Strategic GTM insights for Founders, CEOs, and Investors focused on scaling early-stage B2B Tech (AI-native & AI-powered SaaS)

Real stories and operating lessons from inside complex B2B GTM environments.

luigimallardo.com | LinkedIn

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Over the last two months, I’ve watched founders make consequential decisions based on signals that were real but interpreted incorrectly.

The round is closed. “We’re ready to scale.”

The pipeline isn’t converting. “We need a VP Sales or a CRO.”

A competitor is struggling. “Let’s wait.”

An AI deal has a strong champion, a good pilot and available budget, yet six months later the relationship starts breaking down.

In each case, the signal was genuine. The problem was the interpretation.

The signals are real. The interpretation is wrong.

That is the thread running through the last four articles I published.

In each situation, the founder was trying to solve the visible problem while the real GTM issue sat one layer underneath — invisible, unaddressed, and compounding.

Here are four signals early-stage B2B tech founders repeatedly misread, and the illusions they create.

The illusion of being ready to scale

The signal: a few meaningful logos closed, a round raised, a pipeline being built.

The misreading: we have figured it out, we are ready to scale.

The reality: Maybe. Or maybe you’ve simply proved that a founder can personally close difficult deals. Those are not the same thing.

Product-Market Fit is not GTM readiness.

Most founders confuse a great product with a great go-to-market. But scaling is not a reward; it is an amplifier.

Venture capital does not create readiness. It amplifies whatever system already exists. If that system is built on founder dependency, lack of focus, improvised qualification, and uncodified process, scaling amplifies all of that. You are not accelerating growth. You are accelerating chaos.

Before the next round. Before the next hire. Before doubling the team. Run the test.

👉 Ready to Scale? The GTM Litmus Test for Complex B2B Tech Startups

The illusion that the answer is hiring

The signal: pipeline not converting, board pressure building, investors pushing for a senior GTM hire.

The misreading: we need an experienced CRO or VP Sales to fix this.

The reality is more uncomfortable: you cannot delegate a system that does not exist.

If the qualification happens in the founder’s head, if enterprise choreography isn’t codified, if Account Executives are not consistently successful, and the playbook lives in tribal knowledge passed between reps, then bringing in a VP of Sales does not solve the problem. It adds an expensive management layer on top of a structural vacuum, and gives the board a person to blame when that vacuum fails them.

The best revenue leaders on the market do not build GTM systems from scratch. Unless they are co-founders.

They inherit ones that already kind of work and scale them. Until the system exists, the CRO is the founder CEO. Not because they want that role. Because no one else can build what only they currently understand.

That is the job nobody announces and everybody eventually does.

👉 The CEO-CRO Nobody Wants To Be

The illusion that waiting reduces risk

The signal: a competitor gets acquired, or starts burning enterprise pilots they cannot execute.

The misreading: let’s wait. Once their clients are frustrated enough, they will come to us. Most founders watch.

The reality: this is a time window with a hard close.

When a competitor loses control of their narrative, their enterprise clients enter a period of unusual receptiveness. The champion who bought that solution is quietly asking whether they made the right call. The roadmap conversation is getting vague. Support becomes slower. Customer Success becomes reactive and defensive. Onboarding was a disaster.

That window doesn't last long. Then the new ownership consolidates the narrative, or the prospect domesticates the pain and stops blaming the vendor and starts blaming the category. Once that happens, you are no longer displacing a competitor. You are rebuilding trust in an entire solution space.

Patience in this moment is not strategic restraint. It is wasted window.

The market does not reward patience. It rewards presence.

👉 When a Competitor Bleeds: The Opportunistic GTM Playbook

The illusion that everyone is buying the same thing in AI

The signal: the champion is engaged, the demo went well, the budget exists, the use case is concrete.

The misreading: we know what they are buying.

The reality is that there are often two business cases active simultaneously inside the same enterprise, and the vendor is only seeing one of them.

The champion is buying augmentation. AI that helps their specialists work faster. The ROI is productivity, the buyer is an operational lead, the budget is functional and approvable without C-suite involvement.

Meanwhile, three floors up, a different conversation is happening. The CFO is talking about labour costs. The COO is asking how many of these roles will eventually exist. The board is discussing organisational redesign. Their business case is transformation, not augmentation. The budget is strategic, the sponsor is different, and the approval process requires a completely different conversation.

Same product. Completely different economics. And the vendor is pricing, qualifying, and structuring contracts for the business case the champion describes, while the real decision is being made in a room they have never entered.

There is one question that surfaces the gap. Almost no one asks it.

“If this works exactly as expected over the next three years, are your specialists still doing the same work, only faster? Or are they doing something fundamentally different?”

That answer changes everything.

👉 AI Doesn’t Just Change The Product. It Changes The Business Case.

The thread that connects all four

A funding round mistaken for readiness.
A leadership gap mistaken for a hiring problem.
A temporary market window mistaken for a reason to wait.
An operational use case mistaken for the real economic decision.

Four different situations. The same underlying pattern.

The signal is visible. The real GTM problem sits underneath it.

Complex GTM starts with learning to read those signals correctly: readiness before scale, ownership before delegation, timing before patience, economics before pricing.

Growth does not create clarity. It amplifies whatever clarity, or confusion, already exists.

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• Steve Lipofsky (Lipofsky.com), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

• Ваня Мартинцев

• Tom Fisk

• Evgeniya Koniukhova

Strategic GTM insights for Founders, CEOs, and Investors focused on scaling early-stage B2B Tech (AI-native & AI-powered SaaS)

Real stories and operating lessons from inside complex B2B GTM environments.

luigimallardo.com | LinkedIn

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This edition has a different name. Not because I decided to rebrand. Because the content already had.

I looked at the last three articles I published and realized they had nothing to do with SaaSification anymore. No abstract AI discourse. Just real situations from inside complex B2B GTM environments.

A founder who closes early deals on instinct and then discovers the machine doesn’t work without him.

A strategic client with a 7-digit contract value who escalates to the CEO with a list of product issues, and the real problem is that nobody on the CS team has shown up proactively in months.

A sales team that runs seven sessions with a prospect, validates the ROI, convinces the champion, and still hasn’t secured the deal because three people in the decision system were never made to feel safe.

Three different situations. Three different companies. The same underlying problem.

The product works. The system around it doesn’t.

That’s Complex GTM. Not a category. Not a framework. A description of the reality I’ve been sitting inside for the last twelve months, working closely with a handful of CEOs building AI-native and AI-powered B2B SaaS between €500K and €10M ARR.

The name SaaSification made sense when the big question was whether traditional companies could think and operate like SaaS businesses. That question has been answered.

The companies I work with now already have product-market fit. Most are AI-native, AI-powered or rapidly becoming AI-powered. They have customers. They have proof.

What they don’t have, yet, is the architecture that makes it all work without them.

That’s the hard part. That’s what this newsletter is about from here on.

Three angles of the same reality.

The Post-Round Startup Scaling Trap

The round just closed. First enterprise clients are live. The product works. The market is responding.

This is the moment most founders feel they’ve figured it out.

It’s also the moment the most expensive mistakes happen.

Not because something is broken. Because the founder is the system, and nobody has written that down, tested it, or transferred it. The pitch lives in their head. Qualification happens by instinct. Follow-up happens because they personally remember.

That’s not traction. That’s a person.

And when the VC money arrives and the pressure to hire builds, the first hires land on a structure that doesn’t exist yet.

👉 The Post-Round Startup Scaling Trap

When Customer Complaints Look Like Product Problems. But They’re Not.

A strategic enterprise client sends eight points to the CEO. Not to the account manager. Directly to the CEO.

The CS team reads the list and says: “We have a product problem.”

I read the same list and saw something different.

In the first twenty-five minutes of the subsequent call, the client didn’t mention a single feature gap in any meaningful way. They talked about weekly calls that had stopped. A team they had to chase for basic information. The feeling that nobody was clearly in control.

Product gaps are not the problem. They’re the language.

Enterprise customers don’t escalate because the product has gaps. They escalate when they feel alone.

👉 When Customer Complaints Look Like Product Problems. But They’re Not.

You’ve Been Selling the Champion. You Haven’t De-Risked the Decision System.

Seven sessions over ten weeks. Business case validated. ROI demonstrated. The champion says explicitly: “If the decision were up to me, I would have already made it.”

The deal doesn’t close.

Look at the probability history: 10%. 50%. 25%. 75%. 50%. 90%. 75%.

Every drop happens when a new stakeholder enters unprepared. Every recovery happens when the champion pulls the conversation back.

That oscillation is not noise. It’s the most important diagnostic signal in the deal.

The team has been managing the champion’s confidence. It has not de-risked the decision system. These are two different jobs. Confusing them is the most common way to lose a deal that already felt won.

👉 You’ve Been Selling the Champion. You Haven’t De-Risked the Decision System.

The thread that connects all three

A founder who can’t transfer what only lives in his head.

A CS team that waits for the product instead of managing the relationship.

A sales team that sells the champion instead of de-risking the board.

Three different moments. Three different companies. The same gap.

The system around the product isn’t built yet.

Complex GTM starts when the product works, but the architecture around it still doesn’t.

That’s the hardest phase. And the most important one.

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Luigi

Featured image from Pexels by Thomas Parker

Strategic GTM insights for Founders, CEOs, and Investors building AI-driven tech businesses powered by recurring revenue.

Real stories, proven frameworks, and a mindset for healthy, scalable growth.

Manually curated by Luigi Mallardo.

luigimallardo.com | LinkedIn

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This edition is different.

No links, no market updates, no curated reads this time.

For the last six months I’ve been doing deep operational work with a handful of founders. Less writing, more field. Live deals, pipeline reviews, hiring decisions, first meetings that go wrong and need to be rebuilt from scratch.

At some point I started noticing that the patterns were repeating. Different companies, different geographies, different products. Same resistance in the same places.

So I wrote it down.

What follows is the longest piece I’ve published in a while. It’s not a framework. It’s field notes, from the room where the real GTM conversations happen.

If you’re building complex B2B tech and you’re somewhere between €500K and €10M ARR, this one is for you.

Scaling Complex B2B Tech: When GTM Instinct Ends and Architecture Begins

A founder shows me the vision, the plan, and the end-of-year target. €4.5 million. He’s sitting at €2.5M today.

I ask him one question: how many deals do you need to get there?

Silence. I let it hang.

