1
Most of them seem incrementally better than the others (or much better but not 10X better as the old adage used to be).
Are all new SaaS businesses effectively a play on "Your margin is my opportunity"?
What do you think?
We’ve spent considerable time evaluating current solutions. While there are a range of options - we’ve written more about the existing problems here [1]
SuperTokens.com is open core - it enables you to self host or deploy your product on your customer’s infrastructure.
For our B2B offering, we’ve tried to strike the right balance between price and functionality. Unique to SuperTokens is that you can pay for individual features as opposed to needing to pay for a full tier which may include features you do not need
SuperTokens integrates natively into your frontend and backend - giving you significant control over the end user experience (UI native to your domain, without Auth0 like redirects) and the backend developer experience (override any function and make customisations within your own API layer).
Our implementation of the feature also includes all of the following:
1. API to create tenants, 2. Unique or shared user pools, 3. Create multiple development (staging, testing) environments, 4. Unique login experiences per tenant, 5. User management dashboard to manage users on a tenant level
Additionally, SuperTokens also supports B2B2C and B2B2B usecases!
What’s next: We’re working on several future features - such as SCIM provisioning, TOTP and Pre-built UI for invitation flows
We'd love for you to try it out and let us know what you think. You can get started by visiting supertokens.com
- [1] Existing self hosted solutions don’t support multi-tenancy / org or multi env setup very well. They either require you to deploy one instance of their service per org (= dev ops nightmare), or have limits on the number of orgs before you start seeing performance issues.
Whilst existing managed solutions have the features, it can be frustrating to customize the auth logic. This usually requires you to create webhooks (which are not type safe + you need to secure them), or to upload code onto their service, which is difficult to review and maintain.
Software Engineering Daily - https://softwareengineeringdaily.com
JS Party - https://changelog.com/jsparty
Darknet Diaries - https://darknetdiaries.com/
Changelog - https://changelog.com/podcast
Corecursive - https://corecursive.com/
Any others that people here recommend?
1. Guides: Information that helps you implement the product / try it out 2. Education: Information that helps you understand the product, what it does, why its good etc
When you're browsing a product for the first time, what do you think should be a good balance between these two?
Which companies do you think get this most right?
All the Links to resources are at the bottom
Summary:
On managing your burn: There is no certainty on when things will get better. It could take 6 months or 2 years. The general advice is to maintain 24+ months of runway (30 months to be safe so you can raise with sufficient buffer)
Valuation multiples: Median public co multiples (those growing 20-30% YoY) were 13X+ before and are now down to 5.6X of revenue (60% down). For top tier public companies with growth higher than 40% YoY, the multiple is at 8X
Current activity: Right now, it is a terrible market and hence most companies are not raising. If you could raise, you probably did end of last year when it was a good time to do so. So there is low volume right now.
Rounds are either being done at the old price (they were close to being done when things changed) or are just not getting done at all.
Towards the end of this year & early next, there will be lots of cos that just cant wait anymore. Thats when we'll see a lot more data points
Seed / Series A fundraises: It will take longer to close and at lower valuations. The impact is not significant, yet (due to the above reason). The bar to raise is higher, will require more diligence and hence will take longer.
Deployment of capital: There is a belief that since many firms recently raised large funds - there is lots of idle capital
However, since deployment was so quick, a large part of these new funds have already been deployed
Remaining funds will be used to support existing portco
Eg: Tiger's $12.7B fund announced in March 2022 is already 65% deployed.
The same way startups think about their runway, VCs will be thinking about the limited amount of capital they have and will try to stretch it out.
Outlook: No one knows but those that have guessed have said that a recession is likely in the next 6 months (GDP growth likely be negative in Q2). If you are a growth stage startup and need to raise, then be great
The advice here is generalised but nuances will apply for your specific business. Eg: it may make sense for a category creating company with top tier growth to continue to focus on growth over runway
Resources:
[1] Craft Ventures: Operating in a downturn [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBkzm4a7iY4]
[2] Unseen Sequoia deck on “Adapting to Endure” [https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22036831/adaptingtoenduremay2022.pdf]
[3] YC note from Michael [https://twitter.com/refsrc/status/1527238287471292417]
[4] A16Z Framework: more relevant for revenue generating Series A and beyond companies [https://future.a16z.com/framework-valuation-navigating-down-markets/] [5] Matt Turck, VC at FirstMark: [https://mattturck.com/vcpullback/]
[6] Personal experience from a Sequoia backed founder on what starting a company in 2000 was like: [https://twitter.com/schrep/status/1527520245362982912?s=20&t=NX-QGhQ5FBI1Id66zzlmIA]
[7] Ali Partovi providing a counter argument to being conservative: [https://twitter.com/apartovi/status/1527440722219061248?s=20&t=plBUZk93k50fCs0UupuCgw]