Mark Provost

Important fact about most startup (and VC) success stories. It is convenient to overlook this, but the best companies and products are not built on any specific timeline. The best people win, and that is the only thing that has consistently and repeatably truly won over the test of time.

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"It's table stakes for merchants to be everywhere customers are" - Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify Finally a definition of omnichannel that I agree with -- from the lens of the consumer. Shopify & Target announced a partnership to allow select merchants to offer their products on Target Plus, the retailer's third-party marketplace. Why is this such a huge announcement? 1️⃣ It is a stamp of support by two of the largest commerce players that omnichannel is the future You need to be wherever your customers are. 2️⃣ Target brings the power of discovery to Shopify merchants. While Shopify has incredible enablement tools -- it is in the best interest of the merchants to support discovery channels outside of the extremely expensive Meta. Otherwise Amazon will continue to be the beneficiary of brands seeking discovery for their products. 3️⃣ For Target, this partnership provides their consumers with access to top brands that have cemented their success in the DTC world like True Classic & Caden Lane 4️⃣ DTC should not be thought of as separate to retail. They are both shopping experiences for the consumer that should speak to one another. 5️⃣ It cements the importance of marketplaces for both retailers and brands as key growth channels going forward. --- If you still think omnichannel is just a buzz word, you're wrong. If you still think retail & DTC should be thought of separately, you're so behind. Omnichannel is now and the future of how consumers will shop. Brij is building the solution that will help you connect consumer touch points across every channel you sell through. #shopify #target #omnichannel

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→ Winning practice: Hire sales reps with a history of selling products/services that are harder to sell than yours. → Questionable practice: Hire sales reps from branded market leaders whose products were easier to sell than yours. Start-ups can’t afford order takers in sales.

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YOUR WIN/LOSS DATA IS BS – AND THE LIGHTSPEED 2024 REPORT PROVES IT Take a close look at the Lightspeed 2024 Sales Benchmark Report. It highlights “inaction” (53%) and “economic uncertainty” (47%) as top reasons for losing deals, and “product features” (68%) plus “prior experience” (39%) for winning. But if these are the only insights in your CRM, you’re missing the strategic value hidden in your deal data. –– THE UNSTRUCTURED DATA PROBLEM –– Your GTM stack is overflowing with unstructured data — calls, meetings, emails, etc. Even if you’re using platforms for call recording and coaching, that alone DOES NOT STRUCTURE your data for strategic analysis. If you rely on reps to tag “budget” or “ghosting,” or AI-summaries, you lose critical, nuanced details that drive strategic decisions. Real Win/Loss insights require instant visibility into buyer pains, success criteria, and competitor references (straight from calls, emails etc). They also require a robust gap analysis (think MEDDICC done right), so you see exactly how far the buyer is from their ideal outcome — and how you close that distance. If this data is NOT STRUCTURED in your CRM, you’ll only see “lost due to inaction,” missing the pain you never addressed or the budget holder you never validated. –– WHY STRUCTURED DATA MATTERS –– Without it, you can't get to the real insight that can transform how you sell. Marketing can’t craft competitive messaging if they can't analyse why another vendor beat you. Sales can’t coach effectively if the excuse is always “no champion.” If this data is not structured in your CRM, it can't be actioned and monitored. Result? Your entire org is FLYING BLIND. –– THE GAP ANALYSIS (MEDDICC etc.) –– Gap analysis maps the buyer’s current state to their desired future state. If these details aren’t structured in your CRM, you’ll stay stuck with generic “budget” or “timing” excuses. –– WHY THIS DATA MUST LIVE IN CRM –– Everyone — Sales, Product, Marketing, CS — relies on the CRM for real-time insights. By structuring conversational data into MEDDICC elements, quantifying them into numbers for strength of each element and combining with activity metrics, sales can finally FORECAST, and use resources efficiently. CRM should guide the full journey (sale, retention, upsell), revealing which ICP segments thrive and which might churn — so you can tailor product, messaging, and resources. –– THE FINAL WORD –– If you’re fine with “economic uncertainty” or “prospect went silent”, keep letting unstructured data go to waste. But if you want to truly improve and use your data as a competitive advantage, you need to systematically structure and monitor deal data by leveraging Epicbrief to autonomously pull data from your existing tools like Gong or SalesLoft or similar, structure and populate data in your CRM. No UI. Zero effort from reps. Turn your data into a strategic weapon for growth. ————— Curious how Epicbrief does this? DM me. #b2b #sales