Then we do the math out loud. Average ticket €45K ACV. To close a €2M gap, he needs 45 new enterprise clients in 9 months. With an 8-month sales cycle. So he needs 5 new enterprise clients every month, for the next 9 months. With 10 deals in pipeline today for a total amount of €550K.

The conversation changes completely.

I’m working with a small number of founders building complex B2B tech (AI-driven SaaS, deep tech, vertical software, AI agents) selling into mid-market and enterprise. ARR between €500K and €10M. Different geographies. Different products. They are post-product-market fit, but pre-scale. The hardest moment in the journey.

Over the last six months I started tracking what kept repeating across operational meetings, live pipeline reviews, hiring decisions, deal post-mortems, etc. Hundreds of hours of deep work. I later used AI on top of those transcripts to surface what was repeating. The logos changed. The patterns didn’t.

They have the product. They have customers. They have proof the market exists. The early deals came through relationships, instinct, sheer founder energy. It worked. Until it didn’t.

When the commercial engine stalls in B2B AI SaaS, the instinctive reaction is always the same. Look at the product. Add a feature. Hire a superhero rep. Wait for the market to “get it.”

The problem is almost never the product. It’s almost always how the founder interprets what they see, and the gap between instinct-driven selling and the architecture that scaling actually requires.

The Revenue Math Nobody Does

The opening scene is not an isolated case. It’s systematic. Almost every founder I work with has a clear target and a math that doesn’t add up. Not because they’re naive, because nobody has ever forced them to do the calculation out loud. When they do, priorities shift immediately.

The question is never “what’s your target?” The question is “what does hitting that target actually require: in deals, in meetings, in weeks?” That calculation, done honestly, is one of the most disorienting things a founder can experience. It exposes the distance between the narrative they carry and the reality they’re operating in. And it changes every decision that follows.

The Bottleneck Has A Name

In every company the commercial bottleneck has a name.

Sometimes it’s a long-standing team member who knows the product inside out but can’t qualify a prospect.

Sometimes it’s an external hire who produces theoretical go-to-market plans instead of getting in front of customers.

In other cases it’s the Board, especially the lead investor, who pushes the founder to hire a pedigreed CRO when the company is not ready yet.

The founder already knows. They’ve always known. The work isn’t identifying the problem. It’s confronting the cost of inaction.

I’ve recently watched a salesperson lose a significant enterprise deal after two hours of technical demo without ever reaching the economic buyer and without understanding that the concern was about implementation and change management, not the product. The problem wasn’t the demo. It was that nobody had ever defined what needed to happen in the first 20 minutes of that meeting. And nobody had held anyone accountable for it. The founder knew the meeting had gone wrong. They let it go anyway. That pattern, repeated across five or six deals, is what a stalled pipeline looks like from the inside.

The Founder Who Needs To Stop Being The Best Salesman In The Room

The founder is almost always the best salesperson in the company. That’s also the reason the machine doesn’t scale. As long as the first meeting choreography lives only in their head, the company depends on them for every deal that matters.

The work is first of all to codify that method: the opening, the qualification questions, the structure of the conversation, the next step, and transfer it. Not in theory. In practice, meeting by meeting.

I’ve seen a founder rebuild their entire approach to the first meeting from scratch, put it on paper, test it, then hand it to a newly hired Account Executive. Three months later the team was closing deals that previously required the founder’s direct presence. The founder was still in the room sometimes, but not as the salesperson anymore.

That’s the transition. It’s slower than it sounds and more important than almost anything else on the GTM agenda.

The Product As Refuge

When the commercial conversation becomes uncomfortable, founders retreat to the product. It’s human. It’s also dangerous.

I’ve seen pipelines blocked not because of missing features but because average ticket sizes were too low for the target segment, account profiles were wrong, and sales cycles were too short to indicate real enterprise engagement. The numbers said all of this clearly. The founder was looking at the roadmap.

I looked at a pipeline recently with an average ticket of €1,300 and a 50-day closing cycle. SMB numbers inside an Enterprise strategy. The founder’s diagnosis was that the product needed agentic AI integration before it could compete and justify higher pricing.

The actual diagnosis was simpler and harder to hear: the team was selling to the wrong accounts with the wrong motion. The product wasn’t the problem. The product was the excuse.

The Architecture That Never Ends

There’s a moment in every engagement where structural work needs to give way to execution. Revenue model, account list, ideal customer profile, first meeting choreography. All necessary, all worth the investment. But I’ve seen founders stay in “let’s build the system” mode for months while the pipeline sits empty.

A founding team once spent three months building what I’d consider a genuinely solid GTM architecture. Revenue model finalized. ICP defined. First meeting choreography on paper. Account list enriched. SOA ready. Every session produced a new layer of structure.

Then I asked a simple question: how many first meetings have you had this month? Four. I asked the same question the following month.

Six.

The architecture was immaculate. The pipeline was empty. At some point I stopped asking about the architecture and asked a different question: what are you afraid of?

The market doesn’t wait for perfect. At some point, you have to pick up the phone.

The Pattern That Divides Everything

This isn’t a pattern among others. It’s the variable that determines the speed of everything else — and the one that’s hardest to talk about directly.

Exposed to the same inputs — revenue math that doesn’t work, pipeline that isn’t moving, a sales motion that depends entirely on the founder — founders react in radically different ways.

Some upgrade fast. They take the feedback, kill the old deck overnight, rewrite the pitch, raise their prices, and are executing the new motion the next morning. The discomfort of seeing reality clearly is visceral, but brief. The action follows immediately.

Others resist quietly. They protect their existing worldview. They find reasons why their market is “different”, why the timing isn’t right, why the product needs one more thing before the commercial motion can really work. They schedule another product review. This week ends. The next week starts. Nothing has moved.

This isn’t a question of intelligence. It isn’t a question of experience. It’s the capacity to update your mental model when the data says something different from what you expected. It is GTM Cognitive Elasticity.

Take two founders with the same structural problem: pitch too technical, deals lost because the conversation never reached the economic buyer. One rebuilds the entire approach in a week, tests it on the next meeting, closes. The other spends the same week thinking about how to improve the product to make the pitch easier.

Same diagnosis. Opposite reactions. Very different outcomes three months later.

Cognitive elasticity can’t be taught directly. But it can be pressured. Weekly work — inside the real numbers, inside the live deals, inside the decisions that can’t be postponed — is one of the few environments where this update happens under conditions that actually matter.

The Market Timeline

Founders absorb GTM reality at different speeds. That’s normal. What isn’t normal is assuming the market will adjust to that pace.

I’ve worked with founders at €500K ARR and founders approaching €10M in the same period. Different revenue, different geographies, different products, different teams. The same patterns. The same delays. The same resistance in the same places.

The difference between those who scale and those who stall is almost never the product, the market, or the size of the opportunity. It’s the speed at which the founder can see what they don’t want to see, and act on it before the window closes.

Go-to-market was intuitive when the early customers came through relationships and conviction. It stops being intuitive the moment you need a machine, not a founder. That transition, from instinct to architecture and how you phase it, is where most of the game is won or lost.

The market has no patience for the gap.

If you found this useful, forward it to a founder who needs to hear it.

If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe here.

Subscribe now

What resonated? What’s missing? What’s keeping you up at night?

Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn. Always up for a sharp GTM conversation.

Thank you.

Luigi

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Strategic GTM insights for Founders, CEOs, and Investors building AI-driven tech businesses powered by recurring revenue.

Real stories, proven frameworks, and a mindset for healthy, scalable growth.

Manually curated by Luigi Mallardo.

luigimallardo.com | LinkedIn

Welcome to the first edition of 2026.

If there is a recurring theme in the conversations I’ve had with founders recently, it’s the tension between ambition and focus.

In 2026, AI has lowered the barrier to build anything.

Which makes the temptation to build everything higher than ever.

But scale isn’t built on infinite optionality. It’s built on sequencing.

The companies winning right now are the ones making the uncomfortable decision to narrow their battlefield before they expand it.

Let’s dive in.

🧠 My Work

The Focus Paradox: Why Reducing Market Optionality Increased Exit Value

Startups are addicted to optionality. We tell ourselves: “If I narrow my focus, I trap my company in a small market.” But in crowded B2B SaaS markets, “wide” is where startups go to die.

A few days ago, I sat down with Greg Head on the Practical Founders podcast to deconstruct the journey we built at Woffu and planned a strategic exit to Visma. We didn’t chase unicorn metrics; we made a series of uncomfortable decisions to reduce our market optionality.

The result?

We increased our business optionality.

In my latest article, I break down the exact blueprint behind that paradox:

• The Sequencing Mindset: Using today’s traction to fund tomorrow’s bets.

• The 80/20 Rule: How to allocate resources between your Core ICP and structured experiments.

• The Exit Reality: Why acquirers pay for predictability, not potential.

👉 [Read the full article here]

🎧 [Listen to the full podcast episode here]

Beyond my own piece, the same focus vs diffusion dynamic is playing out across industries.

🌍 SaaSification of Industries

The SaaSification of consumer platforms continues.

Meta is testing premium subscriptions across Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, bundling AI agents and advanced features. Freemium core, paid upgrades, AI as usage-based value. This is SaaS go-to-market logic, applied at consumer scale. Link.

The billable hour is dying in advertising.

As AI compresses production costs, cost-plus margins collapse. Monks is moving 25% of revenue to subscriptions. Advertising agencies are learning what SaaS learned years ago: recurring value beats billing time. Link.

📈 SaaS Market Moves

SaaS Pricing Is in Constant Motion. And That’s the Signal.

In 2025, top SaaS companies made 1,800 pricing changes. Credits, rebundling, hybrid models. Pricing isn’t broken. Static pricing is. Teams that treat pricing as a continuous GTM lever adapt faster than those treating it as finance hygiene. Link.

🤖 AI, Agents & Robots

Enterprise is now the real growth engine for AI

Sam Altman confirmed that Enterprise growth is outpacing consumer growth at OpenAI. Reliable revenue in AI is being built in B2B, not on consumer hype. Link to the interview.

AI Is Failing at the Basics

56% of CEOs report zero returns from AI. The issue isn’t the tech. It’s the fundamentals: clean data, structured processes, governance. AI doesn’t fix broken execution. It exposes it faster. Link.

Death of Software? Not even close.

AI doesn’t kill software. It raises the bar. As Andreessen Horowitz puts it:

AI changes what we build and who builds it. Not how much needs to be built.

Every tech wave that was supposed to “kill” something actually made it bigger. This one will too. Link.

Humanoid Robots Are Leaving the Lab.

Hyundai aims for 30,000 Atlas robots per year in production lines by 2028. Physical AI is shifting from hardware experiments to scalable human-robot operations in real factories. Link.

