Vincent Jong

7 reasons why you should be at SaaStock Europe: 1. Connections  - Whether you are a SaaS Founder, C-suite operator or investor. Your peers will be there and you will meet them through our structured meeting program & our AI powered matchmaking. Outside of the structure and tech, every person is relevant, so the person on your left, right, at the bar, sitting next to you at the centre stage etc, they will be a good connection. 2. ROI - We hear it every year, from the very first session or meetings attended that our attendees have gotten ROI from the outset. Whether the ROI is learning something new from our expert speakers and mentors to help you get out of a rut, or fix the problem you’ve not been able to, or whether it’s meeting a new customer, hire or investor. ROI hits early at SaaStock. 3. The best will be there - we’ve 105 expert speakers this year. Mostly net new, that have never spoken at a SaaStock event or shared their stories to our community. Tomasz Tunguz one of the leading VCs and thought leaders in SaaS for over a decade, is making his first ever appearance at SaaStock Europe. David Politis a serial entrepreneur who most recently scaled BetterCloud to $80M+ and then exited to Vista Equity Partners is joining. Mikita Mikado, CEO of PandaDoc who’s just passed $100M ARR. Guillaume Moubeche who bootstrapped Lempire to $26M ARR in just a few years. Just 3 of 105 amazing founders, Investors and C-suite operators that you’ll learn from. 4. Achieve your Sales Targets - It’s the golden opportunity in B2B SaaS in europe for lead gen. With 4000+ attendees over three days, that are all decision makers, whether CEO, CPO, CFO, CRO, CMO, CTO, the quality bar this year of audience has been raised even higher. Buyers will be there whether you are exhibiting or just attending. If you need that pipeline for Q4 & Q1 & you sell to SaaS, then you really need to be at SaaStock Europe. 5. Keep up to date with the SaaS Industry - From the talks, the meetings, the conversations, you’ll walk away with the knowledge to help define your strategy for 2025. 6. Community - The community vibe at SaaStock remains strong & not only will it provide you comfort in attending for the first time, it will provide you with a welcoming embrace and a stronger network. You’ll walk away feeling like you are part of the community. 7. Inspiration - It’s been a tough time in SaaS over the last two years and whilst things appear to be getting better, we understand that a lot of you have been feeling the headwinds and the challenges. If you don’t step out of the office & try and figure everything out alone, it can often be harder. Connecting with your peers, knowing you are not the only one, getting the advice (or kick up the backside) you may need right now and hearing stories of those that are overcoming and finding a way to win. You’ll leave with the inspiration needed to boost your Q4 and be ready for 2025 Join us to connect and thrive at #SaaStockEurope

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The backlash against AiSDRs was inevitable. Why? A fundamental mismatch in expectations. Scaling outbound sales for enterprise software is magical. Everyone wants it. But the volume of cold outreach has always been one of the lowest impact levers in the sales process. For startups, a great company story, a clear ICP, good messaging, and solid product-market fit have always been necessary precursors to scaling outbound. Without these, you can't move from founder selling to a GTM machine. Even with these nailed, most startups fumble the basics of product marketing and sales ops strategy. If your outbound motion isn’t converting despite all the fancy tools, chances are: ❌ You lack proof of ROI that grabs your buyer's attention ❌ Your outreach isn't tied to compelling events in your buyer’s journey ❌ Your gtm motion isn’t aligned to how your buyers evaluate The fix? Go deep with your happiest customers—the maniacal power users who love your product. Your early customer discovery wasn't enough. *Rediscover* what made them buy, how your product has changed their life, and the measurable impact it’s had on their business. Without that clarity, you are just scaling AI spam.

