Blog
New Podcast: “Appify Your Business,” featuring Bill Furlong, Squarestack
We've wanted to get Bill Furlong on our Above the Cloud podcast for a while. His new book, "Appify Your Business," is well-aligned with the data-driven viewpoint we've developed at the Local Search Association with the Modern Commerce Monitor™️ (formerly Tech Adoption...
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New Podcast: “Scheduling is like hosting,” featuring Aksh Gupta, Occasion
Occasion co-founder and CEO Aksh Gupta had the crowd leaning in this week at the LSA's LOCALOGY ENGAGE: SaaS/SMB event in Washington, DC, when he talked about how something called the "30-second rule" saved his company. The 30-second rule is a process for observing...
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New Podcast: “What makes AR fly or die?” featuring Mike Boland, ARtillery Intelligence
Our latest Above the Cloud podcast features a conversation with Mike Boland, a longtime local digital commerce industry analyst who currently wears (at least) two hats. He is the lead analyst at Street Fight. And he runs his own advisory firm focused on the spatial...
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New Podcast: “Turning Customers into Advocates” featuring Andrea Kayal, Upserve
Our latest Above the Cloud podcast features Andrea Kayal, chief marketing officer of Upserve, a business management platform for full-service restaurants that emerged out of Swipely back in 2016 following two key acquisitions. In May 2016, Swipely became Upserve,...
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Add Your Voice to Our SaaS Engagement Survey
Anyone who builds or sells SaaS products for small businesses knows that it's all for naught if your customers are not engaged with your products on a daily basis. Businesses that do not rely on your products will eventually stop using them. And the engagement cycle...
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Why Are Sales Enablement Platforms So Hot?
We saw the news this week that the sales enablement platform SalesLoft has raised $70 million, giving it a $600 million valuation. The D round was led by Insight Venture Partners, will go toward fueling the Atlanta-based company's growth, specifically to fund...
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SaaS for SMBs: PR Is the Same, but Valuations Have Radically Changed
I saw an ad this morning for SurePayroll, which triggered me to learn more about the company. I was intrigued because while I had heard of SurePayroll, I had not realized it was part of the larger, more established small business payroll company Paychex. I discovered...
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New Podcast: “Robot Waitresses” Featuring Rebellion Research
Our latest Above the Cloud podcast features a conversation on AI with Alexander Fleiss, CEO of Rebellion Research, a New York company that delivers AI-driven investment advice to its clients worldwide. Andrew is also a lecturer on AI at Yale, Amherst, and Rutgers. As...
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New Podcast: “Happiness and Efficiency in the Workplace” featuring 7Shifts
Jordan Boesch got the idea to build a great software product from watching his dad struggle with a combination of excel spreadsheets and sticky notes to juggle the employee schedules at the Quiznos franchises he ran in Saskatchewan. This week's Above the Cloud podcast...
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What’s the Story Behind QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping Services?
Intuit has been gauging interest among small businesses for an on-demand bookkeeping service called Live Bookkeeping and is expected to launch the service in the near future. This has caused some consternation in the accounting world, sparking fears that Intuit is...
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New Podcast: “How Do You Franchise an App?”
Matt Crowell quit his job and sold his car and condo to pour everything he had into his first startup, GetintheLoop, a mobile marketing SaaS platform. While his parents thought he was crazy when he put all his chips in, today the risk looks like it just might pay off....
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New Podcast: “Glengarry Glen George”, featuring George Leith
No matter where George Leith is in the world, he rises at 4 a.m. to hit the gym. And it's often well into the wee hours before he winds down his last call of the day. Half measures aren't really his thing. George runs sales at Vendasta, a white label digital marketing...
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New Podcast: “Think Like an App”, featuring Neal Polachek
A while back LocaliQ asked my colleague Neal Polachek to develop a talk for small businesses that would fit into its Growth Lab initiative. Something to help small businesses stay ahead of the curve. Neal landed on an idea. What if small businesses adapted how they...