🚀 Raising Stars

OpenClaw → OpenAI

Europe built it. OpenAI hired the builder. Not brain drain. Leverage gravity. Talent follows scale, compute, and distribution. Link.

👔 GTM Leadership Lessons

OpenAI isn’t scaling by selling AI features.

They’re aligning pricing, packaging, and distribution to how intelligence is actually used, and letting revenue follow value. Worth reading how their CFO frames monetization. Link.

Hands-on at $330M ARR

Carles Reina scaled GTM at ElevenLabs from $0 to $330M ARR in 3 years. At $300M+, he is still running pipeline reviews, doing outbound, and staying close to deals. GTM leadership is not about managing managers. It’s about owning revenue reality. If you step back from the floor at €5–10M ARR, you’re not leading. You’re escaping execution. Link.

Second-Time Founders Don’t Just Know More. They Decide Differently.

Repeat founders succeed ~30% of the time vs ~21% for first-timers. The edge isn’t fundraising access. It’s sharper GTM sequencing, disciplined hiring, and a distribution obsession over product hype.

Experience doesn’t guarantee a win. It rewires execution: decision quality compounds faster than ambition. Link.

📚 Interesting reads

Discovery is becoming model-mediated.

In the AI era, you don’t convince the user first. You convince the model. Structured data and distribution mechanics become competitive moats. Link.

AI Doesn’t Reduce Work. It Intensifies It

A recent Harvard Business Review work shows that AI tools make people work harder because they can do more. Link.

👀 In case you missed it

Two conversations that sparked strong debate:

• Disney stopped pretending to be Netflix. Strategy is identity. In SaaS too, depth is winning over breadth. Link.

• Stop hiring unicorn CROs before you have a pipeline. VPs accelerate motion. They don’t create it. Builders first. Leadership later. Link.

💬 Let’s Connect

What resonated? What’s missing? What’s keeping you up at night?

Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn. Always up for a sharp GTM chat.

Thank you!
Luigi

Share

Strategic GTM insights for Founders, CEOs, and Investors building AI-driven SaaS businesses.

Real stories, proven frameworks, and a mindset for healthy, scalable growth.

Manually curated by Luigi Mallardo.

luigimallardo.com | LinkedIn

A new wave of Enterprise AI reports is landing with the same conclusion, from OpenAI to McKinsey to BCG:

AI advantage doesn’t come from tools. It comes from operating discipline.

That insight is the backbone of this month’s article.

Over the last two years, AI-for-GTM has turned into a circus. Autonomous outbound. Revenue superintelligence. Agents replacing half the commercial org.

But in real B2B environments, especially with complex sales, AI doesn’t fix weak systems. It amplifies them.

In my latest article, AI for GTM, I break down what actually works on the ground. Not tools, not hype, but the five operating areas where AI creates real revenue leverage when the GTM engine is already sound: qualification, prioritization, execution, feedback loops, and accountability.

Across food, media, automotive, SaaS, and robotics, the same pattern keeps repeating:

systems beat tools.

AI accelerates whatever operating model you already have, good or bad.

This edition brings together the most relevant insights I’ve collected over the last three months. It’s been an intense quarter, which is also why this newsletter took a bit longer than usual. No noise. Only what’s worth your attention if you’re building, scaling, or investing in AI-driven businesses with real GTM complexity.

Let’s dive in.

🧠 My Work

AI for GTM: Operating Reality, Not Tools.

Your Linkedin feed is a parade of promises: “Revenue Superintelligence.” “Fully Autonomous Outbound.”

Everyone claims they can replace half your commercial team with a script.

And founders keep asking the wrong question:

“Which AI tool should we use?”

If you start from the tools, you’re already lost.

Automating a broken process doesn’t create efficiency. It just scales the dysfunction.

The real question is:

Where does AI actually move the needle in a GTM engine selling complex deals?

Over the last 24 months, I’ve been researching and testing AI across real GTM environments. The pattern is simple:

In this article, I break down what’s real, what’s hype, and the five areas where AI actually drives revenue impact today for B2B scaleups operating in complex sales environments.

👉 Read the full article here

🌍 SaaSification of Traditional Industries

Specialty Foods & Subscriptions: SaaS logic outside SaaS

Subscription isn’t about software. It’s about owning the customer relationship, data, and repeat behavior. Specialty food brands show how direct access, onboarding, and habit formation matter more than the product itself. The same fundamentals that drive durable SaaS growth. Link.

Automotive is becoming a software business.

By 2035, software-defined products and services are expected to generate over 50% of OEM revenues, yet only 14% have scaled them. The bottleneck isn’t technology. It’s organizational and GTM transformation. Link.

Disney x OpenAI: from content to programmable subscriptions

Disney isn’t betting on AI for efficiency. It’s betting on AI to turn IP into an interactive, personalized subscription engine. Content won’t just be consumed. It will be generated, remixed, and co-created, with new tiers built around interaction, not access. Link.

📈 SaaS Market Moves

Who said Enterprise SaaS is dead

Image taken from ecotechers.com

Intercom pricing evolution

Intercom’s pricing is a masterclass in monetization maturity.

• Clear value metric: Resolutions + seats

• Persona-led plans: Targeted & relevant

• Limited cognitive load: Simple to digest

• Frictionless add-ons: Easy expansion. It’s not “cheap vs expensive.” Clear vs confusing.

This is how SaaS pricing scales. Link.

KeyBanc & Sapphire SaaS Survey 2025

Despite the “SaaS vs AI” narrative, the market is still rewarding companies showing real, sustained growth. The valuation gap is now brutal: sub-20% growers trade around 3–5x ARR, while >20% growers command premium multiples near 12x ARR. In short: SaaS isn’t dead. It’s just become meritocratic again. Link to the survey.

🤖 AI, Agents & Robots

The State of Enterprise AI 2025

The report is clear: AI advantage no longer comes from access to models, but from how deeply AI is embedded into real operating workflows. Leadership and systems matter more than tools. Link.

The Rise of the $499 Butler-as-a-Service

California-based robotics startup 1X has launched NEO, a humanoid home robot now open for preorder at $20,000. 1X is also rolling out a $499/month Butler-as-a-Service plan, signaling how robotics is moving from hardware luxury to subscription-based domestic help. Link.

Deloitte’s AI Misstep

Deloitte had to revise and partially refund a $290k report after AI-generated citations and references were found to be fabricated. A simple but important reminder: AI without a verification layer doesn’t create efficiency. It just produces errors faster. Link.

🚀 Raising Stars

Figure AI: The “EV moment” for Humanoids

Even though the news broke in September, Figure remains the one to watch. Jumping from $2.6B to $39B in a year isn’t just hype; it signals that investors now view humanoids as the next “foundational models”. Backed by Nvidia and Intel, Figure is moving past cool demos to actual infrastructure scaling (Helix & BotQ). This is execution at a industrial scale. Link.

👔 GTM Leadership Lessons

How Snowflake Actually Makes AI Drive ROI in GTM

One of the most interesting pieces of content on real, operating-level AI strategy I’ve read. Snowflake’s CMO and Founding CRO (Chris Degnan) explain how they made AI drive ROI, from an internal AI council to agentic models and governed data.

👉 One line that sums it all up: “There’s no AI strategy without a data strategy.” Link.

📚 Interesting reads

What is working in SaaS GTM (with or without AI)?

Kyle Poyar surveyed startups and found the average software company has 5 core GTM channels and another 5.5 experiments running. It’s no wonder we all feel exhausted. Focus is the new alpha. Link.

AI doesn’t replace work. It rewires it.

McKinsey’s latest report shows that most AI value comes not from automating tasks, but from redesigning entire workflows where people, agents, and systems are accountable together. Link.

ChatGPT Isn’t Killing Google (Yet)

New data from 973 e-commerce sites shows a clear pattern: organic LLM traffic massively underperforms Google across conversion, revenue per session, and AOV. Intent still lives in search. Link.

AI is forcing GTM to redesign itself

BCG confirms the real AI leverage is not tools or efficiency, but redesigning end-to-end GTM workflows around human judgment plus agent execution. AI doesn’t optimize marketing. It forces a new operating model. Link.

Founder secondaries: risk transfer, not maturity.

Letting founders cash out early doesn’t “free them to be bold.” It removes downside. When founders are safe and the team isn’t, incentives break. Real conviction is staying fully exposed until value is actually created.

👀 In case you missed it

A few ideas and conversations I shared on LinkedIn since the last edition:

• How exits are engineered years in advance through GTM clarity. Link.

• First meetings don’t fail on pitch. They fail on qualification. Link.

• Why enterprise GTM has moved from persuasion to qualification. Link.

• Why “creative pricing” is a maturity warning, not a virtue. Link.

• ROI does not guarantee Retention. "We proved the ROI, why did they churn? Link.

• Champion vs. Courier. Stop confusing access with influence. Link.

💬 Let’s Connect

What resonated? What’s missing? What’s keeping you up at night?

Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn. Always up for a sharp GTM chat.

Thank you!
Luigi

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Strategic GTM insights for Founders, CEOs, and Investors building AI-driven SaaS businesses.

Real stories, proven frameworks, and a mindset for healthy, scalable growth.

Manually curated by Luigi Mallardo.

luigimallardo.com | LinkedIn

A few days ago, I shared a reflection on LinkedIn: too many AI startups are treating short-term pilots like ARR. The post struck a nerve and turned into one of the most engaged discussions I’ve had in years.

The reason it resonated is simple: in the rush of AI-driven growth, the pressure to show traction is immense. It's tempting to count every pilot as a win and label it "recurring revenue."

But this isn't just semantics. It's the difference between building a healthy, resilient business, and building a house on fog.

The quality of the conversation pushed me to go deeper. I’ve now expanded that core idea into a full, unfiltered playbook. It’s my definitive guide to pilot discipline in the AI era, and how to protect your GTM strategy from wishful metrics.

Beyond that deep dive, this edition is packed with other strategic insights: from Oracle proving the real money in AI is in the "boring" stuff, to why AI salespeople are failing, and Elon’s masterclass in building not just a product, but a market.

Let's dive in.