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The SaaS industry is still growing. But much more slowly. Last month I shared an Aleph statistic. Over the last 3 years we have invested in 17 companies. Only 1 out 17 was a classic horizontal SaaS company. SaaS was the single best business model of the last cycle (2008-2021), but the category has since entered a maturity stage (see graph below). This new report from the wonderful software team at Avenir clearly illustrates it. Growth rates for the combined SaaS industry are quickly declining as we are entering the later stages of maturity. In other words, there’s already an established software company in most sectors - and there’s very little room for entirely new software categories. At Aleph we still believe there’s an opportunity to build successful SaaS companies, but new entrants would have to carve out market share in existing industries and displace existing vendors. Vertical software is one area where lesser competition makes it more attractive, but entrepreneurs in crowded horizontal markets would have to work harder than ever before. Another key takeaway from the report - there are only 72 publicly traded companies (with market cap > $5Bn) with a combined market cap of $5.8Tr. However, 56% of this value is attributed to Microsoft alone, followed by a very long tail of lesser performing companies. Moreover, only 2 of the largest 11 companies were funded after the year 2000 (ServiceNow, CrowdStrike). If you are building or investing in SaaS, you should definitely read the full report by Jared Sleeper, Hannah Bao and David Prilutsky (link in the first comment).

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RevOps = Sales Ops? ❌ Most people know the bow tie model for recurring revenue companies. It's one of the most powerful frameworks to explain how SaaS needs to focus on acquisition (new customers) AND expansion (growing with customers). Many businesses are still stuck on the left side of the bow tie. But the markets have changed. Growth at all costs is over. Capital-efficient growth is all about Net Revenue Retention. For example, Salesforce is all in on AI and its Data Cloud. Data Cloud was included in a quarter of all $1 million-plus deals in Q1. It's all expansion. Revenue leaders should look to #RevOps to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of #CustomerSuccess, #AccountManagement, and Solution Architects. Think about it this way: It's not customer success. It's customer growth. You grow with them, and they grow with you.

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Summary of conversations at conferences about AI in commercial functions: Person a: what are you using AI for in your business? Person b: 🤷‍♂️ we tried to make a super cool predictive model but our data was too dirty. Also our revops team was understaffed. I did ask ChatGPT4 to make me a list of restaurants to visit at this conference. Person c: that’s weird, I asked it to make me a picture this morning Person a: 🙋‍♂️ still wondering….what are you using it for in your business again? I believe that AI will ultimately be really helpful to many different business functions. We’re in the very early innings, though.

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Is SaaS dead? (eye roll..) I worked with SaaS. I’ll probably continue to work with SaaS. Some article (link in the comments) was presenting the following trend: ⇒ Growth will slow down ⇒ People are being fired ⇒ Budgets are being cut Think about yourself: you have a lot of subscriptions (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Story-whatever) and at one point you realize it’s too much. You’re not using all of them, so you start dropping some. The same applies to a business which uses a lot of SaaS. Some are going to be dropped. That’s what the article is about. And I resonated. Oh yeah, not to mention the whole A.I. funding BOOM – stupid, obviously. They are in for a disappointment. There is a silver lining, however: “The SaaS spending has increased over 10%, nearly every year since forever” – ha, ha! Sooouhh, my conclusion is the same as in many other situations (when you’re looking for a job, when you fear A.I. will replace software engineers): ⇒ Maybe the times are tough, and maybe the times will get tougher still, but as long as you’re customer-focused, and you solve the REAL problems, everything will be alright.

