Hello and welcome back to yet another edition of SaaS weekly roundup. While coronavirus pandemic continues to spread, companies and investors are getting busy again, in terms of pushing out new updates, scaling to meet user demand and raising capital. In fact, this week has been quite news-heavy. So without wasting any more time, let’s get going.
Table of Contents
News of the week
Google sees huge growth in teleconferencing; forgoes Hangouts moniker to rebrand its enterprise tools to Meet and Chat
Amid COVID-19, the search titan is seeing considerable uptick in the usage of its video-conferencing solution as it’s adding more than 2million users every day. Just last week, the company had shared the daily usage is 25 times higher than it was in the month of January.
Riding the wave, the company is also removing the Hangouts moniker from the branding for its enterprise offerings. So its video-conferencing product is now simply termed as Google Meet, while the chatting product is referred to as Google Chat.
The brand also reached another milestone as its G Suite userbase crossed 6million users. That’s not all, its education software, Google Classroom doubled to 100million users due to the crisis.
Related read: He helped overhaul Microsoft Office — now he’s at Google trying to beat it
An update on Zoom’s security challenges
While Google, Taiwan’s government and many others have banned the use of Zoom, the popular videoconferencing software is pushing out updates to fix the security issues. It has already removed meeting IDs from the title bar of the app so that no one can screenshot it and share it with others, which prevents “zoombombing”.
More importantly, CEO Eric S Yuan provided an update about the security council it has formed. Moreover, the company has got Alex Stamos (ex-Chief Security Officer, Facebook) as an advisor to help it navigate these problems. All in all, it’s impressive to see Zoom rising up to the challenge and accepting that it’s not perfect, and how it’s trying to change that.
Check out
COVID-19: The Ultimate List of Free Software and Resources
A curated list of 250+ (and counting) products and services that are free or heavily discounted during coronavirus pandemic.
Investment quotient
Utah’s Podium raises $125M Series C led by YC after reaching $100M ARR
Podium is among the fastest-growing SaaS startups, and despite the flailing economy, it’s upbeat about its future. The company has raised $125million led by Y Combinator’s Continuity fund at a valuation of $1.5billion. Along with announcing its funding, it’s also introducing a new free plan dubbed Podium Starter.
Workjam raised $70.6million CAD Series C for platform serving frontline workers
Employee engagement software, Workjam has raised $70.6million CAD as part of its Series C funding. The company provides non-desk workers a platform for work scheduling, communication, and training among other things.
CircleCI raises $100 million for automated app testing and deployment
CircleCI is a continuous integration software that lets one run automated app testing, and thus help in faster deployment. The company has raised Series E funding of $100million for expanding further.
Tonkean raises $24 million to automate enterprise workflows
With automation becoming increasingly popular, no-code workflow automation startup Tonkean has received $24million for expanding its global reach. Based out of San Francisco, it already counts companies like Salesforce and Microsoft among its clients.
Must reads
Atlassian’s tools helped build today’s tech. How’s it prepping for the future?
What every product leader should know about collaboration
Lessons in crisis management from your peers in SaaS
Vidyard: From sales-led to product-led and how it changed everything
Listen to
Moveworks utilizes AI to help enterprises with their IT support issues. In this podcast, its founder and CEO, Bhavin Shah shares his journey, why he started Moveworks, and how can companies solve the IT challenges due to the remote work. He also discusses about the role of customer success and how it ties in with marketing.
Successfully pivoting a SaaS business – with Sandi Lin
Skilljar is a SaaS company that’s making almost $10million ARR, but the going wasn’t so easy. Its co-founder and CEO, Sandi Lin, talks about the original idea for a learning platform, how they realized that it won’t work, pivoting it to focus on businesses to offer a platform for training customers, and more.
Listening to users and growing to $100,000 MRR with Baird Hall of Wavve
Baird Hall had a brilliant idea of creating an app that lets listeners to radio shows (and later podcasts) connect with each other. However, he didn’t have much success with it. But instead of giving up, he found a gap in the market – turning clips from a podcast into videos that could be shared on social media sites. Today, he has two bootstrapped SaaS companies and is able to make $100,000 MRR. He talks about his learnings and journey in this podcast.
Watch
SaaS integration strategies that won’t drive you crazy – Adam DuVander
For SaaS businesses, integration are a crucial aspect. This talk shares about how one should go about their integration strategy, which integrations to prioritize and why not all integrations are worth pursuing, especially if they add a burden.
How to position your SaaS product so it sells itself
In this video, host Dan Martell shares his learnings from April Dunford’s book “Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It”, and how they could be applied to SaaS businesses. He highlights six things to be followed: competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value, target market charecteristics, market category, and relevant trends.