🧠 My Work: The Playbook for Pilot Discipline

ERR vs. ARR: The Founder's Guide to SaaS Pilot Discipline in the AI Era

My full breakdown on how to manage pilots without killing your GTM. Includes:

• How to qualify pilots before saying yes

• The “Respect-Contract” I’ve used for years

• Why ERR (Experimental Runrate Revenue) ≠ ARR

• And how to align your team, board, and metrics

→ Read the Full Article Here

SaaS Market Moves

Microsoft’s AI “Partner” Comes for LinkedIn

OpenAI launches a jobs platform. Microsoft owns LinkedIn. Guess who just got disintermediated? The goal is bigger than hiring. It’s about owning the new standard: AI fluency. Link.

Oracle's AI Second Act: The Real Money is in the Plumbing

While others chase the next shiny AI app, Oracle quietly bets on infrastructure, and wins. A GTM masterclass in “boring makes billions”. Link.

At Big Tech, Cloud Revenue Growth is Catching Up to Capex

AI, Agents & Robots

AI Salespeople Are Failing. Here's Why.

New study: AI livestream sellers barely outperform having no seller at all. The only thing that worked? Handling real-time Q&A. It’s not about pitch. It’s about conversation. Link.

Elon on Optimus: Building a Market, Not Just a Robot

He’s not just building a robot. He’s creating the entire supply chain from scratch. A GTM lesson in true category creation. Link.

AI's Dirty Secret: The Real ROI is in the "Boring" Stuff

MIT study: 95% of enterprise AI pilots are failing. Why? Companies are chasing hype in customer-facing tools instead of automating the back-office chaos that kills margins. Link.

Raising Stars

HappyRobot: The AI Workforce for the Real Economy

$44M Series B to scale their “AI workers” across messy supply chains. 70+ customers already in. The lesson? Even in AI, real GTM wins are rooted in unsexy, real-world pain. Link.

GTM Leadership Lessons

Even Great Sales Leaders Are Failing. The Reason is Simple.

Jason Lemkin nails it: experienced CROs are getting fired in 6 months. Why? They’re not spending time with their teams. The future of GTM isn’t fully remote. It’s about showing up: where it matters, when it counts. Link.

Interesting reads

The "Alignment Trap": Why So Many SaaS Companies Lose the Plot

I’ve seen it firsthand. Great product, great people, but no alignment between GTM, Product, and what customers actually value. This piece by Kellogg & Teodosiu is gold. Link.

SaaS Valuations: The “New Normal” Isn’t So Normal

Yes, the median is back to 6–8x ARR. But the spread is brutal: laggards sink under 4x while stars get 10x+. The game has changed. Link.

👀 In case you missed it

A few ideas and conversations I shared on LinkedIn recently:

• Playbooks vs. Scars: Why some “perfect” GTM hires still fail. Link.

• The GTM Co-Founder: Don’t hire a VP Sales. Find a partner. Link.

• Lessons From My Gym Membership: How post-sale culture kills LTV. Link.

• The Original ERR vs. ARR Post: This post sparked the full article above. Link.

💬 Let’s Connect

What resonated? What’s missing? What’s keeping you up at night?

Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn. Always up for a sharp GTM chat.

Thank you!
Luigi

Share

Strategic GTM insights for Founders, CEOs, and Investors building AI-driven SaaS businesses.

Real stories, proven frameworks, and a mindset for healthy, scalable growth.

Manually curated by Luigi Mallardo.

luigimallardo.com | LinkedIn

👋 August is here.

Let’s be honest: most inboxes are half-dead by now, filled with AI hype, SaaS fluff, or vacation autoresponders.

So I’ll keep it tight, sharp, and (hopefully) useful.

This month, I unpacked the GTM leadership puzzle:

– Why the “superhero CRO” is a myth

– When fractional leaders help (and when they don’t)

– A framework to guide Founders to choose the right help…

You’ll find those 3 pieces at the top.

Then we shift gears, from Shopify’s pushback on agentic AI to Barcelona’s robotics play, from Tomasz Tunguz’s new obsession (Agent Managers) to the philosophical wars shaping the AI race.

Pick what clicks. Ignore the rest. And if something sparks a strong reaction, I want to hear it.

Let’s dive in.

🧠 My Work: The GTM Leadership Trilogy

This is my complete, unfiltered playbook for founders facing the GTM leadership dilemma:

1️⃣ The “Superhero CRO” Myth

Why the perfect hire doesn’t exist, and what happens when you chase one.

→ Read the article

2️⃣ The Fractional CRO Trap

As a pioneer of this model, I share why it's often a temporary fix, not a durable strategy.

→ Read the article

3️⃣ The Founder's Guide to GTM support

A practical framework to find the right partner: coach, advisor, mentor, etc.. for your current stage.

→ Read the article

SaaS Market Moves

🛍️ Shopify vs. AI Agents: The Battle for Checkout

Shopify quietly added code to block AI agents from completing purchases without final human review. While Amazon embraces agentic commerce, Shopify draws a line. Platform wars are coming. Link.

🧭 From 0 to Value Prop in 90 Days

A first marketer’s 90-day playbook — from real customer calls to a “big company move.” A tactical guide to positioning that actually differentiates. Link.

AI, Agents & Robots

🚘 Uber, Lucid & Nuro: A $300M bet… or the next Yahoo-Bing?

Uber will deploy 20,000 autonomous taxis by 2030, powered by Lucid’s EVs and Nuro’s AI stack. A bold move or a desperate one? I’ve seen this movie before: Nokia-Microsoft, Yahoo-Bing… High-stakes alliances formed too late, chasing relevance instead of driving it. Disruption doesn’t wait. You either anticipate what’s next, or become a case study. Link.

After AI Agents, Get Ready for “Agent Managers”

Tomasz Tunguz nails the next big challenge: if 2025 is the year of agents, 2026 will be about managing them. The real bottleneck isn’t the AI. It’s our capacity to orchestrate non-deterministic agents at scale. “Agents managed per person” might soon be the new productivity metric. Time to build the tools. Link.

Practical AI for Lean GTM Teams

Forget the abstract theory. A 5-person marketing team details exactly how they use AI across content, growth, and PMM. A super useful, real-world list for any lean team looking to punch above its weight. Link.

🧠 AI SDRs: More Work, Better Results

SaaStr’s AI SDR campaign crushed response rates, but only after real human orchestration. The takeaway? AI doesn’t replace your sales team. It scales them. Link.

OpenAI's New Browser: It's All About the Data

OpenAI is set to release a web browser, a direct shot at Google Chrome. The real play? Bypassing Google to capture user web behavior and data directly for its AI models. Link.

Remember Steve Jobs’ prophecy?

“Computers are an aid to human, not their replacement”. Link.

Raising Stars

Theker Robotics: Barcelona’s Bet on the Physical AI Revolution

Forget Roombas. The next frontier for AI isn’t on your screen. It’s on the factory floor. Barcelona’s Theker Robotics just raised $21M, backed by K Fund, Kibo, and Inditex, to bring AI-powered robots into real-world industrial tasks that traditional robotics couldn’t crack.

This isn’t a SaaS GTM. It’s a deep-tech play where trust, security, and operational ROI are everything, and loyalty is earned one deployment at a time.

For anyone tracking the rise of “Physical AI”, K Fund’s deep dive is worth your time:

👉 Read the analysis

Interesting reads

🧠 The Two Philosophies of AI: Tools vs. Agents

Stratechery’s latest is a must-read on the philosophical divide shaping the AI race. Apple and Microsoft see AI as a tool to augment humans. Meta, Anthropic, and (philosophically) Google view AI as agents to replace us. This core split drives everything—hiring wars, product bets, GTM strategy. As GTM leaders, we don’t just sell features. We sell one of these two visions. Link.

The State of ChatGPT: Adoption in 2025

Pew Research data is in: 34% of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT (up from 17% in 2023), and 28% of workers now use it on the job. A clear signal that AI is moving from novelty to utility. Link.

Your CMO Complains About Sameness? Here's the Real Problem.

A brutal analysis by Dave Kellogg on how the positioning crisis is being masked by the "sea of sameness" myth. And what CEOs should do about it. Link

💬 Let’s Connect

That’s all for this edition.

Let me know what resonated. What surprised you? What’s keeping you up at night?

Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn, always up for a sharp GTM chat.

Thank you!
Luigi

Share

Strategic GTM insights for Founders, CEOs, and Investors building AI-driven SaaS businesses. Real stories, proven frameworks, and a mindset for healthy, scalable growth.

Manually curated by Luigi Mallardo.

luigimallardo.com | LinkedIn

🚀 A Fresh Chapter: GTM Meets Legacy

Over the past six months, I’ve gone deep into the evolving frontiers of SaaS, GTM, and AI. I’ve tested nearly everything: GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek. Not just for fun. This exploration has fundamentally changed how I work. After months of testing, I’m now converging toward GPT (just upgraded to the paid plan in June) and Gemini, which I use as my daily Work OS.

And today, I’m sharing something I care deeply about. And while I’m incredibly proud of this corporate journey, my passion and focus remain fixed on applying these hard-won lessons to scale the next generation of early-stage, AI-driven ventures.

👉 New article: SaaSifying a Corporate Giant. A CRO’s GTM Framework in Action at BAT

It’s the story of applying a full-stack SaaS GTM playbook inside a 120-year-old legacy beast like BAT. Is it possible to slash churn and drive growth by applying startup-like agility to a massive, established machine?

For nearly three years, I dedicated myself to answering these questions and it worked well.

It was a marathon, not a sprint. Moving from high-level strategy to being "on the court," re-engineering everything from KPIs to field and contact center choreographies.

It’s not just a business case. It’s a roadmap for what happens when SaaS frameworks meet old industries. Hope you enjoy it, and pass it along if it resonates.

SaaSing-up

SaaSing-Up the Farm: John Deere's Real Transformation

John Deere is no longer just a tractor company; it’s a SaaS story. Through autonomy features, precision ag software, and subscription pricing, they’re building a recurring revenue machine that rivals tech-native players. A reminder that every industry can be reengineered and “SaaSified”. Link.

SaaS Market Moves

Benioff: "Refounding Salesforce for the AI Era"

With AI now handling 50% of the work, Salesforce’s CEO is redesigning the company from the ground up. Not an upgrade, a total reset. Link.

SaaS GTM in the Age of AI. 2025’s Wake-Up Call

ICONIQ’s 2025 B2B SaaS GTM Report is a must-read. AI-native companies are separating from the pack:

• Trial-to-paid conversions: 56% (AI-native) vs 32% (traditional)

• Quota attainment: 61% vs 56%

• Sales cycles: 5 weeks faster

• Lean GTM teams: 38% fewer FTEs under $25M ARR

• Pricing shifts: 37% now on hybrid (subs + usage + outcome)

• Post-sale investment: Forward-deployed engineers are replacing old-school CSMs

SaaS is splitting into two worlds. If you're not designing AI into your GTM engine, you're already behind. Link.

