2024

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Venture Backed or Bootstrapped? There’s a Third Way. Just Raise One Round.

SaaStr

There’s so much debate on social media and elsewhere on bootstrapped vs VC. Bootstrapped you maintain control, and the unit economics. But many see it as so much harder. And it’s almost always longer. VC can let you go faster, but it can become an addiction. And the dilution all-in generally ends up being 60%-70% by the time you approach an IPO.

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Clouded Judgement 2.29.24 - Shades of 2021

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 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 308
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AI Design Patterns

Tom Tunguz

As we’ve been researching the AI landscape & how to build applications, a few design patterns are emerging for AI products. These design patterns are simple mental models. They help us understand how builders are engineering AI applications today & which components may be important in the future. The first design pattern is the AI query router.

AI 317
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Squaretalk Review

The Daily Egg

Squaretalk offers a budget-friendly, adaptable, and intuitive cloud communication platform to enhance your sales and support teams’ performance and productivity. Its vast. The post Squaretalk Review appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Cloud 277
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Monetizing Analytics Features

Think your customers will pay more for data visualizations in your application? Five years ago, they may have. But today, dashboards and visualizations have become table stakes. Turning analytics into a source of revenue means integrating advanced features in unique, hard-to-steal ways. Download this white paper to discover which features will differentiate your application and maximize the ROI of your analytics.

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Who Sends Traffic on the Web and How Much? New Research from Datos & SparkToro

Sparktoro

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?

More Trending

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Heartfelt Connections: The Power of Relationships in Business Success

Nimble - Sales

This Valentine’s Day, let’s celebrate a different yet essential aspect of our professional lives: networking! Successful businesses thrive on networks of relationships that are built over time, which are crucial for sparking new opportunities, forming partnerships, and driving growth. We’ve connected with industry experts who have shared their insights and personal takes on how effective […] The post Heartfelt Connections: The Power of Relationships in Business Success ap

Business 128
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How to Make AI Your Writing Sidekick for Content Marketing

The Moz Blog

Tasmin shares her tips on how to make AI your content marketing sidekick. Optimize every step of the process, from generating ideas to crafting headlines and simplifying your writing.

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5 Essential Tools for Invoice Payment Processing

BlueSnap

Effective invoice payment processing is crucial for your business’s financial stability and healthy cash flow, yet so many companies still grapple with delayed payments, inefficient processes and the risk of funds stalling in collections. The post 5 Essential Tools for Invoice Payment Processing appeared first on BlueSnap.

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Our First Fixathon: How We Squashed 44 Bugs in One Week

Buffer Resources

Buffer, as a company, closes the last week of the year every year, and historically, as an engineering team, we’d do a code freeze for the week before we’re closed so nothing broke heading into the holidays. (Pretty smart of us.)  This year, we did something different, and it still worked out. We used the last week of the year as a “fixathon” for our whole engineering team.

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6 Reasons Why Your Integrated Payments Strategy Could Fail

If you're in the software industry grappling with integrating payments into your business model, understanding where others have stumbled can be a game-changer for your revenue goals. Discover 6 key reasons behind the struggles many face. The challenge goes beyond the technicalities of integrating a payment system; it delves into the strategic oversight of revenue shares, negotiations with payment providers, and the full exploitation of potential revenue streams.

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From Prep to Pass, Scytale Launches Its Built-In Audit, Transforming It Into The Complete Compliance Hub for SaaS

Scytale

For SaaS companies, it’s hard not to hear the word ‘audit’, without your heart skipping a beat or two. Finding the best audit firm for your company’s culture and tech stack, hundreds of back-and-forth requests, and manually collecting and sharing evidence, takes up so much valuable time and resources. Let’s just be honest: audits are annoying.

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Look, No VC Wants to Fund a Startup With So-So Growth. Except Maybe Your Existing Investors.