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Wouldn’t it be nice to run a SaaS business if there was zero churn? Since this is not possible in this particular universe the next best to do is to do churn deep dives every now and then. In addition to the obvious exit survey responses we gathered all the information about customers that have ended their subscriptions: the source of these customers, stated intent at signup, product usage, support tickets, call notes from CRM — everything. Then myself and Markus sat down in a meeting room and pulled data from various sources for all of these accounts. It’s worth pointing out we focused on customers that had started the subscription during the last 18 months and more or less ignored older accounts that may have joined for legacy features or very old pricing plans. Here’s a sneak peek into our Q4 churn deep dive. Roughly 25% of churned customers stated cost/price as the primary reason. Fixing this is more nuanced than dropping prices. For example, when you don’t pay for the subscription of NYTimes - is it because you can’t afford it, because you think the content is not worth quite as much, or because you think you get the same information elsewhere for a better price or even for free? Further nuance: half of these users were only using one feature ie. getting relatively little value out of the product. Another 25% of churned accounts were cancelled by us because payments had started failing and we could not get these customers to respond. And almost all of these accounts were using the product relatively little. What about the remaining half? Around 12% of churns happened in a way where customers churned not only from Outfunnel but from CRM as well. For example they may have cancelled their Pipedrive and Mailchimp accounts and switched everything to HubSpot. Relatedly, 6% of churns happened due to changes in go-to-market and/or tools. 15% of customers left because of bugs/issues. (This is way too high but relates to a specific thing that kept breaking in Q4 and was largely fixed by the end of the quarter) 6% left because they were missing a feature. And then there were a bunch of smaller churn reasons that we see very infrequently. For example, a requirement to get advanced security documentation from all vendors we couldn’t immediately comply to. And here is where it gets interesting. We then made our best guess on what would have kept them as a user. In theory, we could have kept nearly half of said customers. Of the saveable ones: - 30% could have been saved with more/different features - 25% could have been saved with better communication and/or support - 17% could have been saved with better reliability / no issues - another 17% could have been saved by lowering the price - the rest we could have saved with one-off initiatives All in all, doing this analysis was a very good use of time and we’ll surely do this again. Any good tips for understanding and fighting churn on your end? 

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The common mantra in building a SaaS: you NEED to niche down and focus on one ICP at the beginning - what we did instead "Otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for failure", they say. While I agree with it in the mid-/long run, I believe in a better (and more data-driven) approach in the short-term. (Note: only applicable If you’re building a horizontal SaaS, in our situation: contact data). Back when we started, instead of niching down on one persona, we followed a 'use-case' GTM strategy. Here’s how we did it: 1. CREATING VIRALITY Initially, we created as much virality as possible through organic social media + outbound to maximize sign-up rate. The content was NOT niched down (e.g. not focussed on salespeople), but broad and not targeting a clear person. Over time, this helped us to get up to 100 sign-ups/day. 1.1. USER ANALYSIS We then enriched the sign-ups analyzed, clustered, and analyzed them for patterns. They were continuously ranked on activation, free-to-paid conversion rate, MRR, churn rate, and several other metrics. To those with the ‘strongest pull’ and best metrics, we reached out, and tried to get as many insights as possible (optimal scenario is a quick call). 2. CLUSTER BUILDING As expected, the clusters became more dense after around 4 months, and we recognized 3 major personas. The initial virality stage allowed us to gather a huge amount of data, and thus knowing the personas VERY well. Based on that data, we were able to vertically adjust our content, landing pages, outbound etc. to create a hyperpersonalized and persona-relevant strategy. PRO AND CON OF THIS APPROACH (-) Getting visibility in a crowded market is HARD, and it won’t get easier with the rise of B2B organic social media content (and B2B influencers). (+) There’s no need to make a vague hypothesis on who you should target/what your ICP should be from the beginning (merely based on market analysis and a few customer calls, who often don’t care anyways) What approach do you prefer more? 👇

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There's a dangerous misconception inhabiting some C-suites in the start-up world nowadays. They believe that legacy revenue problems can be magically solved in 2 months. Thanks to this, we decided to discontinue an engagement with a Malaysia-based start-up immediately. This was 5 months ago. This kind of unrealistic expectation reveals a fundamental flaw in how they are operating their business. That explains why they continue relying on their investors’ money rather than focusing on growing the revenue. Through his executives, the CEO of this start-up complained to us, saying that our marketing advisory somehow didn’t produce any tangible results after 2 months. In short, there is no sales growth. FYI, this legacy problem has been with the company for more than 3 years. He expected a quick fix to turn the situation around by engaging us. This short-sightedness is something we’re not able to tolerate. We didn’t see it coming that a seemingly modern, forward-thinking tech startup seems to have shallow thinking, focused solely on instant gratification, and fails to grasp that real, lasting change requires time, dedication, and a willingness to invest in the long-term success of the company.

