The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 31,030 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 97 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Latka says B2B buyer allegiance is dropping and AI churn is rising
“We are seeing less and less allegiance from B to B buyers to any software product. Churn is just generally higher with these AI tools.”
Yaman: The 'founders eat last' mentality is antiquated
“Don't do the move of like founders eat last. I also think that's old and antiquated. Like you have to understand your worth.”
Borden says developers cannot vibe code deep vertical domain software
“You can put together a prototype, like and you can vibe code your way to kind of a, you know, a simple scheduling app but you can't vibe code your way to something that has kind of deep value to a domain.”
Sinha: India-based sales teams can close large US enterprise deals with travel
“That's false. So you can have people based in India sell to a large enterprise US customers. You do need some face time. So myself my co-founder and the salesperson at times will be traveling to the US and Europe. So those are seasonal or periodic trips that w…”
Romain Torres: AI will completely replace human ad copywriting and optimization
“One skill that until now was very important, but that is gonna be completely replaced by AI over time. Basically what will happen, I think, is You'll describe your product. AI will come up with a script for you that will use a platform like Arcades automatical…”
McKeefery and his wife retained 100% equity in Reviews.io until sale
“100%, yeah. I had this, you know, I, there was a few people in the company who would help me along the way, and they got really big earn outs, but it was only really from me saying, hey, I want to make sure you get a big earn out out of this rather than it bei…”
Reviews.io beat heavily funded VC-backed rivals by staying closer to their customers
“I had some big competitors in reviews like wealth financed, VC backed companies that were backed to like hundreds of millions. And, but they weren't close to their customers. They weren't there listening to them. And I truly believe that we did well against th…”
McKeefery claims acquirer App Hub did not understand Reviews.io's unique business model
“The company that purchased reviews was a, basically a roll up of Shopify apps. But reviews really wasn't the Shopify app. It wasn't that play. We had a much different playbook. And the company, the people who were heading up that company at the time really did…”
Hamdi: Y Combinator AI startups are often 'fugazi' ChatGPT wrappers
“I think AI right now has a lot of like Y Combinator kind of fugazi with a couple of people and, you know, a chat GPT wrapper.”
Teens make six figures monthly on TikTok Shop using Arcads AI avatars
“Teens create TikTok shop accounts and they just like create a ton of content on TikTok using Arkad's avatars to promote those supplements brands and say sometimes like do really, really good revenue, like sometimes like six figures a month without any paid ads…”
Moore: Apple's Merchant of Record Services Are Worth Around 15%
“Apple is a merchant of record. And Apple deals with, you know, you don't have to deal with chargebacks, you don't have to deal with disputes, you don't have to deal with taxes. You also don't have to deal with involuntary churn. Because I have news for you. If…”
Superwall Customers Are Passing App Review Using Stripe Billing
“Like, so we have, we now have customers that are using super wall to build with Stripe. And they're just getting through app review, like, it's fine.”
Rush: Intentionally caps micro-SaaS tools at $100k MRR to avoid enterprise bloat
“Basically the way, I do is I start, I get to fifth decade, then I pose, then I come back and I get a hundred K then I pose and go to other tools. And I basically don't want to go farther than a hundred K because then it becomes a product that will require me t…”
Adding non-essential onboarding questions boosted Cal AI's user conversion rate
“Initially, we had no animations, we had no GIFs, it was,
Very bland.
We only asked the questions we needed in order to give the user their calorie daily intake estimate that they would need to gain weight or lose weight, and
That was, it was purely utility, bu…”
Alina Vandenberg says European and Outlook-using prospects close significantly slower
“We also observe that we're gonna sell less well if, sorry, they're based in Europe, they take forever to close. If they're on Outlook, for some reason, people that use Outlook, they're a lot slower to make decisions as well and if they're a traditional company…”
Giffis: Product-focused startups cannot over-invest in customer onboarding
“You can over invest in acquisition. You can over invest in retention. You cannot over invest in onboarding. It's the most important motion in your business, especially if you're a product focused business, right?”
Singh: Median Public Software Stock Down 21% Since 2018
“The median software company that's public is down 21% over the last six years, from 2018 to now.”
Singh: Diluting Equity for Marginal Growth Rates Destroys Shareholder Value
“A way to think about it is if, let's just pretend you're growing a hundred percent a year, and then you raise a growth round for twenty-five million dollars, you sell a third of your company, and now your share count is a third bigger. But if your growth rate …”
High interest rates require SaaS payback periods of 12 to 18 months
“In a world of, ah, higher interest rates, that really we need to be solving backwards from 12 to 18 months.”
Latka: The most bankable software companies usually start as agencies
“The most successful software companies we see that are most underwritable, bankable, they usually launch an agency.”
Levy: Construction companies are negligent if not using Document Crunch
“It's just candidly negligent to not be using our product if you're in the construction industry.”
Hyrkin: Non-AI SaaS companies cannot get revenue multiples above 5x
“Not six. I mean unless you're AI right now, you're not getting north of five.”
Hyrkin: Debt lender demanded 1% equity monthly and $1M penalty
“And this firm continued to negotiate with us after we had verbally agreed and kept squeezing and adding in more and more and more and more terms to the point where they started to demand they wanted at one point, an additional point in the company for each mon…”
6sense demanded a 3x price increase six months before contract expiration
“It's six months before the contract expires. They're like, we're gonna triple your price and hang up the phone.”
