Brantley Pace’s Post

The SaaS business model - not what it used to be The software as a service (SaaS) business model has been one of the most popular and successful models for tech startups in the past decade. SaaS companies offer cloud-based software solutions to customers via subscription plans, which generate recurring revenue, lower costs, and increase scalability. However, not all SaaS startups succeed in the competitive and dynamic market. In fact, many SaaS startups struggled in 2023 due to their reliance on external investors and the declining interest of those during the year. One of the most prominent examples of SaaS startup failure is Pitch, a presentation software company that raised over $50 million in funding but it is now facing a 2/3 staff layoff. Pitch's founder and CEO, Christian Reber, announced his departure from the company in a LinkedIn post, where he shared his personal journey and the reasons behind Pitch's demise. He cited the COVID-19 pandemic, the market saturation, the product-market fit, and the investor pressure as some of the factors that contributed to Pitch's downfall. Pitch will continue operations according to the now former CEO but with a focus on organic growth and sales rather than attracting new investors. This is a useful reminder of the challenges and opportunities for tech startups in 2024, and the lessons learned from Pitch's failure. What do you think of the SaaS business model and the SaaS industry? Do you agree or disagree with the post? Please share your thoughts and opinions in the comments below. #SaaS #SoftwareDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareCompanies #SoftwareSolutions #SoftwareTrends #HristovDevelopment

One thing that I realized by the second year of my venture was that the true blocker for my venture's growth was tech/engineering. If your business model & unit economics are working, your speed of iterating and building your tech is where ALL the growth lies. Tech, with solid prioritization, creates that 'operating leverage' which can help you grow your revenue faster than your costs. It not only powers your customer-facing apps but is the backbone for backend operations, especially for a last-mile venture like mine. We faced delays in deploying our geo-fencing and multi-pickups functionality leading to higher costs and subsequently, higher delivery charges to the customers, impacting our competitiveness and growth. It's always a chain-reaction where at the end of the day, it all went back to experience & costs due to slow/off-shore tech development. It even derailed our acquisition discussions with Careem 🤯 So before rolling with the startup-ideas, get your tech-leader/cofounder rolling in-house, on-ground & in full-control. You can still fail, but that's for another day. #learnings #cofounder #tech #growth #saas #leverage #lastmile #software #startups builders & engineers tinkering with saas/web3 ideas, let's connect -> https://buff.ly/3QTPNoo

I’ve been building software products and startups for a few years now. 🛠️ It’s hard work. Like, really, really hard. 😓 But it’s also exciting and exhilarating and amazing, especially when customers are happy, coming back for more, and sticking around for a really long time. 😊🔄 It’s also easier when other software companies offer truly special pricing for startup founders and teams. Building any business is costly, so price breaks from other companies are godsends, immensely appreciated and can sometimes be game changing. So, it’s my pleasure to announce a new AtlasGM pricing plan designed exclusively for early-stage B2B software ventures looking to scale efficiently with channel partners. 🚀 In the high-speed, high-stakes environment of startup development, there's little room for distractions from the core mission: building awesome software. At the same time, it's incredibly important to foster connections with channel partners early and continuously. AtlasGM addresses this challenge by enabling startups to launch a transactional, private marketplace effortlessly. The self-serve experience enables customers and partners to connect and transact autonomously, streamlining operations and freeing up valuable valuable team time and resources. Who Qualifies? - New customers 🆕 - B2B software startups based in the US or UK 🌍 - Less than 3 years old 🎂 - 3 or more team members (full-time) - Between $3M and $10M in VC financing 💸 Pricing Details: - Enjoy 80% off our Growth Plan for the first 12 months 💥 - Followed by 50% off in the second year 🔖 - Plus, pay only 1% on gross services billings (a 30% discount) 📉 - Up to $3M in gross professional services billings per year 📈 Read the full announcement in our blog article here: https://lnkd.in/dHtc2fFD Let’s do great things together! 💪🌟 Thanks for supporting this announcement with an emoji, repost and/or comment 😉 James, Sarah, Jacques, Fausta, Matt, Matt, Nick, Kristina, Antonio, Tiago, Valeria, Axel, Emma, Jay, Nilendu, Eldad, Dimitar, Matt, David, Sameer, Mike, Will, Puli, Jay, Greg