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SaaS & tech start-ups: The 10 biggest challenges in 2024 🚀 - and how to master them. Yesterday a dazzling superstar - today a problem child? Or do we go through the valley, up the mountain? The 10 biggest challenges I see in 2024: 1️⃣ Market Saturation & Competition: It's crowded out there. Standing out requires more than just a great product 🟢 Niche over mass – clearly define product and ICP ❌ Don't chase every sales opportunity. 2️⃣ Funding & Investment: Securing capital is tough, especially with cautious investors demanding quick results 🟢 Present realistic business plans with a focus on cash-flow scaling ❌ Avoid inflated projections that set you up for failure. 3️⃣ Customer Acquisition & Retention: Gaining new customers is costly and time-consuming. Retaining them is equally crucial for sustainable revenue 🟢 Focus on Customer Success – generate recurring impact ❌ Rising CAC and higher churn risk make new customer revenue less predictable. 4️⃣ Scalability of Technology: Developing scalable solutions is a significant technical and financial hurdle 🟢 Choose tech that grows with you ❌ Avoid tech that can't scale and meet future regulatory and functional requirements. 5️⃣ Data Security & Privacy: Increased reliance on cloud services heightens the risk of security breaches. Compliance with data protection laws is critical 🟢 Use reliable, certified cloud services from the start ❌ Don't compromise on security and compliance – hope and closing your eyes are not a strategy. 6️⃣ Talent Acquisition & Retention: The competition for skilled professionals is fierce. Finding and keeping top talent is challenging 🟢 Offer ESOP & share success ❌ Don't settle for mediocre talent - better to share with the best than to fail with the wrong ones. 7️⃣ Technological Advancement: Keeping pace with rapid tech evolution demands continuous innovation and agility 🟢 Stay innovative – avoid getting lost in details ❌ Don't get bogged down in the present at the cost of the future. 8️⃣ Regulatory Challenges: Navigating different legal requirements across countries is particularly tough for international operations 🟢 Establish standards and get certified early ❌ compliancy is no nice to have – shortcuts lead to setbacks. 9️⃣ Cost Management: Meticulous expense management is essential to make the most of limited resources 🟢 Maintain lean operations and prioritize spending ❌ Avoid uncontrolled spending – financial discipline is key. 🔟 Market Access & Internationalization: Expanding into new markets requires deep local knowledge and significant investment 🟢 Hire an internationally experienced CRO early and involve them in the company ❌ Don’t wing it – expertise and strategic insight are key to successful expansion. These challenges require strategic and immediate action. How are you tackling these? Share your strategies and insights below! 👇 #SaaS #TechStartup #Challange #Growth #CROMastersAi Image: created with Midjourney

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99% of SaaS Startups I see don't produce their value-add services and create additional revenue streams. They "give it away" Here is how one of my teams made too much money (according to our analysts): - Find something that your post-sale team does over and over again - This could be a best practice or application - Create a low-cost, medium-cost, high-cost offering - Make it easy to sell and deploy - Get high-quality partners to deliver the low-cost offerings -Your team can deliver the new fun stuff to your high ARR customers --> Real-life example: At Brightcove, in the early days of video, we noticed that a large majority of our customers wanted a video portal. After building the same experience a few times, we created a template application that we sold and deployed at a pretty good margin. We created 3 price points (for example, 30, 60, 90k). We had marketing put together 1-page sheets for the sales team We made sure that anyone on our team could be brought into a presales conversation to talk about its ease of use We had so much demand for each version that we found 3-4 partners that were fully trained in how to build and deploy them. This was because our services revenue was too high a percentage for a SaaS company. From the numbers, it looked like the product was too complex to launch and needed services. The reality was that we created a services product that filled an area of high demand. This eventually was folded into the actual core product as an offering. The core PS team would then work on the super custom experiences (catchup TV that is integrated with cable permissions, apps, etc.) #startups #sales #professionalservices #saas #technology

