Blog•Jan 12, 2026
What Is Shopify? How It Works + Pricing Guide (2026)
Shopify is a cloud‑based e‑commerce platform that lets merchants launch and run online stores without coding, offering design, payments, inventory, and shipping tools in a single dashboard. The service supports more than 5.6 million live stores and over 875 million customers worldwide, scaling automatically for traffic spikes. Pricing begins at $39 per month with a three‑day free trial and a promotional $1 per month for the first three months. Shopify also provides a robust app marketplace and AI‑driven content tools to enhance store performance.
By Neal Schaffer’s Blog
Blog•Jan 10, 2026
If You’re Going to Stick with a Mediocre VP for Now, You At Least Have to Micromanage Them
The article argues that while autonomy fuels A‑players, mediocre VPs require close oversight. Founders often retain underperforming executives due to timing or cash constraints, but leaving them unchecked can damage cash flow, sales, product velocity, and morale. The author proposes...
By SaaStr
Blog•Jan 10, 2026
Open APIs Are Over
After two decades of thriving on open APIs, major software platforms are erecting barriers. Salesforce limited Slack’s API calls, Datadog disabled a rival observability startup, and Epic faces a lawsuit over restricting patient‑record access. The acceleration of AI‑driven development enables...
By Tomasz Tunguz
Blog•Jan 9, 2026
The Change You Need Is the Change You Make. SaaStr AI Annual 2026 Will Help You Get There.
SaaStr AI Annual 2026 positions itself as the definitive gathering for B2B SaaS leaders confronting the AI wave. The conference promises operator‑led sessions that deliver concrete frameworks for pricing, GTM, and product development, rather than abstract theory. Attendees will join...
By SaaStr
Blog•Jan 9, 2026
Trajectory
The post argues that the software era has moved from merely adopting tools to mastering the specific paths—called trajectories—through which those tools are used. By tracking how users interact with CRM, IDEs, or AI assistants, companies can automate processes, refine...
By Tomasz Tunguz
Blog•Jan 8, 2026
Where Agency Revenue Is Heading: Fewer Big Retainers, More Mid-Market Retainers, and Longer Engagements
The 2025 State of Digital Agencies survey shows agencies are holding clients longer, with 31% retaining them for over three years and 19% for two to three years. Retainer contracts dominate, rising to 85% of engagements, yet 86% of monthly...
By Rand Fishkin
Blog•Jan 8, 2026
Beeper & Day One
Beeper, the all‑in‑one messaging hub, rolled out a September update that adds Google Voice, on‑device LinkedIn, Instagram typing indicators, and full Telegram custom‑emoji support. The company also unveiled its premium model built on local bridge technology, highlighted at an Automattic‑hosted...
By Matt Mullenweg
Blog•Jan 8, 2026
How to Get Dangerously Good at AI in 99 Seconds With Better Prompts
The post argues that AI’s value hinges on how users prompt it, not on model sophistication. It introduces a four‑part prompt framework—role, context, command, format—that transforms vague queries into actionable outputs. The author also recommends system prompts and a personal...
By Dan Martell
Blog•Jan 7, 2026
5 Interesting Learnings From Motive at $500,000,000 ARR. And The Match Up With Samsara.
Fleet‑management startup Motive filed its S‑1, revealing $500 million ARR and a growth rate of about 27%, while rival Samsara, now public, reached the same ARR milestone with 76% growth and recently achieved GAAP profitability. The two companies differ sharply in...
By SaaStr
Blog•Jan 6, 2026
How to Keep Customers Without Lowering Your Prices: A 7-Step Retention System
The article presents a seven‑step system for retaining customers without resorting to price cuts. It argues that churn stems from delayed value, confusion, and poor usage rather than cost, and outlines concrete actions such as capturing cancellation reasons, accelerating time‑to‑first‑value,...
By Dan Martell
Blog•Jan 3, 2026
Hooray, You Got Profitable. That’s Great, But It’s Not Enough. It’s Time To Reaccelerate Growth.
SaaS founders who have reached profitability are being warned that profit is only a medicine, not a cure. Market data shows companies growing 40% command 4‑5x higher ARR multiples than those growing under 10%, with high‑growth firms valued at 25x...
