Blog•Oct 23, 2025
🧑🚀 AI Vs. Climate, AI Poisoning & Superintelligence Freeze
More than 800 public figures, including AI pioneers, called for a halt to super‑intelligent AI development amid extinction and societal‑risk concerns, while industry moves apace with Amazon rolling out AI smart glasses for delivery drivers and GM planning an “eyes‑off” driving system for Cadillac by 2028. Tech consolidation and efficiency shifts continue: Meta cut 600 AI roles while still rebuilding a core superintelligence team, Fal.ai reached a $4 billion valuation, and Applied Digital signed a $5 billion, 15‑year lease for 200 MW of data‑center power. Meanwhile, researchers warn of acute safety threats—“AI poisoning” can corrupt models with as little as 0.001% poisoned tokens—and proponents highlight AI’s climate gains (traffic‑signal tuning can cut emissions up to 10%), underscoring high stakes for regulation, data security, and energy policy.
By Matthew Berman
Blog•Oct 23, 2025
Ask Us Anything 2025
In their annual Ask Us Anything podcast, Center for Humane Technology leaders Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin argue that the AI race has accelerated into a dominance-driven flywheel—frontier labs pour capital into bigger models, users, and compute not merely for...
By Tristan Harris
Blog•Oct 23, 2025
New Woo
WooCommerce 10.3 was released ahead of Black Friday/Cyber Monday, introducing checkout improvements, built-in tracking for cost of goods sold, and a beta MCP server that lets AI assistants (like Claude, Cursor, VS Code and other MCP-compatible clients) interact directly with...
By Matt Mullenweg
Blog•Oct 23, 2025
Product-Market Fit Is No Longer Static
Venture investor Tomasz Tunguz argues product-market fit (PMF) is no longer a one-time milestone but a continuous condition because rapid advances in AI are constantly reshaping customer needs and technical possibilities. He points to firms that lost PMF between 2021–2024,...
By Tomasz Tunguz
Blog•Oct 22, 2025
Your Google Business Profile Is the Secret to Local SEO
On the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch argues that Google Business Profile has evolved from a simple directory listing into a publishing platform critical for local SEO, AI overviews, and zero‑click searches. He prescribes concrete weekly and monthly actions—regular...
By John Jantsch
Blog•Oct 22, 2025
5 Interesting Learnings From Klaviyo at $1.2 Billion in ARR
Klaviyo is emerging as an undervalued SaaS leader after hitting $1.2B in ARR, trading at just 6.1x ARR despite 32% YoY growth and top‑7% Rule of 40 performance. The firm is driving durable expansion via multi‑product adoption (54% of ARR),...
By SaaStr
Blog•Oct 22, 2025
Your Pricing Is (Probably) Broken
SaaS and AI startups largely have broken pricing: founders default to flat fees, feature bundles, seat-based and usage models that misprice customers and leave revenue on the table. Poyar highlights concrete fixes — e.g., add premium editions (50–100% higher price...
By Kyle Poyar
Blog•Oct 21, 2025
From Zero to 20 AI Agents in 10 Months: The SaaStr Playbook for Actually Deploying AI Agents That Work
SaaStr scaled from zero to 20 AI agents in 10 months by prioritizing aggressive training over vendor hunting—committing 30 days of daily tuning up front and an hour a day ongoing—to drive real revenue outcomes. The company ingested 20 million...
By Jason Lemkin
Blog•Oct 20, 2025
Why SaaStr AI London 2025 Is Where You Learn AI + GTM From The People Actually Doing It. At...
SaaStr AI London 2025 (Dec. 1–2 at Park Plaza Westminster Bridge) positions itself as a hands‑on conference for B2B leaders to learn AI‑powered go‑to‑market playbooks directly from operators—over 100 speakers including OpenAI, Intercom, Databricks and Wiz are slated to present....
By SaaStr
Blog•Oct 20, 2025
How to Scale Your Business with a 3-Tier Pricing Strategy
The article argues that a three-tier pricing strategy—entry, core, and premium—helps companies shore up revenue by matching offerings to distinct customer budgets and use cases, improving product-market fit amid economic uncertainty. It advises clear feature differentiation, value-based pricing, and deliberate...
By Christopher S. Penn
Blog•Oct 20, 2025
Import AI 432: AI Malware; Frankencomputing; and Poolside's Big Cluster
A Dreadnode proof‑of‑concept demonstrates AI malware that runs locally on on‑device LLMs (Phi‑3‑mini via ONNX), autonomously exploiting misconfigured Windows services to escalate privileges—flagging a nascent threat limited today to high‑end workstations and CoPilot+ PCs but with serious security implications as...
By Jack Clark
Blog•Oct 20, 2025
How This Yelp AI PM Works Backward From “Golden Conversations” To Create High-Quality Prototypes Using Claude Artifacts and Magic Patterns...
Yelp product manager Priya Badger outlined a conversation‑first approach to building AI features, starting with curated “golden conversations” and working backward to design realistic prototypes and interfaces. She demonstrated using Claude to generate and refine dialogue, Claude Artifacts to embed...