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LSA 19 Preview: Demystifying the All in One Solution
Next week at LSA 19 in beautiful Dana Point, CA (which will be a nice respite for a polar vortex victim like me), I'll be running a workshop called "Demystifying the All in One Solution", that will unpack why all in ones are such a thing and offer some strategies for...
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Why Did Broadly Acquire About.me?
Broadly's acquisition of About.me announced today seems to be a bit more about acquiring the About.me team than about the product. We reached out to Josh Melick, Broadly's Co-founder and CEO, and he offered us this take: "First, we really liked the team. I’ve known...
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Who Will Own the Restaurant Vertical?
In its latest State of SMB Software report, our friends at SurePath Captial made a compelling prediction. We dug into this idea a bit with SurePath founder Mark MacLeod on a recent Above the Cloud podcast. As SurePath notes in the bullet point above, one of the...
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New Podcast: “Question Time with Tolithia”
This bonus episode of Above the Cloud is part of our continuing effort to leverage the amazing content generated at the November Tech Adoption Summit in San Francisco. This podcast was taken from the Q&A segment of Tolithia Kornweibel's well-received talk at the...
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New Podcast: “The State of SMB Software” featuring Mark MacLeod
The third annual "State of SMB Software 2018 report from our friends at SurePath Capital Partners paint a picture of a robust small business software market in 2018, with money pouring in to make big bets on companies that are enabling SMBs to in effect run their...
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Conference Video: Building a Challenger Brand
One of the most popular sessions at last year's Tech Adoption Summit event in San Francisco featured Tolithia Kornweibel, head of marketing at Gusto, giving a talk about how the upstart SaaS company has staked out a promising niche in providing small businesses with...
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Conference Video: The Case for Product-Driven Marketing
We're in the process of digging into the video vault from last year's Tech Adoption Summit, held November 7 at a tiny, quirky venue in San Francisco's Mission District. It was a packed day spent geeking out on the things that drive the small-business SaaS industry --...
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New Podcast: “Websites Aren’t Dead” featuring Mono Solutions’ Jillian and Matt
Our first podcast of 2019 features a conversation with Jillian Als and Matt Matergia, two of the key players at Mono Solutions, about the constantly changing small business website design and fulfillment business. They spoke to us back in December from Mono's...
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Newly Flush Tax Jar Determined to Maintain Its Unique Culture
TaxJar, a company that automates sales tax collection for eCommerce businesses, just raised $60 million from Insight Venture Partners, with the assistance of our friends at SurePath Capital Partners. TaxJar's last funding round was a $2 million seed round in 2014. The...
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Sharon Rowlands Signals New Direction for Web.com
Web.com's hiring of Sharon Rowlands as its new CEO signals new owner Siris Capital means to bring substantial changes to the Florida-based website builder. Rowlands is known as a turnaround CEO. She will replace the retiring David Brown at the end of this month. In...
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Top 10 Small Business Software Stories of 2018
It was a busy year for the small business software industry. Some of the leading SMB brands raised piles of money, made game-changing acquisitions, and launched new products and services to box out competitors and make their platforms stickier. We took a look back...
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Top Five “Above the Cloud” Podcasts of 2018
Back in mid-2018 we decided that the Tech Adoption Index program needed a forum for conversations with some of the most interesting and influential figures in the small-business software world. From this emerged "Above the Cloud", a podcast that tries captures thought...
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New Report Tackles the All-in-One SaaS Sales Dilemma
Several topics and themes have been persistent during the course of producing the Tech Adoption Index program for the LSA, as well as the Above the Cloud podcast. Chief among these is the debate over the "full stack" vs. point solutions. There are many layers to the...
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Wix Makes an SMB-OS Play with New Ascend Platform
On a recent Above the Cloud podcast with SurePath Founder Mark MacLeod, a segment that didn't make the final edit involved a discussion about how there is a growing race among Squarespace, Square, and Shopify to assemble the right package of services in order to...
