Blog•Dec 3, 2025
Top 10 Posts of 2025
The 2025 "Top 10 Posts" roundup highlights a paradox in AI: OpenAI pledged $1.15 trillion in compute contracts through 2035 while DeepSeek demonstrated a 90%+ drop in training costs with its V3 and R1 models. Nvidia’s $110 billion vendor‑financing scheme dwarfs the early‑2000s telecom bubble yet is backed by strong cash‑flow customers. Venture exits shifted dramatically, with second‑market transactions delivering 71% of 2024 liquidity, and public SaaS growth slowed to 17% as IPOs vanished. Together these trends reshape capital allocation, pricing, and product design across the tech ecosystem.
By Tomasz Tunguz
Blog•Dec 2, 2025
The 2025 State of Digital Agencies: It’s Still Rough Out There, but Slowly Improving; and Is AI Really a Threat?
The 2025 State of Digital Agencies survey shows a mixed but improving picture. Half of agencies reported revenue growth, while net margins rose for roughly a third. Concerns about AI as a business threat increased to 53%, and two‑thirds worry...
By Rand Fishkin
Blog•Dec 2, 2025
A Year Free of PostHog ($16,500 Value): The All-in-One Analytics, Experimentation, Feature Flag, Surveys, Session Replay, Error Tracking, Data Warehouse,...
In this episode, Lenny Rachitsky introduces PostHog’s all‑in‑one product analytics platform and announces a free year of PostHog Scale (a $16,500 value) for annual newsletter subscribers. He highlights how PostHog combines analytics, experimentation, feature flags, session replay, error tracking, data...
By Lenny Rachitsky
Blog•Dec 1, 2025
This Week on How I AI: “PMs Who Use AI Will Replace Those Who Don’t” With Marily Nika
In this episode, Google AI product lead Marily Nika walks through an end‑to‑end AI workflow that turns a product idea into a full vision in minutes, using tools like Perplexity for research, custom GPTs for PRDs, v0 for prototyping, and...
By Lenny Rachitsky
Blog•Dec 1, 2025
The 8 Things No One Tells You About ‘Prosumer’ Vibe Coding (That You Need To Learn To Build a Real...
Jason Lemkin outlines the hidden challenges of AI‑assisted ‘vibe coding’ for B2B SaaS products. While AI agents can generate functional code quickly, they also hallucinate, require rigorous verification, and lack built‑in quality controls. Lemkin stresses that non‑technical founders must adopt...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 1, 2025
Two Billion+ B2B Companies Lost Salesforce Access Indefinitely. This Is Your Security Wake-Up Call.
Two high‑profile SaaS vendors, Gainsight and Drift, were forced off the Salesforce AppExchange after a sophisticated threat actor stole OAuth tokens and exfiltrated data from hundreds of customers. Salesforce revoked the compromised tokens, pulling both companies' integrations offline indefinitely. The...
By SaaStr
Blog•Dec 1, 2025
Six Billion Reasons to Cheer for Shopify
Shopify merchants generated $6.2 billion in sales on Black Friday, a 25 % increase over the previous year. The platform’s infrastructure endured extreme load, peaking at 31 million API requests per minute and handling 53 million reads and 2 million writes per second. This scale...
By David Heinemeier Hansson
Blog•Nov 30, 2025
PagerDuty Falls to ~$1B Market Cap on $500M ARR. Just 2x ARR. Profitable Isn’t Enough. You Have to Grow.
PagerDuty reported $497 million ARR, up only 3% YoY, and became GAAP profitable, yet its market cap slipped to about $1.1 billion—roughly two times ARR. Growth has stalled at 4‑5% and net‑revenue retention fell to 100%, meaning existing customers no longer expand....
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 29, 2025
A Beta Is Like Inviting Guests Over
Jason Fried argues that the most effective beta occurs just one to two weeks before a product’s official launch, essentially at version 0.99. At this stage the goal isn’t deep feature validation but a final house‑cleaning sprint to eliminate obvious flaws....