By Lenny Rachitsky
Blog•Oct 19, 2025
👾 The Next AI Breakthrough Will Be Better Interfaces
AI’s next major advance will come from interfaces that present reasoning in visual, interactive formats rather than defaulting to text, aligning outputs with how humans naturally process information. The piece argues that tasks like data analysis, project planning and design...
By Matthew Berman
Blog•Oct 19, 2025
10 Things To Know About Raising Venture Capital for The First Time
Raising venture capital is a disciplined, sales‑like process that founders should treat as a long-term relationship-building exercise rather than a one-off transaction. Investors prize timing, clear traction and unit-economics (ARR, growth rate, CAC, LTV, burn multiple), and founders are advised...
By SaaStr
Blog•Oct 19, 2025
How to Measure AI Developer Productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren
Nicole Forsgren, creator of the DORA and SPACE productivity frameworks and Senior Director of Developer Intelligence at Google, argues in advance of her new book Frictionless that traditional developer productivity metrics are often misleading and must be replaced with measures...
By Lenny Rachitsky
Blog•Oct 19, 2025
Dear SaaStr: What Are The Top 10 Metrics Series A Investors Look At?
Jason Lemkin outlines the top 10 metrics seed‑stage SaaS startups must prioritize to secure a Series A, led by rapid ARR growth (ideally 7–15% month‑over‑month toward $1M ARR) and strong retention signals like 100%+ NDR and 90%+ GRR. He emphasizes...
By SaaStr
Blog•Oct 18, 2025
SaaStr AI App of The Week: Alloy — The AI Prototyping Tool That Actually Looks Like Your Product (Not Some...
Alloy, an AI prototyping tool from the makers of Index, captures live product pages and generates on‑brand, production‑looking UI prototypes from plain‑English prompts, letting PMs iterate features in minutes rather than weeks. The startup says it has 10,000+ signups and...
By SaaStr
Blog•Oct 18, 2025
Competition Is Really Heating Up in Our Market. What Should We Do?
Jason Lemkin warns that intensifying SaaS competition requires measured diagnosis and an aggressive, customer‑focused response rather than panic. He advises tracking win/loss rates, doubling down on top customers, accelerating feature gap fixes, and hunting for a 10x differentiator, while emphasizing...
By SaaStr
Blog•Oct 18, 2025
🧑🚀 ONE HUNDRED WAYS TO USE AI
The post introduces a hands‑on playbook titled “100 Ways to Use AI,” designed to turn readers into AI power users through 100 practical, ready‑to‑try examples covering personal, work, and creative tasks. Each entry details the use case, benefits, step‑by‑step instructions,...
By Matthew Berman
Blog•Oct 17, 2025
This Week in AI Engineering
This week’s AI engineering roundup highlights three developments reshaping developer workflows and compute economics: OpenAI launched Agent Builder, a no-code drag-and-drop tool that lets non-developers assemble multi-agent workflows alongside ChatKit, Evals and reinforcement fine-tuning; NVIDIA unveiled the DGX Spark, a...
By Louis Bouchard
Blog•Oct 17, 2025
Snowflake’s AI Revolution: How AI Transformed Marketing and Sales at Scale with Snowflake’s CMO and Founding CRO
Snowflake executives Denise Persson and founding CRO Chris Degnan outlined how the company has operationalized AI across marketing and sales to drive measurable ROI, scaling AI adoption to 90% of its 450-person marketing team and serving over 10,000 customers. Internal...
By SaaStr
Blog•Oct 16, 2025
How to Build a Trusted Network in the Age of AI-Generated Content
As generative AI makes convincingly fake content ubiquitous, the article argues that testimonial must shift from praise to verifiable proof of identity and work history. It warns that polished sizzle reels and AI-generated endorsements can mask inauthentic speakers, influencers or...
By Christopher S. Penn
Blog•Oct 16, 2025
20VC X SaaStr Is Back!! The New Rules of Venture: Portfolio Construction, Kingmaking, and When Founders Walk Away
Venture investing is being rewritten as AI startups compress time-to-unicorns and force a rethinking of portfolio construction: early-stage funds now need ~20–25 initial bets before concentrating ~75% of capital into 3–5 winners, while the exit threshold has risen from ~$200M...
By SaaStr
Blog•Oct 16, 2025
In Startups, The Harder You Work in Sales, The More Good Leads You Get
Jason Lemkin argues that in startups the highest-quality leads concentrate with the hardest-working, most prepared sales reps, creating a self-reinforcing “hustle feedback loop.” He cites internal data showing top-quartile activity reps closed deals at 2.3x the rate, had 31% larger...
By SaaStr
Blog•Oct 16, 2025
How to Build Your AI Team, Task by Task
On the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, Ava Gutierrez of ThinkWithAI.com urged businesses to adopt AI task-by-task rather than as wholesale job replacements, framing AI as a “new hire” that needs context, onboarding and clearly defined roles. She recommends mapping individual...