We made a pivot that saved our startup (and might kill it) 🥲 We dodged a bullet by the launch that never happened! Our best business decision yet. We thought we were building the ultimate pitch deck tool to compliment the rest of our SaaS offerings. A trap we narrowly escaped. Thanks to the countless user interviews and rawdawging we did in the first 6 months of our journey. We were handing out literally everything to the founders. The plot. The design. The thought. That would do. Wrong. Our pivot came when we realized founders wanted a tool, yes - but they craved guidance and personalized support. They needed founder to founder brainstorming. Even those who own paid versions of our top competitors came back to us coz we give the best TLC 🥳 This shift saved us, bringing in steady revenue and keeping our startup alive. Good thing is that we did not blindly deploy dev resources into publically shipping this. We have been doing a lot of BTS user pilots. Now we are at cross-roads. What do we double-down on? Do I have to accept and figure a way to sustain a service + product model. At what cost. Or do we put in more efforts into segmenting the tech-first vs service first founders. Market is speaking & there's a clear need. Resource vs Time 😬 The best step forward for us has been the incredible partnerships we have closed that will help us take care of the service part while giving us enough time to decide to either kill the feature or risk selling. Its not been all bad though. 90% of the founders who work with us extend their consumption of our offerings. Plus it has given us invaluable feedback about the open ends we need to close in our overall SaaS offering. It's a tightrope walk between growth and sustainability. Exciting times ahead! 💀

💰I'm an inch away from having my first £20,000 month and it's f*****n crazy to me. But here's why it's not what it seems: For my first 6 years of building startups, I was focused on one thing: capital creation (read: creating enough money to stay afloat) And most of the time, I barely managed. The truth is in my entire career there hasn't been a single year that I have made more than $25,000. I've been on an endless cycle of building, scrimping, iterating, failing, and starting again. So to open Stripe and see nearly £20k processed in 4 weeks. This should feel like a freakin' enormous milestone, right? Making what I'd usually make in a whole year, in a single month?! But I'm holding off from poppin' the champagne, because I realize I've simply entered a new phase of the business. From *capital creation* to *capital allocation* Now that we're making meaningful revenue, I need to tap into a whole new skillset: spending it well. Honestly, this is pretty scary. In many ways, it feels new and uncomfy and out of my wheelhouse. How do we protect our values as we scale? Am I being an ethical, effective leader in the world? How can I make sure I can keep paying my incredible team? How can I not f*** up this incredible thing we've created? The pressure on founders is immense not because of the day-to-day, but because we're consistently reaching new phases. We're playing in the unknown. We're trying to make it look effortless, but there's so much overthinking, second-guessing, and making educated guesses. I'm so proud to be here, but I'm nervous / ecstatic / humbled/ grateful / excited (ALL THE FEELS) to see what this next phase brings for me and my tiny team I hope sharing this resonates with the builders out there! ❤️ PS: thank you EVERYONE for your amazing amazing amazing support through every phase of Generalist World, let's go get this next one 🌀🌀 🌀 🌀 #bootstrapping #buildinpublic

Greg has some great advice for aspiring entrepreneurs planning to start a new venture in 2024. I would add that it's important to consider the technology hype cycle (especially those chasing the AI buzz) and accurately gauge the market's position relative to this curve. If the trend is rising and hasn't peaked yet, be prepared for a decline, followed by a more stable phase of business growth. Misjudging the timing of this relative to your cash needs and runway while not cash flowing is a sure way to add to the statistics Greg calls out. For me - I like boring and will stick to my lane of slow (not too slow though.. 🤪) and steady 🤣 #entrepreneurship #2024 #CEO #startup #AI #genai #AWS #awspartners #awspartner

Many SaaS startups don't realize this: Once you hit PMF, the challenge is no longer just about finding new ways to grow. It's also about fighting against regression. Before PMF, every action has an asymmetrical reward-to-risk ratio. You have a lot to gain and very little to lose. But when you’ve gained enough traction, raised a sizable round, and have better brand awareness, things become different. Your customers count on you for critical business workflows. Bugs, downtime, and half-completed features are no longer tolerable, but you’re still expected to ship at the same rate. Some enterprise prospects might come knocking with customization requests. It’s too big of an opportunity to turn down, but it is also a big distraction for the current roadmap. You know paid channels are important for scaling, but their underwhelming performance will make you wonder whether the cost is worth it. You want to go upmarket by adjusting your pricing and branding, but it can sometimes rub existing customers the wrong way before seeing real upsides. You think hiring is the solution, but all the time spent on interviewing, coordinating, and revamping the team will slow things down, at least for a period of time. You want to counter-balance the deceleration by running quick experiments like the old days — only to realize that they become harder to conclude, and making the wrong call can erase your previous work. You’re now stuck between a rock and a hard place. You’re not as nimble as new competitors but also don't have the resources incumbents do. You might be growing in some areas but regressing in others, making the overall growth seem slow. And because you’re not seeing the growth you wanted, you flip back and forth between different strategies, which only slows you down even more. Ouch. It's a tough spot that many Series A/B startups find themselves in, but the good news is that you can often prevent these regressions if you know what they look like ahead of time. On the surface, it might make you look more “conservative.” But in reality, they help preserve your progress so you can take bigger, more confident bets. Remember, jogging steadily in the right direction will get you to your destination faster than sprinting in circles 😉 #startup #saas #PMF #regression #growth

