Anatoly Sharifulin 🔜 PGC London

Q4 is the most important season for SaaS In November, SaaS companies see an 11-24% increase in average MRR Even higher if you play your cards right But you don’t just walk into Q4 with a plan The results you get from Q4 come from your preparations in Q3 Q3 is all about figuring out your ICP & the Q4 roadmap Q4 is all about executing the Q4 roadmap Promotional deals, marketing efforts, localising campaigns Records are broken when opportunity meets preparation Don’t miss this opportunity

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⭐️ Exciting times ahead! Imagine a world where you're able to manage and engage all your tasks in one platform. Now stop imagining and welcome Zixflow.🚀 🔹Zixflow is a revolutionary, comprehensive platform that has been ingeniously engineered to handle tasks, engage with various initiatives, and so much more. ✨Prediction 🔮With the consistent advancements in AI and our increasing reliance on digital tools, platforms like Zixflow are poised for substantial growth in the coming years. We'll likely see these intuitive all-in-one systems fully integrated into daily personal and professional activities, becoming as common as productivity apps are today. 📝These are my key thoughts: • Zixflow crowns its brilliance with the feature, emphasizing the importance of connectivity and closer collaborations in our increasingly remote and digitally reliant world. • The introduction of such a platform is timely, in an era where efficiency, digital transformation, and streamlined workflows become increasingly coveted in the technology sector. • This integration of management and engagement tools under one umbrella is progressive and vision-oriented, heralding an era where professionals can declutter their digital space and refocus their energies. 🌐 Zixflow transcends the norms by ambitiously bridging the gap of doing more with less. With such a dynamic platform, businesses can revolutionize their working models with higher levels of productivity and efficiency. Looking forward, this is undeniably inspirational. Zixflow paints an optimistic picture of the future - one in which our digital tools are streamlined, efficiency is maximized, and productivity skyrocketed. An all-encompassing platform, you ask? No, it's not another mirage but a tangible technological intersection that'll redefine how we work and engage. Feel inspired yet? I certainly do! Let's look forward to these remarkable advancements and the sea of opportunities that’ll transform the world of AI. Let’s anticipate the dynamism of Zixflow - a platform whose ripple effects will most definitely be felt across industries. Potent. Revolutionary. Exciting. Zixflow, we look forward to the journey.🌟 #Zixflow #technology #innovation #AI #digitaltransformation

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The 3 biggest mistakes you're making when writing ads for ecom #3 is the worst! 1. Trying to sound smart: The assumption is that the smarter you sound - the more trustworthy you or your offer is. The reality is you're more like to confuse your audience. People want clarity. Does your ad tell your buyer they are in the right place? Does it communicate value in the quickest and simplest way possible? Don't over-complicate it. 2. Not including keywords in headlines: This is basic, but often overlooked. Structure your ads the way people search and include keywords Your ad has a higher chance of getting clicked when it continues the pattern of thinking your prospect has when searching for the item. Rather than a pattern interrupt... This is pattern completion. 3. Overly focusing on your brand: Let's keep it real - Unless if your brand is really well known... No one cares about it as much as you do. People care about what you can do for them. Focus on selling benefits. Focus on customer pain points. Focus on your competitive edge. Focusing on yourself only gets you clicks from people that already know you. That's all, folks! See you on the next one.

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HockeyStack’s Odin AI agent just got a HUGE update. Odin can now build reports from TEXT. Just type in the report you want to see, iterate with text, and VOILA. We built the best product in the category, which allowed us to beat incumbents and scale really fast. Then we hit a roadblock - marketing teams are busier than ever. Every marketing team wants answers to their questions to scale efficiently. Our competitors need you to export everything into a BI tool and create a ticket for your ops team. HockeyStack’s no-code report builder is fully self-serve, but still takes time. Now, Odin builds your reports, analyzes them, gives recommendations, and more. Excited for the third release soon. P.S: If you are a customer, go to report builder and click on Generate with Odin to start using text to report.

