2023

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Why Your Startup Needs a Fractional CTO – TechEmpower

TechEmpower SaaS

A Fractional CTO bridges the gap between founders and developers to help keep your tech strategy aligned with your business goals. This helps your startup stay agile and competitive in a fast-paced marketplace.

CTO Hire 975
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Raising Venture Capital in 2024? The Air is Very, Very Thin Above $200,000,000 Valuations

SaaStr

If I had to summarize venture capital today, it would be like this: There is Very Little Oxygen Today Above $200m Valuations What do I mean? It’s still a weird world in venture: Firms are both shutting down and raising new funds. More entrepreneurs are doing direct investing themselves than ever. Unicorns are hurting, but — Nasdaq is at an all-time high.

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How Much Does it Cost to Use an LLM?

Tom Tunguz

How much does AI cost? It depends on a a few different dimensions, but for a typical use case where a user enters a query & expects about a 200 word response, the cost varies from $0.03 to $3.60. Different models cost different amounts. Also, the size of the context window is an important factor. The context window is a fancy way of saying the quantity of background information the user can provide to the AI.

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Nifty Project Management Review

The Daily Egg

Nifty is a project management software company that focuses on providing an all-in-one solution. Get collaboration features, discussions, document sharing, and reporting. The post Nifty Project Management Review appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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Build the Case: Quantify the Real Costs of In-House Testing and QA Gaps

Underinvesting in software testing costs more than you think, and now you can prove it. This guide helps you quantify hidden costs like developer time, support overhead, tech debt, and lost revenue. Use the companion calculator to model your own data, and present your findings with a ready-to-edit presentation template. Whether you're making the case to leadership or validating outsourcing, this toolkit gives you the numbers and tools you need.

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53 Questions Developers Should Ask Innovators

TechEmpower SaaS

At TechEmpower, we frequently talk to startup founders, CEOs, product leaders, and other innovators about their next big tech initiative. It’s part of our job to ask questions about their plans, challenge their assumptions, and suggest paths to success. The conversations are interesting and varied because they’re about new, exciting, different things.

More Trending

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ChatGPT & Taylor Swift

Tom Tunguz

For each of the 14 weeks, more people searched for ChatGPT than Taylor Swift according to Google Trends data. You won’t find people outside of tech hubs googling for microservices or layer 2 blockchains or serverless databases with any great frequency. But Minnesotans & Idahoans & Vermontans are searching for ChatGPT. People are curious about AI.

ChatGPT 360
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Webnode Review

The Daily Egg

Webnode is a website builder utilized by more than 40 million users. With Webnode, you can build a simple website or blog. The post Webnode Review appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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Should I Sell for $50m … Or Push On And Try to Build a Unicorn? Especially … Today?

SaaStr

A life poorly lived is a trap Go for it at least once — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin  (@jasonlk) May 5, 2023 BusinessInsider had a great story a ways back on Datto’s $1b exit to Vista Private Equity (more on the role of PE in SaaS here ). So much of it resonated with me, especially the story of the CEO’s 10-year journey, and turning down an earlier $100m offer to sell.

Banking 353
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Clouded Judgement 12.1.23 - Net New ARR Starts to Rebound + AWS ReInvent Recap

Clouded Judgement

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now Amazon ReInvent This week Amazon had their annual AWS ReInvent conference. Couple takeaways for me: 2024 is shaping up to be the “prototype to production” year for AI. This year, there was tons of experimentation.

AWS 299
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The Next Evolution in Subscriptions and Recurring Payments

Rise to the next level of recurring revenue. Discover how recurring payments are reshaping industries beyond simple subscriptions, driving a $1.5 trillion market. Learn the crucial strategies for building scalable, secure, and seamless recurring payment infrastructure to boost customer retention and fuel growth.

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2023 SaaS Benchmarks Report

OpenView Labs

Discover essential SaaS growth insights in the 7th edition of our SaaS Benchmarks Report. Learn about ARR, product-led growth, retention strategies, and more for 2023.

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The Definitive Guide: Product Analytics for Product-Led Growth

OpenView Labs

Leading product-led growth companies are growing 50% year over year, far faster than traditional SaaS companies (21%) according to recent benchmarks. It’s no surprise then that PLG is buzzing within the industry. That said, achieving true product-led growth takes a winning combination of free parts of your product, virality, paying users, and more. Startups spend years (and thousands of dollars) trying to figure out the right model for viral growth – and many never do.