By Jason Fried
Blog•Nov 29, 2025
The “Buy Your Own Product” Test: Why Every B2B Founder Should Be Their Own Customer (At Least For A Day)
Jason Lemkin urges B2B SaaS founders to purchase their own product using the public buying flow, not internal shortcuts. By submitting contact forms, calling support lines, and attempting in‑app upgrades, founders expose friction points that often go unnoticed. The exercise...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 28, 2025
The First $100,000,000 ARR at UiPath: How Founder CEO Daniel Dines Went From 10 Years of Struggle to Hypergrowth
UiPath, founded by Daniel Dines, hit its first $175 million ARR after a four‑year sprint from a modest $1 million base, illustrating a textbook hypergrowth trajectory in B2B SaaS. The company’s breakthrough came from a $10,000 pivot that turned a niche screen‑reading...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 28, 2025
How to Make $100K in 6 Weeks With a Productized Service
Dan Martell outlines a six‑step framework to generate $100K in six weeks by productizing a service. He emphasizes pricing for outcomes, targeting affluent clients, and using a single‑page offer delivered via chat‑based selling. The method relies on a repeatable delivery...
By Dan Martell
Blog•Nov 27, 2025
How the New SaaStr AI Benchmarking Tool Can Build Your 2026 C60 Plan in Seconds
Jason Lemkin introduces SaaStr.ai’s new AI‑powered benchmarking tool that generates a data‑driven C60 financial plan for 2026 in roughly a minute. The C60 model, based on the Last‑4‑Months (L4M) growth rates, provides realistic revenue, burn‑rate, and runway projections, replacing the...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 27, 2025
Gartner: Enterprise Software Spend Will Grow a Stunning 15.2% Next Year. But Most Of That Will Go to Price Increases...
Gartner forecasts enterprise software spending to jump 15.2% in 2026, but roughly 9% of that growth will simply offset price hikes on existing products. The remaining expansion is concentrated in AI‑driven applications and infrastructure, with AI software spending expected to...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 26, 2025
Is AI Support Perfect? No. But It’s A Lot Better Than No Support at All
Jason Lemkin argues that companies should deploy AI‑powered customer support now rather than wait for perfection. Well‑trained AI can resolve 60‑70% of tier‑1 queries instantly, delivering 24/7 coverage and cutting response times from hours to seconds. A hybrid model that...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 26, 2025
The First 30 Seconds Matter More Than You Think
The episode explores how the first 30 seconds of a product experience can determine its success, illustrated by the host’s journey from a frustrating start with Beautiful.ai to the instant wow factor of Gamma. It highlights Gamma co‑founder Grant Lee’s...
By Sean Ellis
Blog•Nov 25, 2025
Our 20+ AI Agents and Their Moats: Real But Weak
Jason Lemkin explains that while his company runs 20+ AI agents across its GTM stack, the core AI capabilities are largely interchangeable—prompts can be copy‑pasted between platforms with minimal tweaks and achieve comparable results. He argues that true moats lie...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 25, 2025
The 8 Things No One Tells You About 'Prosumer' Vibe Coding (That You Need To Learn To Build a Real...
"The AI does the coding. You still do a lot of the engineering, though."
By Jason Lemkin
Blog•Nov 25, 2025
Local LLMs Are How Nerds Now Justify a Big Computer They Don't Need
The author argues that while running local LLMs on personal hardware is technically impressive, current models are far behind the performance of rented frontier models, making them impractical for everyday development work. Consequently, investing in high‑end, expensive machines with massive...
By David Heinemeier Hansson
Blog•Nov 25, 2025
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...
By Rand Fishkin
Blog•Nov 25, 2025
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...
By Tomasz Tunguz
Blog•Nov 24, 2025
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...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 24, 2025
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...
By David Heinemeier Hansson
Blog•Nov 23, 2025
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...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 22, 2025
🧠 Community Wisdom: Resurrecting Churned Users, Doing Performance Reviews for 50 People, Getting Users to Give You Product Feedback, Managing...
In this episode of Community Wisdom, the host curates top discussions from the members‑only Slack, covering tactics for re‑engaging churned users, scaling performance reviews for teams of 50, and strategies to encourage meaningful product feedback. Listeners also learn practical methods...
By Lenny Rachitsky
Blog•Nov 22, 2025
Gemini 3 Solves One of the Biggest Headaches With Vibe Coding: Now Your Site Doesn’t Have to Look Like It...