By John Jantsch
Blog•Oct 15, 2025
5 Critical Phases of Building Your SaaS Sales Machine: Jason Lemkin + Harry Stebbings
SaaStr co-founder Jason Lemkin and investor/podcaster Harry Stebbings updated their deep-dive guide on building a SaaS sales machine, refreshing a 20+ minute playbook for 2025 that outlines five critical phases for creating a first sales team. The piece details practical...
By SaaStr
Blog•Oct 15, 2025
The Odds of Making It
A new look inside startup growth from zero to $25 million ARR
By Kyle Poyar
Blog•Oct 14, 2025
AI Deals Are Scaling to Massive Valuations. But In Many Cases—Also Massive Dilution. See E.g., OpenAI
So there has never been a “start-up” like OpenAI. Already with 800,000,000+ users and a breathtaking $500 Billion (!) valuation. But it’s also raised and spent epic amounts. So as the chart from FT below shows — all the historic...
By SaaStr
Blog•Oct 14, 2025
Why Being a “Nice” Manager Totally Backfires, According to Simon
In a recent session with The Optimism Library, leadership expert Simon emphasized the critical distinction between being "nice" and being "kind," highlighting how the former can undermine team performance. He shared his personal journey of prioritizing likability over accountability, which...
By Simon Sinek
Blog•Oct 14, 2025
If You Ever Think “Should I Fire This Person?” Even Once … Well, Then It’s Time
A new article emphasizes that managers should act decisively when doubts about an employee's performance arise, suggesting that if a leader contemplates firing someone even once, they should proceed with the termination. The piece argues that extending additional chances may...
By SaaStr
Blog•Oct 14, 2025
Everyone Should Be Using Claude Code More
In a recent discussion, Lenny highlighted the transformative potential of Claude Code, an AI tool that operates locally on users' devices, significantly enhancing productivity for non-technical individuals. Unlike cloud-based solutions, Claude Code boasts capabilities such as file organization, image enhancement,...
By Lenny Rachitsky
Blog•Oct 14, 2025
Everyone Should Be Using Claude Code More
How to get started, and 50 ways non-technical people are using Claude Code in their work and life
By Lenny Rachitsky
Blog•Oct 14, 2025
The Data Pendulum Swings to Consolidation
Fivetran and dbt Labs have announced a merger in an all-stock deal, creating a combined entity with an anticipated annual recurring revenue (ARR) nearing $600 million, signaling a strategic shift towards consolidation in the data infrastructure market. This merger reflects...
By Tomasz Tunguz
Blog•Oct 13, 2025
Programming Bottom-Up
Paul Graham's essay "Programming Bottom-Up" introduces an alternative and highly effective approach to software development, contrasting it with the traditional top-down design methodology. While top-...
By Paul Graham
Blog•Oct 13, 2025
Import AI 431: Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear
What do we do if AI progress keeps happening?
By Jack Clark
Blog•Oct 13, 2025
Evals, Error Analysis, and Better Prompts: A Systematic Approach to Improving Your AI Products | Hamel Husain (ML Engineer)
Watch now | 🎙️ How to build better AI products through data-driven error analysis, evaluation frameworks, and systematic quality improvement
By Lenny Rachitsky
Blog•Oct 13, 2025
Dear SaaStr: I Want to Keep Doing 1-on-1s With My VPs, But How Do I Streamline Them?
Dear SaaStr: I Want to Keep Doing 1-on-1s With My VPs, But How Do I Streamline Them? 1-on-1s may be partially out of fashion, but most CEOs I work with still do at least some of them. 93% of you...
By SaaStr
Blog•Oct 12, 2025
👾 LLMs Create Token... Humans Create Value
Why human insight, judgment, and creativity remain the ultimate edge in an AI-driven, token-generating world.
By Matthew Berman
Blog•Oct 10, 2025
How to Turn a Moment Into Momentum
How to Turn a Moment Into Momentum written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing Listen to the full episode: Overview On this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Don Yaeger, New York Times bestselling...
By John Jantsch
Blog•Oct 10, 2025
More Thinking. Worse Results. Wait, What?
From face recognition to grammar learning, both humans and models perform better when they don’t reason step-by-step. Here’s the paradox.
By Louis Bouchard
Blog•Oct 10, 2025
🧑🚀 2025 Best Inventions, LLM Backdoors & Nano Banana Camera
Best Inventions of 2025, LLM backdoor risks, Nano Banana camera, Google’s Gemini AI agents, and Microsoft’s record-breaking GB300 supercluster.
By Matthew Berman
Blog•Sep 19, 2024
Dear SaaStr: What’s Your Top Advice For All New B2B Founders?
A veteran SaaS VC advises new B2B founders to temper speed with caution, recommending they pause on uncertain big decisions and extend runway budgets by 6‑12 months beyond original forecasts. He stresses the importance of building a aligned founding team...
By SaaStr
Blog•Jul 24, 2024
Dear SaaStr: How Do You Draw The Line Between Founder and First Employee?
The piece advises that the line between founder and first employee should be drawn by timing and commitment: founders are present before a name, product, code or funds, take essentially all the risk and work for little to no salary....
By SaaStr