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New Podcast: “SMBs Get Lied to a Lot”
Gene Marks is a dynamo. Every morning he gets up at 5:00 to write on small businesses issues for Forbes, The Guardian, Inc., and other publications he contributes to regularly. Then he heads off to run The Marks Group, a CRM reseller and consulting firm that serves a...
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New Podcast: “No One Wants to Make the Wrong Decision”
Our latest episode of the Above the Cloud podcast series features an interview with Mark Canon, a long time local search/SMB software exec who is currently chairman of Boomtime. Today when he isn't creating art at his New Mexico studio Mark is thinking deeply about...
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New Podcast: “Selling to SMBs is Hard” Featuring Ted Paff
Our latest podcast is a combination clinic and therapy session for anyone who has ever tried to build software products for small businesses. At the recent Tech Adoption Summit in San Francisco, my colleague Neal Polachek interviewed Ted Paff, a former VC turned...
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Service Titan, Square Move the SMB SaaS Ball Downfield
Two recent news events offer some additional insights into the trajectory of SaaS for SMBs. As we have said previously, we expect many zigs and zags as SaaS companies who focus on building software for SMBs try to find their sweet spot. The size and valuation of...
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New Podcast: “Stop Talking About Your Product”
Our latest episode of Above the Cloud features an interview with Costantino Caroppo, a former CMO at the Italian digital agency Axelero and the self-described "father of the Italian IYP" for launching Seat Pagine Gialle's first digital directories while an executive...
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Tech Adoption Summit Session Recaps
On November 7, LSA hosted the second Tech Adoption Summit in San Francisco. It was an exclusive, c-level event focused on the future of SMB technology adoption and the implications for technology providers and sales channels. The following are summaries and links to...
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At #TAS: The SMB SaaS Playbook
In contrast to the morning sessions at this week's Tech Adoption Summit in San Francisco, the afternoon sessions had a more “playbook” tone to them. The afternoon was kicked off with Neal Polachek interviewing Trina Ward (of the eponymous consulting firm) in a session...
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At #TAS: The Art and Science of SMB Tech Adoption
The morning session at the Tech Adoption Summit was a mix of content demonstrating an energetic balance of both art and science in moving SMBs into a more robust implementation of technology. The morning started with a presentation by Tolithia Kornweibel, Marketing...
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Secrets to Selling the Full Stack
SaaS was on full display at two recent conferences that have their roots in the Yellow Pages industry, a clear indication of just how much change is occurring among companies that sell digital products and services to small businesses. First, at the SIINDA...
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Vendasta Goes Freemium to Expand Agency Pipeline
Last week Vendasta announced it was shifting to a "freemium" model targeted to small digital agencies. This release raised a couple of immediate questions. First, I wondered if this was a real shift in strategy or just a more public announcement of something that...
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Why SMBs Abandon DIY Software Mid-Purchase
According to a new survey conducted by LSA and Mono Solutions, more than half of SMBs have at some point abandoned an online software purchase in the middle of the process. And their reasons suggest that DIY software vendors overall haven't yet perfected the customer...
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Softbank, Hard Cash and Warm Hearts
Looks like Goliath investor Softbank may place yet another huge bet on the WeWork. Softbank already put nearly $4.5B into the real estate play that has been rumored to be preparing for a public offering. According to filings, WeWork losses continue to mount as they...
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Facebook Goes After the SMB Long Tail with ‘Consultants’ and ‘Pros’
Today in New York Facebook held its Global Partner Summit. There were a number of announcements coming out of the event: Creative Compass (tool to measure the impact of ad creative) New Marketing Partner categories: Facebook Marketing Consultants and Facebook Pros...
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New Podcast: “SMBs Have No Time”
There are few people with a broader or deeper perspective on the small business SaaS world than Mark MacLeod, the latest guest on the "Above the Cloud" podcast series. Mark was the founder CFO at Shopify, which helped democratize e-commerce by enabling SMBs to become...
