Across Terms here. In this series, we have explored a variety of funding options for startups looking to launch a new financial product as well as terms to consider when negotiating your first warehouse facility.

Outsourcing Services 124

Outsourcing Services Software Review Scale Banking 124

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User Experience

Buffer Resources

OCTOBER 18, 2023

Instagram is one social media platform that is evolving at a rate of knots. Remember when all you could do on Instagram was share oversaturated images of your food? (Love you, Lo-Fi filter.) Now the social network lets you do everything from broadcasting to your followers to creating your own stickers with AI , with a host of new features only hitting the Meta-owned app in the last few months.

AI Search 127

AI Search Social Media AI Subscription 127

The Daily Egg

OCTOBER 9, 2023

Website owners have an option: create AI content, or employ human writers and editors. Although the idea of taking advantage of artificial. The post AIContentfy Review appeared first on The Daily Egg.

AI 275

AI 275

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What Does A Salesperson Need To Do To “Earn Your Business”? Solve my problem. Just truly solve my problem. The beauty to sales in SaaS is as sales professionals, for the most part, you aren’t selling a commodity or a fungible product. You can’t just go down the street, or to another website, to get a better deal on the Ford F-150.

Business 257

Business Pricing SaaS Sales 257

Sparktoro

OCTOBER 17, 2023

Today, Google’s search results still look (mostly) like lists of snippets and links, e.g. But, plenty of search marketers and industry observers suspect we’re in the closing days of this format, and the future holds something closer to how AI-tools like ChatGPT and Bard answer user-inputted prompts, e.g.

AI Search 113

AI Search AI ChatGPT Marketing 113

As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.

Pricing

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 30, 2023

The Federal Trade Commission’s focus on technology has transfigured the M&A market for startups. The Google anti-trust lawsuit & Amazon anti-trust cases may stifle those companies’ ability to acquire startups for significant sums. Facebook has faced a similar suit for illegal monopolization, which resulted perhaps indirectly in the divestment of two of its more recent acquisitions.

Acquisition 247

Acquisition Startup Pricing Technology 247

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 11, 2023

At a16z Bio + Health, we are constantly looking to expand our expertise and partnerships in service of our mission to support founders pioneering transformative healthcare solutions. With the rapid pace of innovation in AI and other enabling technologies, it is crucial that we have leaders on our team with deep knowledge of how these tools can be applied to drive meaningful change.

Artificial Intelligence 112

Artificial Intelligence Healthcare AI Innovation 112

Buffer Resources

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Many social media platforms are rethinking the way they reward their top creators.  A blue tick or badge on social media used to mean you were someone to watch — whether that meant a creator with a growing following or a recognized public figure. But with Meta’s new verification subscription and X Premium , getting the social stamp of approval requires a lot less by way of expertise (if you’re willing to spend a bit of money every month, that is).

Social Media 127

Social Media Branding AI Engagement 127