Today's SaaS Pulse
Salesforce launches AgentExchange, a unified AI marketplace with $50M builder fund
Salesforce has merged its three separate app and AI stores into a single marketplace called AgentExchange, now live with more than 13,000 ready‑made apps, AI agents, and automation components. The new store features intent‑aware search, one‑click buying and instant activation within Salesforce or Slack, and includes a $50 million builder fund to encourage partner development.
Also developing:
The Pinball Customer Journey Has Replaced the Marketing Funnel
The author argues that the classic marketing funnel no longer reflects how modern consumers navigate a fragmented, multi‑channel landscape, likening today's journey to a pinball machine where prospects bounce between apps, newsletters, social feeds, AI tools, and peer recommendations before converting. By illustrating a banking‑choice scenario, they show how users repeatedly loop through various touchpoints, making it essential for brands to be present and consistent across the specific platforms their audience frequents. The piece emphasizes that effective marketing now means delivering the right message in the right place, rather than relying on a linear funnel model.
Hidden Price Hikes Push Customers to Switch via AI
Quick heads-up for anyone using LegalZoom as a registered agent. My annual fee quietly jumped from $299 to $499 this year without any notice. That is already two to three times the cost of other reputable providers. With a quick...
Network with Competitor CEOs to Unlock Strategic Growth
Why Getting to Know Your Competitor CEOs Is Your Secret Weapon The counterintuitive relationship strategy that could transform your business 5 Reasons to Meet Your Competitor’s CEO They could buy you someday (or vice versa) – 60% of B2B exits...
Private Equity : The New Distribution Channel for AI Startups
The post argues that private equity (PE) firms have become the primary distribution channel for AI startups, thanks to the rapid growth of PE‑owned companies—now outnumbering public firms 4:1 in the US. Because PE portfolios consist mainly of mid‑market firms...
DOJ Settles with RealPage over Its Software’s Alleged Rent Price Fixing
The U.S. Department of Justice has reached a settlement with RealPage, the landlord‑software provider accused of facilitating rent‑price fixing by sharing competitors’ data. Under the agreement, RealPage must restrict its algorithm to use only data that is at least 12...
Stop These ‘Best Practices’ Sabotaging 2025 Lead Generation
The 7 ‘best practices’ that are killing your lead gen results in 2025. 1. Copying Competitors’ Funnels I watched Startup Founders obsessively replicate whatever funnel was trending on LinkedIn. The result was always the same: generic messaging, cold leads, and a sinking...
AI‑driven Outbound Cuts Accounts to Three Ready Buyers
If you're an early-stage SaaS trying to scale AI outbound and have no idea what intent signals actually matter, this is for you 👇 My friend Alexa Grabell (CEO of Pocus) just spent 9 months rebuilding her entire sales motion...
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This Week in SaaS Nov 18 - 24, 2025
Top exits, deals, news, and blog posts of the week.
Master SaaS Revenue Forecasting with 4 Data Sources
Join me live on Tuesday! How I forecast subscription, usage, and services revenue. Plus, grab my forecast model template. You'll walk away with the 4 key SaaS finance data sources that create an accurate forecast. And live attendees will receive...
Claude Opus 4.5 Streamlines Tool Calling, Cuts Token Bloat
BREAKING: Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4.5 Several of the upgrades are squarely at people like me, developers building agents. I'm particularly impressed with how elegantly they handle one of the biggest issues developers are dealing with: tool calling. MCP is...
Amazon’s Starlink Competitor Is Launching with ‘World’s Fastest Satellite Internet Antenna’
Amazon unveiled Leo Ultra, the first high‑performance antenna for its upcoming satellite‑internet service, targeting business and government customers in a private preview ahead of a commercial launch next year. The 20‑by‑30‑inch terminal promises up to 1 Gbps download and 400 Mbps upload...
Shared Mental Model Ensures Consistent AI Adoption Across Teams
You cannot ask a thousand people to adopt AI and expect consistency. You need a shared mental model. Without it, the company’s output becomes a collage of mismatched assumptions.
Data, Not UI, Is AI's True Enterprise Gold
AI's true gold for the enterprise isn't in the UI or the model—they're both commodities—what breathes life into AI is the apps, data & metadata that describes the data to the model and then deliver value—just like oxygen for us....
ChatGPT’s New Shopping Research Tool Compares Products for You – so You Don’t Have to Open 20 Tabs
OpenAI rolled out a new Shopping Research tool for ChatGPT on mobile and web, available to Free, Go, Plus and Pro users ahead of the Black Friday season. The feature lets users describe a product need in natural language, then...
Treat Love Like a Startup: Vision, Risk, Commitment
I’ve built and sold companies worth millions. But the best decision I ever made was choosing the right person to build life with.... I’ve done the big deals. I’ve lived the founder rollercoaster. I’ve cashed the checks. But none of...
Clarity Fuels Momentum: Faster Decisions, Shorter Meetings
Clarity makes things move. When people know what they’re doing and why, decisions get lighter. Work connects. Progress becomes visible. Teams stall when clarity fades. They slow down because no one can explain the plan in a sentence. You can...