By SaaStr
Blog•Jan 2, 2026
How Much Equity to Give Your First Employees: The Real Data From 50,000 Startups
Carta’s State of Seed report, based on 50,000 startups, reveals concrete equity benchmarks for early hires. The median grant for the first employee is 1.50% of fully diluted shares, falling to 0.85% for the second, 0.50% for the third, 0.44%...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 30, 2025
OpenAI’s GTM Lead Maggie Hott: No Commissions, 100% Pilot Win Rates, and the Race Against Incumbents
OpenAI’s go‑to‑market leader Maggie Hott, who grew ChatGPT Enterprise from ten to 500 reps, revealed unconventional sales tactics that defy industry norms. OpenAI eliminates sales commissions, insists pilots achieve a 100 % win rate, and prioritises rapid distribution to stay ahead...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 30, 2025
Gross Profit per Token
Meta announced a $2 billion acquisition of Singapore‑based AI agent firm Manus, which reported $100 million annual recurring revenue and 147 trillion tokens processed since its March 2025 launch. The deal underscores the relevance of gross profit per token as a valuation lens,...
By Tomasz Tunguz
Blog•Dec 29, 2025
This Week on How I AI: How Webflow’s CPO Built an AI Chief of Staff
In this episode, Webflow CPO Rachel Wolan explains how she built a personal AI "chief of staff" to automate calendar management, meeting prep, email triage, and provide candid feedback. She highlights that creating bespoke, disposable AI tools for oneself reveals...
By Lenny Rachitsky
Blog•Dec 28, 2025
Member Brief: Why Shopify Should Acquire BigCommerce
A viral LinkedIn post by venture investor Jeremy Horowitz joking about buying BigCommerce caught industry attention when Shopify COO Harley Finkelstein publicly liked it. The gesture signals Shopify’s possible interest in acquiring the mid‑market eCommerce platform. Analysts interpret the like...
By 2PM Newsletter
Blog•Dec 28, 2025
One Reason The Best AI B2B Startups Are Growing So Quickly: Truly Insane Value
AI‑driven B2B startups are scaling rapidly because they deliver ROI that is orders of magnitude higher than traditional solutions. The post highlights ElevenLabs’ $22‑per‑month voice‑over service that replaced a $3,000, weeks‑long process, achieving 1,000× cost and time savings, and cites...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 28, 2025
Dear SaaStr: My Co-Founder Is Threatening to Quit Unless I Give Him More Equity
A co‑founder threatens to quit unless granted additional equity, highlighting the common tension that arises as startups evolve. SaaStr notes that B2B co‑founder splits typically average a 2:1 ratio, but perceived fairness can shift after two years. The recommended remedy...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 27, 2025
AI And The Death of The 2021 Sales Process
The post argues that the traditional 2021 B2B sales playbook is obsolete in an AI‑driven buying environment. Buyers now complete most research themselves and expect instant answers, so a four‑day response cost a $10k deal. Deploying AI agents that can...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 23, 2025
4 AI Automations Behind Million Dollar Businesses With No New Hires
An article outlines four AI automation strategies that let businesses generate million‑dollar revenues without adding staff. It highlights how AI can handle content creation, lead generation, workflow management, and predictive analytics, effectively replacing traditional hires. By leveraging these tools, entrepreneurs...
By Dan Martell
Blog•Dec 22, 2025
This Week on How I AI: How to Get Your Whole Team Excited About AI
In this episode, product designer Brian Greenbaum shares a repeatable playbook for turning a team into AI enthusiasts, emphasizing fast tool experimentation, hands‑on workshops, and a clear adoption roadmap that won over leadership. He explains how championing AI accelerated his...
By Lenny Rachitsky
Blog•Dec 22, 2025
Dear SaaStr: When Should You Sell Your Startup?
The SaaStr post outlines practical signals for when founders should consider selling their SaaS startup and when they should hold off. It advises exiting before cash runs out, when the team cannot be strengthened, or when a founder’s personal “magic...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 20, 2025
App of the Week: OpenRouter — The Universal API for All Your LLMs
OpenRouter launched a unified API that aggregates more than 300 large‑language models from over 60 providers, letting developers access any model through a single endpoint. The platform automatically routes requests based on cost, speed, accuracy, and privacy, and provides built‑in...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 20, 2025
🧠 Community Wisdom: What PMs Need to Master in the Age of AI, Testing Product Activation with AI Browsers, Splitting...
The episode explores how product managers must adapt to AI, covering practical uses like testing product activation with AI-driven browsers and balancing traditional PM responsibilities with prompt engineering. It compares analytics platforms Mixpanel and PostHog, highlighting strengths and trade‑offs for...
By Lenny Rachitsky
Blog•Dec 19, 2025
Is Zendesk Building a Glean Competitor with Its Unleash Acquisition? Not Exactly, But Here’s What’s Really Happening
Zendesk announced the acquisition of Unleash, an Israeli AI‑powered enterprise search startup with more than 70 connectors, to embed permission‑based retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) and AI agents directly into Slack and Microsoft Teams. The move targets internal employee‑service workflows—IT, HR, and...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 19, 2025
Wolfram Automattica
Stephen Wolfram has joined Automattic as a special advisor, bringing his computational expertise to the WordPress ecosystem. Wolfram, known for the Wolfram Language and the knowledge engine behind Wolfram|Alpha, has been engaging with Automattic teams since early 2024. The partnership...