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Sellers who have "need for approval" from their prospects are 35% less effective (RAIN Group). It's not your job to make your prospect feel "good" all the time and here's a prime example: When Spencer Ivey is asked for a discount, he simply nods his head and says "....Okay..." He doesn't jump to justify his pricing. He doesn't immediately start negotiating. He lets the silence linger. No doubt, this makes the prospect who just asked him for a discount feel somewhat uncomfortable (Ironic, since that's what they were trying to do to HIM when they demanded a discount!). 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐝𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐚𝐲 𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐢𝐬𝐧'𝐭 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞, 𝐢𝐭'𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫𝐬. Salespeople that want their prospects to like them (need for approval) will immediately jump to problem solving mode when they get asked for a discount. But the best? They're ok with a little discomfort, even if it means they're less "likable". They know that the discomfort will compel the other party to justify their ask with more information (information is your greatest ally in a negotiation).  

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This is a huge week for B2B SaaS. Shopify is crushing it with $8B+ ARR and accelerating, while Datadog is hitting $2.6B ARR with 27% growth.  Palantir Technologies is growing 27% at $2.8B ARR and Atlassian is aiming for $10B ARR in 5 years. Abnormal Security is doubling at $200M ARR too. The takeaway?  Even at these insane levels growth is real if you nail your Go-to-Market plan. For early stage founders, this is proof that with the right GtM direction + execution, you can scale big. Keep iterating and don’t sleep on your strategy - we are here to help! #B2B #SaaS #Growth #GtM #Founders

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Shopify just concluded their Q2 2024 earnings call & anyone who's a part of the Shopify ecosystem (agencies, theme devs, app devs) should go through these calls - they're gold mines of insights on what to focus on & where things are headed for the future. I just went through their investor presentation and here are 4 insights from the prespective of an app dev: Fact: Their stock price is up 22% and they've now beat market expectations for the 2nd quarter in a row despite a largely slow macro and consumer spending environment. The Shopify leaderships attributes their insulation from macro economic consumer behaviour to their diverse spread of merchants across various verticals and geographies Insight: I suspect this insulation to stay intact as we go into Q3 and Q4. This would imply that BFCM and Christmas for the larger Shopify ecosystem are going to be as strong as ever irrespective of the marco economic climate. Drown out the noise and just keep chugging away at your Q4 prep Fact: Lifetime offline GMV (through Shopify POS) current stands at ~10% of total lifetime GMV Insight: Expansion into retail + offline is definitely one of the places where Shopify is keen on driving growth and I'd be tracking this metric quite closely for the next 2-3 years to see if there's an opportunity to service POS specific use cases as an agency or app Fact: Q2 B2B GMV growth is at 140% & this is the single highest quarter for B2B in terms of GMV Insight: 140% YoY growth is NUTS. Similar to POS, I'd be closely following on how things unfold on the B2B side of things and find opportunites to solve problems and service merchants. A lot of first mover advantage to be had here. Fact: Gross Payment Volume (GPV) is 61% of GMV. Insight: GPV is basically the transaction volume processed by Shopify Payments (including Shop Pay). At 60% of GMV, Shopify is basically a payments company with a layer of software that drives the other 40% - as a Shopify partner I'd stay the fuck away from this part of the business. Anything even remotely close to payments and Shopify will shut you down simply because they don't want anyone eating into that revenue.

