TLDR Founders 2024-03-25

Stability AI CEO Resigns 👋, Pricing GenAI Features 💲, Scaling to $250M ARR 🚀

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Headlines & Trends

Stability AI CEO Resigns to Pursue Decentralized AI (2 minute read)

Emad Mostaque has resigned as the CEO of Stability AI. He is leaving to focus on decentralized AI due to skepticism over closed platforms like Stability's. Mostaque believes that centralized AI can't be beat with more centralized AI and wants to ensure that AI remains open and decentralized. This move highlights the ideological divide among AI startups in terms of democratizing AI through open models or commercial offerings.

GTM Strategies to Reach $250M ARR at ActiveCampaign (10 minute read)

ActiveCampaign, a marketing automation SaaS company, implemented various go-to-market strategies to achieve significant growth and a $250 million ARR. These strategies included experimenting with LinkedIn ads, leveraging customer advocacy, creating industry-specific content hubs, hosting educational workshops, exploring affiliate and influencer partnerships, and optimizing conversion rates. They all contributed to increased pipeline and customer engagement in 2024.

Pricing and Packaging Your B2B or Prosumer Generative AI Feature (6 minute read)

This article discusses strategies for B2B SaaS and prosumer companies to effectively price and package generative AI (genAI) features. It emphasizes the importance of understanding early usage, customer personas, and product vision to align the value and cost of genAI with the company's overall offering. The article explores various packaging options (core offerings, upgrades, and add-ons) and pricing models (subscriptions and hybrids), highlighting the need for flexibility and alignment with customer value as the genAI market evolves.
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Strategies & Tactics

How to Decide Fast (5 minute read)

Founders have to balance their gut instincts with data-driven insights. It is both an art and a science to develop a lean "data-informed" mindset to accelerate decision-making for startups. This article offers 7 quick tips to help you with this process. Hint: make a habit of checking your metrics every day to stay informed.

The Four W’s of Product-Led Sales (7 minute read)

Product-Led Sales (PLS) is a superpower because it gives you the best of both worlds: the seamless onboarding and proven engagement of a self-serve product along with the large contract sizes of sales. A successful approach involves identifying 'trigger' events indicating a user is ready for sales outreach, reaching out to the correct persona, choosing the right communication channel, and crafting a personalized, value-driven message.

Lessons from a $60M Series A Fundraise (10 minute read)

The founders of Leapsome share an honest behind-the-scenes look into their first fundraise, which raised $60M in a very different 2022 environment. This comprehensive guide takes readers through the entire process, from creating a compelling pitch deck and supplementary data to prioritizing investors, managing meetings, conducting due diligence, and much more.
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Tools & Resources

Bluedot 1.1 (Tool)

Generate follow-up emails from Google Meet.

NotionCircles (Templates)

A curated collection of top Notion templates.

DataMotto (Tool)

Make your data ready and clean with AI.
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Miscellaneous

The Problem of AI Ethics and Laws About AI (5 minute read)

This article critiques approaches to regulating AI and software, using the UK Post Office scandal as a case study to illustrate how institutional failures, rather than technological flaws, can lead to significant injustices. It argues for a nuanced understanding of AI's diverse applications, suggesting that a broad, one-size-fits-all regulatory framework is impractical due to the rapid evolution and varied uses of AI technologies.

Software and a Service: The Diagonal Software Opportunity (8 minute read)

This article discusses the transformative potential of combining AI, software, and services into a new business model called Diagonal Software, which aims to overcome traditional service industry challenges by leveraging AI to improve scalability, margins, and customer experiences. It highlights examples across various sectors, including financial advising, back office functions, and robotics, emphasizing the symbiotic relationship between AI and services to unlock new markets and drive significant growth in the software industry.

How Figma Grows: An Interview with Figma's CTO (20 minute read)

Take an in-depth look at Figma's plans to expand from being just a $20 billion design tool to becoming a $50 billion ecosystem that spans the entire product development lifecycle. The CTO of Figma shares insights on sequential growth loops, the role of AI in raising and lowering the design barrier, and what defines great product leadership.
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Quick Links

Velocity and Possibility (1 minute read)

When working on projects, make sure to allocate time for exploration before scaling.

Churn Analysis using ChatGPT (2 minute read)

This post showcases how to analyze customer data, run logistic regression, and identify factors behind churn, all without coding or data expertise, by using ChatGPT.

Let Reality do The Heavy Lifting (2 minute read)

When searching for potential customers, seek out those who have experienced the full extent of the problem you solve and let that reality speak for itself.
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