Jacob Duval

The power of Kiwi SaaS 💪 Though the kiwiSaaS Community has now officially shuttered its doors, they didn't leave us empty-handed—as well as 2 years of amazing insights, resources, and community-building, they recently launched their report: "Insights from the Cloud" 🧠 The report was a treasure trove of information, including: 💴 The SaaS sector generated a staggering $3.6B in export revenue in 2023, growing at 15% CAGR since 2016. It’s a major economic driver for NZ. ⚙️ SaaS solutions support greater productivity across sectors, which has an effect on the national economy. 📈 Strong, up-to-date data is a key puzzle piece in making the right strategic decisions (something ecoPortal knows well) 🚀 Scaling is the real challenge, with only 10% of SaaS companies in the high-growth phase 🌍 The SaaS delivery model's global reach is unmatched, with a strong pipeline of companies targeting high growth Ryan McMillan noted in a recent post that you can't slash your way to success—growth requires investment. The SaaS sector in New Zealand is not just thriving but transforming the economy; to see long-term gains, the industry must continue to be recognised for all that it can contribute to the country and the world, and invested in accordingly 🌍 Image from "Insights from the Cloud" 📈 #SaaS #Founder

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BirdDog Week 16 Update We've got tons of exciting updates about BirdDog this week--we're still burning road! Product Updates: - EMAIL DRAFTS: The note pad now floats as you select source information and then is supplied as context in a prompt that uses some of the best cold email templates from LinkedIn posts to write you a cold email draft to your prospects. - FINE TUNED MODELS: We've fine tuned our first model and are adding it to our production pipeline. This one will have no effect on our users & was a cost saving move for us; as we start to fine tune more models, however, expect the data quality to increase. - QUICKER WORK FLOW: An annoying feature we had was not letting you progress through an account until you ranked it--we took the guard rails off, you're free to zoom around. - ADDING NEW QUESTIONS: You can now edit and add your own questions directly on the platform, including selecting the data type you want the answer returned as. Business wise, we've been super focused on our onboarding experience. Now, if you send us some of your accounts before the first call, we'll show you how to set up the questions on the platform and run them while we're chatting with you. Yup, you can see the questions get answered in real time... The effect this last change has is pretty cool. In some ways, it's starting to feel like magic. Thanks again for all the support everyone--we're excited to keep going :) P.S. We've got a new, full length demo video below--longer than usual, but it really digs into the pain point we're working to solve

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18% of all folks who engaged with the Supabase project, made a contribution somewhere in open source. On top of that, they average about 32 unique open-source contributors weekly. We are standing on some business at OpenSauced, shipping faster than we are announcing publicly (we will fix that announcement cadence soon). In this video, I walk through some new insight features of the project. Let me know if you find it useful. #opensource #insights

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Thanks to everyone that came to see my talk at ServerlessDays ANZ yesterday! Here are the slides. For those that missed it, here are the main lessons I shared: ✨ LLMs are not magic, they're just another useful tool in a builder's toolkit ✨If you want to be build with LLMs quickly and cheaply, see how far you can go with prompts and RAG. ✨If you need more control than you can achieve with those, you'll likely need to do fine-tuning, tuning or even training, all of which are much more expensive comparably. ✨Plan for your models to change all the time - use Artificial Analysis to navigate the changes ✨Plan for your prompts - version your prompts and construct them independently of inference ✨Getting LLMs to behave consistently for your use case is super challenging, but there are tools like the Seed and Temperature features to help ✨Hacking LLMs to behave outside the intended behaviour is easy, but you can architect around this using techniques like prompt proxies (thanks to Tomasz Tunguz for sharing great design patterns) If you have any questions about building using these tools, feel free to reach out!

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I wouldn't want to managing engineering teams at Atlassian, Canva or Xero right now... Easygo are doing something I've never seen before & offering $100,000 SIGNING ON BONUS for any Tech professional who is working at the above companies to jump ship and join them. They also pay 20% above market on salaries... The majority of briefs I take from scaleups usually ask us to headhunt from these sorts of companies on the sly - but this is the first outward marketing/incentive and blatant talent grab I've ever seen. Anyone managing teams at the above, my terms of business are in your inbox, along with 10,000 floated CV's I've sent in the last 10 years... Engineers head over to: https://lnkd.in/g7eseqjW to claim your sign on bonus! #Wow #EasyGo #Recruitment #SigningBonus #Atlassian #Canva #Xero

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Have you been looking on Wrongmove? Most developers waste a whole lot of time looking at ‘deals’ that never stack-up. And, if you do ever buy something that’s On or ‘In’ the market (where you’ll be bidding against competition), the only way you’ll do that is by being the person that pays the most. In a business that’s already so risky, paying too much for things before you’ve even started is the worse thing you can do. To listen to this full episode of the Inside Property Development Podcast, head to the link in my bio now. . . . #propertypodcast #propertypodcasts #propertypodcasters #propertypodcastsuk #propertybusiness #propertytips

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Stop chasing great ideas. Start solving great problems. A friend came to me with a simple pain point: no platform dynamically aggregated NZ's building consent data. 4 days later, we had a working prototype pulling live data by council area—valuable for property developers, real estate agents, and economists. Turns out, Stats NZ already had a solution (hidden behind poor SEO). But here’s the takeaway: The best ideas start with problems that are frustrating, repetitive, or hiding in plain sight. What’s the one thing you’d happily pay someone to fix in your business? Solve that.