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A Day Around Dreamforce: The Growing Power of Sales Enablement
A luxury of living in the Bay Area is that I don't have to spend $500 to $1,000 a night to sleep in an average hotel near the annual Dreamforce gathering. So I took advantage of the easy commute and attended an offshoot of the nearly 200,000-person Salesforce annual...
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Guest Post: Forget Native Apps, SMBs Should Focus on The Mobile Web
From smartphones to tablets, mobile devices are increasingly dominating the time consumers spend consuming digital media. And it’s really no surprise - we all know it was already in 2015 that mobile search surpassed desktop searches. In certain emerging markets, like...
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Survey: 31% of SMBs Still Using ‘Paper’ to Manage Customer Info
This week Salesforce is holding its massive developer and partner conference Dreamforce in San Francisco. In conjunction with the event, the company has released a survey (reg. required) of 490 small and medium size business owners (SMBs). It explores technology...
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Square’s Mobile Payroll App = More Disruption?
Yesterday I saw a bunch of news alerts, emails and tweets regarding Square's announcement extending its existing desktop small business payroll service to its mobile app. Reading through some of the news, Square's announcement moved its stock favorably and trimmed a...
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A Peek into the World of MSPs and IT Providers
I recently attended an event outside of Boston put on by the team at ChannelPro - ChannelPro SMB Forum. Like many trade shows or conferences, there were presentations and workshops and exhibits. Overall it was a super interesting mix of Managed Service Providers...
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New Podcast: “A Product First Go to Market Strategy”
In a business world awash in buzzwords and phrases, let us lay one more on you: product-centric customer acquisition. As buzzy as it sounds, it's a profound concept. Give valuable yet free stuff to lots and lots of SMBs knowing full well that the overwhelming majority...
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Will Every Business Eventually Become a Subscription Business?
A hot (relatively) new business book is making the argument that we are making a fundamental shift from an ownership economy to a subscription economy, where we essentially rent what we need for as long as we need it. The book, "Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model...
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New Podcast: “A Completely Different Experience”
How does Microsoft think about the small business cloud? We asked that very question of Microsoft SMB Channel Strategist Abid Chaudhry, on our latest Above the Cloud podcast, "A Completely Different Experience." Chaudhry joined Microsoft early this year after a...
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Podcast Previews Tech Adoption Summit Speakers and Themes
Some of the biggest challenges facing those building SaaS products for small businesses will be addressed at the upcoming Tech Adoption Summit, Nov. 6-7, at The Laundry in San Francisco's Mission District. How to acquire SMB customers efficiently. How to build a brand...
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Gusto on Scaling Customer Experience
The small business software space is crowded, which raises an interesting overall question about how to differentiate among products that are for the most part all pretty good. When we spoke with Ariel Diaz, CEO of Blissfully back in June, we explored the idea of...
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Guest Post: 5 Sales Arguments for SMB Websites
Websites are key to building a strong digital foundation for small businesses. Yet many still struggle to understand the value of an online presence. According to a recent study by Visa, more than 50% of SMBs still aren’t online, but with digital presence playing a...
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New Podcast: “Humans Aren’t Resources”
Gusto is one of the most celebrated business operating in the small business cloud software space, having raised more than $300 million to date and generating ample press for its approach to disrupting the payroll and HR space. Last week we visited Gusto's impressive...
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Office Depot Goes Deeper into Services, Adds Co-Working Space
If you even had the impulse to grab a seat at a workstation in the Office Depot furniture department and just start working as if you were in your own office, that rather strange fantasy can now come true, in a fashion. Office Depot revealed this week that it will...
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What is a Tech Agency Channel Partner?
When we talk to companies offering digital marketing solutions for small businesses, from full-stack solutions to focused offerings like SEO or websites, many express a common refrain. They want to explore new reseller channels. Most have worked with media partners...
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Gusto Sees Big Opportunity in Fragmented Payroll Space
For sometime now I have been pointing to Gusto as the poster child for disruption in the SMB cloud space. Many of you have heard me talk about how Gusto has been squarely focused on taking market share from the two largest SMB payroll providers - ADP and Paychex. In a...