“Do things that don’t scale” This is one of the most common advice given to start-ups at Y Combinator This advice insists that in the early stage of start-ups, founders of a start-up should focus on doing things manually instead of doing things that allow them to scale/grow quickly When you hear that advice, you will be thinking, how is the advice helpful? “But that won’t scale…” This is what you’d likely hear from most product builders because the thinking is that without doing things that will scale/grow it will not help you reach the goal of building your company to X million or billion dollar revenue. However, things that scale are the domain expertise of established products. The magic of creating something new is starting in a place where things don’t scale. In this week’s post, we talk about the power of doing things that don’t scale by looking at: 1. Paul Graham’s philosophy and advice to founders 2. Your unfair start-up advantage 3. Example startups that did things that didn’t scale 🔗 Read more here: https://lnkd.in/ddUTs3BV Notable shoutouts to startups that have embraced this mindset in the early days: Airbnb Dropbox Stripe Zappos Family of Companies Buffer 🚀 If you find this valuable, share it with your network! And if you haven’t already, consider subscribing to The Product Blueprint for more insights and actionable tips.

How does one go about their startup journey? This is what we'd go for: 1. Exit the startup circus quickly: → Ditch the fundraising charade. → Ignore the so-called mentors and advisors. → Stop dressing up my business as a fake unicorn. 2. Bootstrap with a vengeance: → Use our own funds. → Pour in the sweat equity. → Tap into government grants for the initial launch. 3. Keep the team lean: → No early hires. → Outsource non-critical tasks. → Rely on the co-founding squad for the core functions. 4. Rethink building products: → Abandon initial solutions I had in mind. → Don't write a single line of code. → Wait for # 5. 5. Find and cherish 'The One Customer' who’s willing to: → Educate me on their business and pain points. → Identify the most critical challenges for quick wins. → Provide a landscape of existing solutions and their gaps. → Demystify their buying process. 6. Develop and refine an MVP: → Work hand-in-hand with this customer. → Offer them a substantial lifetime discount. → Never offer my solution for free. 7. Grow through referrals: → Leverage the first customer’s network. → Onboard their peers on the initial product. → Learn and iterate with each new customer. 8. Monetize from day one: → Generate revenues right out of the gate. → Scale sensibly and wisely. There's no rush. → Always stay below the break-even threshold. 9. Maintain a lean, agile team: → Hire deliberately. → Focus on product development. → Handle sales myself, at least for the first year. 10. Figure out the rest as I go. What do my fellow early stage founders think? #founders #startup #startupecosystem #ceolife

Here’s the most common question I get from startup employees: I’m leaving my startup – should I exercise my options? 90% of the time, I say no. For most employees, the value of stock options in startups is a lie perpetuated by founders, CEOs, and investors: these options will make you some real money. More likely, they will be worthless OR they will cost you money. Sure - there are exceptions like DoorDash, Datadog, and Snowflake. But for the rest of us, there is less than a 10% chance your options will be worth millions. My quick rule of thumb → Unless the startup is later-stage with a layup to get to $100M in annual revenue, don’t do it. Startups with less than $100M revenue (typically Series C/D+) rarely exit. In thinking about whether to exercise options, we fear the worst: We leave the company, don’t exercise, and five years later we see Instagram posts by former co-workers buying new homes after the company IPO. Remember that when you exercise your options, you are now an investor in the company. So act like one. Don’t make the decision based on FOMO. Develop your conviction: Can you see $100 M in annual revenue, healthy margins, and continued growth for this company? Think like a late-stage investor - not someone who wants something to show for their time and effort.