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Changing our pricing is never an easy decision. We discussed our new pricing plan extensively and came up with multiple versions. As early-stage startup founders, we won't know which pricing model is best for us unless we experiment with them in production. So I put some of our thoughts into this blog. Check out the story behind this pricing change: https://lnkd.in/gRPmJgZM

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👉 Guess who else is coming up on the Calyx blog, but we haven't gotten to announce them yet? 🌟 Krithika M. from OpenAI, former Retool and Stripe to discuss all things developer (and non developer!) marketing - you won't want to miss what Krithika is thinking about when it comes to the future of marketing + AI. 💫 Edith Harbaugh co-founder and founding CEO of Launchdarkly to share about building and scaling a wildly successful developer brand (and how to hire great marketers?! Always a challenge). ✨ And Shani C. Taylor, head of success at Figma and prev. Airtable, on champion led growth - a topic where she has deep expertise and that applies surprisingly well to dev tools! Annnnd even more that I'll share soon :) We're considering increasing our publishing cadence for a couple of weeks because we have so many great interviews to share in the backlog - follow along here or sign up with our link in bio!

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Hey Linkedin 👋 I'm launching a new SaaS called Linker! And we got 229 Beta Testers in Less than 4 weeks. And we are launching on the 10th! So we have 11 days ⏳ to get another 274 members before we launch. And that's why we need your help, Linkedin! We need another 274 beta testers who ideally: ✅ Need more leads to grow their business ✅ Uses cold email campaigns to grow their business ✅ Uses cold outreach campaigns to grow their business ✅ Uses Linkedin to generate sales calls. So if you know at least 1 person who would need something like this. Tag'em below so they can see if Linker is a good fit for them🔥 In return, I can share with you my secret technique for never losing your keys again! 🔑 (Okay, maybe not. But I can offer a free personalized review of your current outreach strategy, which is almost as good, right? 😄) -------- Linker might be something they might want to check out because: It helps you to find verified emails and phone numbers, from Apollo, Sales Navigator, and Google Maps. And guess what! We also have an email verifier integrated, so you can verify emails from other sources. That's not it! It will also create personalized first lines so you can personalize your cold email or cold linkedin campaigns! We're giving unlimited email exports to people who join on the 10th of June! So if you know someone who might need something like this tag'em below or share this post. Thanks, Greg

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101. How you sell through events - Mats Nyberg 🎉 🚀 Listen to when Mats Nyberg - CEO at Trippus Event Solutions - joins me in B2B SaaS CEOs 🎙 We talked about: - Event-led as main GTM strategy - Small exclusive events vs. big conferences - How you maximize your value from events - And much more...💡 Listen to the interview by searching for" B2B SaaS CEOs" where you listen to podcasts. 🎧 #SaaS #Event #B2BSaaSCEOs

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A common bias in startup founders: Bigger market = Better opportunity. That's simply not true. In fact, it's much better to focus on a smaller niche and being the best in the world at a very specific problem, for a very specific type of customer. Try to be a big fish in a small pond - And think about the dynamics of your market, instead of the size of it. 1. Do people actually have the problem you think they do? 2. Do they care enough about the problem to spend time and money to solve it? 3. If yes to above, can you execute on the product to replace the old way of things, or replace legacy competitors? Then from $0 to $1M ARR, the more niche your market, the better. And then either expand very gradually to address a larger TAM over time....Or you might be surprised at the size of what you thought was a "small niche" #startups #saas

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How I got offers to be the CTO in a South Korean startup, a co-founder with an engineering manager at Google in SF, and a lead developer in a Nordic project (unrelated to my previous posts about job offers). In early 2023, a few months after the release of ChatGPT-3, "chat with your PDF document(s)" apps were popping up everywhere. While these functionalities are now common, they weren't back then. I found an open-source code for a simple demo of this kind of app. I'm not sure what got into me, but I forked (cloned) it, and decided to add a lot more features to it and completely rework it. In particular, I made it a full-stack application: you could upload multiple documents, create/delete multiple chat windows and use specific documents within them, have context-aware conversations in respect to the chat history, and more. I put it together in 1-2 weeks, and released it as an open-source project on GitHub. Posted it on Twitter (1st tweet, 0 followers). It received ~40k views and +700 stars on GitHub. Everything else I made before that point got 0. I then started getting messages from people. 1/ An engineering manager at Google in SF wanted to be an equal-part co-founder in an AI project. We had a few calls, some at midnight, but it eventually dissolved because the guy's vision for the app was the kind that would've needed a team of full-time developers and a few months. Ambition is great, but this was a fever dream (I would've been the solo dev). 2/ Someone from South Korea reached out, offering me to be the CTO in their new startup. No salary, just equity. The startup? "Your AI platform for everything." Again, the limit of what I can do is pretty high, but I'm not (too) delusional. Other than me, there were two other guys. They had me sign an NDA, of course. Needles to say, I didn't join. Their homepage is the same as it was a year ago. 3/ Two people working in software engineering (although not developers) from the Nordics reached out. I thought what they envisioned was a little out of scope, but nevertheless doable. They asked for my hourly rate, and I gave them what is probably equivalent to senior engineers at large companies in Slovakia, but still probably lower than mid-level devs in Nordic countries. They said 'Sure, no problem', then ghosted me lol. I guess it was a problem after all. Sorry, purchasing power parity is great, but only for the products I buy, not for the salaries I get. And with all that, I thought to myself: if I can put together something in 1-2 weeks and have it potentially change the course of my life, then the last couple of years I've spent learning to code have not been in vain. This project didn't change my life, but I became more optimistic. I realized that a totally different life and future might be one side project away. That's why I launched the last project, and why I'll keep launching more. Sooner or later, we'll get there. Not a shred of doubt about that in my mind.