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DexYP Results Show Why They Thryv
DexYP released its 2Q earnings yesterday and the results make it clear why the company is aggressively shifting its focus from selling business leads via printed directories and digital products like SEM and into a software as a service model via it's Thryv CRM...
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New Podcast: “Age is a Moving Target”
What happens when the 50-plus crowd leaves the corporate world and either starts or acquires small businesses? Will their adoption of could technology to run these businesses be more like older owners of existing small businesses, who tend to be reluctant to move...
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New Podcast: “There Must Be an App for That”
The Above the Cloud podcast is back this week with a new episode featuring Josh May, co-founder & CEO of POWr, a San Francisco based start up that builds website plug ins for self-service website users, mostly small business owners. Josh sees POWr's role as...
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New Podcast: “Art of the Demo”
Josh Melick, co-founder and CEO of Broadly, has small business in his DNA, with parents who were small business owners and a resume filled with stops at leading SMB-focused companies. After stints at Ingenio, YP and DemandForce, Josh and fellow engineer Assaf Arkin...
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How the New SMB Generation Is Changing Everything
Every day about 10,000 Americans reach retirement age. This data point sits at the heart of why The Local Search Association made the decision to launch the Tech Adoption Index last year. While not every one of the 10,000 American turning 65 each day is a business...
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Guest Post: The Next Frontier of Business Websites
The business website has come a long way from its static origins. Even so, it continues to evolve and adapt to the unique needs of small businesses owners. We’re at an exciting point -- breaking away from the antiquated standard into something new, more impactful and...
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New Podcast: “Sell Customers What They Need”
Let's say you sell digital marketing services to SMBs. And you sold just a single product to a particular customer. And it's the wrong product based on their identifiable needs. And it's the only or one of just a few products that you offer. And you never talked to...
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What Metrics Drive SMB SaaS Companies?
The Tech Adoption Index team is on a journey to deliver insights that matter to the community we are building in the small-business software world. One item on our checklist is an examination of key operational metrics in the SMB SaaS world. There are many good...
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Introducing Our New Podcast: Above the Cloud
The Tech Adoption Index rolled out its new podcast "Above the Cloud" this week, with the inaugural episode featuring an interview with Blissfully.com CEO Ariel Diaz. Blissfully recently released its "2018 SMB SaaS Trends Report" -- a comprehensive look at how small...
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Wisps of the SMB Cloud in Meeker’s Internet Trends Report
Mary Meeker recently released her annual PowerPoint magnum opus on Internet Trends so we thought we'd pore over it to see which nuggets were most relevant to our coverage area -- the small business cloud and the emerging SMB technology stack. We found a few relevant...
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The Growing Power of the Small Business OS
Advertising is a fickle beast. Small businesses will move quickly in and out of advertising products, churning out if value isn't perceived, or proven. Small businesses are less likely to switch providers for the tools they use to run their day to day business -- the...
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Coming Soon: “Above the Cloud” Podcast
For more than a year we’ve been developing the Tech Adoption Index -- a program that is all about the vast and critically important small business software world. Specifically we’ve been acquiring and sharing data-supported knowledge about how SMBs are using...
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Millennials Driving the Future of Small Business
A study recently issued by the insurance company Metlife and written up by the home improvement directory Thumbtack on its blog shows that an overwhelming number of millennials plan to exit full time employment to work as freelancers or solo-preneurs. These figures...
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Is New KPMG, Microsoft SMB SaaS Play a Wiise Move?
Down under three leading enterprise companies have joined forces to help SMEs (the acronym used outside of the U.S. for small and medium sized enterprises) streamline and upgrade their business operations. Wiise is a new play by KPMG, Microsoft and the Commonwealth...
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Is the “Full Stack” a Churn Buster?