Jason Lemkin explains how Gemini 3, especially when used in design‑first tools like Replit’s new design mode, breaks the uniform look of AI‑generated “vibe‑coded” sites that have been dominated by Claude’s default aesthetics. By letting developers define their own design system...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 22, 2025
AI App of the Week: Aurasell – The AI-Native CRM That’s Actually Replacing 15 Tools
Aurasell, launched in August 2025, is positioned as the first AI‑native CRM that consolidates 15+ sales tools into a single platform, promising to cut GTM tech‑stack costs by half and reduce reps' admin time by 30‑40%. Built from the ground...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 22, 2025
Dear SaaStr: What Types of Customers Should Be Avoided and How Do I Recognize Them?
The post challenges the common SaaS advice to weed out “bad” or overly demanding customers, arguing that these clients often serve as the most valuable teachers for product improvement and growth. It outlines how to differentiate truly problematic customers—those who...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 21, 2025
The First $100,000,000 ARR at Ramp: How CEO Eric Glyman and CTO Karim Atiyah Built a $30B+ Finance Platform Through...
Jason Lemkin’s post breaks down how Ramp’s founders used asymmetric risk thinking—backed by a large seed fund—to chase high‑barrier, high‑upside problems in business spend management, leading to $100M ARR and a $32B valuation. Key takeaways include hiring for spiky, high‑growth...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 20, 2025
Crunchbase: We’re At The Highest Level of Unicorn Production in 3+ Years
Jason Lemkin reports that October 2025 saw the highest influx of unicorns in over three years, with 20 new companies adding $44.5 billion in valuation, signaling a resurgence driven by AI‑native startups. He explains that while overall funding is normalizing to...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 19, 2025
NEW: Upload Your Agency’s Logo and Customize Your Audience Research Graphs
SparkToro’s new feature lets Agency and Enterprise users upload their own logo and generate white‑labeled, high‑resolution PNG graphs for audience research reports, which can be exported directly from the browser. This upgrade streamlines branding for consultants, agencies, and in‑house marketers...
By Rand Fishkin
Blog•Nov 19, 2025
The #1 Clear Sign a VP Will Fail. Be Honest With Yourself When You See It
Jason Lemkin argues that the single best predictor of a VP or C‑level executive's failure is whether they have stopped doing the core work of their function—selling, coding, marketing, or meeting customers. He illustrates how hands‑on involvement preserves market insight,...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 19, 2025
5 Interesting Learnings From Valve at $17 Billion in ARR
Jason Lemkin highlights Valve’s Steam platform as a model of ultra‑lean, high‑margin profitability, generating over $17 B in revenue with just 330‑360 employees and $50 M+ per Steam staffer. He extracts five lessons: charge premium commissions when you deliver outsized value; automate...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 19, 2025
The New UX Era
In this episode, Yaakov Carno examines the rise of the prompt‑bar as the new front‑door UX for AI‑enabled SaaS products, mapping over 40 real‑world examples from Canva to Notion. He explains how the traditional onboarding flow has shifted into a...
By Kyle Poyar
Blog•Nov 18, 2025
Cursor Hit $1B ARR in 24 Months: The Fastest Scaling SaaS Ever?
Jason Lemkin highlights Cursor’s unprecedented growth, reaching over $1 B ARR in just 24 months and a $29.3 B valuation after a $2.3 B Series D—making it the fastest‑scaling B2B SaaS ever. The post attributes this speed to a product‑led strategy with zero marketing...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 18, 2025
Yes, The IPO Market Came Back in 2025. But It Still Has a Long Way to Go.
The post argues that while the IPO market for software and AI companies has revived in 2024‑2025, it remains a fraction of its 2019‑2021 boom. Data shows only eight IPOs so far in 2025—about 17% of the 2021 peak and...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 18, 2025
NEW: AI Tool & Social Network Usage Graphs Are in SparkToro
The post announces a major upgrade to SparkToro’s data visualizations, now showing the exact percentage of a target audience that uses specific search engines, AI tools, and social networks rather than just country‑level averages. It highlights the ability to customize...
By Rand Fishkin
Blog•Nov 17, 2025
Stop Building Financial Plans on Hope and Prayer: Why Your C-60/C-90/C-10 Planning Is Backwards
Jason Lemkin warns founders that many financial plans are built on hopeful Q4 spikes rather than realistic data, leading to cash crises. He advocates using a C‑60 revenue plan—about 60% confidence with linear growth—and a conservative C‑90 cash plan that...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 17, 2025
How to 10x the Value of Your Business Without Adding a Single Customer
The post shows how to dramatically increase a company’s valuation by maximizing customer lifetime value instead of chasing new leads, detailing formulas for LTV, churn reduction, and revenue expansion. It highlights retention tactics, upselling, cross‑selling, and pricing adjustments as levers...