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99% of SaaS Startups I see don't produce value-add services and create additional revenue streams. They "give it away." Here is how one of my teams made too much money (according to our analysts): - Find something that your post-sale team does over and over again - This could be a best practice or application - Create a low-cost, medium-cost, high-cost offering - Make it easy to sell and deploy - Get high-quality partners to deliver the low-cost offerings -Your team can deliver the new fun stuff to your high ARR customers --> Real-life example: At Brightcove, in the early days of video, we noticed that a large majority of our customers wanted a video portal. After building the same experience a few times, we created a template application that we sold and deployed at a pretty good margin. We created 3 price points (for example, 30, 60, 90k). We had marketing put together 1-page sheets for the sales team We made sure that anyone on our team could be brought into a presales conversation to talk about its ease of use We had so much demand for each version that we found 3-4 partners that were fully trained in how to build and deploy them. This was because our services revenue was too high a percentage for a SaaS company. From the numbers, it looked like the product was too complex to launch and needed services. The reality was that we created a services product that filled an area of high demand. This eventually was folded into the actual core product as an offering. The core PS team would then work on the super custom experiences , or be focused on deploying the new tech to the 1st tier customers. #startups #sales #professionalservices #saas #technology

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A few weeks ago at SaaStock, I had the chance to talking to Diane Wiredu 🦁 founder of Lion Words 🦁, about messaging and positioning. These are some of the biggest mistakes B2B SaaS companies make when it comes to messaging: - No clear ICP and positioning. The best way to dilute your messaging into something meaningless is by trying to talk to 10 different ICPs with different needs. - Product < Solution. Sure, you can mention your product and features, but make sure you link them to a clear pain point and customer goal. Don’t assume that your client will automatically make the link, communicate it clearly. - Fluffy, empty generic messaging. If your headline is “Transform your business with our all-in-one solution” or “Your partner in digital transformation” you lost me. Instead, focus on the problem you solve + unique value you provide. What are some of the mistakes you see B2B tech companies make when it comes to messaging? #messasing #saas #positioning

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Our strategy at PeakSpan is simple - scaling a growth company successfully should be an iterative, incremental process. The decisions and options you have in front of you at $3M of ARR scale are vastly different than those at $10M and different still from those at $25M and beyond - scale your way into success sensibly, putting your foot on the gas more and more when the data asserts that you’re ready for it and it’s the right thing to do. This video encapsulates our approach in a nutshell - swinging as hard as you can for a statistically unlikely outcome when you’re a young, still very much evolving business, simply isn’t the value maximizing strategy. https://lnkd.in/e96AzU_N

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Why I think GTM is Broken 💔 : 3 Key Problems Tech Scale-Ups Face ⛔ I recently joined B2B Practitioners because I’ve seen too many tech scale-ups struggle to grow internationally. It’s not that they lack ambition—it’s their go-to-market strategy that often holds them back. Here are 3 critical GTM problems I’ve seen time and time again: 👉 Fragmented Strategy: GTM isn’t just marketing or sales. Without a unified approach, teams pull in different directions. Aligning sales, marketing, and product is key to creating a sustainable growth engine. 👉 No Focus on Sustainable Growth: Growth at all costs? It works until it doesn’t. Companies need to prioritize efficiency and predictability, especially in complex European markets where quick wins are rare. Nothing happens overnight (well... almost nothing) 😉 👉 Lack of Local Market Understanding: Europe isn’t a single market. Scaling across DACH, UK, Nordics, and Southern Europe requires more than language localization—it needs a strategic shift in positioning and messaging. This I have witnessed over and over again Have you experienced these challenges in your GTM? Let me know your thoughts in the comments! #b2bpractitioners #GTM #marketing #scale

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ICP Magicians - Sunday Learnings The “Hell Yes” we got from a CEO/Founder on our first discovery call for our ICP product was very gratifying. He called the team ICP Magicians in his intro to his Rev Ops leader. That made me smile. The team is pretty magician like. What they do is a bit more data science than magic, but magic is a pretty flattering description. On our discovery call the CEO/Founder was very clear that aligning his Sales, Marketing and Product teams on Target Market Prospects was his top priority. Seems to make sense. He wants to use data from is current clients to identify and define his Target Markets (ICP) with a high degree of conviction. Our value prop is to identify the most thorough set of attributes of his current clients as well as a conversion metrics heat map and other characteristics to make it easy to do so. A few things stood out in our exporation of PMF and value proposition positioning. The Job to Be Done of ICP sits with the CEO. Nobody else. Sales and Marketing seem to care less about defining ICP and Target Market prioritization than the CEO does. Sales and Marketing Leaders presented with the opportunity to better understand current client attributes have responded with general apathy… “Meh, what we have is good enough.” The CEO we met with was not content with “Good Enough”. He wants, “The BEST possible” to align the entire organization on the North Star of the highest priority prospects before any money is spent on the GTM funnel of Marketing and Sales so only the likeliest to be happy and high LTV customers enter the funnel. He also emphasized that this data will inform the product roadmap. But is this CEO unique or do other CEOs/Founders see defining Target Markets and ICP as their Job to be Done and a High Priority on their list of todos?   

