All 22 Marketing & Sales Tech posts we have indexed from venture capital blogs and newsletters, plus the highest-scoring pieces of the past year and the people who write about it most.
Mailchimp's acquisition by Intuit for $12B in 2021 has ended in decline—the platform is now shrinking, with parent company earnings stripped of its figures and management cutting 17% of staff. The fall stems from a seven-year drift away from focus (adding CRM, social, SMS, postcards) combined with a structural shift: AI agents now provision email via API, not UIs, leaving Mailchimp absent from the platforms where new apps are built.
Analysis of 17,000+ mobile subscription apps reveals optimal free trial lengths by plan type and category: 30-day trials convert 86% better for annual plans, 10–16 days peak for monthly, and AI apps hit a wall at 16 days due to inference costs.
Steve Jobs asked
Most B2B companies fail to recognize and nurture unprompted advocates—like SaaStr's organic coverage of Replit (214 articles, 5.9M impressions, $0 cost)—because nothing in their stack detects it and standard responses (routing to sales, formalizing deals) kill the relationship. The playbook: detect advocates by ICP-qualified audience reach, assign a named engineer permanently, fix their problems in public, and protect their independence.
SaaStr replaced Salesforce's UI with a headless API approach running AI agents on Claude, discovering that open platforms supporting multiple surfaces and agentic consumption drive 10x usage growth—a lesson for vendors on the future of enterprise software.
When AI agents constantly write to systems of record like Salesforce, storage costs explode—40GB in 30 days, pricing structures built for human clicks break, and vendors face a choice: adapt pricing to agent-driven data volumes or watch customers migrate to cheaper databases and APIs.
Databricks crossed $7B ARR at 80% YoY growth—a 30-point reacceleration at scale—passing Snowflake on company revenue while absorbing margin pressure from agent-driven query volume. The $190B valuation holds a stable 25–27x multiple, reflecting that growth is real revenue, not multiple expansion.
A practical guide to selecting B2B+AI events for 2027, with data on lead generation, audience quality, and sponsor ROI—emphasizing that organizer attendance claims are often inflated and that direct reference calls matter more than brand prestige.
Saastr (13) · The Sociology of Business (6) · Lenny's Newsletter (4) · Stage 2 (3) · Deconstructor of Fun (1) · Stratechery (1) · Madrona Ventures (1) · A Wealth of Common Sense (1) · OpenVC.app (1) · A16Z (1)
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