Jordan Bentley

One of the biggest things working for our PE-backed projects is tried and true SEO. While many agencies will come in and instantly recommend 20 net new blog posts, refresh page content, and try to invest in other things that may accelerate growth, there's a huge opportunity to just optimize the existing assets. This prolongs success and often leads to frustrated clients being assured 'well you know, SEO takes a long time to take affect...' Get some quick wins right away to get buy in and trust. Examples: Started project mid January and for just optimizing existing blog posts, product pages, home page, and meta: ✅Organic Traffic grew 15% ✅High intent form submissions grew 74% ✅Product pages replaced the high priority keyword rankings from the blog pages for a far superior landing experience (and in turn converted the same volume of high intent form submissions from the products page in April as received the entirety of Q1) This will apply for nearly any established site with decent history & authority. Small tweaks will make a world of difference. And while you're diving into the low hanging fruit wins, you can start formulating your longer term plan for growth in the background.

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Folks often ask - what's the value of 100% accurate and real time web analytics? Let's run some scenarios - Assume you have a baseline conversion rate of 2%, and 50,000 visitors per day. Assuming you have a 30% signal loss (which we've been seeing consistently) due to client side data capture you would need: 31 days to observe a 5% conversion rate impacting trend 8 days to observe a 10% conversion rate impacting trend But with Insights and edge server data capture, you will get an email of that same impact: 4 days to observe a 5% conversion rate impacting trend 1 day to observe a 10% conversion rate impacting trend. Our Insights customers see trends weeks before their competitors #SpeedMatters - not just web speed but decision speed!

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Here are the top 4 reasons we walked away from Micro SaaS acquisitions in 2023: 1. The David and Goliath Problem: Imagine being a small business trying to compete in a market overflowing with venture-backed giants. These Goliaths have deep pockets, enabling aggressive marketing and pricing strategies. They dominate the landscape, ready to wage price wars, or invet in acquisition strategies with very long-term paybacks. It's a tough game for the smaller Davids. 2. The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing Issue: SaaS business model = higher valuation so keep your guard up. These wolves in sheep's clothing often rely heavily on manual processes or bespoke software, compromising scalability and profitability. Moreover, if a single product is propping up the whole business, there's a ticking time bomb of limited growth potential. 3. The One-Man Band Dilemma: A business overly dependent on key individuals is like a band led by a solo artist. What happens if the frontman exits, post-acquisition? The sweet music can quickly turn into a cacophony, disrupting performance and operations. 4. The All Eggs in One Basket Situation: High dependency on a few clients is risky. It's like putting all eggs in one basket. Lose a key client, and you can face a harsh fall, threatening the company's profitability and long-term survival. When investing in SaaS, understanding and assessing these risks is critical. Know your risks, make informed decisions, and ensure your success in the SaaS investment landscape. Your thoughts?

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Do you know how many hyper-growth public software companies are growing by over 40% this year? According to the latest June Guggenheim report… Zero. Not a single public SaaS company is growing over 40%. Do you know how many are growing their next twelve months (NTM) revenue over 30%? Also, zero! With that context, I was strategizing with my team on the most impactful ways companies can change their growth trajectory, and one thing we landed on solving immediately was time to integrate. If a company growing at 30% can pull in all net new integrations and thus revenue by just 1 month over the course of the year, it can increase its growth rate by almost 5%. For simplicity, assuming a $100M annual revenue, a 10% discount rate, and a 5-year valuation period, using a DCF, the company’s present value would not be 5% more valuable, but closer to 20% more valuable for all shareholders. The power of compounded growth rates. Game changer, and with just the smallest adjustments. That’s why smart companies are investing heavily in new customer onboarding and no-code, low-code technologies, like lightweight agents, hosted or embedded UIs, and more. The Socure team is ahead of the curve—ask our people about what we’re building and how we can help you accelerate your revenue growth.

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🗞️ The biggest DAP solution just got acquired for $1.5 Billion in cash 💰 Here's the full breakdown and implications: WalkMe, founded 13 years ago in Israel, coined the term "Digital Adoption Platforms" 🫣 and helped create the category that Chameleon operates in. The original problem WalkMe was looking to solve: more efficient employee training for internal applications/tools (such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, SuccessFactors etc.) WalkMe focussed on serving the enterprise, and customers include Nestle, IBM, US DoD. In 2021 WalkMe went public (WKME on Nasdaq) raising $300M and peaking in the public markets at a $2.8B valuation. Most recently it's market cap was ~$900M. SAP is a massive German-based software company with a market cap of $220B that acquired WalkMe. It offers both software and services (e.g. to help enterprises undertake digital transformations). It's CEO said: "By acquiring WalkMe, we are doubling down on the support we provide our end users, helping them to quickly adopt new solutions and features to get the maximum value out of their IT investments." 📌 What does all this mean for Chameleon? 🧳 It's another milestone in the development of the category; seeing one of the biggest software companies (SAP) dive into this raises awareness of the whole category 💸 Although it was trading at a ~4x multiple (value:revenue) the acquisition is at 6x, demonstrating that the market perceives great value (and future value) in this technology ⚔️ Cements WalkMe's use case: employee training for internal applications. The new breed of DAP solutions (like Chameleon) typically focus on end-user engagement... the acquisition should mean a clearer divergence between these use cases and more clarity on the best solution for each. 🚤 We can continue to innovate at speed while competitors (WalkMe, and also Userflow) have to invest time/energy being absorbed into their acquirers, and shift strategy and focus to better align with their parent companies 👌