By Matt Mullenweg
Blog•Dec 17, 2025
Databricks Vs. Snowflake at $5B ARR: Same Revenue, 2x Valuation Gap. Here’s Why.
Databricks and Snowflake have converged at roughly $5 billion in annual recurring revenue, but Databricks is growing at over 55% while Snowflake trails at about 29%. The faster growth translates into a valuation multiple nearly twice Snowflake’s, driven by Databricks’ stronger...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 17, 2025
The Best Growth Tactics of 2025
The episode distills the top growth experiments of 2025, revealing that outbound/ABM, partner ecosystems, and events/community dominate despite AI hype, while tactics span content, PLG, launches, and paid ads. Readers shared 50+ real‑world tactics—from LinkedIn engagement outreach and intent‑based ABM...
By Kyle Poyar
Blog•Dec 16, 2025
The $7,500 Migration Fee That Just Cost a Vendor $80,000 ARR. Really, $240,000.
An $80,000 ARR SaaS deal was lost when the vendor imposed a $7,500 migration fee, pushing the contract into the following year. The author argues that such fees create friction, extending ROI timelines and giving incumbents a chance to retain...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 16, 2025
Klaviyo Adds Co-CEO To Get Back To Product. The Dream, But Does It Work?
Klaviyo announced a co‑CEO structure, pairing founder Andrew Bialecki with former Workday co‑CEO Chano Fernandez. Bialecki will focus on engineering, product, and AI‑driven vision, while Fernandez will lead go‑to‑market, operations, and finance. The company recently crossed $1.2 B in revenue run‑rate,...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 16, 2025
Cloudflare CMS Stats
Cloudflare’s Radar 2025 report examined the top 5,000 domains to map CMS usage. WordPress leads the open‑source segment with a 47 % share, while Drupal lags at 4.7 %. In the proprietary arena, Adobe Experience Manager accounts for 16 %, Contentful 8 %, and...
By Matt Mullenweg
Blog•Dec 16, 2025
The Bifurcation in the AI Market
The AI market is splitting into two distinct camps: open‑source models, which remain roughly 22‑25% of usage despite being 10‑100× cheaper, and proprietary providers that retain pricing power for high‑value workloads. Open‑source share held steady, briefly spiking to 35% during...
By Tomasz Tunguz
Blog•Dec 13, 2025
SaaStr AI App of the Week: Kintsugi — The AI That Puts Sales Tax on Autopilot
Kintsugi is an AI‑native platform that automates sales‑tax compliance for high‑growth B2B and e‑commerce firms. It monitors nexus thresholds, registers businesses, classifies products, files returns and remits payments across all U.S. states and many countries. Since its August 2023 launch the...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 12, 2025
The First $100,000,000 ARR at Samsara: How Founder CEO Sanjit Biswas Built a Platform Giant by Digitizing the Physical World
Vertical SaaS leader Samsara has surpassed $1.75 billion in ARR, up 29% YoY, after scaling from its first $100 M ARR milestone. Founder‑CEO Sanjit Biswas leveraged a beginner’s‑mind approach, reassembled his Meraki team, and pivoted based on customer feedback to build a...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 10, 2025
55% of All Departmental AI Spend Is Now on Coding. And It’s Not Slowing Down
Menlo Ventures reports departmental AI spending reached $7.3 billion in 2025, with coding accounting for $4 billion (55%). AI‑driven coding tools such as Cursor and Claude Code grew sevenfold year‑over‑year, pushing daily usage to half of developers and delivering 15% faster software...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 10, 2025
Want to Get In Front of 3,500 B2B + AI Buyers a Week? Submit Your AI Agent to SaaStr
SaaStr quietly launched an AI Agents Directory that now draws about 3,500 weekly visitors—primarily B2B founders, CTOs, and RevOps leaders actively seeking AI agents to integrate. The platform is free to submit, curated, and up‑voted by the community, giving listed...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 10, 2025
Dries OSS
The post clarifies that DHH’s Fizzy is source‑available, not open source, because the company retains SaaS rights to sustain its business model. Dries Buytaert expands on this distinction, arguing that source‑available licensing is acceptable even if it falls short of...
By Matt Mullenweg
Blog•Dec 10, 2025
The Two Context Databases Powering Enterprise AI
Enterprises are adopting two distinct context databases—operational and analytical—to serve as the new system of record for AI agents. Operational databases capture procedural knowledge and trade secrets, while analytical databases encode metric definitions and reasoning logic. The article emphasizes that...