One of the primary rationales or selling the full SMB marketing and technology stack is that sellers who only go to market with a single product are vulnerable to churn. So for defensive reasons, it’s important to be in a position to be that single source provider to...
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PayPal’s Big POS Acquisition Targets Square
PayPal, having sat and watched the success of Square, pulled the trigger on a $2.2 billion acquisition yesterday aimed squarely at its payments and point of sale rival. PayPal acquired iZettle -- a Swedish SMB/SME payment platform -- with the aim of keeping pace with...
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Square Joins the Food Fight
There's a powerful new entrant into the crowded restaurant technology field. Today, Square announced it will offer an entire restaurant management system called Square for Restaurants. Square is entering a hotly contested market with legacy players like OpenTable --...
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Podcast: Weebly, Square and Omnichannel Commerce
When the recent blockbuster $365 million Square-Weebly acquisition was announced, Surepath Capital's Shubham Datta and I jumped on the line to record an OnTarget podcast to run through why Square would do this and whether we thought it was a good idea. Datta believes...
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Amazon Using Discounts to Drive Pay Adoption
"Your margin is my opportunity" is one of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's most famous quotes. The retail payments sector is feeling the sting of this classic Amazon disruption strategy -- offering the same service at a lower price to drive market share. Sacrificing margin...
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At SaaSConnect: SaaS Growth Trends for 2018
The world of cloud based apps for small and medium size businesses is all about good news and bad news for those in the business SaaS market. This according to a presentation this morning here at SaaS Connect in San Francisco by Blissfully Founder and CEO Ariel Diaz...
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#LSA18: The New Market for SMB Services
The New Market for SMB Services panel featured a great mix of perspectives from leaders in the solution market with a cohesive message. Consumers are driving the change and demanding personalization. SMBs need to navigate and offer the same level of engagement with...
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#LSA18: When is an App not Just an App? When It’s Part of Zoho One
The day’s featured speaker, Zoho President Raj Sabhlok was introduced by Charles Laughlin, Project Lead for LSA’s TAI (Tech Adoption Index). From its roots in network management software 22 years ago, Zoho has evolved into a multinational online services provider with...
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Podcast: Talking Guided Selling and Start-up Life with Perry Evans
The notion of guided sales and marketing is a hot topic in the local and small business marketing space, as well as in the small business SaaS space. Organizations are looking for optimal efficiency in how the acquire and onboard customers. And they are looking to...
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Henry Schein: First Dental, Now Dogs & Cats
Distribution companies are facing an existential crisis in the face of price and convenience driven competition from online competitors, notable Amazon. In order to have a chance at long-term survival, distributors are expanding their service offerings to diversity...
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Channels Channels Channels
I took the opportunity to attend the Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Las Vegas this week. Why, you might ask? Fair question. On a hunch I decided to attend what is billed as a gathering of 6,000 channel partners with the likes of AT&T, Vonage, Comcast 4...
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Podcast: Talking SMB Sales with Cisco’s Jenn Allen
Jenn Allen believes most tech companies are getting it wrong when selling to "cloud native" small businesses. And getting it right is important, given we're looking at a pretty rapid transition from older to younger business owners in the coming years as Baby Boomers...
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Six Principles Driving the Tech Adoption Index
About a year and a half ago we developed a set of six principles that served as the foundation for what would become the Tech Adoption Index. These principles were the reasons we believed the small business shift to the cloud would become the biggest game changer...
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Our Take on DocuSign’s IPO Filing
E-signature giant DocuSign filed for an IPO this week, hoping to raise an unspecified amount in an IPO expected to happen sometime in April, according to a report in TechCrunch. The company's S-1 offers a first ever look at the company's financials. DocuSign generated...
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Podcast: Mark Canon’s Contrarian Views on Tech Adoption
Our latest On Target podcast guest Mark Canon has a unique way to describe his long tenure in the local/SMB space. "I have used more of other people's money to learn things than pretty much anyone else." Canon is currently CEO of Boomtime, a New Mexico based company...