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Initially, Shopify struggled to raise VC because of 1 misunderstood metric. Today its market cap is $86.5B. 😳 Investors evaluating Shopify were stuck on the fact there were already 10,000 e-commerce merchants, causing concern around TAM. But if you don't get TAM right, you won’t be able to calculate slope, which is what you’re supposed to be investing in anyway. You need to answer two questions to get that evaluation right: → Is this a trend that’s going to continue to grow significantly? → Is this a company that’s capable of catalyzing that growth? If investors had answered the above, they would have seen that the addressable market was likely to grow exponentially—and that Shopify was going to be the primary enabler of that growth. In theory, investors get it. But in practice, it's actually very hard to invest in because you have to be able to understand the dynamics of why that increase will happen. One indicator is the rate and quality of progression in a product’s service, particularly if you're a user of a similar product. AI is a great illustration of how this is happening right now. Its progression rate is astonishing. If a service provider's service is getting better over time, you should invest in it with the assumption that it’s progressing exponentially. That's why I'm bullish on Notion right now. The way they've implemented AI indicates that as AI improves, Notion will accrue increasing benefits. Take their recent announcement that inside Notion, users can call on their other apps for information, reinforcing themselves as the front page of where you do work, making it your OS. I break it all down in the video below. Comment any topics you want me to cover for future Whiteboard Wednesdays. 

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Inspired by a recent post by Kevin Jurovich: Top acquired companies with small teams. How much did the acquirer value each employee? Twitch: 100 employees @ $970M acquisition → $9.7M / employee Waze: 100 employees @ $1.1B acquisition → $11M / employee YouTube: 65 employees @ $1.65B acquisition → $25.4M / employee Oculus VR: 75 employees @ $2B acquisition → $26.7M / employee Minecraft: 40 employees @ $2.5B acquisition → $62.5M / employee Instagram: 13 employees @ $1B acquisition → $76.9M / employee WhatsApp: 50 employees @ $19B acquisition → $380M / employee!! For reference, historically, the median valuation per employee for tech M&A deals is closer to $0.7M / employee. Goes to show, it's better to have a few gems than a pile of stones. 💎

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Shopify needs to kick out all of the payment options to recapture 40% of platform GMV + regain Billions in rev/year. Today they only process 60% of its stores’ Rev. Other payment processors/options (Paypal, Amazon Pay) capture 40% of GMV. Their major problem: how does Shopify stay friendly with the bizs who pick Shopify’s pocket? Shopify’s value prop has always been flexible options at checkout. But 70% of Shop’s Rev is from payments. At the end of the day, Shop needs to collect that Rev. Their options are limited: - Restrict options at checkout. - Charge a toll to the other payment providers. - Hide/deprioritize others in the UI. I’m watching this evolution closely. Shop’s still growing, so this won’t be a tomorrow update. But eventually, Shopify will need to monetize more of their GMV. Leaving half of their current opportunity on the table is only excusable when there’s other growth to be had. #shopify

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You could be saving $500,000-750,000 in Shopify storefront management fees this year. If your store is: → Built on an expensive headless solution → Requires an agency to make any changes → Built on a cobbled together custom theme → Requires 10+ expensive 3rd party applications to operate → Is currently being managed by 3rd party developers or contractors Then you're likely (and unnecessarily) spending many 5-figures a month to manage a storefront. All those costs eat into your profits and kneecap your ability to re-invest into growth. What you need is a storefront that is: → Scalable → Cost-effective → Reduces your dependency on 3rd parties → Empowers your team to make changes, whether they are technical or not That's exactly why we built Platter. We have a number of case studies in the pipeline that demonstrate how 8-figure brands have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by switching to our theme & app bundle. Interested to learn more? Drop me a DM and we can provide you with a free storefront audit.

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Shopify did $2,045,000,000 revenue in Q2 But only $563M of that is recurring software subscriptions. 75% comes from what they call Merchant Solutions Revenue. The bulk of this is payment processing fees. This revenue doesn't come with the 80% margin profile that we see from subscription fees. And this pushes Shopify's gross margin down to just 51%. This means they have less cash available to pay for R&D and S&M. They only spend 17% on R&D (vs high 20% -- low 30% of the SaaS co's we track) and only 17% on S&M (vs 40%) They generate 12% operating margins. But only generate ARR per employee of $174K - well below the $387K median across the companies we track. They currently trade at 13X revenue run rate.