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State of 404 by the numbers I summarised my findings from this Dune dashboard: https://lnkd.in/g8re-BbH 1. 404 is exploding Guess how many 404 projects there are on eth, base and arbitrum? 1810! That’s a lot in such a short amount of time. 2. ERC404 and DN404 numbers Base is the fastest growing 404. At current rates, base 404 will surpass eth based 404 as dominant play. ERC404 and DN404 are different implementations. ERC404 v2 is a new version that just came out that should be replace v1. ERC404 v1 projects Eth - 697 Base - 404 Arbitrum - 88 DN404 projects Eth - 310 Base - 173 Arbitrum - 52 ERC404 v2 projects Eth - 43 Base - 32 Arbitrum - 11 3. Rise of solana 404 The dune dashboard doesn’t account for solana projects building on SPL404 or Blast. It will be interesting to see their growth as SPL404s are performing well and leading the trading volumes on magic Eden. Hope you enjoyed this! I think this one is worth a bookmark to check back in a few months to see the growth.

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Today we're releasing the Supabase AI assistant v2. It's like cursor for databases. It's so easy, even an Australian can use it ↓↓

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Atlassian underperforms on this metric. ARR per employee. It's a nice comparison metric across companies. helps us to understand the efficiency of the business. Atlassian has done a good job improving this metric over the last 7 years but they still lag behind the majority of companies I follow. The median across the businesses is $403,000 in ARR per employee. As a direct comparison,  Monday is at $436,000 per employee Snowflake is at $442,000 Palantir is at $651,000 Zoom is at $617,000 Atlassian beat out Hubspot, Sentinel One, Veeva and Procore - but still a bit of work to do to become best in class here. 

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Here’s what a bad software selection process (A) looks like: 1. Get frustrated with the same old buggy spreadsheet or ancient system feeding you dodgy info that causes more problems 🤔 2. Google ‘manufacturing software’ and sign up for a few free trials of the most couple of results 3. Immediately get sucked back into number 1 because another spinning plate has caught fire 🏃‍♂️🏃‍♀️🏃 4. Get annoyed by the polite but persistent emails from the software vendors wondering why you haven’t logged in 👻 5. Rinse and repeat step 3 😤🥵 6. Get to the weekend and forget it all until Sunday night when the thought of steps 3 and 4 pop into your head as you’re putting the light out 😬😳 7. Eventually give up because the plates must keep spinning 😓 Optimal time to value? Never Better software selection process (B): 1. Accept the current systems aren’t working but you’ll have to live with them for a while longer 💡 2. Map out the current business process and identify where mistakes happen or things get stuck or missed 🧭 3. Show this to colleagues and refine it, and get agreement things can be better. Agree they’ll need to cover you while you put time into finding a solution 🤝 4. Identify the quick wins, which problems if solved will have the biggest impact 🥧 5. Long list 8-10 and refine to 2-4 software options that align best with your business process and budget* 🔎 6. Prepare some data (bills of materials and parts/components) that you can import to make the trials more realistic 🗂️ 7. Set aside a day or a couple of half days and get the trials started. Import your data and try out some simulated orders / jobs etc. 📅 8. Contact the software support and see how helpful they are. Can they help you make the implementation easier?👂 9. Identify the option that aligns best (80/20 rule) with your business process ✅ 10. Make a decision and tackle your ‘quick win’ to demonstrate value to colleagues 🪜 Your job title isn’t ’software buyer’ so it’s natural to be cautious. Process B above will cost you less time and get a result that benefits your business. *how do you budget for software? The ‘cost of doing nothing’ is a good way to think about this. Most subscriptions options are cheaper than you think but the real question is ‘how much time will this save me?’ and ‘how much cost will this help me avoid? (Think unnecessary hires, funding rework and redundant stock, fixing mistakes). Optimal time to value? 60 days

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HYPE! Some massive news: I've been putting in mad hours to make this the most comprehensive Supabase resource out there -> Supabase book is 100% real and coming in hot! After 1 year of crazy work, you can preorder: https://buff.ly/4c19uTB Got questions? Hit me up? -- #supabase #firebase #database #postgres #webdev #coding Packt