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It’s time for controllers to take control of their time. ⏰ I joined FinaHQ as co-founder in February 2024, knowing we were onto something impactful, but little did we realize just how eye-opening the response would be. I still remember the interaction with our first potential customer; their reaction was nothing short of mind-blowing. “This is incredible, it could save us so much time!” They couldn’t believe how many man-hours we could save them, how many errors we could prevent, and how much manual documentation would become a thing of the past by integrating all their data seamlessly. In 2024, it’s astonishing that people are still wrestling with Excel, downloading CSV files, and processing everything manually – even big companies! Comprehensive tools that solve the hard problems of consolidation and reporting, like dealing with minority interest computations and business combination adjustments, are rare to find. Complexity in accounting and reporting today extends to mid-market companies, and the existing solutions were either too expensive, overly complex, or just plain outdated. We wanted to change that. 🚀 Thus, FinaHQ is not just a tool; we’re solving real, everyday problems. And seeing the tangible impact – saving thousands of hours and reducing errors – makes all the hard work worth it. ✨ #FINAHQ #TimeManagement #AccountingSolutions #DataIntegration #ModernAccounting #SayNoToManualProcessing

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Pindrop was among the first to start research in deepfakes (circa 2017), BUT we were NOT the first to launch a commercial product in deepfake detection. Several start-ups got funded in 2021/22 well before we started to develop Pulse, our deepfake detection product. Fast forward to today, ⭐️ Processing well over 100M+ calls - largest in the industry ⭐️ Several of the leading US financial institutions are our customers ⭐️ Zero to multi-M in ARR in 6 months ⭐️ 20% of our new ARR in the last 6 months came from Pulse Read this Axios article quoting our CEO Vijay Balasubramaniyan on our market momentum. So how did we come from behind to lead the race. Here are some learnings 1️⃣ Clarity on the use case. We chose protecting call centers as our first use case. At the time, call center was not as topical in the press (unlike use cases like election misinformation). Our experience in call centers indicated that customer impersonation is often the first frontier of attack by bad actors and we saw enough early validation, e.g., Senator Brown's letter to the top US banks to support our thesis 2️⃣ Building with customer feedback. We interviewed 50 large US financial institutions, before we wrote the first line of code. Created a design partner program with a dozen of them. Most of them went on to being beta customers and early paid customers. We did not have to do any gimmicks of giving the product for free to design partners, because of the value they saw. 3️⃣ Designing for the use case. We prioritized integration with our existing call center authentication and fraud products. Existing customers could start using deepfake detection almost instantaneously. This became a major differentiator against our competitors. 4️⃣ Leveraging our existing GTM motion. Our GTM teams had the right relationships with the buyer and the operational persona. This allowed us to get out of the gates much quicker than our competitors. 5️⃣ Strong conviction of our CEO which gave us the flexibility to make the right resourcing trade-offs. Great example of #foundermode One unsolicited advice to all the #VCs who have posted their market analysis of the deepfake detection market. They all make the same mistake - viewing this as a monolith technology market, and using the modality as the sole market segmentation criteria. In reality, the business use cases (and not modality) will be the primary drivers of spend and market success. As an example for some one to win in Call center deepfake detection, being good at audio deepfake detection is not sufficient. What customers need is ... ☞ Specialization in phone audio and not just digital audio ☞ CCaaS/Telephony/Carrier integrations for real-time call capture & notifications ☞ Use of deepfakes as one of multiple factors and not as the solo one Thanks Sam Sabin for an excellent article Kudos to our deepfake detection team for building such an amazing product - Amit Gupta Elie Khoury, PhD Aarti Dongargaonkar

