SaaSholic news #002
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SaaSholic news #002

SaaSholic
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Timeless wisdom

How not to die

For an entrepreneur, when you talk about success, chances are not on her side. As we know, 9 out of 10 startups will fail. In this situation, before thinking about growth, the first step is to make sure your startup stays alive.

The essay below was written by Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, an American seed money startup accelerator that has been used to launch over 2,000 companies, including Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise Automation, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox. One of the biggest experts when talking about startup success.

After having evaluated and invested in literally hundreds of companies he breaks down his most important startup learning of how not to die.

http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

APIs, the root of integration

If you work with developers, you already know how important APIs are. But if you don’t, the fact is: APIs are an increasingly important piece of how software is built, so if you work with SaaS and don’t master APIs you’re behind.

One big proof of what APIs can do is Stripe Treasury: “a banking-as-a-service API that lets you embed financial services in your marketplace or platform.” Simply, by writing a few lines of code, platforms can let their customers set up bank accounts at partner banks like Goldman Sachs. 

The essay below goes into a deep analysis of the API scene, breaking down the market and an opinion on where things are heading.

https://notboring.substack.com/p/apis-all-the-way-down

AIs Learning Process

AI is a reality, and learn to work with this technology is essential to get ahead of competitors. If you’re interested in learning all the processes behind it, here is the perfect start for you. 

But our point in this section is to illustrate how AI will set the winners and the losers in all markets.

An AI will try to take the quickest and easiest path to its goal. If the rules aren't exhaustively described and thought, they will many times take routes that we humans consider as "cheating".

In this 3min video, you'll see an AI cheating in a couple of multiple ways to win a hide-and-seek game. (Brace yourselves!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu56xVlZ40M

SaaSpedia

Quick pills of SaaS concepts that are always worth refreshing.

What is ARPA? 

The acronym stands for Average Revenue Per Account and serves to measure how much, on average, each account generates revenue for a company every month. It's simple, self-explanatory but crucial to be nailed.

Average Revenue per Account (ARPA)