AI, Agents & Robots

Product vs. Distribution: The ChatGPT Problem

Microsoft owns the pipes, but users are asking for ChatGPT, not Copilot. A classic GTM case: superior product vs superior distribution. Link.

Altman: A "Free Robot" with Your ChatGPT Subscription

Yes, really. Sam Altman envisions a future where signing up for GPT includes a robot in the box. Link.

🧠 Satya Nadella hits the mark:

“AI must prove it’s socially useful enough to justify its energy usage.”
Clear, grounded, and necessary. The bar isn’t just capability. It’s impact. Link.

Raining Stars

The Boring (But Powerful) Side of AI Mobility

Everyone loves Waymo’s robotaxis. But Nigerian startup Moove is betting on fleet management: keeping AVs charged, clean, and deployed. And they're raising $300M to do it. This operational control could be where the real value lies. Link.

A16Z: Enterprise AI's New Speed Run

The median GenAI startup now hits $2.1M ARR in 12 months. Top quartile: $5.3M. Series A in 7 months. Capital efficiency and speed are the new default. Link.

🚀 $80M Exit. Solo. Bootstrapped. 6 Months.

Maor from Base44 closed $80M in 6 months. Solo, no VC, $3.5M revenue. Different game, different rules. Link.

Interesting reads

🧠 GenAI Confusion Still High

Deloitte's 2025 UK consumer study: 1 in 4 adults haven’t heard of generative AI. Of those who have, most don’t fully understand it. The gap between buzz and comprehension remains wide. Link.

💬 Let’s Connect

That’s all for this edition.

Let me know what resonated. What surprised you? What’s keeping you up at night?

Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn, always up for a sharp GTM chat.
Luigi

Share

Strategic GTM insights for Founders, CEOs, and Investors building AI-driven SaaS businesses. Real stories, proven frameworks, and a mindset for healthy, scalable growth.

Manually curated by Luigi Mallardo.

In the race to leverage AI, it's easy to get caught up in the hype. But the fundamentals of building a resilient, valuable SaaS company? Those are timeless. This edition, I’m pulling back the curtain on a journey close to my heart: scaling Woffu from its early bootstrapped days to a strategic acquisition by Visma. It's a deep dive into the Go-To-Market playbook we used, packed with real-world lessons on strategic focus, efficient growth, and designing for optionality that are directly applicable to today’s AI-driven SaaS leaders.

Read the full Woffu GTM case study.

Beyond Woffu, this issue scans the horizon for critical shifts and practical insights shaping SaaS, AI, and GTM. We’ll explore:

• The "SaaSing Up" of Everything: How AI is not just improving SaaS but also accelerating the transformation of traditional industries into 'as-a-service' models, demanding new GTM thinking.

• SaaS Market Dynamics: From robust software spend forecasts powered by AI to the ongoing revolution in SaaS pricing (yes, Salesforce is feeling it too).

• AI, Agents & Automation: The real-world impact of AI agents, how leading AI companies are monetizing, cautionary tales from the frontier of AI in sensitive fields like therapy, and a look at mind-blowing robotics.

• Investment & GTM Wisdom: The evolving VC playbook for AI and actionable advice on critical early hires.

My goal, as always, is to cut through the noise and deliver candid, grounded insights you can actually use. Let’s dive in.

SaaSing-up

AI Disruption: But What Kind?

Uber and Airbnb didn’t just sell software, they rewired markets. But the impact on hotels vs. taxis? Totally different. The lesson: don’t just shout “disruption.” Ask what kind. Link.

AI Transforms the XaaS GTM Playbook

As AI accelerates the "Everything-as-a-Service" shift, it's also rewriting the GTM playbook. GenAI is now key to streamlining complex XaaS sales, from lead to quote. Link.

SaaS Market Moves

Software Growth Accelerates: AI is the Engine

Thoma Bravo forecasts 19% annual growth in software spend, with AI as the main driver. SaaS itself is maturing, holding steady at 13% YoY. The upshot: demand is real, and timing still matters. Link.

Netflix Is Targeting a $1 Trillion Valuation.

Content, scale, and... SaaS? Worth watching. Link

Salesforce Admits: AI Needs New Pricing

Forget per-seat for AI agents. Salesforce's new "Flex credits" for Agentforce show they're listening to CIOs concerned about AI costs and value. It's all about outcomes now. Link.

AI, Agents as a Service & Robots

OpenAI Eyes $12–13B, Anthropic Hits $3B Run-Rate

Enterprise-grade AI is turning into a real business, fast. Link.

Anthropic's new subscription tier targets users who want more power than free, less friction than enterprise. Smart move. Link.

Shopify's Founder: “Use AI by Using It”

Tobi Lütke’s internal memo says it plainly—no theory will replace hands-on usage. AI isn’t optional, it’s learn-by-doing. Link.

M𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗼𝗻 𝗔𝗜 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻 2025

Solid snapshot of how AI agents are being used across industries right now—beyond the hype. Link.

Enterprise AI: Finally, No Hype

OpenAI’s latest enterprise AI report lands with 7 grounded, actionable lessons. Surprisingly realistic, worth a read. Link.

8 tools to use to do the work of 8 people.

A practical look at AI tools promising significant productivity leaps, a glimpse into how AI is augmenting, and sometimes replacing, human tasks. Link.

AI Therapists: Promising Results, Serious Risks

Therabot, a clinical AI chatbot from Dartmouth, matched human therapists in reducing depression and anxiety symptoms. Impressive results—but in mental health, stakes are high, and errors kill. Link.

Robots You Can Ride.

Kawasaki unveiled CORLEO, a hydrogen-powered quadruped robot you can ride like a horse. It uses AI to balance in real-time based on the rider’s movement. Sci-fi? No. It exists.

Raining Stars

Clay’s Pricing Inspires SaaS Founders

SaaS founders are drawing pricing inspiration from innovative models like Clay's, emphasizing value-metric alignment and usage. Link.

Paid is betting on the scalability of “service as software”

London-based AI agent marketplace, Paid just raised a $10 million seed round. Manny Medina, Founder of Outreach and now Founder and CEO of Paid sees AI agents as replacing SaaS products.

Interesting reads

The New VC Playbook: AI Roll-ups & Buyouts

Top VCs are becoming RIAs, launching companies, acquiring others, and building with AI like PE firms. A strategic shift worth watching. Link.

Who Should Be Your Startup's First Sales Hire? (It's Not Who You Think)
Forget the “hungry SDR.” The right pick? A seasoned seller ready to build with you. Smart take on a make-or-break decision. Link.

For Parents: How University Students Are Actually Using AI

A practical look into how the next generation is adopting AI in real workflows. Some surprises in here. Link.

That’s all for this edition.
What’s your take? Let’s discuss. Reply or DM me.

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Insights, real stories and food for thought about “healthy” SaaS and AI agent go-to-market strategies, customer-centric growth and efficient recurring revenue models in both Tech and Traditional Industries.

Manually curated by Luigi Mallardo.

GTM Growing Pains at 10M+ ARR: Lessons from Cloud Academy

In the last edition, I shared an article about a typical Enterprise SaaS GTM struggle. What happens when growth slows between $5M and $15M ARR and how to fix it. A few CEOs I know thought I was talking about their company… interesting.

Read that article here.

This time, I’m sharing another real-world case—Cloud Academy—one I have worked with.

Even profitable scale-ups surpassing $10M ARR with strong 50% YoY growth can hit GTM walls that make scaling to $20M–$30M much harder. Cloud Academy’s story is full of insights for companies in similar situations. How do you spot these issues early? What course corrections actually work?

Read my deep dive here.

The AI Wave Keeps Accelerating

The last time I felt this level of excitement about market shifts was back in 2010–2012, when I was learning how SaaS was changing GTM forever. AI is having a similar and even more powerful moment.

Here are some key moves I’ve been watching in the last few months:

SaaSing-up

Sam Altman’s Vision for AI Subscriptions

“Currently, I am more excited to figure out how we can charge people a lot of money for a really great automated software engineer or other kind of agent than I am making some number of dimes with an advertising-based model.” Link.

AI Getting Into Telco Bundles

Singapore telco Singtel is bundling Perplexity Pro as a free add-on. Just like Spotify or Netflix. Found this in Benedict Evans’ newsletter, and it caught my eye. Link.

YouTube Launches a $7.99 Subscription

YouTube, the goliath of online video, is now Netflix’s biggest rival for attention. Link.

SaaS Market Moves

Is Deflation Coming to SaaS?

Suddenly, those old pricing models look outdated and heavy. Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Link.

SaaS Resilience: 2024 KeyBanc Report

Growth may be slowing, but SaaS remains strong. Key insights from the latest KeyBanc Capital Markets report. Link.

Microsoft vs. Adobe: AI Pricing Smoke & Mirrors

Microsoft’s Copilot pushes an extra charge on subscriptions. Adobe plays a different game. Are we paying for real AI breakthroughs or just their profit margins? Cut the crap and demand real value. Dig here.

AI, Agents as a Service & Robots

OpenAI Explores ‘Salaries’ for AI Agents

Call it ‘salaries’ or ‘subscription fees’. it’s still SaaS. Link.

Global Robot Density in Factories Doubled in 7 Years

We’ve gone from 74 robots per 10,000 employees in 2016 to 162 in 2023. Link.

Klarna’s AI-First Transformation

Klarna made waves last year by replacing SaaS vendors with ChatGPT. Now, they’ve cut 20% of their workforce, largely through attrition. Peers remain skeptical. Link.

Klarna CEO recently clarified their perspective. Linkedin post.

ChatGPT Subscribers Nearly Tripled to 15.5 Million in 2024. Link.

Grok3 vs. ChatGPT: Who Wins the SaaS Battle?

Grok3 is setting new performance records, but will users actually switch from ChatGPT? With 300M users already integrated, OpenAI holds the advantage. Unless Grok proves overwhelmingly better. Link.

By the way I’m using Grok and I’m starting to really like it.

Microsoft’s Copilot mess here.

Everyone Is Building AI Agents—But No One Agrees on What They Are. Link.

Interesting reads

Europe’s Cloud Shift

European firms and agencies are eyeing a switch from US cloud giants to local providers, fearing data privacy risks under Trump. Concerns over security and sovereignty are driving the shift. Link.

AI Hype & Bull Festivals

Scientists found that large crowds don’t move randomly but flow like a vortex. Isn’t this what is happening to the AI Hype? Link.