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To change our approach to retention in SaaS, we have to be able to paint a different picture. This picture must be able to demonstrate the following: Efficiency gains Highly predictable retention & growth Cross-company engagement and success How much reactive focus can you handle before everything breaks? We accept more than we should, and our customers are unwillingly participating in this reality. The move from reactive to proactive is a massive step in the maturity of our practice. Our roots in reactive execution go back to our company's founding. From our first customers, we can find ourselves quickly behind the ball even though our company chose CS as one of its first hires. As our company grows, we realize it doesn’t grow fairly. Not all departments get what they need, and CS can be among the top. Our resource request is the can that continuously gets kicked down the road. I was consulting with a company that was in its eighth year. During these eight years, it had many moments of success, followed by periods when things didn’t work out as planned. The CS function suffered, at times, severely when expectations weren’t met. The team dramatically changed in leaders, number of team members, and skillsets needed as the company navigated its path. With each cut, we never really recovered. Customers were left hanging without a contact at the company, and eventually, this bit them hard when a key member who had sacrificed themselves for years chose to move on. At this moment, simply notifying customers of a change in CS assignment resulted in a month's loss of 10 customers. Why? The company forgot them, so they forgot about the subscription and canceled once reminded. It's hard to fault them. It's hard to fault the CS resource, which was always understaffed and could not reach all accounts in their portfolio. When things break, it takes significant effort to recover from them. It's easy to avoid years of neglect until you experience a loss like that.

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𝑰̳ ̳𝒉̳𝒂̳𝒗̳𝒆̳ ̳𝒃̳𝒖̳𝒊̳𝒍̳𝒕̳ ̳𝒎̳𝒖̳𝒍̳𝒕̳𝒊̳𝒑̳𝒍̳𝒆̳ ̳𝑺̳𝒐̳𝒍̳𝒐̳𝒘̳𝒂̳𝒓̳𝒆̳𝒔̳.̳ First, what the heck is Soloware? To be honest, I didn't know the term until a few weeks ago. Recently, İskender Dirik shared an interview with Dharmesh Shah, the founder of HubSpot. I think he coined the term Soloware. Soloware is software used by only one person. When I heard this, I felt a bit relieved because I'm not the only one doing this and writing software for a single person. As a developer, I love writing code if existing software is too expensive, too complex, or doesn't exist - I build it for myself. Here are three Solowares that I use almost every day: 𝟏. 𝐀𝐧 𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐦𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐚: With existing tools, you have to download an image, save it on your computer, and then upload it. I wanted an editor where I could just copy the image to the clipboard and paste it. Since you can't paste an image directly on LinkedIn, I added a feature to save the image and copy the local path. When I want to upload an image on LinkedIn, I don't have to search for it. I just paste the path in the dialogue box. By the way, it's browser-based, and it's possible to write local files with JavaScript. 𝟐. 𝐖𝐘𝐒𝐈𝐖𝐘𝐆 𝐄𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐒𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐌𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐚: Since it's not possible to use HTML code on most social media platforms, many use Unicode characters to format text. There isn't any real editor for that, so I created my own. If you want to use it, just comment, and I'll send you the link. 𝟑. 𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐬𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐒𝐨𝐟𝐭𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐞: I send a lot of newsletters for my side project Mabya. I need simple software to write text-based newsletters. Most existing tools are too complex for this use case or too expensive, so I wrote my own.

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