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Many people are trying out the Bluesky social platform at the moment. I've pulled a copy of their app source, to have a dig around. Some notes: - A single React Native TypeScript codebase for iOS, Android and web -- nicely put together. - They use Maestro for e2e tests (fun fact: we were their first cloud customer!) - Statsig for feature flagging / gates. - Sentry for error logging, no huge surprise there. - They maintain quite a few patches for deps using patch-package - we found as we push against the limits of certain dependencies, this is the easiest way to do it, instead of forking. - TanStack / React Query - yeah this is good. - They use a semicolon-less format, this is actually my preference. Fight me. - Lingui for multilingual. - Nice use of Expo Haptics sprinkled throughout. - They forked bottom-sheet - not totally surprising, can be quite painful to work with. #appdev #nerdingout #ios #android

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This was Dovetail at the start - 3 guys in a shoebox. Now it's worth $970M AUD. Here's the story: Chapter 1 - Founding When Benjamin Humphrey (left) was working at Atlassian as a designer, he observed something: • Engineers had JIRA or other issue-tracking software • Analysts had Amplitude or other analytics software • Designer had Sketch or other design software But what did user researchers have? Their worfklow was convoluted and disjointed, a consistent hop between tools. So he created a prototype version of the product with a development agency. It just focused on diary studies, but it managed to attract 200 MAU. The initial traction was enough to convince Bradley Ayers (middle) to come aboard to lead the tech side, and Dovetail was born. Chapter 2 - PLG from the Start Ben and Bradley dreamed of a profitable lifestyle biz, not a VC-backed rocket ship. But Dovetail's MVP was off the mark. So they went back to the drawing board, doing deep user research to rebuild the product from the ground up. The result? Dovetail 2.0 - pricey research software UX at an affordable price, all in the cloud. Shipped fast and fueled by PLG, it worked like a charm. Even without a sales team, Dovetail scored customers like Google, Amazon, and the US Air Force. Chapter 3 - Rapid Growth With PLG in high gear, Dovetail's growth kicked into overdrive. In 2018, they hired their first employee, Chris Manouvrier (right). Product development kicked into overdrive. The team grew further, and the 2020 launch of video transcription and sentiment tagging became the hook to upgrade teams to paid plans. The breakneck growth prompted Ben and Bradley to change course. They raised a Seed, a Seed-1, and then the Series A where they hit the $970M valuation. Headcount surged to 100 as Dovetail stepped on the gas. Chapter 4 - Product Expansion Now VC backed, Dovetail's ambitions soared. It expanded from a UX research tool to including more qualitative insights like customer support interactions. The PLG flywheel kept on spinning. Researchers raved about Dovetail, referring friends and colleagues. Solo users turned into teams, then entire departments. Soon, Dovetail boasted 4,000 customers and 250,000 users spanning tech, government, and academia. Chapter 5 - Dovetail Today Today, Dovetail continues to evolve. Cofounder Bradley departed as the company refocused on its design roots. AI now lends a hand with transcription, summarization, and surfacing insights. But even as Dovetail scales, the PLG DNA that fueled its early success remains its growth engine. And it's taken Dovetail from three guys in a shoebox to a $970M juggernaut, with plenty more chapters yet to be written. — I broke down the entire journey of Dovetail and product in my latest deep dive: https://lnkd.in/eyraQckG

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SMSA produced this After Open report at 10am EST this morning. Of course it's not going to save you from a down day like today...only a crystal ball and bets placed night before would avoid today's losses. But if you're quasi connected to the market, yet invested, this report would have given a good breakdown: "After the opening bell on August 5, 2024, major U.S. stock indices faced significant declines. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI) dropped to 39,056.19, showing a decrease of 1.71%. The S&P 500 Index (INX) fell by 3.65% to 5,151.14, while the Russell 2000 Index (RUT) declined by 4.15% to 2,021.8569. The technology-heavy NASDAQ Composite Index (IXIC) experienced the steepest fall, plunging 6.34% to 15,712.532. On the brighter side, some stocks managed to post gains. Notably, NVD surged by 14.79% to $2.95, GDXD rose 17.44% to $21.75, FNGD appreciated by 14.00% to $32.98, ALAB gained 3.20% to reach $43.74, and BBD increased by 3.06% to $2.28. Conversely, several stocks suffered notable losses. ZK and CZR both fell by 5.61% to $14.48 and $33.66, respectively. SNOW dropped to $113.10, losing 5.59%; TALO decreased by 5.63% to $10.06; and S declined by 5.68% to $19.91. Stay tuned for our Post-Market Summary after the market closes for a comprehensive analysis of today’s trading activity." #appbuild #buildinpublic #softwaredevelopment #nocode #stockmarketsummaryassistant #smsa #stocks #stockmarket #fintech #AI #startup #entrepreneurship #startuplife #financialnews Alchemy Apps

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Last year 52% of Devs told us they'd leave their jobs if forced to return to the office (RTO). We've seen the RTO trend rising in 2024. I'm super keen to see what the landscape looks like now. With fewer devs working in fully remote setups, I'd suspect people would answer this question differently this year. I can't wait to find out 😀 #developers 👉 Take the Survey https://lnkd.in/dt76fgp9 so we can keep bringing transparency to the SA tech scene 🙏🙏🙏 #DevNationSurvey

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