After years of scaling cold email volume, we cut from around 200,000 messages a month to about 2,000 and started getting better results. Here is what changed in outbound, what is still working on LinkedIn, and how to rebuild your outbound engine for the AI era.
SaaS founders with years of legacy code are now giving AI coding tools full access to their repos. Here is how members of our mastermind prepared their code, trained Claude like a junior engineer, and compressed quarter-long projects into a week.
AI coding tools mean a competitor can copy your best feature in a week, and some customers now think they can build your product themselves. Here is what SaaS founders in our mastermind see as the new sources of defensibility.
September 18, 2026
Earn-outs are showing up in more SaaS deals, especially for companies that aren't growing fast. Here is what founders in our mastermind have learned about how earn-outs fail, how buyers use them, and how to structure one you can actually collect.
An asset purchase offer can look similar to a stock purchase on paper and leave you with far less after taxes, especially if you qualify for QSBS. Here is how to spot the gap, why buyers ask for it, and how to push back.
Private equity buyers and strategic acquirers value a SaaS company in very different ways. Here is how to figure out which one is your best buyer, and why the answer should shape your exit prep long before you run a process.
This week's SaasRise discussions covered how SaaS leaders are rethinking paid acquisition, outbound, and pricing as cold email saturates and organic search declines. The conversations focused on going omnipresent across channels, matching motions to buyer personas and ACV, using AI as agentic workflows rather than chatbots, and structuring partnerships, trials, and pricing to convert and retain the right customers.
How to diagnose the "value valley" behind high activation and retention but low trial-to-paid conversion. It covers whether pure PLG even fits your product, how to find the exact step where willing users stall, matching onboarding to the buyer's emotional state, and getting insight from behavior when users won't talk, plus when a pilot or product-led sales motion beats hands-off self-serve.
Real cost data on the ~8x gap between LinkedIn and Meta for B2B, and why "moving" channels is the wrong frame. The playbook: let Meta carry volume for your average customer, reserve LinkedIn for a curated enterprise list where deal sizes justify $50 clicks. Includes Meta list-enrichment tips, when to expand vs. lock audiences, and how multi-channel presence lifts your Google search volume.
A hard look at why cold email rarely pays off below ~$2,000 ACV, even with AI. It breaks down the response-rate math (roughly $100 per qualified lead after bots and low reply rates), why cheaper AI assets don't rescue the economics, and lean tactics if you test anyway: ask-first before sending, generate-on-click, and bot filtering. Plus the higher-return alternatives, an enterprise tier and doubling down on organic.
Should you run a launch offer, and if so, discount or extra credits? This post makes the case for getting real usage before you lock in pricing: free trials first, feedback second, price third. It covers why "founders pricing" with a clear expiration beats a flat discount, when a deep annual discount makes sense, and how to protect your price integrity on the pricing page.
Evaluating whether to build AI-powered SaaS products and agentic workflows on top of proprietary models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, or on open-weight alternatives like DeepSeek, GLM, Qwen, Kimi, Llama, and Mistral
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