“SaaS+” refers to software companies that extend their core products and services with value-added features such as built-in e-commerce, insurance, and payment processing.
Building these features into your product pipeline will create secondary conveniences that will delight customers and also new revenue streams that will excite investors.
Justin Kaufenberg (Managing Director at Rally Ventures) and Greg Blasko (Co-Founder at Monoline) will use their experience building platforms for youth sports to explain how to “build the foundation of your SaaS+ house right” using multi-merchant cart technology, parent-child data models, and other ideas.
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All six recommendations include detailed examples of software architecture choices made within companies like Kayak, Amazon, and Shopify that combine to increase the number of transactions each user makes.
“The alignment of these concepts drives product roadmaps, core technology architectures, pricing strategies, and product marketing,” the authors state.
Thank you for reading TC+!
Walter Thompson
Editorial Manager at TechCrunch+
Don't express the “Use of Funds” slide as a percentage
Image credits: Hayek Kamps (Opens in a new window) / TechCrunch+ (Opens in a new window)
Creating a pitch deck is like 4D chess: founders need to provide investors with a compelling story that will carry the company from this funding round to the next.
Some teams like to share slides outlining how they plan to allocate funds, but Haje Jan Kamps said the percentage breakdown is a “red flag” for potential investors.
“How much technology do you need to develop? How many customers and how much revenue do you need? How many staff do you need to develop that technology, sell it to customers and support it?”
In other words, “You’re raising money for milestones, not percentages or runways.”
4 ways your customers can trust your generative AI enterprise tools
Image credits: Umdasshu 9 (Opens in a new window) /Getty Images
Given the ongoing discussion about the dangers of AI’s existence, it was an interesting experience to sit in the theater last night and watch a three-hour epic about the dawn of the atomic age.
Now, 80 years later, we are once again entering a new technological era without first building a framework for ethics, safety, trust, and a myriad of other considerations.
According to TC+ contributors Luigi La Corte and Leo Arango, there are no industry standards or government agencies guiding AI development, so startups must establish new best practices.
“Providers that take proactive steps to reduce the chance of 'randomness' in LLMs and build maximum trust will be the big winners.”
Pitch Deck Analysis: BusRight's $7M Series A Deck
Image credits: Bus right (Opens in a new window)
American school buses are the largest form of public transportation in the country, with some estimates saying they carry students to school 10 billion times each year.
School bus management platform BusRight recently raised $7 million in Series A funding with a “well-designed” and “meticulous” presentation, according to Haje Jan Kamps.
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cover
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Go to the market
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Target Audience
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Market size
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problem
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Solutions/Products
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Traction
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Sales Process
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Business Model/Unit Economics
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customer's voice
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Dynamics of sales decisions
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Growth forecast
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team
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Termination/Contact
Ask Sophie: What visa options are available for startup founders with families?
Image credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
Dear Sophie,
I'm a startup founder in Berlin and I just visited Silicon Valley to meet new customers. The trip made me realize that I need to be based in the US to expand my US customer base.
What is the best visa option for me and my family? Will any of them allow my husband to work and continue his career?
— In search of scale
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Looking for your next book? 9 authors recommend books for you
Image credits: Daniel Griselli/Getty Images
Anna Heim asked several tech writers, “What books did you read this summer that you think other people would enjoy?” Here's what they said:
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Adam Duvander
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Phil Rosen
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Adi Pollack
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Andrew Lee Miller
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David Kadavi
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Sarah E. Brown
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Zeke Four
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David Spinks
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Purna Virgi
Making AI trustworthy: Can we overcome the black box illusion?
Image credits: Custom Designer (Opens in a new window) /Getty Images
While a cartoon character might imagine a giant hot dog when he's hungry, a large language model (LLM) can hallucinate for a variety of reasons, including poor data quality and unclear prompts.
According to Dr. Mike Capps, CEO and co-founder of Diveplane, major AI platforms “make guesses and estimates based on what they believe to be the most likely answers, rather than actual data.”
With instance-based learning, on the other hand, training data points are “compared to each other to gain insights about the dataset and the predictions,” Capps says. “In other words, IBL 'shows it how it works.'”