SaaStr

Ok some of this post I’d hope would be blindingly obvious. But it isn’t, so I’m going to try to help by being brutally direct: No VC on Planet Earth Wants to Invest in a Startup with Mediocre Growth None. No one. I can’t tell you how many emails a week a month that go something like this: “It’s been a challenging year with 30%-50% growth, but with some funding, we can grow much faster next year!

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Clouded Judgement 1.12.24 - Hard Truths

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 Reinventing Founder Friendliness - Back to the Future This week I joined Ed Sim (Founder and Managing Partner at Boldstart Ventures) on Harry Stebbings podcast to chat about the state of venture backed companies heading into 2024 and 2025.

Cloud 281
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Why Databases Won't Charge for Storage in the Future

Tom Tunguz

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 262
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People, Passion & Perfection: The Key Ingredients for an Awesome Product

Need help launching innovative software quickly? Dive into "People, Passion, and Perfection" and unlock the secrets to building excellent products in the digital age. Fast-track your journey with Tech Accelerator: Agile and Cloud-Native for flexibility & scalability AI-powered innovation for faster results Quality at every step for a flawless user experience See real impact across industries: Healthcare: Empower patients and medical professionals with intuitive solutions Education: Transform cla

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8 IVR Survey Tips: Get Vital Feedback Instead of Noise

The Daily Egg

IVR surveys are a set of pre-recorded automated questions customers can answer via voice or phone keypads. Aside from the benefits IVR. The post 8 IVR Survey Tips: Get Vital Feedback Instead of Noise appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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Email is the Most Consistent, Reliable Marketing Channel on the Web and I Can Prove It

Sparktoro

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.

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How AI Will Usher in an Era of Abundance

Andreessen Horowitz

It’s impossible to talk about new technology without talking about human flourishing — every new technology from the plow to the microchip has typically been followed by a period of newfound wealth for consumers in the form of cheaper goods, improved productivity, and longer, healthier lives. In many ways, the most financially average person in our modern society experiences daily luxuries that history’s Pharaohs and Caesars could not imagine: instant communication, broadcast television, global

AI 138
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The Best Way to Drive Demand in Marketplaces is Hiding in Plain Sight

Casey Accidental

This essay was co-created with Dan Hockenmaier. In marketplace businesses, the network is the product. If you’re not growing both supply and demand, the product generally isn’t getting better over time. And your network effects which compound organic growth are not getting better, and probably getting worse. Most marketplace founders and leaders intuit this over time, so they obsess over growth metrics.

Payments 115
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How to Achieve Product-Market Fit

Speaker: Dan Olsen - Product Management Trainer and Consultant, Author, and Speaker

Everyone working on a product is trying to achieve the same goal: product-market fit. But most products fail to do so. In this webinar, product management expert Dan Olsen will share his simple but effective framework for achieving product-market fit from his book The Lean Product Playbook. He will explain his Product-Market Fit Pyramid and The Lean Product Process, a 6-step methodology that guides you through how to: Determine your target customer Identify underserved customer needs Define your

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Four Steps to a Better-Performing About Page

The Moz Blog

An About page is often part of a buying journey. It can drive people to your site and help convince them to trust your brand, boosting both brand loyalty and conversions. Ann shares four key steps to create better-performing About pages.

Branding 122
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Why (and How) to Think About Your ROI of Global Digital Payments

BlueSnap

When CFOs and other business leaders think about their return on investment, it is easy to overlook payments. However, your global digital payments strategy can significantly impact profitability. The post Why (and How) to Think About Your ROI of Global Digital Payments appeared first on BlueSnap.

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How to Grow on Threads: 9 Learnings from the Buffer Team

Buffer Resources

OK, I’m going to call it: Threads is here to stay. After a record-breaking start, Threads is fast proving that it was no fly-by-night fad but a force to be reckoned with among the other social media giants. Threads by Instagram now has an estimated 160 million monthly active users and counting. To put that into perspective, that’s a little over a third of X’s (formerly Twitter) monthly active users of 550 million — and X has a good 16 years on Threads.