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The average successful exit for a bootstrapped SaaS company happens around the $5–10M ARR mark. Contrast that with VC-backed companies, where anything less than a 10x return is often considered a "failure." And while slow and steady wins the race for some, let's be realistic here — how long will it actually take? Years of grinding, reinvesting every penny, and hoping for that shmillion dollar outcome. So, here's a thought: 𝗺𝗮𝘆𝗯𝗲 𝗮 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗰 𝗯𝘂𝘆𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗶𝘀 the outcome you should be optimizing far all along.... Here's why: First off, it makes sense. You get immediate value realization.   No need to wait years for a 𝘱𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘭 IPO.   There's a clear and high probability off-ramp. Unlike VC, which often dilutes your control, strategic buyers actually want your expertise and want to preserve your vision. You might even get to lead your "baby" into its next growth phase. This means lower stress, higher satisfaction.   No more sleepless nights worrying about making payroll or prepping for the next funding round. Skip the exhausting cycle of pitches, term sheets, board meetings, and no pressure for unrealistic growth either. You get to focus on what you love—building and improving your product. Plus, you get to tap into the buyer's resources, distribution channels, and customer base. Your product could scale faster than you could ever do on your own. But what about the unicorn dream?   For every 1x unicorn, 1000x startups never make it big. Strategic acquisition offers a bird in hand—tangible success you can bank on. The real question here is: 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗴𝗮𝗺𝗲? Do you want to build an empire? Create something valuable and move on to your next adventure? Is your goal financial security? Or do you just like the constant hustle of startup life? The choice is yours to make. If you're a SaaS founder with $40k+ MRR and curious about what's possible, let's talk! For the love of the game 🏴‍☠️ ⚡ #Fundraising #Investing #VentureCapital #Startups 

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Four reasons Shopify is WINNNNING in the enterprise. Caveat, this is also why Andy Cloyd and myself are betting so heavily on the Shopify ecosystem in the coming years at Superfiliate Now, how are they winning? Product Velocity: Shopify's relentless product innovation is pulling enterprise brands into their ecosystem. It's not just about switching platforms, it's about Shopify's ability to integrate every crucial business need, from Shop Pay to POS to Commerce Components (CC and kudos to Ilya Grigorik) The Power of Shop Pay: This isn't just a payment method... it's become a trusted brand that drives conversion. By introducing Shop Pay to non-Shopify sites, they're starting to show significant lift, easing brands into Shopify’s full suite of solutions. Agency Migration: The shift is happening quickly. Former exclusive Salesforce Commerce Cloud agencies are now building Shopify teams. They’re attending Shopify Unite not just Dreamforce. This momentum is driving enterprise re-platforms at scale. CIO Career Moves: Just like the cloud migration was once the career-defining project for CIOs, Shopify is becoming the same for enterprise commerce. A new generation of tech leaders sees the upside, and Shopify is positioned to be their golden goose. My favorite quote from Andy about choosing Shopify as a brand: "...it starts to become stupid to be anywhere else." The leadership at the top of Shopify knows exactly what game they're playing and are building a multi-front product, technical and services infrastructure to become the dominant player. Kudos for the masterclass: Tobias Lütke, Kaz Nejatian, Jeff Hoffmeister, Mikhail Parakhin, Harley Finkelstein, Bobby Morrison, Archie Abrams, Glen Coates, Daniel Debow

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OpenAI just raised $6.6 B at valuation of $157 Billion. Consider this: 1. Largest company (valuation) in Canada is RBC $235 B. TD is $148 B and Shopify is $138 B. 2. Articulate Global raised $1.5 B in 2021 and largest Canadian round was Clio this year at $900 MM and $3 valuation. 3. In 1980/81, Microsoft raised $1 MM on $20 MM valuation - they did $17 MM in revenue that year. Looks like biggest round for Google was $25 MM. The numbers for OpenAI are staggering. Microsoft Ventures Sequoia Capital Cohere Artificial Intelligence Radical Ventures

