SaaStr
MAY 12, 2024
Dear SaaStr: What Was Your Very First Sales Story? How Did It Go? My very first sales deal was for $6,000,000. In my first start-up, I was mostly hunting whales — seven-figure and eight-figure deals. I had no experience doing any of this. For our First Big Customer, we’d been negotiating a $6m/year contract for quite some time (they always take time).
USIO
MAY 13, 2024
As time presses on, a world of paperless transactions catches up with the world everyday. Over time the world has seen a speedy decline with paper checks. Paper checks usually cost around $4 to $20 and fluctuates due to certain companies and how they function. The reason why they can be so expensive is that overtime additional expenses go into paper checks like the costs of labor charges, working hours dedicated to making the check, material costs, and other charges levied by banks.
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SaaStr
MAY 10, 2024
So HubSpot had a great quarter, despite there being many challenges in the sales and marketing segments overall in the past 18 months: $2.5B ARR 23% Growth 22% Customer Growth 15% Operating Margins (non-GAAP) That’s about as good as it gets. Even as many selling software to tech have struggled, HubSpot has maintained top-tier growth. But … that doesn’t mean it got easier.
Tom Tunguz
MAY 8, 2024
When a person asks a question of an LLM, the LLM responds. But there’s a good chance of an some error in the answer. Depending on the model or the question, it could be a 10% chance or 20% or much higher. The inaccuracy could be a hallucination (a fabricated answer) or a wrong answer or a partially correct answer. So a person can enter in many different types of questions & receive many different types of answers, some of which are correct & some of which are not.
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Generative AI is upending the way product developers & end-users alike are interacting with data. Despite the potential of AI, many are left with questions about the future of product development: How will AI impact my business and contribute to its success? What can product managers and developers expect in the future with the widespread adoption of AI?
Clouded Judgement
MAY 10, 2024
Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now Q1 Software Earnings Are… Not Good We’re about halfway through Q1 earnings season, and it’s not been pretty. If I had to sum up software earnings in one quote it would be the following from Yamini Rangan, the Hubspot CEO: “Switching gears to macro.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
SaaStr
MAY 6, 2024
Dear SaaStr: What Should Founders Do To Get Noticed By An Established Company’s M&A Team? Don’t bother too much with trying to get “corporate development” or the M&A team’s attention. That’s not their job. Probably the most important thing to understand is that in 95%+ of tech companies, the “M&A team” does not drive M&A.
Tom Tunguz
MAY 8, 2024
The fastest growing category of US venture investment in 2024 is AI. Venture capitalists have invested $18.3 billion through the first four months of the year. At this pace, we should expect AI startups to raise about $55b in 2024. AI startups now command more than 20% share of all US venture dollars across categories, including healthcare, biotech, & software.
Andreessen Horowitz
MAY 7, 2024
As more workloads and data move to the cloud and generative AI takes over the enterprise , cybersecurity is more critical today than ever. And that’s because with every new paradigm shift—from the internet to cloud computing—the sheer magnitude of digital threats has exploded and threat vectors have become increasingly sophisticated. Some of the greatest software platforms in history have risen to the occasion in their respective markets to protect the enterprise against these evolving threats.
User Pilot
MAY 9, 2024
Happy customer service can be the difference between inconsistent revenue and a good bottom line. When users are delighted with your product experience, they engage more and tend to renew and even upgrade their accounts. This article takes a deep dive, showing you what happy service really means and practical steps to keep customers happy throughout their relationship with you.
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Discover how top SaaS companies are earning up to $700k + and zero upfront cost with Usio Integrated Payments.
Stax
MAY 7, 2024
You’ve heard that cash is king. Not so much anymore! Cashless transactions have dethroned the age-old cash payments. When was the last time you withdrew cash from an ATM? Or paid for your groceries using hard cash? If you’re like most people, then it’s probably been a while. With credit card transaction volume hitting over $9.5 trillion in the US in 2022, accepting card payments is no longer a question of whether to, but how to.
SaaStr
MAY 7, 2024
Dear SaaStr: What’s a Resonable Discount for an Annual Contract? How About a 3 Year Contract? First — you don’t want a true net discount at all. What I mean what you want is a pricing structure that anticipates discounts so the net effect is revenue positive. Later, when you implement a CPQ and other more sophisticated systems to manage pricing for a large sales team, these processes and systems will be designed to help you do just that, at least in part.
Buffer Resources
MAY 9, 2024
Social media search is growing. Google search results are increasingly filled with results from social platforms. According to this study , 87 percent of social media marketers say social search is vital to their strategy. There’s even an industry inside joke that adding “reddit” or “pinterest” or, of course, "linkedin" at the end of your search terms will more likely deliver exactly what you need.
Andreessen Horowitz
MAY 10, 2024
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast , a16z General Partner Zane Lackey and a16z Partner Joel de la Garza sit down with Derrick Harris to discuss how generative AI — LLMs, in particular — and foundation models could effect profound change in cybersecurity. After years of AI-washing by security vendors, they explain why the hype is legitimate this time as AI provides a real opportunity to help security teams cut through the noise and automate away the types of drudgery that lead to mistakes.
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.