That’s all for this edition. What’s your take? Let’s discuss. Reply or DM me.

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Insights, real stories and food for thought on SaaS, AI and Customer-Centric go-to-market “healthy” growth in both Tech and Traditional Industries.

Manually curated by Luigi Mallardo.

So much is changing in the world.

There is so much noise.

In the Linkedin world, the noise is becoming pfff… annoying, to say the least.

I’ve been focusing the last few months to meet with a number of European businesses 5 to 15M in ARR that have been experiencing disappointing growth.

Interestingly they work in different niches but they share similar Enterprise SaaS GTM issues.

What are these issues and what has to be changed, in a context where devaluation, write-off or even worst (especially for the Investors) the survival without an exit can become the most likely events?

I’m sharing a recent article about this topic and you’ll also find in this edition a number of other news that caught my attention in the last few months.

My Work:

This is the link to the article “Enterprise SaaS GTM issues when growth is disappointing between 5 and 15 million in ARR. Therapy for a real “typical” story.”

I’m humbly proud that last week Dealflow mentioned it.

News on SaaSing-up companies

Ferrari is looking to add fresh revenue streams with subsciptions. Link.

Reddit stock price is benefiting from lucrative AI content subscriptions with Google and OpenAI.

Link about the deal with Google.

CNN launches a subscription for heavier users. Link.

SaaS

Netflix Will Stop Reporting Subscriber Numbers Starting in 2025

The company wants to reorient investors toward time-spent-viewing metrics where it has more potential upside in the years ahead. In other words, more focus on Customer Success than Sales. Link.

SaaS vs AI pricing framework implications

Will AI agents trigger a shift in SaaS from subscription to outcome-based pricing? Why some AI newcomers may find it hard to deal with unpredictable cash flow. Link.

AI Agents as a Service

Why millions tried ChatGPT but most of them haven’t been back?

Everything takes time. Link.

Klarna plans to shut down SaaS providers and replace them with AI.

That’s very brave… Link.

ChatGPT at 1M+ subscribers and some pricing implications.

Subscription prices could reach as high as $2,000 per month. Link.

Interesting reads

Age of successful Founders

May be I’m biased here but why VCs tend to invest on young entrepreneurs when the evidence shows that success comes from middle aged ones. Read this interesting article from HBR. Link.

Product marketing should move more towards solution marketing.

Write less about the product and more about use-cases being specific about the business outcomes. Link.

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Insights, real stories and food for thought on SaaS and Customer-Centric go-to-market growth in both Tech and Traditional Industries.

Manually curated by Luigi Mallardo.

My Work:

The rise of Fractional CROs as a Service

The risks and implications of picking the wrong go-to-market leaders and the rise of the fractional model. Experience and perspective. Link.

News on SaaSing-up companies 📈

Reddit SaaSing up before the IPO

The company is seeking to generate new revenue by licensing its content for training artificial intelligence models. Link.

AI Agents as a Service

Selling software will evolve to selling agents

Interesting thoughts by Tomasz Tunguz on what the implications are and how sales strategies of SaaS companies must evolve. Link.

Nvidia announces AI-powered health care 'agents' that outperform nurses — and cost $9 an hour. Link.

How American businesses used AI in 2023

Nearly 70% of American companies said they used AI for business operations in 2023, according to Statista. Roughly half used AI for accounting and human resources purposes.

Klarna claims some real-world GenAI

Klarna, a major payment provider fintech, announced that it deployed an OpenAI-powered customer support agent, and it’s now handling two thirds of customer chats, the equivalent of 700 human agents, with the same accuracy but a lot faster. That might sound too good to be true, but sometimes step changes in automation work like that. Link.

Rising Stars

Humanoid robots on the rise

Figure, a company building humanoid robots, raised $675 million at a valuation $2.6 billion, led by OpenAI and Microsoft. Link.  

Interesting reads 📖

Private Equity looks to create value through SaaS portfolio companies. Link.

Insights, real stories and food for thought on SaaS and Customer-Centric go-to-market growth in both Tech and Traditional Industries.

Manually curated by Luigi Mallardo.

My Work:

DO’S and DON’TS for a healthy B2B go-to-market strategy.

Guidelines for going into Mid-Market and Enterprise. Link.

Revenue and GTM Leader, Mentor, Advisor, Consultant, Coach.

They can all be useful if you know who you need. You wouldn’t hire an electrician to fix a leaky pipe. Would you? Link.

News on SaaSing-up companies 📈

Klarna launches subscription ahead of IPO.

Swedish fintech company Klarna launched its first subscription plan, “Klarna Plus,” for $7.99 per month, featuring benefits like no added service fees when using Klarna’s One Time Card, double rewards points and access to exclusive discounts with popular brands. Link.

Contact Center as a Service.

Contact-centre-as-a-service subscriptions are set to experience a significant surge in revenue, according to a study by Juniper Research. Link.

Target moving towards Walmart+ and Amazon Prime.

It is the seventh-largest retailer in the United States, and a component of the S&P 500 Index. Should launch paid membership later this year, according to Bloomberg

SaaS

Cloud revenue unstoppable.

Why Shopify 25% price increase for its most profitable client base is not a bad idea.

Shopify ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) are bigger businesses who are generally less price sensitive. Furthermore people will understand the correction due to inflation. Third and finally this is a way to reinforce the positioning aim of the company to move more upmarket. Being cheap is not good to sell to bigger businesses. Link.

AI Agents as a Service

The era of Robot as a Service (RaaS) approaching

Humanoid Robot Startup Figure AI in Funding Talks With Microsoft, OpenAI. Figure AI is building a humanoid robot to perform hard jobs. Link.

OpenAI reached $2bn run-rate annual revenue. Link.

Apple has made more AI investments than the others.

Source: Financial Times, PitchBook. Elaboration by SuperhumanAI

Software companies have a bright future.

Apart from OpenAI & Microsoft many large SaaS companies are beating predictions & raising their growth expectations because of AI. Mongo & Snowflake announced accelerations in their businesses as a result of AI. ServiceNow is the most recent, stating in the last earning call that “In Q4, our gen AI products drove the largest net new ACV contribution for our first full quarter of any of our new product family releases ever, including our original Pro SKU.” Link.

Rising Stars

In last month newsletter I mentioned how Shopify CEO, Nvidia and Jeff Bezos amongst others invested in AI-powered search app Perplexity. This months it entered the top 10 on the App Store productivity charts, ahead of apps like Google Calendar and Microsoft Word.

Interesting reads 📖

50% of unicorns minted in Europe last year went out of business. 17% lost the unicorn status.

Insightful data in this article by Sifted on how “… some of the eye-watering valuations many startups picked up during the heady days of yesteryear have begun to get washed away …”. Link.

Insights, real stories and food for thought on SaaS and Customer-Centric go-to-market growth in both Tech and Traditional Industries. Maximum once per month in your inbox.

Manually curated by Luigi Mallardo.

My Work:

What’s wrong with the VP Sales model in SaaS.

Why most scaleups fail to find the right Revenue Leader. (1) Bad Timing. (2) Unreasonable Expectations. (3) Wrong Profile. (4) Inexistent Onboarding. Link.

As a CEO are you Bottleneck, Maradona or Down-To-Earth?

In my experience there are three types of CEOs in early stage SaaS. What's your profile?

Leadership Mantras

Everyone should have a list of personal and professional mantras. Something to remind ourselves regularly. The start of a new year is a good moment to do it. Here are mine. Link.

News on SaaSed-up companies

How to price and bundle AI features.

Takeshi Numoto has been the revenue architect of Microsoft cloud business from 8 billion $ in 2015 to 140 billion in the year ending June 2023. Now he faces the challenge of building the revenue model to convince customers to pay for AI tools. Link.

Never say never.

In 2020 Netflix founder Reed Hastings promised "No ads. Ever." Today the basic plan with Ads is fully operative and has more than 23 million active users. Link.

SaaS

High Net Revenue Retention is not necessarily a good thing.

In a recent chat of Jason Lemkin with Henry Shuck, CEO of public listed company ZoomInfo, Henry shared interesting insights about the SaaS macro-environment (watch) and acknowledged that high NRR (Net Revenue Retention) is not necessarily a good thing. I wrote a Linkedin post about it that generated engagement and interesting interactions, including from ZoomInfo CEO. Read the thread (link).

How to know if a SaaS business is overvalued or not.

Take the Enterprise Value to Yearly Revenue ratio (for example a company valued 1 billion € with 100 millions in revenue has a ratio of 10). This multiple shouldn’t be bigger than 1/3rd of your growth rate. So in this case you should grow at least by 30% yr on yr. Link.

Customer Success is the first to get eliminated in a layoff.

This is so wrong and short-sighted. In a difficult and competitive context the real work should start after the sale.

AI Agents as a Service

Presentation: AI, and everything else

Every year Benedict Evans, one of my favourite readings, produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends. For 2024, ‘AI, and everything else’. If your startup isn’t working on generative AI, what’s wrong with you … Link.

OpenAI launches a store for custom AI-powered chatbots. Link.

Rising Stars

Bezos bets on Google challenger

Shopify CEO, Nvidia and Jeff Bezos amongst others invested in Perplexity. This one, more than ChatGPT, may become the real Google Challenger. Link.

Interesting reads 📖

Software report covering merger and acquisition (M&A) trends.

Transaction volume was down. Infrastructure software has the highest total value. Median enterprise value multiples for all segments combined in this report during the last 36 months were 4.3x revenue and 17.5x EBITDA. Link.

Podcasts and Webinars 🎬

Would you cut your feet to fit the shoe of what VCs want to hear?

As a tech founder, if you follow the trail that works for you and your customers, there are many ways to create a valuable software company. Cutting your feet to fit the shoe of what VCs want to hear is not necessarely the right thing to do. Listen to this interview to a founder of a Healthcare scaleup who is happy and doing well. Link.

Bundle or Unbundle?

When you start up your SaaS business the opportunity is to bundle your offering. When you scale up it's the opposite, you should consider the opposite. Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo has been the first evangeliser of the #Subscription Economy and spoke recently about the latest developments including his own experience with customers like Linkedin. Link.

I wish you a resilient and serene 2024 and the same for your families and friends. My thoughts go primarily to good fathers, separated with children and this is why. Link.

I wrote the last edition of the SaaSification newsletter more than two years ago. I have good “stories” for having discontinued it for so long but what it counts now is that it’s a great time to get back with the same passion to share.