Omnisend CEO warns against buying cheap backlinks to avoid Google penalties
“Shall you buy backlinks? Yes. Shall you buy from the low authority website? Please don't do that because Google recognized it and then you can be penalized, yeah? So if there is something for cheap in the market, usually there is a trap.”
Omnisend CEO: AI models will not recommend brands lacking general awareness
“But, you know, now I believe that in the world of AI, general brand awareness will become more important. It's the same as, like, human brain, yeah? If artificial brain will not see you as a market player, they will never recommend you.”
Novoselsky: 65% of B2B Searches Start on Social, Not Google
“Here's the stat that's really alarming, is 65% of the B to B search starts on social, not on Google.”
Schumacher: Well-managed SaaS companies almost never go bankrupt without excessive VC funding
“If you manage the SaaS well, it's almost impossible to get into bankruptcy. It usually only happens if there's a VC pouring too much money. Founders go crazy. The environment tanks.”
Founders can multiply $10M QSBS exemptions using multiple irrevocable trusts
“And so for federal taxes, if you want to save more money on federal taxes, what you do is you create a revocable trust and you gift your shares to your children or to your spouse or to your relative, your brother. And each of those trusts that you create gets …”
Call Recording Shifted From $7B Valuation to a Commodity Feature
“A lot of services that were premium services, the most prominent example of which would be call transcription and recording, that used to be a whole company worth seven billion dollars, Now that's a feature of most revenue platforms and a commodity feature at …”
Jacobs: Building proprietary software is unnecessary to create a big business
“And all of the people that said you need your own software in order to build a big business, those people I don't agree with actually.”
Making BDRs do lead research indicates a broken data model
“One of the things here is don't let your BDRs do lead research. Give them the leads and make sure, and if they say they need to do anything with them, it means your model's broken.”
Singh: Startups should generate $1 of ARR for every $1 raised
“My view is, you know, if you raise a hundred million dollars, you should be able to generate a hundred million dollars of error off of that platform over time to pay back for the time that it takes to get to that hundred million dollars.”
Singh: Platform software products are vastly more durable than single vertical solutions
“Because the platform product is way more durable than the single vertical product. And the single biggest problem people make in investing and starting companies is they think they, because they get a lot of great feedback from their customers because they're …”
Chellappa: Big tech hires showed no performance difference compared to startup hires
“I've hired people from Salesforce, Zendesk, I've hired people from big brand companies, and I've seen no difference in performance from somebody who might have just worked for a smaller startup or run their own mom and pop business in the past.”
Chellappa: Founders should lead sales and close the first 10 accounts
“I'm a firm believer that this, that the founder should be doing sales, and doing some other marketing for the first two years. They should be the one closing the first 10 accounts. If you're not doing the, I closed the first 40 accounts, because we were bootst…”
Lemlist hired early videographers and delayed hiring salespeople until $1M ARR
“We had a team of up to 10 people in the video team out of a hundred, out of 80 to a hundred people and that was a significant investment compared to most of the SaaS companies that you see. Even at the beginning of the company, I think it was the second or the…”
Lauris: Omnisend wins 80% of competitive sales cases against Mailchimp
“Mailchimp, which is our direct competitor as well, but if we compete against Mailchimp, in 80% of cases we win against them, because we know that we drive way better value for those who sell online.”
Moore: The TAM for Monolithic BI Platforms Like Domo Collapsed
“We just saw our TAM get completely crushed at RJ Metrics, because on one side, all this money is pouring in to companies that are doing exactly what we are doing, which is making it really, really hard to scale in an economically efficient way, but on the othe…”
SMB SaaS spending growth surpassed enterprise growth in late 2023
“The interesting thing happened Q-three last year. So, around Web Summit last year, we gave a State of the Union on, on SaaS. And we said, it's interesting. The small buyers come back. The small buyers started outperforming the big buyers for the first time in …”
Buhrdorf: Founders should never hire a lawyer for company formation
“You know, when you do a formation, people come to me and say, hey, should I use a lawyer to do a formation? I say, absolutely not. Not only will they do it wrong because they don't do 1000 of thousands of these like we do, we make damn sure we do it right, hav…”
Martin: Nine-Figure VC Competitors Failed to Dislodge Time Doctor
“And we actually were terrified around 20, 21, because we had like seven companies that raised over a hundred million dollars, To come directly after our market, and so far, none of them have really penetrated the market that badly because we already had that e…”
Martin: Remote workers are 35% to 40% more productive than in-office workers
“Remote workers are 35 to 40% more productive than their office workers.”
Martin: Prioritize Marketing Channels by SEO, Paid Ads, Then Email
“Do SEO, paid ads, and email in that order. If your CMO tells you to do anything different, they don't know what they're talking about.”
Isilay: UK startups should wait until $10M ARR before US expansion
“Whereas we stayed focused on the U.K. Market and his advice was stay focused on the U.K. Market until you get to ten million AAR and then look at the U.S. Market. And that real, that was invaluable advice and stopped us blowing through our money too quickly.”
Zero-MRR startups can run outrageous marketing because they lack a brand
“You don't have a brand when you're zero MRR. Like, you can do outrageous things with zero consequence, as far as I can tell. Like, The worst thing that happens is you just start over and everyone forgot what you were doing in the first place.”