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If you're an e-commerce business, you’ve likely heard about Shopify Audiences. These powerful, data-driven audience segments can significantly reduce your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and streamline your marketing efforts. Here’s why they’re so effective: - Targeted Advertising: Shopify Audiences use purchase data from across Shopify's vast network, ensuring your ads reach people who are more likely to convert. - Higher Conversion Rates: By targeting high-intent users, your ads are more relevant, leading to better engagement and higher conversion rates. - Lower CPA: With improved targeting and higher conversion rates, your overall advertising costs decrease, giving you a better return on investment. So what's the catch? While Shopify Audiences can dramatically improve your CPA, there's a catch. As more businesses use these audiences, they become saturated. This means your ads are shown to the same users repeatedly, leading to reduced effectiveness and increased costs over time. Also, they're not usually very large, meaning they're not able to sustain the depth of spend that would make a big impact for your brand. At JUICE, we've been hard at work developing a solution to overcome this. To maintain the benefits of Shopify Audiences and prevent saturation, integrating additional data sources is key. This is where JUICE AI Audiences come in. 🚀 JUICE AI Audiences is our proprietary approach to generating high intent audiences based on customer intent signal, your existing customers, and many other factors. How JUICE AI builds on the success of Shopify Audiences: - Diversified Data Sources: JUICE AI Audiences supplements customer data with additional behavioral, third-party, and real-time analytics, keeping your audience pool fresh and diverse. We work across 80+ data vendors to scale this as well. - Continuous Optimization: Our tools continuously monitor performance, ensuring your ads are always targeted to the most relevant and engaged users. - Scalable Growth: By integrating multiple data sources, we help your campaigns scale sustainably without hitting the usual plateaus. Case Study: A mid-sized e-commerce business experienced a 35% reduction in CPA and a 50% increase in new customer acquisitions over six months by integrating JUICE AI Audiences along with Shopify Audiences. 📈 Audience vendors have become a key way to get RoAS where it needs to be in today's expensive CPM environment. Don't sleep on them!

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I've invested in over 300 startups over the last 5 years, and there is one common trait that nearly all failed early stage startups share - they don't run a proper customer discovery process. You can read about the importance of customer discovery all over the internet, but that practical application of it among first time founders is still extremely low. We look at over 10,000 deals each year Forum Ventures and I see firsthand just how few founders actually excel in this process. One subset of founders simply doesn't do it at all. It's a classic archetype - build product in a vacuum without running any validation cycles. Typically the founder profile here skews more technical/product where founder-led sales feels out of character and not an area they enjoy spending time. Often founders think they can "product their way" to initial customers, but more often than not that new feature set they are excited about fails to generate user demand, simply because they never asked anybody if they care about what they were building. There is a classic startup'ism - first time founders focus on product, second time founders focus on distribution - and it rings very true within this subset. The second group of founders actually understands the importance of running discovery and leans into it early in their build process. While they have the best intentions, ultimately they come up short because in practice they don't actually know how to run an unbiased process. Discovery that focuses around a feature/solution set will skew toward lukewarm positive responses from potential customers, "sounds interesting, let me know when the beta is ready". The reality is no one is going to tell you that your baby, in this case your product, is ugly when it's far easier to just smile and nod. Founders often take this false signal as validation and race to ship a product that ultimately falls flat on its face. There is an art to soliciting feedback from a potential customer. The process emphasizes questions on their existing workflows, bottlenecks they experience in their day to day, understanding what motivates them and how they measure success in their role. This is a critical area we emphasize when evaluating investment opportunities, and a process we are very hands on in assisting our portfolio companies. Having a strong network is a massive advantage when launching a startup but close network relationships have the potential to give false signals across a customer discovery process. There are ways to combat this by being very deliberate when once solicits feedback from their network, but there are definitely bonus points for net-new out of network customer validation.

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The smartest Valley use case I've seen this month: A $15B+ enterprise company booked 7 director/VP-level meetings by flipping the traditional outbound playbook. Instead of pushing for sales calls (which rarely works with senior execs), they did something different: They used Valley to send hyper-personalized invites to: • Their event booth • Team dinners • Networking sessions 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁: Booked meetings with senior leaders from Fortune 500 companies. Why this worked? 1. Lower commitment ask (stop by our booth vs. hop on a call) 2. Natural environment for relationship building 3. Removes the immediate sales pressure 4. Creates organic conversations 𝗞𝗲𝘆 𝗜𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁: Sometimes the path to a meeting isn't a direct "𝘣𝘰𝘰𝘬 𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭" CTA. Think about what your prospects actually want: • Network with peers • Learn about industry trends • Have meaningful conversations This allowed them to then book meetings with senior level people from Netflix, Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce. If your team sets up booths or hosts games or dinners, reaching out to prospects and just inviting them in will help you book far more meetings.

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