As the generative AI arms race rages on, we are starting to see the early formations of the tech stack. Similar to the SaaS ecosystem, there are three layers to the generative AI landscape 1) the App layer, 2) the Model layer, and 3) the Infrastructure layer. This article walks you through each layer in more detail, what considerations each of them faces, and the moats fortifying them all.
Everyone loves a good 'come up' story, from Rocky, to Rudy, and now to add Loom to the list. In Loom’s early days, the co-founders had maxed out their credit cards and were two weeks away from closing their doors. Fast forward to today, Loom is now valued at around $1.5 billion and has over 14 million users and 200,000 businesses on its platform. Here’s how they did it.
To onramp into the fast lane, Loom launched with a Product-led Growth (PLG) model and attracted users through a simple-to-use free chrome extension. The product’s quick time-to-value hooked users immediately, but it was the company’s execution to convert feedback into features that turned them into evangelists. Then four years into the company’s PLG model, Loom pivoted its GTM strategy to target enterprise accounts and increase its ACV.
A Product-led Growth (PLG) model doesn’t fit every company, especially those offering a complex product and selling to buyers who would naturally prefer speaking to sales. And yet, despite fitting the bill, QuotaPath, a sales compensation and commission tracking platform, has been doubling down on its PLG strategy to drive continued growth. Here’s how they did it.
QuotaPath designed their sales funnel around three outcomes acquisition, activation and retention. Double-clicking into the acqusition piece, the company built a library of free resources that invites any go-to-market team to find best-in-class templates for their sales team. By providing targeted value upfront, QuotaPath drew decision-makers into its funnel, where they could be nurtured and eventually activated into customers.
Spinning up landing pages and hoping for the best will not yield quality leads. Instead, creating content that speaks to your audience’s pain points and desires is the first step to attracting hand-raisers. The next step is to convert their interest into buying intent by nurturing them through an email cadence. This article walks you through the eight steps to creating an effective lead funnel.
How do you help people discover software they need but don’t yet know exists? For Zapier, a workflow automation platform, that meant creating guides and integrations with common platforms to improve the company's organic discoverability. As users looked to streamline their existing workflow, they came across Zapier's resources on how to do it. This article walks you through how Zapier built a content library that now brings in over 2 million readers.
Most companies have a blog but don't have a coherent strategy on how their blog drives site traffic, demo conversions, and new sales. The common issue is not measuring the activity and impact of the blog—treating it as an island that’s disconnected from the company’s larger business goal. This article provides a three-step framework on how to align your blog with your go-to-market motion and fuel your customer’s buying journey.
As a startup founder, the decision to raise capital means balancing the tradeoff between growth acceleration and ownership dilution. In today’s environment, inflated multiples no longer prop up valuations, forcing founders to re-think if cash to the balance sheet is worth the cost to the cap table. This article provides an excellent breakdown of how consecutive rounds of capital impact a founder's ownership.
So what’s going on with public software valuations (and why you should care)? As of August last year, the overall median revenue multiple straddled around 5.2x, which is down from over 15x back in June 2021. Aside from a company’s stock performance, the impact of this decline could be felt in the private market as well. Although the public-to-private multiples don’t have a one-to-one relationship, public valuations could give a sense of how private valuations are trending. This article provides you the latest on public-software valuations and the trends in the industry.
Product-led growth (PLG) companies are always looking for ways to deliver value before they capture it. Four tactics that these companies can use to add value while driving growth include: 1) In-product experiments, 2) On-demand interactive product demos, 3) Usage paywalls, and 4) Smart Trials.
(Hmmm, what are Smart Trials, you ask?) Smart Trials are a way for PLG companies to help their sales team prioritize which accounts to spend their time on. At its core, Smart Trials use personalized automation and trigger-based nurture emails to nudge high-value accounts into converting from free to paid. A company that does this really well is Coefficient, a Google Sheets data connector that sells to enterprise teams.
The path to finding product-market fit varies between SaaS companies. Some businesses spend years finding initial traction, and others never cross the chasm (falling into the pit of despair). For Maven, a telemedicine platform that connects parents with healthcare professionals, that meant starting as a B2C company, but through digital communities, it paved the path to selling into businesses.
In the early days, Maven started with low-lift digital communities that encouraged women to share the challenges they faced with the healthcare system. As the network grew, the company began pitching the value of Maven's ecosystem to employers, who are ultimately the end-customer. Today, Maven has more than 2,000 doctors, caretakers, and specialists and over 15 million users on the platform.
In case you missed the first installment in the 'SaaS Weekly AI Mini-Series.' In this article, I share the three lessons I learned from my conversation with the founder of Advocat AI, a virtual deal desk that uses AI to help sales teams automate contract negotiations. The interview highlights how Advocat AI built a $1M ARR business by spending 12 months on customer discovery.
These are my key takeaways: 1) Don’t rush customer discovery, it may take multiple iterations before you find the core problem. 2) Involve your customers on day one, but be selective when building their feature requests. 3) Be outcome-focused not solution-focused when building your product.
Metrics are vital to measuring the success of any business strategy, and this is no different for account-based marketing (ABM) activities. A few metrics that help to tell the story of your ABM strategy include open rates, click rates, and reply rates (and a few others). This article walks you through the five-step process to successfully track the impact of your ABM campaigns.
The goal of value-first onboarding is to reduce the time it takes for new users to receive value from your product. The first step is identifying the 'activation moment,' the moment when new users experience the full value of your product for the first time, and then eliminating any friction that prevents them from achieving that goal. This article walks you through the key components of a successful onboarding process.
Despite competing in an oversaturated market, ClickUp, a cloud-based project management platform, reached six million users within five years. The company differentiated its brand and stood out from competitors by following a market shift to the 'consumerization of SaaS.' This article walks you through the six core tactics that ClickUp used to achieve such rapid growth (my favorites are: 'use community as a moat' and 'uplevel your social strategy').
SEO 101 tells you that you need 'keywords' in your content to get it to rank on search engines like Google (even I know that). But the nuance is that you need both primary keywords (the main topic of a page and the single keyword to optimize a page for) and secondary keywords (any keywords closely related to the primary keyword) to be discovered. This article walks you through how to find both types of keywords and how to optimize your content with them.