Chase for Business has announced a new business banking account called Business Complete Banking with a new feature, QuickAccept. QuickAccept allows a business owner to take card payments in minutes, without opening a separate merchant account, and have funds available the same day at no additional cost.  Most banks have historically kept business checking accounts and merchant accounts siloed because they operate within separate divisions or entities. Customers are forced to open two different accounts within the very same bank – meaning separate pricing, signup, logins, reporting, cust ..read more

A ton has happened this year around the world – it’s been a rollercoaster – especially for small businesses. This global pandemic has affected different markets in various ways. For instance, we’ve seen grocery stores actually doing better compared to restaurants and event businesses that are really feeling the pain.  It has been heartbreaking to watch small businesses be turned upside down, many of them even forced to close their doors permanently. But it has also been really inspirational watching them reinvent themselves and embrace this change. Their ingenuity and resiliency is helpin ..read more

It turns out that adding payments is the solution for finding value and opportunity in almost any size of vertical SaaS business – at least according to Adeyemi Ajao, a co-founder and Managing Partner at Base10 Partners. He recently published an article in Forbes that takes a look at how SaaS platform businesses can have great success even in markets that are perceived as ‘small’.  “Vertical SaaS companies are becoming SaaS + payments companies, and by doing so are creating mega-opportunities in deceptively small TAMs (Total Addressable Markets),” he asserts and goes on to say, “What is ..read more

WePay asked some of our partners for their leadership advice and to share a nugget of business wisdom. These became part of our partnership with the popular SaaStr podcast and we’ve collected them here. From SaaStr Podcast Episode 206: Kashoo CEO Jim Secord, “The most important thing we’ve learned is to really use your own software. I don’t think there’s any better way to develop product and customer insight than actually eating your own dog food. We are the biggest critics or fans of our own software and it drives us to constantly improve.” From SaaStr Podcast Episode 207: BigCommerce CEO Br ..read more

  There were several themes that emerged from the sessions at SaaStr Annual 2019. The conference typically is a great venue for software platforms and ISVs to network, conduct business and celebrate what is now a $650B industry, according to Bessemer Venture Partners. In our discussions and at the sessions we attended, one of the themes this year that stood out was around growth and scale. People were keen to talk about what happens after a company has achieved initial success. Not just getting past the startup phase and finding product-market fit, but what happens after you’ve had some ..read more

One of our favorite conferences of the year – SaaStr Annual – is almost here. It’s no exaggeration to say this is THE actionable conference for SaaS business leaders, so much so that it had to move from SF hometown to the San Jose Convention Center in order to accommodate more people. From Feb 5-7, you can expect it to be packed with great speakers and topics, like “The Top 5 Questions Every SaaS CEO Wrestles With” from Dave Kellogg, CEO of Host Analytics and Q&As with top execs from Slack and Zoom. Not that we’re biased, but the session we’re most looking forward to will our own CEO Bill ..read more

Over the past year and a half we have published a series of blog posts taking a look at the best articles and advice for SaaS and ISV businesses available on the internet. We started with a general focus on all aspects of an ISV or platform and then late focused more on growth areas and how SaaS businesses can increase users, activity and revenue. All in all we looked at well over 100 articles covering everything from starting out to metrics to marketing to hiring. Here’s a full list of all those blog posts just in case you needed some light reading if you are travelling over Thanksgiving. So ..read more

Last time we looked at SaaS and ISV business growth we examined user growth – the core element for success in these businesses. But there is another element to growth that can be just as important – increasing user engagement. If your customers use your platform more frequently that in turn drives up overall usage and in the end, revenue. Plus you pick up all kinds of secondary benefits around brand and brand image that will help with other aspects of growth. Driving user engagement is a more complex topic and not one that typically lends itself to instant results because it is also intimatel ..read more

This month we sat down for a Q&A with GoFundMe (GFM) CEO Rob Solomon. Rob joined the platform in 2015. The platform started working with WePay in 2011. This interview is abridged. Q: You lead GoFundMe and Crowdrise by GoFundMe. For those that don’t know them, can you briefly introduce them? A: GFM is a social fundraising platform to empower people to help each other out. And since its founding, GFM has enabled more than 50 million people to donate more than $5B to causes they care about. The platform was started by Brad Damphousse and Andrew Ballester. They were wandering in the wildern ..read more

User growth is the lifeblood of SaaS businesses and ISVs – and churn is the force draining away that lifeblood. Company survival depends on continuously adding new users and keeping them on the platform. The pieces below offer strategies for maintaining user growth. A good place to start is a comprehensive look at the metrics that a SaaS business or ISV should track in order to understand user behavior and focus on user growth. Ryan Law, CMO of Cobloom, wrote this piece on Medium which looks at both growth metrics and churn metrics. Look out for links to other sets of SaaS metrics that suppor ..read more