Article's Content
Article's Content
Welcome to Volume 145 👋
Happy Thursday!
In this week’s newsletter, we cover:
- 📈 How Carta Increased its Organic Traffic by 100% in Just 6 Months
- 💸 The a16z Team Takes a Deep Dive Into FinTech Pricing
- 👀 What’s the Latest in B2B SaaS This Week?
- 🧠 This Week’s Brain Food
- ➕ The Best Content Across the Web
Let’s get into it.
Looking for a marketing conference without the B.S.?
You’re in luck — Ross will be in Austin, TX, this October 18th to speak at the Marketingland Festival by the pros at The Marketing Millennials. With dedicated spaces for everything from branding and content creation to eCommerce and revenue tactics, it’s a day you won’t want to miss!
Check out the rest of the Marketingland lineup and book your ticket before they’re all gone!
B2B SAAS INSIGHTS
Taking a Closer Look at Carta’s 100% Organic Traffic Increase in 2023
In just six months, Carta, the $7.4-billion equity management platform, has increased its organic search traffic two-fold from 100k to 200k. It’s the kind of growth that marketers, investors, and VCs dream of. Now, the question is: How exactly did they do it?
In our most recent case study, I look at the content strategy and market dynamics contributing to Carta’s amazing 2023. Here are some of the insights:
- For over a decade, private company exits have outperformed public ones, and the pandemic has increased this dynamic
- Carta aims to be the “stock market for private companies” and launched in the midst of private market dominance
- Carta offers tools and services for a range of customers, allowing it to capture a wider range of keywords with its content
- The complicated nature of private equity means Carta can target short-tail keywords with fundamentally sound TOFU content
To see how Carta’s investment in short-tail keywords like “stock options,” “special purpose vehicle,” and “qualified purchaser” is paying off in terms of traffic, CPC-saved, and SERP position, check out the full article on Labs.
B2B MARKETING
The a16z Team Takes a Deep Dive Into FinTech Pricing
The B2B SaaS space gives companies plenty of pathways to monetize and build cash flow. It’s a topic Ross covered extensively in a recent Labs post, which you can find right here.
Product-led companies like Calendly and Loom might opt for a freemium model to gain a mass following and then roll out paid options for more features or access. Other companies, like Plaid or Stripe, might opt for a usage-based or take-rate pricing model.
For Stripe and other companies in the FinTech vertical, pricing can be particularly challenging.
Thankfully, Marc Andrusko and Seema Amble from Andreessen Horowitz have talked to dozens of companies in this niche and are now sharing the keys to early-stage pricing. In a new post called The B2B Fintech Pricing Journey, the two a16z experts provide the following insights and more:
- Unfortunately, there’s no perfect formula for determining pricing after building your minimum viable product
- Include pricing options in your survey during the discovery phase to get preliminary data from your ideal customers
- Be careful of reliance on third parties for your core solution — this can hamstring your ability to match what customers are willing to pay
- “Kicking the can down the road” with customer-driven pricing can be effective during the early growth stages
- As you reach scale and are ready to maximize value, it’s important to establish a pricing team
Read the rest of the article here for more insights on FinTech pricing.
👀 What’s the Latest in B2B SaaS This Week?
🧵Oops — Threads forced to introduce rate limits to reduce the impact of spam bots
💲Data management startup Runway raises $27.5 million in funding to help reinvent financial data usage
💻 Wix announces its latest AI tool that allows users to create a website using prompts
Want to sponsor our next issue? Reply to this email, and we’ll share how you can reach more SaaS founders and marketers today.
🧠 This Week’s Brain Food
If you’re like me and have the option of working from your home, a cafe, or really anywhere with an internet connection, one of the purported benefits is your ability to take back some of your time for exercise and being outdoors. Hopefully, you’re less like me in the way that you actually take advantage of this opportunity.
The flexibility of a remote or hybrid schedule means, ideally, you can take some time out of your day to enjoy the summer weather. I’m sure you know all the benefits — improved cardiovascular health, reduced stress levels, and increased creativity — but that doesn’t always translate into action.
So, let this be your reminder to block off some time in your schedule tomorrow (and the day after, and the day after that…) to take a stroll outside!
🏅 Twitter Thread of the Week
Fact check time — are software companies a bad business model? By Brad Gerstner
🎖️ LinkedIn Post of the Week
Large language models get “lost in the middle” while reading long inputs. By Philipp Schmid
🤳🏽 Nice Finds You Should Binge
- Study finds LLM performance dips when tasked with identifying information placed in the middle of long documents
- Can Elon’s “universe-understanding” xAI match up against OpenAI and ChatGPT
- Sequoia Capital examines how companies use “The New Language Model Stack” to create new AI apps
- How Miro turned the whiteboard into a $17.5 billion valuation
🎧 What We’re Wired Into This Week:
Upbeat Study Music. By Jason Lewis — Mind Amend
This smattering of insights is brought to you by Ethan Crump!
If you have any feedback, suggestions, or ideas you want to see in this newsletter, feel free to email me at ethan@foundationinc.co. We’re always looking for ways to improve and make sure you’re getting the best B2B SaaS marketing resources.
Have a great weekend, and see you on the other side!