By Tomasz Tunguz
Blog•Dec 9, 2025
DHH & Open Source
Basecamp’s new product Fizzy is marketed as open source, but it is released under the O’Saasy license, which prohibits downstream users from offering the software as a SaaS product. The license’s SaaS‑restriction violates OSI’s rule that open‑source licenses must not...
By Matt Mullenweg
Blog•Dec 9, 2025
The AI Value Gap : Where Does the $7,000 Per Seat Go?
A new OpenAI study finds AI saves white‑collar workers 54 minutes daily, translating to roughly $7,282 of recovered productivity per seat each year. Current SaaS pricing—ChatGPT Plus, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Google Workspace AI, and Gamma—captures only 3‑5% of that value,...
By Tomasz Tunguz
Blog•Dec 8, 2025
This Week on How I AI: Which AI Model Is the Best Designer? And ChatGPT Agent Mode, the “Little Helper”...
In this episode, Michal Peled demonstrates how ChatGPT's agent mode can act as a "little helper" for real‑world tasks—automating LinkedIn recruiting, creating interactive AI personas, and building a parking‑avoidance app—by first interviewing humans to capture exact workflows and then refining...
By Lenny Rachitsky
Blog•Dec 8, 2025
Why Your Startup Will Fail, If It Does Fail: The Drama Inside, Not Outside
Jason Lemkin argues that internal dysfunction, not competition, is the primary cause of startup failure. He identifies unforced errors such as co‑founder rifts, loss of key executives, and a culture of blame as fatal. The article prescribes concrete actions—regular appreciation,...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 8, 2025
Streaming Comes Into the Fold
IBM announced an $11.1 billion acquisition of Confluent, valuing the streaming‑platform provider at 10 × its last‑twelve‑month revenue. Confluent, the commercial arm behind Apache Kafka, serves more than 40 % of Fortune 500 firms and posted Q3 revenue of $298.5 million, up 19.3 % YoY, with...
By Tomasz Tunguz
Blog•Dec 6, 2025
🧠 Community Wisdom: Combating Ageism, Facilitating Roadmap Discussions, 90-Day Onboarding Plan, Staying Stealth Pre-Launch, and More
The episode covers practical community‑building tactics, including how to confront ageism, run effective roadmap discussions, and design a 90‑day onboarding plan for new members. It also shares strategies for keeping a product stealthy before launch and balancing transparency with secrecy....
By Lenny Rachitsky
Blog•Dec 6, 2025
4 Reasons to Send Investor Updates Even When Times Are Tough
Founder communication falters when startups hit rough patches, but Jason Lemkin argues that regular investor updates are essential even in downturns. Updates break isolation by connecting founders with experienced backers who can offer advice or introductions. Writing hard‑line metrics forces...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 6, 2025
The Top 10 “Hidden Gem” SaaStr Posts You May Have Missed — Per SaaStr’s Own AI
SaaStr.ai scanned the platform’s massive archive and surfaced ten under‑read articles that deliver high‑impact SaaS guidance. The list spans sales playbook design, quota cadence, founder dilution, hiring stretch VPs, and financing pitfalls. Each post offers concrete tactics for founders looking...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 5, 2025
From 10 to 31 Tasks Daily : The Agent Inflection Point
An author integrated Google Gemini CLI with Asana, linking AI agents to email, calendar, and CRM, enabling them to execute tasks directly within his workflow. By delegating to agents, he increased his daily output from 10 to 31 tasks, handling...
By Tomasz Tunguz
Blog•Dec 4, 2025
The Most Powerful Growth Engine in AI: Freemium Fueled Word of Mouth
Sean Ellis explains that AI product growth hinges on a freemium model that creates an instant "wow" moment, enabling frictionless first use and sparking word‑of‑mouth referrals. He argues AI lacks latent demand, so viral adoption depends on users experiencing powerful...
By Sean Ellis
Blog•Dec 4, 2025
The 2026 Sales Reckoning: Why Your Traditional Sales Team Is About To Look Very Different
The blog argues that by 2026 B2B software sales will be dominated by AI‑driven prospecting and technical specialists rather than traditional account executives. Real‑world examples include a $4 million deal closed solely by a sales engineer, Vercel’s outbound motion run by...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 3, 2025
An Outbound Playbook for 2025
In this episode, Kyle talks with Fivos Aresti, co‑founder of Workflows.io, about the four‑pillar outbound playbook that drove their growth to $2M ARR in 2025. They stress a hybrid approach that blends manual cold outreach for Tier 1 accounts with AI‑enhanced,...
By Kyle Poyar