Scale 52
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What’s going on with pricing this year? A deep dive into 2023 pricing data.

OpenView Labs

Every year, OpenView uncovers the latest SaaS pricing trends, and this year is no different. Our seventh annual SaaS Benchmarks report , released earlier this fall, revealed five key trends around pricing (in addition to a range of other important SaaS metrics) based on findings from more than 700 SaaS companies. Here’s what we found: 1. Folks are changing both pricing and packaging.

Pricing 52
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How an AI sidecar product drove 30% of sign-ups: Eraser’s founder on building and growing DiagramGPT

OpenView Labs

Editor’s Note: This article, by Eraser founder Shin Kim, first appeared in Kyle Poyar’s newsletter, Growth Unhinged, which explores the unexpected behind today’s fastest-growing startups. You can subscribe to get the latest from Kyle here. Eraser — a documents and diagrams tool for engineering teams that I founded in November 2020 — has grown rapidly, with sign-ups scaling by 20x in the last year.

AI 52
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What’s New in Apache Airflow® 3.0—And How Will It Reshape Your Data Workflows?

Speaker: Tamara Fingerlin, Developer Advocate

Apache Airflow® 3.0, the most anticipated Airflow release yet, officially launched this April. As the de facto standard for data orchestration, Airflow is trusted by over 77,000 organizations to power everything from advanced analytics to production AI and MLOps. With the 3.0 release, the top-requested features from the community were delivered, including a revamped UI for easier navigation, stronger security, and greater flexibility to run tasks anywhere at any time.

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The Pre-PMF Guide to Product Management: How to Move Faster and Stop Throwing Away Your Roadmaps

OpenView Labs

Editor’s Note: This article, by June founder Enzo Avigo, first appeared in Kyle Poyar’s newsletter, Growth Unhinged, which explores the unexpected behind today’s fastest-growing startups. You can subscribe to get the latest from Kyle here. For someone who had spent seven years as a Product Manager (PM), confidently stepping into the world of entrepreneurship, this turn of events was nothing short of a rude awakening.

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How to Maximize ROI on Your Early Paid Advertising Efforts

OpenView Labs

So, you want to use paid advertisements for your early-stage B2B startup to drive user sign-ups or contact sales. Your company has little to no experience with paid campaigns, and you’re reluctant to spend money on something that might not work. Whether you’re considering your first paid campaign or have launched a few campaigns with underwhelming results, this article will lay the groundwork for what you’ll need to be effective going forward.

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B2B Marketing in 2024: 8 Trends That Are Changing the Game and What They Mean for Your Business

OpenView Labs

As we stand at the brink of 2024, let’s play a game I call “Back to the Future of B2B Marketing.” We’ll peek into the rearview mirror at last year’s predictions – where I hit the mark and where, perhaps, I went off course – and then leap forward to unravel the biggest B2B marketing trends of 2024. So, buckle up and let’s dive into what’s coming, what’s changing, and what it all means for you.

B2B 52
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You’re Doing ABM Backwards. Here’s Why & How to Fix It.

OpenView Labs

ABM has been flipped, and I’m not talking about the funnel. Companies looking to execute an ABM campaign have their priorities upside down. The promise of ABM has always been better sales alignment and innovation to drive insights about who marketers should target, in turn arming sales teams with the information they need to close deals. Instead, we got a lot of display targeting technology that goes after accounts and not even the right people in those accounts.

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Agent Tooling: Connecting AI to Your Tools, Systems & Data

Speaker: Alex Salazar, CEO & Co-Founder @ Arcade | Nate Barbettini, Founding Engineer @ Arcade | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO @ Aggregage

There’s a lot of noise surrounding the ability of AI agents to connect to your tools, systems and data. But building an AI application into a reliable, secure workflow agent isn’t as simple as plugging in an API. As an engineering leader, it can be challenging to make sense of this evolving landscape, but agent tooling provides such high value that it’s critical we figure out how to move forward.

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How to Use Generative AI and LLMs to Improve Search

TechEmpower SaaS

Artificial Intelligence (AI), and particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), have significantly transformed the search engine as we’ve known it. This presents businesses with an opportunity to enhance their search functionalities for both internal and external users. With Generative AI and LLMs, new avenues for improving operational efficiency and user satisfaction are emerging every day.