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Square Appointments Free for Small Merchants
Point of sale player Square made its bones enabling micro-businesses selling short ribs out of food trucks or honey at farmers markers to accept credit card payments. Since then they've layered on services to offer a more complete solution to small businesses, and to...
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Gusto Tops 60K Customers, Adds Free Product
Gusto the SaaS company offering payroll processing and HR services for small businesses, revealed that it crossed the 60,000 customer threshold in January. It has also launched a new product called HR Basics that helps SMBs handle routine HR tasks like managing...
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Podcast: Talking Small Business Tech with Vendasta’s Brendan King
Vendasta CEO Brendan King wants to lead his reseller partners, which range from local media sellers to vertical digital agencies to pure play technology companies, into a world where they sell a full cloud-based marketing technology stack using a monthly recurring...
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MYOB Steps Up Battle with Rival Xero
Down in Australia there's an aggressive battle between two cloud-based SMB accounting software providers -- MYOB and Xero. MYOB recently announced new AI features that they believe will enable bookkeepers and accountants to spend more time offering clients advisory...
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Why Did WeWork Buy SEO Firm Conductor and Why Should You Care?
Last week WeWork acquired digital marketing firm Conductor. After it happened I got a number of informal messages like: WeWork + conductor, make sense? Many people were surprised by the move, and from a distance it's initially confusing potentially. WeWork rents...
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Nordy Ups the Ante
In another signal that the role of customer experience continues to gain importance, Nordstrom has bought two technology companies to help further its CX success. Few brands are more closely associated with quality customer experience than Nordstrom. Nordstrom...
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SurePath Report Details Active SMB SaaS Market
Every year our friends at SurePath Capital Partners produce a much-anticipated "State of SMB Software" report that measures the level of interest VCs and private equity investors have in the market for SaaS products designed for small and medium size businesses. Last...
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Tech Adoption Index Forms Influential Board of Advisors
When we launched the Tech Adoption Index last year, we did so based on a clear hypothesis and set of objectives. Our hypothesis was that small business owners are hungry for tools to help them operate their businesses more efficiently, and these tools are coming in...
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Podcast: Talking Square with SurePath’s Shubham Datta
On this week's LSA OnTarget podcast, we talk to Shubham Datta, a director at SurePath Capital Partners, an investment advisory firm that specializes in the small business SaaS industry. Our topic was Square, which announced its earnings on February 27. Our...
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New from the Tech Adoption Index: Profiling the Cloud SMB
When we launched the Tech Adoption Index last year, one of the questions we were trying to answer was what defines an early adopter of cloud services to run their small business. When we talk about the "small business shift to the cloud" we are really talking about...
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Booming Square Sees Multi-Channel Growth
Fintech powerhouse Square rolled out a strong Q4 and FY 2017 earnings report yesterday, showing a strong move upmarket to serving larger retailers ($500K+), and greater traction among consumers with Cash App and Square Card, as well as an expanding product ecosystem...
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Dropbox Looks to Raise $500M in IPO
Last week Dropbox announced plans to go public with the goal of raising $500 million at an estimated $10 billion market valuation. Dropbox launched 11 years ago and has since grown to more than $1.1 billion in annual revenues. Revenues have grown 39% and 31% over the...
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Freshbooks Predicts Burst in Self-Employment Driven by Millennials
Over the net two years 27 million Americans plan to break the corporate shackled and enter the ranks of the self-employed, essentially tripling the ranks of solo-preneurs. And Millennials will make up about 40% of those workers declaring their independence. This is...
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Home Services Providers Lag Consumers in Tech Adoption
A new Verizon Telematics study makes it clear that home services companies are way behind their customers in adopting new technology. Provider that do embrace new (and largely mobile) technology will be rewarded with more loyalty and repeat business. The Verizon...
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Mobile App Usage is Driving the SMB Cloud Shift
An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer in some ways states the obvious when its says that Millennials and teens are rapidly moving away from cash and in the direction of payment apps like Venmo and CashApp. The article underscores a few key principals driving the...