Topics

The two key topics of my content are the same I have been passionate for a long time. They are now more relevant than ever:

1. How to build and scale “healthy” go-to-market strategies and engines if you are a SaaS startup or scaleup selling primarily into Mid-Market and Enterprise.

2. How the “SaaS mindset does not apply to startups only but also to big corporates willing to reshape the way they operate, identify the right KPI’s and re engineer processes to ensure consumers are always at the heart of everything we do”, as the CEO of a public listed consumer brand company said after having worked two years together. 

What you can expect

This newsletter will bring on average once per month in your inbox my latest blog articles plus insights, learnings and real stories of SaaS (Software as a Service) startups & scaleups as well as companies in traditional industries adopting SaaS go-to-market models. It’s food for thought about Customer-Centric Growth and Efficient Recurring Revenue Models.

Why read and recommend.

If I look back at the 15- 20 businesses I’ve been working with in the last 10 years, the last two years have finally brought the validation I was aiming for. I consider the “diversity” of these experiences as my USPs (Unique Selling Points):

• The four out of four B2B scaleups I’ve been involved with higher intensity (in three of these as CRO as a Service since 2018), they all got acquired between 2022 and 2023. Woffu, Tiendeo, Wide Eyes and Whisbi. What % of startups get an exit in the tech industry?

• In 2021 I worked hand in hand with the CEO and the leadership team of the marketplaces Japanese group Lifull Connect (was at $50M+ in yearly revenue and profitable) for building a new SaaS business in Asia and Latin America from scratch. I supported the build up of value proposition and sales motion, working also on the ground with the sales and marketing teams. In two years the SaaS revenue went from $0 to 8-digit ARR.

• In 2021-2022 I worked closely with the CEO and Founder of San Francisco-based B2B Enterprise SaaS Cloud Academy in the growth journey from $15M to $30M in ARR, linked to his earn-out after having sold the company to a Private Equity firm. Spotting issues, redefining processes and data, hiring successful AEs and SVP Sales USA.

• A few early stage (Seed) startups I’ve supported by building on the court the Fundamentals of their go-to-market engine from scratch (GTM focus, value proposition & pitch choreographies, Sales and Customer Success playbooks and teams) are keeping on doing great in their journey:

  • Frenetic, Enterprise SaaS platform for AI-driven magnetics component production, which I supported at the start in 2020 and more recently in early 2023, just raised $12M Series A to keep on growing in US.

  • In 2019 I had great time working with BDEO to bring efficiency and higher margins to the insurance industry through Visual AI, and also with Caravelo to bring subscriptions to the Airline industry. They both raised in 2023 from VCs to keep on executing their mission and I look forward to their exit at the right time.

• Out of the tech sector, since 2022 I’ve been intensively working with a public listed consumer brand company, British American Tobacco. I drove a successful implementation of my SaaS framework for the scaleup of their reduced-harm GLO platform, working hand in hand with the Marketing Leadership Team of Central-South Europe, the CEO of Italy and their marketing and brand activation agencies. The implementation of the framework has been instrumental in increasing retention rate substantially and move to the next level the way the company is building a "true" customer-centric approach for customer acquisition and adoption, in order to move smokers to better alternatives to cigarettes that reduce harm.

Content of this new SaaSification newsletter edition

For this first edition after so much time, I thought it was a good time to update the articles of my Blog that received more views and engagement since I started to write in 2020. There are 4 that stands out. For the next editions I have a few new articles I’m drafting that I trust you’ll find interesting.

I've also manually collected news in the last 12 months about companies and industries that are adopting SaaS-like approaches to grow healthily and become more Customer-Centric. I’m sharing these insights below.

If you find my project interesting and useful, please share with your network and recommend your peers to subscribe to this newsletter.

I count on your support.

Thanks!

Luigi

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on pexels.

From my Blog:

How to deal with the fear of devaluation, write-off or survival without exit.

What have been the consequences of the 2020-2021 VC bubble and its unreasonable valuations? What should be the plan to regenerate value? Link.

The Fundamentals of Go-To-Market Playbooks

I wrote a Linkedin post in Summer 2023 to share how too many SaaS B2B startups and scaleups are still following a Go-To-Market Playbook that is obsolete although it used to work well in 2015-2020.

Nevertheless there are some basic “Fundamentals” of a Go-To-Market Playbook that do not change with time or specific circumstances or industries. Link.

How the most valuable consumer brands become SaaS-like “true” Customer-Centric organisations

SaaS go-to-market best practices provide a great framework for customer centricity. Nike and Starbucks are as SaaS as Microsoft and Adobe. What are the Mantras to become SaaS-like? Link.

Game Plan for a Healthy Go-To-Market in early-stage B2B SaaS

For gaining traction in Middle Market and Enterprise in B2B SaaS you need a game plan of 4 Pillars and its 10 main Fundamentals. Link.

News on SaaSed-up companies

It took Nike 7 years to hit $1M in revenue. Now they make $1M every 10 minutes. Growing fast matters, but growing for a long time matters more.

Nike has been one of the first companies to adopt SaaS-like customer-centric GTM models up to the point to hire their current CEO, John Donahoe, from a SaaS company, Service Now. I found this linkedin post and podcast quite interesting.

Amazon expands healthcare push with One Medical benefits for Prime members

Prime members in the US who opt in will have access to unlimited, on-demand virtual healthcare via One Medical, the subscription-based group that Amazon acquired last year for $3.9bn. Link.

Amazon is also testing grocery subscription service for Prime members. Link.

News on SaaSing-up companies

In October 2020 I shared in this newsletter that Pret A Manger had launched a subscription model in UK. It seems that the experiment worked out and the company is scaling the model to other countries. LINK.

Rising Stars

Do you know Vendr? They raised a series B of 150M$. It’s a real-time database of thousands of negotiation insights, collected from a community of customers and negotiation experts. For finance and procurement leaders, this means access to the art of the possible for every SaaS negotiation, to maximize outcomes. They want to fix sales by making sure that software buyers and sellers have equal access to information. I found it quite interesting.

SaaS

Amazon and Microsoft under investigation.

UK’s CMA competition authority will conduct an investigation into ‘hyperscaler’ cloud market share. Amazon and Microsoft dominate, obviously, so they’ll be looking for abuses (and we might get some interesting data)”. Link.

The gurus of Product-Led-Growth are in trouble.

Product-Led-Growth (PLG) framework for SaaS VC-backed startup has not delivered. OpenView, one of the most influential VCs following the PLG wave, laid off most of its staff and will no longer make new investments. Link.

AI Agents as a Service

AI agents will democratise services that today are too expensive for most people.

This recent article by Bill Gates is easy to understand and helps visualise how the future belongs to Agents as a Service. Link.

Interesting reads 📖

Is the growth of subscriptions in several industries creating inequities?

Interesting perspective in this article about the risk that the economy-wide transition to subscriptions may take away consumer choice — and it can exacerbate the existing inequities in the way we shop. Link.

Customers’ forgetfulness when it comes to subscriptions can boost companies’ revenues by up to 200%.

This is according to economists at Stanford and Texas A&M. Link.

Every company is a software company. Finally a Big Three consulting firm finally realise SaaSification is a “big thing”

Also big consultancy firms like McKinsey start to realise there is a big opportunity in helping traditional industries and consumer brands adopt SaaS models. Link.

Subscription fatigue: More companies are charging monthly fees. How much can consumers take? Link.

SaaSification is for business leaders who understand that any business is SaaS business as well as for those who don’t realize it yet.

Manually curated by @luigimallardo

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News on SaaSed-up companies 🗞

A few weeks ago AT&T accepted that it should never have bought Warner Bros - then Amazon purchased MGM, for $8,45bn. Link.

Netflix is reportedly planning to get into games even more. Link.

Line extension for Zoom which is building an event platform. Link.

As anticipated in previous editions of the newsletter, Twitter has just listed a new paid-for “Twitter Blue” service on app stores, suggesting the social media company may launch its long-rumoured subscription service soon for 2.99$. Link.

News on SaaSing-up companies 📈

Ford is becoming a SaaS companies by powering-up software updates to deliver a more seamless Amazon Alexa experience, BlueCruise and more this year. Link.

The Most Popular Paid Subscription News Websites. More than half of the outlets included in this ranking are at least 100 years old. Link.

News on to-be-SaaSed-up companies 📉

A leaked Walmart memo highlights the daunting challenges facing the world’s largest retailer which is losing ground to competitors like Amazon, Target, and Instacart. Link.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Rising Stars

Riders Share Launches Rider Pass, Industry-First Subscription Service for Peer-to-Peer Motorcycle Rentals. Link.

SaaS

ABM shouldn't be conceptualized as account-based marketing. It's account-based everything. Or, better put, account-based go-to-market. There. ABM should be ABGTM. Link.

Interesting reads 📖

According to new research from Bold Commerce, more than 70 percent of retailers have, or soon will, integrate subscriptions into their ecommerce strategies. Link.

Why subscriptions are the key to better banking and financial services. Link.

Manufacturing is currently experiencing a rebirth that is very similar to what happened to the software industry twenty years ago. Everything is turning “as a service” and today the manufacturing industry is delivering the outcomes their users are seeking, as opposed to simply pushing products. Link.

B2B start-ups are making Europe more competitive. European B2B start-ups outperform their US-based peers in value per invested capital. Link.

Podcasts and Webinars 🎬

The resiliency of Subscription Businesses. Link.

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SaaSification is for business leaders who understand that any business is SaaS business as well as for those who don’t realize it yet.

Manually curated by @luigimallardo

Share SaaSification

This newsletter has been silent for the last two months because things have been hectic in business and I prefer not to write just to write…

In return this edition is quite dense of real stories and interesting news.

I also wrote a new post.

What is the Sales Playbook and what is not ->

Is the Sales Playbook a template? Many people miss the point on the real nature of this fundamental piece for a scaleup journey. Link.

News on SaaSed-up companies 🗞

Google is aiming to becoming an e-commerce platform to challenge Amazon. Easier said than done. Link.

Shopify 2020 results show that the company’s merchant sales were over 40% of Amazon’s. In that sense Shopify is only three years behind. Shopify is riding a wave of both consumers and brands becoming ready to go direct. It means that giant companies can get access to the same tools as startups. Link

Private Label business has been part of grocery retail for 150 years. Now Amazon seems to be using the same classic playbook. It's a BIG business. Link.

Amazon Prime announced 147 Million Subscribers in the US. Basically in the country there is more than one subscription per household. Link.