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Let the wave begin! Pioneer Fund company Recall.ai *grew their revenue 10x* in the past year, has 300 enterprise customers, and just raised a $10M Series A led by Ridge Ventures. David Gu and Amanda Zhu dropped out of college at age 19 to start the company. They've grown it exponentially with a tiny team. They make it easy to build meeting bots that are cross-platform. They're aggregating all these different APIs into one unified API, the way Twilio did with cell phones. At first it "sounds" easy to build a meeting bot -- just integrate with the Zoom API. But in fact there's a huge long tail of things you need to build, security and privacy pitfalls, automations, transcription complexities, integrations, the calendar invites where someone is using Google Meet or Teams, staying up-to-date with the libraries, etc etc. Recall takes care of all of that. It's WAY easier to build on top of Recall.ai and focus on the features that make you unique. Congratulations to the Recall team!

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What are the 5 elements of Apollo.io's product-led growth motion that helped build their $1.6 billion business? Leandra Fishman goes into detail in this episode of Game Changers by Sequel.io 👇 1️⃣ 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗞𝗣𝗜𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝗴𝗼𝗮𝗹𝘀 2️⃣ 𝗥𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: driving product adoption is linked to compensation 3️⃣ 𝗗𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗳𝘆 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: video, live chat, webinars, etc. 4️⃣ 𝗠𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗺𝘂𝘀𝘁: increase the # of stakeholders involved in purchase decisions 5️⃣ 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗼𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: communication, messaging, lead scoring https://lnkd.in/gRStVtzb

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"Monetization must be a first-class citizen in your product from Day 1 & if you're not thinking about entitlements early on, you're not setting yourself up for success." -- Justin Gagnon Justin leads growth engineering at Calendly, which means he's built & evolved monetization in the context of both hyper-growth & scale. We sat down last week for a conversation about feature management, monetization, and the services needed to deliver flexible pricing & packaging at scale. Some of the topics we covered: 1️⃣ Why monetization is so complex in B2B SaaS 2️⃣ The role of entitlements 3️⃣ Paying down bad product decisions vs. bad monetization decisions 4️⃣ How Justin & team built monetization infrastructure at Calendly 5️⃣ The tech & commercial debt that comes when monetization is a last-class citizen If you're a product & engineering leader, I highly recommend this episode with Justin. Schematic has learned much from him over the last year and so very excited to share the full episode (link in the comments).

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I met with a founder who’s bootstrapped an impressive local newsletter media business that reaches millions of people per year and makes $5M/year of revenue. But, he was in rough shape due to recent changes in Instagram’s algorithm causing his traffic to plummet, and ad dollars have been harder to get since the good old ZIRP days. He wanted me to invest in his business and is raising some VC money to shake things up. We’re all guilty of this. We look at an industry, shake our heads and declare it "dreadful" - a lost cause, doomed to fail where time, effort and money go to die. But some of these “dreadful” businesses that most people try to avoid are the ones I’m honestly most excited about right now. The media business is a prime example of this. I was reminded of it the other day. And as the founder was explaining his challenges, he uttered the fatal words: "media is a dreadful business." That's when I had to stop him in his tracks. Here’s my point of view: If you build a media business, you own a rare resource: people's attention. Which attention you own is "your business." Monetize the right high-value audience, and you've got a beautiful business. And how you monetize that attention is also "your business." Monetize correctly through subscriptions, paid community instead of ad dollars, and suddenly you've got a high-margin, high-impact model. The status quo of media business is to find advertisers and optimize around impressions. But the most interesting way to monetize media is to build your own internet products (marketplaces, SaaS, communities) and optimize around monthly recurring revenue. The reality is the most dreadful businesses just need to be reoriented to be beautiful ones. New business model, new distribution channel, attach a creator to it. The truth is, there are no dreadful businesses - only dreadful “status quo” mindsets. When you approach an industry with curiosity, creativity, and an unwavering belief that there's beauty to be found, even in the most seemingly bleak of landscapes, that's when the magic happens. After all, some of the most beloved, profitable businesses in the world started out being called "dreadful." And these days we call those businesses cash machines. History is rich with examples of 'dreadful' industries reborn through innovation. Someone comes in and looks at it completely different. And it becomes a golden business. That fires me up.

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Before I even knew what a Venture Builder was back in the day, all I pretty much did on a day to day basis was validate and launch little businesses with the goal of getting them to $10k per month in revenue. Once I got to that point I'd ask myself a few questions: "Can this thing go on without me? If I hire someone, can the revenue cover the costs and potentially make a profit? How big can this really get?" If the answers were: No, No, Not very big. I'd scrap it and shut it down. Yes, Yes, Big enough to be worth proceeding. Then I'd start the CEO search and start raising. I'd say that 9 out of 10 were scrapped, but that doesn't mean that I/we (investors) lost any money. Most of the time we all made out pretty good in such a short period of time. Venture Building is a lot of fun and can make you a lot of money if you follow the process, stay lean and make the hard decisions based on data.