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In-Depth Guide to GA4 Path Exploration (+Better Alternative)

User Pilot

Are you wondering what the GA4 path exploration report is? If so, you’re in the right place, as this is the main question we explore in the article! To be more specific, we: Cover its most common use cases. Show how to create the report. Explain its different settings. Compare it to Userpilot Paths. Let’s dive in, shall we? TL;DR The GA4 path exploration report provides a visualization of successive or previous actions that users take at a particular stage of the user journey.

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Addressing Top Enterprise Challenges in Generative AI with DataRobot

The buzz around generative AI shows no sign of abating in the foreseeable future. Enterprise interest in the technology is high, and the market is expected to gain momentum as organizations move from prototypes to actual project deployments. Ultimately, the market will demand an extensive ecosystem, and tools will need to streamline data and model utilization and management across multiple environments.

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Sapphire Ventures: GenAI Funding is Up 271%. Everything Else? Down -36%

SaaStr

So most of you can probably infer from funding posts and press releases just how much B2B funding is going into GenAI startups. But exactly how much? Sapphire Ventures has the latest data. In 2023: GenAI funding was up a stunning +271% (!) But overall, B2B VC funding was down -36% 2024 seems to be pretty much the same. Top SaaS VCs are investing 80%+ in AI-first startups: This is where the VC frenzy is right now.

AI 317
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Episode 14: Pipe | The Past, Present, and Future of ISVs in Embedded Finance

Infinicept

Our guest today is Luke Voiles. Luke is the CEO of Pipe, leading the charge on embedded finance with their super interesting and appealing product. We discuss the role of vertical software in the embedded payments and finance ecosystem doing a deep dive into past, present, and future in the space. Read the full transcript below.

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The Sudden Repricing of Startups in Early 2024

Tom Tunguz

We’re entering a new pricing environment for software: AI vs non-AI. It’s only happened in the last few weeks. Recent earnings have pushed some of the most important companies to all-time highs. Company Performance Confluent 34% Cloudflare 21% ServiceNow 20% Microsoft 14% This dynamic doesn’t favor everyone. Theory created a public market AI index to track software companies who have significant product plans or current AI businesses.

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10 Standard UCaaS Features + 7 Cutting-Edge Capabilities

The Daily Egg

Successful organizations know that the more interconnected their communication channels are, the better they can perform overall. With UCaaS (Unified Communications as. The post 10 Standard UCaaS Features + 7 Cutting-Edge Capabilities appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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Software Composition Analysis: The New Armor for Your Cybersecurity

Speaker: Blackberry, OSS Consultants, & Revenera

Software is complex, which makes threats to the software supply chain more real every day. 64% of organizations have been impacted by a software supply chain attack and 60% of data breaches are due to unpatched software vulnerabilities. In the U.S. alone, cyber losses totaled $10.3 billion in 2022. All of these stats beg the question, “Do you know what’s in your software?

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SOC 2 Audit: The Essentials for Data Security and Compliance

Scytale

Spoiler alert: money doesn’t make the world go around. It’s data security and compliance. But don’t just take our word for it. 73% of consumers are more concerned about their data privacy now than they were a few years ago. But the importance of data security and compliance is old news, and customers no longer prefer companies with robust security standards – they demand it.

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The Future of Prosumer: The Rise of “AI Native” Workflows

Andreessen Horowitz

Few people love the software they use to get things done. And it’s no surprise why. Whether it’s a slide deck builder, a video editor, or a photo enhancer, today’s work tools were conceived decades ago — and it shows! Even best-in-class products often feel either too inflexible and unsophisticated to do real work, or have steep, inaccessible learning curves (we’re looking at you, Adobe InDesign).

AI 129
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ClickFunnels Payment Gateways

Subscription Flow

Imagine a situation where each prospective client that visits your website receives a seamless checkout experience, resulting in a rise in conversions and satisfied customers. When talking about ClickFunnels payment gateways – when a reliable payment gateway is integrated with ClickFunnels – this vision comes to pass. A payment gateway is not just an essential component that connects customers’ bank accounts to your merchant platform—it is more than a service.