Spotify Launches Podcast Subscriptions. Spotify is beating Apple to the punch — Apple’s podcast subscriptions debut next month — and it’s promising creators more favorable business terms and wider distribution. Link.

News on SaaSing-up companies 📈

Subscriptions have the power to change the culture of traditional organization. Synsam Group, Scandinavia’s largest optical chain, with over 500 clinics and 3,500 employees, pioneered an enormously successful subscription program which helped them thrive during the pandemic and has quickly become a central strategic imperative for the company. From selling eyewear to selling eyesight. Link.

Disney Plus reached 100m subscribers after 16 months with the trajectory of growth likely to be even steeper as they launch in new markets. Disney executives originally predicted that Disney Plus would amass between 60 and 90 million subscribers by 2024. Direct-To-Consumer business is the company's top priority. Link.

News on to-be-SaaSed-up companies 📉

What news publishers can learn from Netflix. About $27 in the US buys monthly digital access to Netflix, Disney Plus, and Spotify’s library of 70m recorded songs. For that sum, it is possible to subscribe to one of these news sites: the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times or The Times of London. But not more than one. Link.

Rising Stars

Grocery as a Service. Consumers are taking fewer 73% trips to the grocery store and instead are shopping more at food subscription services and online grocery stores, with 80% of U.S. consumers having shopped online for groceries since COVID-19 outbreak. Experts predict these trends are going to continue to grow. Online grocery service, Hungryroot, has leaned into this change in consumer behavior with their online grocery delivery service model. Link.

Clubhouse seems to have gone quiter in the last few weeks and everyone from Facebook to LinkedIn to Twittter is trying to copy the formula. Neverthless they just announced a new big round of VC investment valuing the company at $4bn, 3 months(!) after a round valuing it at $1bn. Link.

Subscription Billing Platform Chargebee Becomes Unicorn. The company developed an infrastructure for companies to create a subscription business in as little as 10 days and be able to bring in a reliable source of revenue. Link.

SaaS companies

“Cloud spending grew a stunning 23% in 2021, from $270 billion to $330 billion. But that’s just the start.” “Get in Early” to big accounts, almost whatever it takes. Link.

How enterprise-software vendors must adapt to the new era and adopt a new strategic playbook to weather the different challenges ahead. Success will take a renewed strategic focus, a willingness to expand “as-a-service” offerings beyond subscription pricing, and a greater emphasis on profitable growth. Even McKinsey realized that ... Link.

You cannot grow properly only with new clients. As you scale a big portion of additional SaaS revenue must come from existing customers. Look at a few interesting case studies in this blog post of SaaStr (link). Just consider that each marginal 20% of Net Dollar Retention (NDR) is a doubling of company ARR in 5 years (link). Especially when you go upmarket, the opportunities of Customer ARR expansion are bigger. Link.

Interesting reads 📖

Working from home. If you can do your job from anywhere, someone anywhere can do your job. Are superstar employees about to be offshored? Link.

We’re in the midst of a reset, one that is already transforming the economy and what employees, customers and our broader communities expect of companies. Every Company is a Tech Company Now, according to the Times. Link.

The old solutions for solving a crisis no longer work. And so, a new dawn of leadership is needed. Courageous and Compassionate leadership is now a prerequisite for anyone striving to lead organizations within the 'new normal.' Integrity, insight, and inclusiveness are the “three essential qualities of leadership.” Link.

Sadhguru via Getty images

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Why this newsletter. Link

Archive of previous issues. Link

Share SaaSification, by Luigi Mallardo

I wrote a new post that I wanted to share with you all.

Why Jeff Bezos appointed his SaaS guy as successor ->

Jeff Bezos has surprisingly announced that in Q3 2021 he will step down as Amazon CEO. Surprising was also the choice of his successor: Andy Jassy, the company’s top cloud executive and CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Why. Link.

Featured image by Building Materials Online (BMO) 

News on SaaSed-up companies 🗞

Amazon's news release announcing CEO transition. Link.

An interview with James Gwertzman, the head of cloud gaming at Microsoft. Gwertzman was a fountain of knowledge and insight, providing a wealth of information on cloud computing, cloud services, and things to come in the games industry. Link.

News on SaaSing-up companies 📈

Nike acquires data integration expert Datalogue. This is Nike’s latest acquisition to enable its consumer-led digital transformation. "The acquisition of Datalogue builds on our digital momentum by enhancing our ability to transform raw data into actionable insights in real time and across the enterprise." said John Donahoe, President and CEO, Nike, Inc. Link.

Twitter Introduces New Paid Subscription Service "Super Follow". New revenue streams will undoubtedly be key to Twitter’s ambitious plan to double its revenues by 2023. Link.

Volkswagen to work with Microsoft on cloud-based Automated Driving Platform. Link.

Ford and Google sign six-year deal for in-car connectivity and cloud services. Link.

Rising Stars

SaaS companies may still be your big fish. But then, data companies are that triple-sized moby dick falling from the skies straight through your roof and right into your living room (cit. Aleksandar Stojanovic).

Data as a Service. Databricks, a start-up whose software helps companies quickly process large sets of data and get it ready for analysis, said it has raised $1 billion in fresh cash, including from a few prominent investors: Amazon Web Services, Alphabet, Salesforce and Microsoft all joined in. Link.

One of the key mantras of SaaSification is that everything is becoming Conversational and this may help to explain the meteoric rise of Clubhouse. Many believe that live audio represents the next phase of social media — or, at the very least, a long-overdue addition to the current text-, photo- and video-based experiences. Link.

Chelsea Stahl / NBC News; Getty Images

SaaS companies

A Common and Critical Mistake When Forecasting Next Year's Bookings in SaaS. Link.

Thoughts on Hiring Your First VP of Sales by Dave Kellogg, one of the most respected SaaS leaders globally. I agree with 3 and 4. I disagree with 1, 2 and 6, especially as far as Europe is concerned. Link.

Interesting reads 📖

Peloton and Ford have the same market cap. Ford has been the best selling vehicle in America for the last 40 years and Peloton has the best selling bike with an iPad taped to it for the last 4 months. Link.

Do you want to understand what is happening in the world through real numbers? Have a look at the last presentation of Benedict Evans. Covid brought shock and a lot of broken habits to tech, but mostly, it accelerates everything that was already changing. Link.

McKinsey figured that European B2B startups generate more value per funding than US but EU B2B startups fail earlier than US startups, with only 27% advancing from Seed to Series A. Link.

Podcasts and Webinars 🎬

What is the future of car ownership? Lynk & Co. is an upmarket car brand from Geely and Volvo, who want to attract customers with connectivity and a car club offering. "People Want To Drive a Car, Not Buy A Car", Lynk & Co. CEO said in a recent interview. Link.

Technology enablement, new generation of customers and the need of recurring revenue. Are We At The Subscription Economy Tipping Point? Link.

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Manually curated by @luigimallardo

Would you like to experiment?

Join us in a Clubhouse fireside chat this Sunday at 18:30pm CET time.

It’s targeted to European Founders, VCs and Operators to discuss whether the "classic" SaaS VP Sales model in EU is working or not.

The “room” will be open to the public so it will be also a chance to see how this “new thing” works.

To get into Clubhouse you need an invite to the App from someone you know and who is already a member. There are not many invites available at the moment. I have 2 left so give me a shout asap. More infos at the bottom.

The link to access the room on Sunday is here.

Will be with me:

Oscar Macia, CEO ForceManager

Ana Paula Reis, VC Bynd Venture Capital and co-Founder BridgeWhat

Raul Porojan, Director of Sales & Customer Success Project A Ventures

Oriol Juncosa, Managing Partner and Co-Founder Encomenda VC

More guests to be confirmed.

** Download the IOS app, look for people you know and get into the queue asap. Android is under development and coming soon.

You can listen to Clubhouse rooms like you listen to podcasts. So whether you’re walking the dog, or you’re unloading the dishwasher....come join us on Sunday to listen to true experiences.

I’ll try to make sure there will be time for live questions and comment from the attendees.

Subscribe now

Why this newsletter. Link

Archive of previous issues. Link

Manually curated by @luigimallardo

Subscribe now

I wrote a new post that I wanted to share.

Going upmarket in B2B SaaS ->

In B2B SaaS going upmarket is often the only way to keep on growing at a decent rate over time. Many founders and operators still struggle with that idea and often they miss the execution of the most appropriate game plan. Link.

News on SaaSed-up companies 🗞

If I were in Twitter's shoes I would not be sleeping all night because of the rise of Clubhouse. You should check out. Link.

Photo by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images

News on SaaSing-up companies 📈

"We are creating the Ikea of the future". After spending most of its more than 75-year existence as a retailer operating huge destination-stores, the Swedish chain is rapidly moving from its one-size-fits-all strategy to a multi-tiered network of stores that include in-store urban locations and even neighborhood shops specializing in design services or as places to pick up orders placed online. It will have all three formats in five key cities by 2024, it says. Link.

Apple’s Self-Driving Electric Car Is at Least Half a Decade Away. Link.

News on to-be-SaaSed-up companies 📉

BMW, Audi, Merc cancel subscriptions. “The approach of the OEM’s overseas appears to have been ‘build it and they will come’, but they have forgotten that subscription is very different to retailing. Link.

SaaS companies

The average SaaS business is trading at 22.6x revenue. Also of note, 60% of companies are trading at 10x revenue or greater (all time high). Link.

Tomas Tunguz undercovered some really interesting insight around the valuation topic that is worth reading as well. Link.

New definition of ARR. Everyone today wants to claim they have ARR because the valuations are higher. There’s a newer ARR metric for SaaS companies called cARR, which is contracted ARR, or the annualized value of the contracts signed but not deployed. That number is typically larger and provides a bigger number to multiply, hence a higher valuation. Link.

Sales. The new question should be not “is your sales process repeatable?” but “is it optimizing?” And never “optimized,” because you’re never done. Link.

Interesting reads 📖

Consumer subscriptions. Contrary to popular belief, subscription pricing doesn’t work because of the lower price point that a monthly installment allows. It’s effective because a subscription reorients each customer’s mind from product function to value proposition. Link.

Enterprise software. Digital business, led by projects with a short Time to Value, will get more money and board level attention going into 2021.” Gartner has increased its estimates for global enterprise and IT spend for 2021 and 2022, with Enterprise Software and SaaS the biggest beneficiary, projected to grow a stunning 10.2% in 2022. Link.

The age of the electric vehicle is much more than just a switch of technology. Link.

An Epitaph for Intrapreneurship. Why big companies should not try to act like startups. Link.

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