By Dan Martell
Blog•Nov 16, 2025
The Hard Truth About Fundability: What 2,000+ Pitch Decks on SaaStr AI VC Taught Us
Jason Lemkin analyzes over 2,000 SaaStr AI VC pitch decks and finds that only about 23% of companies meet top‑quartile growth benchmarks that make them fundable for elite VCs, with just 12% truly elite. The data reveals a massive gap between founder...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 16, 2025
How to Use AI Agents for Marketing
In this episode Kyle Poyar talks with Hamish Grant of SafetyCulture about how they built a suite of AI agents to super‑charge their marketing and sales operations. They detail four workflows—platform‑agnostic lead enrichment, an AI‑powered inbound BDR that drafts personalized...
By Kyle Poyar
Blog•Nov 14, 2025
20VC X SaaStr This Week: Why Most VCs Need to Step Aside, What’s Really Defensible Today, and How to Actually...
In a candid 20VC × SaaStr episode, Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings and Rory O’Driscoll argue that the traditional VC playbook is obsolete, urging most VCs, executives and founders from the past decade to step aside for AI‑savvy talent. They outline three viable...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 14, 2025
Stop Looking For Sales Magicians
Jason Lemkin argues that the idea of a "sales magician" is a myth—only a handful ever exist and even they falter when market conditions change. The real breakthrough comes from hiring a first sales rep who can quickly internalize and...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 12, 2025
The Single Biggest Mistake You’ll Make as a Founder. Again and Again.
Jason Lemkin argues that the single biggest mistake founders make is tolerating mediocrity in senior team members—co‑founders, VPs, and partners—because it silently drains time, resources, and momentum. He breaks down three deadly forms of mediocrity, quantifies their hidden costs, and...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 12, 2025
NEW in SparkToro: Take Action Combines Real Audience Data with LLM Magic to Give You Actionable Marketing Takeaways
The post introduces SparkToro’s new "Take Action" feature, which merges real audience data with LLM prompts to turn research insights into concrete marketing recommendations across 16 pre‑built tasks. By embedding smart prompts, a short questionnaire, and automatic saving/sharing of outputs...
By Rand Fishkin
Blog•Nov 11, 2025
Yes, AI Native Wins Today. But It’s Not Too Late. You Can Change. See, E.g., Clio and Gamma
The post argues that while AI‑native companies dominate today, legacy firms can still catch up by fundamentally redesigning their products to "do the work" rather than merely support workflows, as demonstrated by Clio and Gamma. It highlights that true AI‑native...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 10, 2025
It’s Not Just You. Everyone Is Paying a Lot More for AI Engineers. Especially Equity.
In this SaaStr AI episode, Jason Lemkin highlights Carta’s data showing AI engineers’ equity grants soaring up to 40% while salary growth remains modest, driven by an "AI or Die" mindset, big‑tech poaching, and perceived massive upside. He warns founders...
By Jason Lemkin
Blog•Nov 10, 2025
Traditional SaaS May Be Dying. But It Might Also Be Your Fault.
Jason Lemkin argues that traditional SaaS models are collapsing because vendors are exploiting existing customers with aggressive price hikes, mandatory AI bundles, and hostile renewal tactics, turning customer success into a sales funnel. He illustrates the fallout—lost advocacy, higher churn,...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 8, 2025
When Competitors Come Calling: 6 Questions That Will Help You Make the Right M&A Decision
Jason Lemkin outlines a six‑question framework for founders to objectively assess acquisition offers, emphasizing gut instinct validation, understanding the acquirer's strategic motives, honest economic analysis, and the founder's own growth trajectory. He stresses timing, opportunity cost, and the importance of...
By SaaStr
Blog•Nov 8, 2025
SaaStr AI App of the Week: Dust – Build Custom AI Agents That Actually Know Your Company’s Data
Jason Lemkin highlights Dust, a no‑code platform that lets any employee build specialized AI agents tightly integrated with a company’s own tools and data, achieving remarkable 70%+ weekly adoption at firms like Doctolib and Qonto. The key differentiators are its...
By SaaStr