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I 💯agree with Oz Merchant on this topic. Some folks advise founders to pitch very selectively and 'pick your pitch' - you get one shot, choose it wisely? I'm 180 degrees opposite of that - be a promiscuous pitcher! - ABP - ALWAYS BE PITCHING. Because your pitch gets better with every no, take that feedback, learn, iterate. Right now it's taking 50-100 no's for Triangle co's to get funding, it's still tough out there, so get through the no's fast to get to a yes. Check out the event - also go see others pitch, it all helps you get better - pitching is like PMF - lots of iteration, tons of grinding to get through to the other side.

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As people navigate the world of venture studios, I thought it'd be interesting to interview those with experience. Recently I caught up with Brian Bemiller, Innovation Engine Leader at 1848 Ventures, backed by Westfield. 1848 Ventures is a corporate venture studio building new B2B SaaS businesses targeting SMBs. They're specifically not building insurance companies, despite their parent, Westfield, being an insurance company. It's an interesting and proactive strategy. Brian was 1848 Ventures first employee, who previously worked at Westfield. He's seen a lot as the studio has built and launched several ventures, iterated on its validation process, hired a bunch of people (they're hiring today!) and more. Here are some highlights from that interview: Q: Why did Westfield decide to launch 1848 Ventures? There are two long term outcomes we target: (1) direct financial value from the income generated from ventures that we launch; and, (2) the indirect financial value that we generate for our parent company, Westfield, via access to new customers and data. Two examples of ventures we’ve launched, which we’re now scaling are TakeUp and Vandra. Q: Can you describe how your process works for creating new ventures? There are two distinct parts of our organization. The first is the early stage venture creation “engine” that starts with market exploration in one of our core industries of focus (retail, restaurants, hotels, real estate and construction) and progresses through customer discovery and business model ideation and de-risking through hypothesis driven, in-market testing. Throughout these phases, many alternative problem spaces and business model ideas are explored and tested. Many of these are ultimately shut down or significantly pivoted. For those that progress through the initial hypothesis driven, in-market testing, the venture is transitioned to an experienced B2B SaaS leader to carry the momentum forward into early customer acquisition, product launch/go to market, and the original team heads back to the beginning to restart in a new space. For those ventures that experience early indicators of future success (initial customer acquisition, customer feedback, market understanding, etc.), a Seed investment is made to drive additional customer growth and progression on the journey towards product market fit and scale. Once that investment is made, funds are leveraged to build a team around that specific venture and execute a Seed investment plan, iterating along the way informed by learnings from customers and the market. Q: Why do people join 1848 Ventures? For many, a corporate venture studio represents an opportunity to do the kind of work they're passionate about without the challenges and time commitment of raising capital. So many individuals on the team have come from other venture studios or the VC-backed startup world & enjoy operating and continuing to grow their skills via new and diverse experiences.

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Black-box automation systems like Advantage+ and PMax are designed to deploy the entirety of an advertiser's budget while meeting their performance targets. This creates the incentive for waste: a platform can balance high-value and low-value inventory to exhaust an advertiser's budget while delivering the requisite ROAS. How does this dynamic change in a recession? Advertisers will likely a) cut brand spend and b) shift budget to the largest, most dependable, and most sophisticated platforms. But to what degree do black-box automation campaigns scale? Far more low-value inventory exists than high-value inventory. With more money being allocated to the largest platforms' automation tools -- placing more demand on their high-value inventory -- can these platforms continue to deliver acceptable performance while consuming additional budget? What's the upper limit?

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if you are struggling to define the core values of your company as a ceo or founder ... You aren't the only one! At Software Legacy Partners, we help leadership teams of vertical market saas companies with this all the time. The good news is that they already exist... Start by picking three employees that you would absolutely clone and enthusiastically hire if you could. Describe every characteristic of those people. Somewhere in that list are your core values. #VSaaS

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A startup idea worth pursuing is: 1. pitch-worthy: you enjoy distilling it down and telling people. 2. join-worthy: you can form a community around it. 3. earn-worthy: folks will invest time/effort for collab opportunities or early access. 4. prepay-worthy: cashflow. https://lnkd.in/gA2icK8h

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One of the really cool parts about the Everything Marketplaces community is seeing all of the wins shared by founders & teams. This ranges from earlier stage founders like Peter Monteza Mike Wolkon Gabriel Lobl sharing about crossing early milestones, more mid-stage founders like Brendan Candon sharing about a key partnership for SidelineSwap, to even later stage founders like Anthemos Georgiades sharing about a big product launch at Zumper. Something that members have also been telling me is that when they see a post with a founder sharing a win, they also feel like they're winning when they see it. This is how I know that we're building something really special for the world of marketplaces. Here's a screenshot from our April roundup & recap post where we helped highlight a few recent wins shared by community members.

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