Pocket Casts Now Lets You Create a Playlist of Your Favorite Podcast Episodes
Pocket Casts, the podcast app owned by Automattic, introduced a new Playlists feature that lets users manually or automatically curate episodes in a custom order. The tool includes Smart Playlists with rule‑based filters such as episode length, download status, or...
AI Landing Page Tools Still Miss Critical Nuance
We’re entering a new phase in how people find products. More searches start inside LLMs. Fewer people land directly on your site. Which means the visitors who do make it through are more intentional than ever. This raises the bar...
Cox Enterprises Hit by Oracle Data Breach - but It Won't Name Who Carried Out the Attack
Cox Enterprises disclosed that a zero‑day vulnerability in Oracle’s E‑Business Suite was exploited in August 2025, compromising the personal data of 9,479 individuals. The breach was detected in late September, and an investigation concluded on October 31, confirming that full...
QuickBooks Leads, New Contenders Emerge in Accounting Survey
Quick preview of the Accounting software category. QuickBooks is again on top. But some surprising players are filling in the other colors. Any guesses? If you work in software, SaaS, or AI, please take a moment to participate in my...
Databricks on AWS Now 10x Easier to Deploy
This is super awesome, it just became 10x easier to setup Databricks on AWS!
Struggling with Passwords? Keeper Password Manager Plans Have a Huge 60% Discount This Black Friday
Keeper is offering Black Friday discounts of up to 60% on its password‑manager plans, slashing the Personal and Family yearly subscriptions to $19.20 and $40.80 respectively. The Business Starter plan also drops 30% to $84 for five users, each receiving...
Real User Touchpoints Spark Honest, Faster Innovation
Every product begins as a question you don’t yet know how to answer. You can guess. You can model. You can argue. But none of it substitutes for the small shock you feel the first time the product touches a...
Predict Cash Flow Impact Before Hiring or Projects
So excited to show off how we handle scenario planning for clients of @Profit Labs!! You can now model exactly what happens to your cash flow when you hire that next person, lose a big client, or take on a...
Figma Is at $20B. Right Where Adobe Offered to Buy It. When Is Saying ‘No’ Worth It in A Strong...
Jason Lemkin examines Figma’s decision to reject Adobe’s $20 B acquisition offer, showing that while the headline numbers look similar, the time‑value‑adjusted cash and stock from the deal would have been worth roughly $22‑23 B today versus the post‑IPO market cap of...
ChatGPT Leads Impactful GTM Tools; AI Agents Rise
If you're searching for GTM tech this Black Friday, start with these: Maja and I asked our communities about their favorite B2B GTM tools in 2025 including which were "most impactful" and which are "must try". 195 software GTM leaders...
Start Simple: Test 5 Pricing Ladders with One‑click Upgrades
Pricing a niche SaaS is hard. Especially while you're still figuring out who loves it and why. You want to test different pricing strategies early. Here are 5 ladders to test: 1) Usage Trigger: events, runs, records. Show a live bar. Offer top-ups. 2) Seats Trigger: active team...
OVH Boss Predicts Major Cloud Price Rises Are Coming - so Get Ready
OVHcloud CEO Octave Klaba warned on X that cloud service prices could rise 5‑10% by mid‑2026, driven by sharply higher hardware costs for RAM and NVMe storage as AI-driven demand spikes. TrendForce data shows DDR4 prices up 158% and DDR5 up...
No Backup, No Cry
The author argues that full-system backups are unnecessary when you treat devices as disposable and rely on encrypted local copies synced to services like Dropbox and GitHub. By keeping all important files in Dropbox and using version‑controlled repositories, any lost...
Build Outbound Email Infrastructure Before Crafting Copy
Build Your Outbound Email Infrastructure The Right Way 📬 Most teams obsess over copy and sequences. But none of that matters if your emails never reach the inbox. Outbound does not start with messaging. It starts with domains, inboxes, warm...
Email Infrastructure, Not Copy, Drives Outbound Success
Every successful outbound program begins long before the first email is ever sent. In B2B marketing, the technical groundwork — domains, inboxes, authentication, and reputation management — determines whether your carefully crafted messages ever make it to the inbox. Most...
Why Reliability Is the Hidden Battleground in Payments Infrastructure
Payments outages dominate headlines because they directly halt commerce, making reliability a non‑negotiable responsibility for merchants. Dojo CTO Nick Fryer argues that resilience must be engineered through cloud‑native, multi‑region, multi‑cloud architectures that employ active‑active traffic routing rather than passive backups,...
Hire Only When Role Is Clearly Defined, Avoid Obligatory Hiring
This post on hiring [link in comments] by Gaurav Vohra (H/T Gokul Rajaram ) caught my eye. The title can be misread, but the underlying point hits on something I’ve seen in tech companies—big and small—for years. I’ve made this...