User Pilot
MAY 7, 2024
Product adoption software is the lifeblood of the modern product management process. It is the key to making your product unforgettable and ensuring it gains traction in a difficult market. In this article, we explore what product adoption software does and identify 12 of the best product adoption tools on the market. TL;DR Product adoption software drives users to adopt a product through carefully curated product experiences.
Stax
MAY 6, 2024
When you think about growing your business, improving data security probably isn’t at the top of your list—and that’s understandable. After all, the topic of security doesn’t sound as exciting as that latest Instagram hack and isn’t as immediately impactful as a new sales tactic. However, the last thing you want to do is neglect data security.
SaaStr
MAY 9, 2024
Dear SaaStr: How Many Hours a Week and On The Weekends Did You Work as a Founder? The first time I worked at a start-up, I was confused. I came in that first Saturday to the office to work, and no one was there. Right before that first start-up job, I had been a young “grunt” in a services business before that for 22 months. I worked in the office constantly.
Subscription Flow
MAY 9, 2024
Running an Ecommerce store takes a lot: not only do you have to ensure that you sell top quality products, you also need to invest in having a robust marketing department that keeps your potential customers aware of the products’ existence. Doesn’t it suck then finding out that almost 70% of these visitors who put items they wish to buy in their shopping cart will end up not buying them due to checkout abandonment and, in general, a faulty Ecommerce checkout flow?
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Explore how integrated payment strategies impact investor and buyer evaluations. Payments are more than a feature — they’re a key to long-term success and market differentiation. They help SaaS companies offer seamless user experiences and efficient operations. Investors and strategic buyers assess these integrated payment strategies as a measure of a company's growth potential and sustainability.
Andreessen Horowitz
MAY 7, 2024
For consumer products, the rubber hits the road at retention. It’s the lifeblood of an app and the hardest metric to move, as I learned viscerally during my time running the growth team at Snap. To attract repeat users, companies can’t just fill a product with the latest and greatest tech — they must intentionally craft each product feature to ensure their users come back again and again and again.
User Pilot
MAY 8, 2024
Have you been struggling to engage users and keep them coming back to your product? Or are you looking for ways to expand your user base to new demographics? In either case, using a product analytics tool to perform user needs analysis is the way to go. To help you with it, we’ve put together a user needs analysis example that outlines the key steps.
Inturact
MAY 10, 2024
Know the aftermath of Google's March 2024 Core Update on SEO, content marketing, and digital landscapes. Discover winners, losers, and strategies for navigating this transformative shift.
SaaStr
MAY 6, 2024
So long time friend of SaaStr Tomasz Tunguz, now heading his own VC fund Theory Ventures, has again summarized a lot of data into a few great charts. This time, on Mergers & Acquisitions. My biggest take-away: there are barely more than 50 acquisitions of $50,000,000 or more, at least disclosed one, in software of U.S.-based startups each year.
As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.
Subscription Flow
MAY 10, 2024
Nonprofit organizations have moved on with the times. No longer do these charity organizations accept only bank drafts or one-time gifts. Donors now have the option of recurring donations for nonprofits. To keep up with the modern donors’ purchasing habits, nonprofit organizations or NPOs can set-up recurring donation systems in-line with these donors’ spending preferences.
Andreessen Horowitz
MAY 9, 2024
If history is a guide, transformative breakthroughs emerge when powerful creative tools reach the masses. That’s why we’re thrilled to lead the $5M seed round for Yellow, a company focused on revolutionizing 3D character creation through generative AI. The potential impact is immense. Despite rapid progress in 2D image generation and control, 3D has remained stubbornly difficult and expensive due to challenges like maintaining clean topology and requiring numerous intermediate repres
User Pilot
MAY 7, 2024
Using no-code tools for product managers allows you to build, iterate, and deploy software products without any coding knowledge. But what is the best tech stack for product management? Let’s review the top five no-code tools tailored for product teams, including their key features and usage in product management. TL;DR A no-code platform is a type of software that allows you to create applications, automate tasks, and manage product development cycles without any prior coding knowledge.
The Moz Blog
MAY 7, 2024
By embracing mentorship and allyship, and by advocating for change, we can work together to build a better future for women in SEO.
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Start-ups & SMBs launching products quickly must bundle dashboards, reports, & self-service analytics into apps. Customers expect rapid value from your product (time-to-value), data security, and access to advanced capabilities. Traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools can provide valuable data analysis capabilities, but they have a barrier to entry that can stop small and midsize businesses from capitalizing on them.
Sales Hacker
MAY 7, 2024
Noah Marks is a transformative growth leader focused on building GTM engines and scaling organizations for sustainable growth. He has been in the strategy & operations world for the last decade (with Udemy, WalkMe, Okta and Salesforce), and has spent almost the entirely of his career in the B2B technology market (with the lone exception being a slight deviation into the world of M&A investment banking).
Andreessen Horowitz
MAY 6, 2024
The Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF) team is often asked by portfolio founders how exactly cultural leaders can be a game-changing asset for their companies. On the flip side, athletes, entertainers, and C-level executives also ask what they should expect when investing in technology startups and working with founders looking to build the next big thing.
User Pilot
MAY 7, 2024
Frustrated trying to design interactive software walkthroughs that drive activation? It’s a common experience. But don’t worry—this article will provide some inspiration. We handpicked a few of the best SaaS walkthrough examples and explained what made them great. We also covered best practices to ensure your walkthroughs get high user engagement.
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