AI Search 519
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Selecting a Software Development Company in 2024

TechEmpower SaaS

In 2023, there were approximately 26.3 million software developers worldwide. This vast pool of talent showcases a wide range of experience and portfolios, quality of work, and inquisitiveness. Given this diversity, it's important to be selective in the development services company with whom you choose to partner. In the 25 years that TechEmpower has been in business, we’ve seen thousands of companies come and go.

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Generative AI – The End of Empty Textboxes

TechEmpower SaaS

We recently completed a web-based application that uses a unique algorithm to match professionals with new career opportunities. As part of the onboarding process, the app asks both job seekers and employers what they’re looking for - in a text box - while providing a few suggestions in a pop-up. If you’ve ever used a similar application, (or if you’ve ever used the Internet at all) you’ve probably seen this approach before.

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The Top 20 Symptoms of a Weak Development Team

TechEmpower SaaS

When speaking with founders and CEOs, we often hear concerns like this: My project manager is losing confidence in the development team. The PMs are seeing late deliveries and bugs that suggest the devs just aren’t capable enough. I think that poor communication and differing team cultures might be part of the problem, but how can I know for sure? It’s a good question.

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State of AI in Sales & Marketing 2025

AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.

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Technical Review: A Trusted Look Under the Hood

TechEmpower SaaS

Many CEOs of software-enabled businesses call us with a similar concern: Are we getting the right results from our software team? Most innovators don’t have a technical background, so it’s hard to evaluate the truth of the situation. We hear them explain that their current software development is expensive, deliveries are rarely on time, and random bugs appear.

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Startup CTO or Developer

TechEmpower SaaS

What does it mean to be a CTO for a startup? What does the role demand? Should a startup CTO spend their time programming? Exploring new technologies? Increasing competitive advantage? The answer is: it depends. The role of a CTO varies as the company matures. Here’s a graphic from Socal CTO that illustrates the roles as they change over time: In its earliest days, a startup’s top need is often to produce a product.

CTO Hire 390
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Startup Metrics

TechEmpower SaaS

When talking to startup founders or other innovators, we always ask questions to better understand their business as a core. What does the business do? How does it meet customers’ needs? And most importantly, how does it make money? One way to approach that last question is to use this simple model: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) How will your business reach prospects?

Metrics 390
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SaaS Capital: Across 1,500 SaaS Startups, Yearly Contracts Don’t Actually Increase NRR

SaaStr

So SaaS Capital put out its latest report on SaaS retention and NRR after having surveyed over 1,500 SaaS companies and professionals. You can download it here. There are a lot of great learnings and metrics in the report, and a few stood out to me: #1. Annual Contracts Didn’t Boost NRR, And Even Multi-Year Contracts Only Had a Modest Impact on NRR.

Startup 362
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SaaS Essentials: Failed Payment Solution Guide

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.

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Fundraising By VC Firms Themselves Is At a 10 Year Low. What That Means.

SaaStr

So when I was a founder, I didn’t pay much attention to how VC funds themselves worked. I just pitched them. But fast forward to today, and there is an incredible amount of information about how the industry actually works, and we put a bunch of the best stuff on SaaStr itself. Most important today is for founders to know (1) how active the venture markets are, at each stage and (2) how healthy venture is overall.

Startup 362
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Pilot: 57% of Venture Startups Will Need to Raise More In 2024

SaaStr

SaaS products and services like Pilot track the finances of 1,000s of SaaS and other startup so they’re an interesting source of hard data. What does Pilot’s latest data say? Something that’s both not surprising but also pretty impactful: 57% of venture-backed startups will have to go “back to market” in 2024 to raise more capital.

Startup 357
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It’s Now Year 2 of the Venture Downturn

SaaStr

Here's the thing about venture right now Seed stage remains vibrant, similar to any of past 5-6 years Series A and later has gotten over 2021, and is back in market … but … Has moved back to Default No Pacing is far slower because of it — Jason Be Kind Lemkin  (@jasonlk) March 19, 2023 So folks in venture are back to business. 2022 was a year of dealing with the fallout of fallen unicorns, terrible deals, and slashed valuations.

Startup 358