High‑Profit 3M‑User Portfolio Hits $1M Revenue
An amazing portfolios of apps just landed on @acquiredotcom > $1M TTM revenue > $595K TTM profit > 2.95M monthly active users Lean team, diversified revenue mix, and strong recurring base. Love rare portfolio listings like this: Check more here: https://t.co/iqotQkQkUE https://t.co/aAtqSU3dIs
Microsoft’s Fara-7B Is a Computer-Use AI Agent that Rivals GPT-4o and Works Directly on Your PC
Microsoft unveiled Fara-7B, a 7‑billion‑parameter computer‑use AI agent that runs locally on a PC and interacts with web interfaces via pixel‑level visual input. In benchmark tests on WebVoyager, it achieved a 73.5% task‑success rate, surpassing larger models such as GPT‑4o...
AI Coworker Saves Tax Accountants 90 Minutes Daily
.@Combinely is building an AI coworker for tax teams. It uses firms’ existing tools to proactively handle inboxes, client questions, and return reviews— saving accountants 90 minutes every day. Congrats @Tom_inv & @ArthurGranacher! https://t.co/7QdOSPxS0U https://t.co/OydTCWWSar
Resilience and Vision Drive Infra Tech Success Without Connections
“This isn’t a 3-month tryout.” Aleks Đekić (CEO @ Alguna) shares how building infra tech—without connections and facing countless nos—required deep resilience and a long-term vision. Ep 219 👇 YT: https://t.co/qcHlPohaTO #SaaS https://t.co/HqyvyV3dZq
How Our AI BDR Drove Inbound From 30% to 71% of Revenue From Inbound — By Letting AI Qualify 24/7
Jason Lemkin explains how deploying an AI Business Development Representative on their website, fully integrated with Salesforce, boosted inbound‑generated revenue from a historic 30% to 71% in just a few months. By qualifying visitors 24/7, instantly booking meetings, and feeding...
Comparing 1999 to Today: Key Differences Uncovered
Because I'm old and was around in 1999, people ask me the differences. Here's what I've got. What am I missing? https://t.co/BBkuxy3iXw
Customer Obsession Fuels Intuit’s Relentless Innovation
Everything I learned from interviewing Intuit's CEO. https://t.co/mPBJsX4VXB
A Guide to Difficult Conversations, Building High-Trust Teams, and Designing a Life You Love | Rachel Lockett
In this episode, executive coach Rachel Lockett shares practical frameworks for leadership, including when to coach versus direct, the GROW model for self‑solution, and strategies to make difficult conversations smoother. She discusses avoiding burnout by designing energizing careers, nurturing healthy...
New AI Agent Adds Visual Timeline to Company Research
It's shipping Sunday! (Not all days are Shipping Sundays for me -- but today is). As you may recall, a few weeks ago, I launched a simple but super-useful (at least for me) AI agent called CompanyResearch .ai The premise...
Practical AI Agent Trends for Marketing 2024‑2025
SPOILER ALERT: our new 100+ page "Martech for 2026" about to be released has a lot to say about #AI #agents in #marketing and #martech . Before you do the LinkedIn equivalent of swiping left, let me assure you that...
How AI Is Turning Travel & Expense Into a Strategic Advantage
CEO Marne Martin of Emburse argues that AI is reshaping business travel and expense (T&E) management from a reactive, error‑prone process to a strategic, predictive function. AI‑powered platforms can accelerate expense processing by up to 67%, enabling travelers to capture...
Meet Rodrigo: PLG’s Tactical Expert Scaling $1.5M ARR
I get a lot of credit for ProductLed , but I want to introduce you to the man who is actually in the trenches. Meet Rodrigo F. , our Chief ProductLed Implementer. He is the architect behind our Implementation Program...
Europe's AI Advantage at Risk without Secure and Private Infrastructure
Joe Baguley, CTO for EMEA at Broadcom, warns that Europe’s AI ambitions hinge on secure, private cloud infrastructure as the EU rolls out the AI Act and related strategies. He cites that 48% of EMEA IT leaders waste at least...
AI Boom Thrives, Business Models Still Uncertain
Everyone in AI feels the same tension right now, but this piece finally names it clearly. The tech is real. The progress is real. The spending is real. The business models aren’t. Not yet. This is the best breakdown I’ve...
JAMF Deal Highlights SaaS Growth’s Brutal Reality
Francisco Partners announced this week they're taking JAMF private for $2.2 billion at $13.05 per share. The headlines trumpet a "50% premium" to recent trading prices. The press releases talk about "strategic flexibility" and "accelerating growth." But here's what the...
AI Music SaaS Hits $621K ARR, Profitable
This is the future of music right here. Live on @acquiredotcom: AI music creation SaaS that turns vocals and text into full songs with voice. > 3M+ users > $621K ARR > $559K TTM profit > 80% margins Bootstrapped and profitable. Full listing: https://t.co/Obvm9zKtc6 https://t.co/W1RRxUq9Oj
Frustration with Billing Tools Birthed Alguna's Solution
“This company started from pure frustration.” Aleks Đekić (CEO @ Alguna) shares how repeated billing/tooling pain across companies—and no solution that worked—sparked the product that became Alguna. Ep 219 👇 YT: https://t.co/qcHlPohaTO #SaaS #AI https://t.co/srkKqglNpQ