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Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt has founded & exited multiple companies. He's an advisor and board member to numerous startups and enterprises. And for the last 8 years, he's run WillingnessToPay.com, a B2B SaaS Pricing consultancy, where he's consulted with over 150 clients ranging from startups doing $1M in ARR to enterprises with $1B+ in ARR. Not only that, he's written a best-selling book called the Pricing Roadmap, and published dozens of excellent videos on youtube to share his expertise on B2B SaaS pricing & packaging, negotiation, company building, M&A, and SaaS monetization. In this clip, he describes why pricing & packaging becomes so complex for SaaS companies to manage. It stems from two places: 1. Dual sources of complexity from product & sales that amplify each other 2. Not having a clear monetization strategy Listen or watch the full episode now👇 YouTube: https://lnkd.in/d6pipMFT 🎥 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dDK9pCrw 🎧 Apple: https://lnkd.in/dnbRiiEe 🍏 Key Takeaways about SaaS pricing, packaging, negotiation, and monetization: - Feature-based analysis is a popular approach, but may be more academic than practical in B2B contexts. Unless you’ve got a clearly understood category and feature set (e.g. in commoditized markets), avoid overly academic analyses. - Relying solely on quantitative methods can lead to flawed insights. Intuition and diverse data sources are critical in resolving internal dissonance about product value and pricing. - Pricing should be a series of ongoing negotiations with your customers, not a one-time event. Play an infinite & collaborative game with your customers – find a way to make expansion a shared goal that results in gain for both parties. If you're building a B2B SaaS startup and focused on pricing, packaging, and monetization, I highly recommend this episode.

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How do you use LinkedIn when you are a young startup looking for shortcuts to your series A? In this clip from a longer podcast with SaaS Club and Omer Khan I share what we did at Dreamdata and how we made that work

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Currently, rollups are fragmented, leading to poor UX and disjointed liquidity. Here the first demo of Javelin by our portco NodeKit With Javelin, users can synchronously send messages and move funds across #rollups on NodeKit within a single 2s block.

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Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt is one of the most compelling pricing experts we’ve spent time with. Would recommend listening to this conversation if you have some time. Some great perspective on flaws with using traditional quantitative methods (e.g. Conjoint, MaxDiff) to inform B2B pricing exercises, how to get to more practical, functional truths that persuade internal stakeholders, and not underestimating how important each contract conversation with your customers are in future pricing considerations.

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Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt has been formally helping companies with monetization for almost a decade across the world. He shares some of that wisdom in the episode below — for anyone owning or informing these types of decisions at their company, this is a great listen.

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I have been having a lot of discussions on how real this major SaaS replacement using AI is for Klarna. And if so, how replicable is this? As mentioned on this last week's episode of All In, Chamath Palihapitiya talks about how the industry historically "never went after the system of record" software, like Salesforce or ERPs. They are too hard to rip and replace. Now we are hearing from Klarna that they have managed to do this with AI. Systems of record have a REALLY low tolerance for being wrong, especially in regulated industries. How much custom work is required to get AI to generate accurate enough results to do this? These systems are notoriously complex. They require A LOT of training for admins to maintain, and even then it is a struggle. Each implementation is different. Consulting firms make TONS of money customizing instances of this software to make it work for companies. Now Salesforce is shifting gears to enable their customers to build agents themselves with Agentforce. What does this mean for their underlying software? Did they see the writing on the wall? Many enterprises have leaned on SaaS to provide a framework to operate, automate, and collect/manage data (you tell us how to do it). These SaaS providers take usage and learnings across companies, build functionality, and deliver it across their customers. And they maintain it! Of course, there are some enterprises who think they know best and build their own. Then companies assign an owner of that system and the processes around it to coordinate efforts and make sure it is providing value (if they do it correctly). They are essentially relying on "what is everyone else doing?" combined with "who knows our business the best internally to make sure it works for us?" A downside (and upside) is that SaaS vendors are incentivized to generalize patterns (especially VC backed companies), so customization is usually always needed at large enterprises. If AI can build and maintain these systems, problem solved on that end of relying on external vendors to do it. If it can also solve the customization problem, even better!! However.... what happens when the knowledge sharing stops? The generalized patterns, although sometimes tough to customize, are also incredibly useful to introduce new frameworks and shifts in the way these enterprises operate. This is why Salesforce has been adopted across so many enterprises. It was a much better operating model than what they had before. This really begs the question of which parts will get open sourced and shared. Will the common patterns and frameworks just become freely available and the customization and maintenance will get automated by AI? "Software was eating the world, now it is eating itself". https://lnkd.in/gZ93bx-S

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