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Global Small Business IT Spending to Top $186 Billion in 2018
A new forecast from technology research firm IDC, projects that SMB IT spending will hit $600 billion in 2018 and reach nearly $700 billion by 2021 - growing at nearly 5% a year. According to the press release announcing the forecast, IDC divides the SMB market into...
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Will Small Business Optimism Boost Cloud Tech, SaaS Adoption?
New data from the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) suggests small and medium sized businesses are optimistic about the state of the business climate. One key challenge SMBs face is finding qualified and skilled employees and with a tight labor...
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Podcast: Zoho’s Raju Vegesna on Keeping it Simple for SMBs
Zoho is something of a anomaly in the cloud software space. Privately held, India-based Zoho has never raised a dime of outside money and it competes with some of the giants of the cloud, think Salesforce, Google, GoDaddy, etc. So how does Zoho break through and set...
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Office Depot Sees Business Services as its Way Forward
Funny how the world evolves. Years ago when I was helping the team at The Kelsey Group, we used to talk and write about how the big box stores were destroying Main Street U.S.A. We debated and discussed how that disruption would impact the local media business. The...
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SMB Market Defined by Galaxies, not Ecosystems
The collection of companies offering digital tools to small businesses either directly or via resellers is better described as a collection of galaxies than as an interconnected ecosystem. Such is the conclusion of Lorren Elkins, an executive with the software company...
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Zoho Releases Bolster its “Business Operating System” Platform
Cloud software provider Zoho rolled out two product releases and one update today that advance its strategy of being a one-stop resource for businesses to run their operations entirely in the cloud. Today the company rolled out ZohoFlow, a drag and drop application...
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Do SMBs Want All-in-One Cloud Solutions?
Companies selling digital solutions to small-businesses have long chased the notion that SMBs want sellers to “make it easy for them” and wrap up the media products they need into one turnkey solution. One payment and one dashboard where they can see how it’s all...
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On Target: Irana Wasti Details SMB Opportunity for GoDaddy
Many companies selling tech to small businesses target larger and more established merchants. Not GoDaddy. The hosting and domain provider sees “nascent” businesses as its big opportunity. These “nascents” are the businesses that may only exist as a freelancing side...
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On Target: The #CloudSummit and the State of SMB SaaS
Do small businesses really want all in one solutions for their small business apps? Or is this concept more for the benefit of SMB sellers looking to boost margins and reduce churn? Will AI/machine learning be the catalysts for development of a self-service sales...
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New Study Points to Growing SMB MarTech Adoption
A new study on SMB adoption of marketing automation tools, commissioned by marketing automation firm ActiveCampaign, describes the progress from using email marketing (a requirement to participate in the survey) through CRM to marketing automation. The report of the...
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#CloudSummit: Small Business Perspectives on Cloud-Based Tech
In preparation for last week’s SMB Cloud Adoption Summit in San Francisco, we interviewed a handful of small-businesses owners to ask them about their use of cloud software to run their businesses. The idea was to provide an SMB voice to the event, as well as to bring...
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#CloudSummit: Machine Learning & AI’s Impact on SMB Marketing
“If you don’t have a Machine Learning and AI slide in your investor deck, you are not getting funded,” SurePath Capital’s Mark McLeod told the SMB Cloud Summit audience last week, slightly tongue-in-cheek. Earlier in the day there was a discussion of how machine...
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#CloudSummit: 4 Tactics for Winning in the SMB SaaS Space
Last week Kris Barton, Chief Product Officer for USA Today Networks and ReachLocal (a wholly owned subsidiary of Gannett), shared lessons learned at LSA’s 2017 SMB Cloud Summit regarding the SMB view of SaaS, media tactics, and other observations in serving a 15,000...
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#CloudSummit: GoDaddy Expanding Product Portfolio with Cloud-Tech
At the 2017 SMB Cloud Summit, GoDaddy’s SVP of Productivity, Irana Wasti, had an insightful conversation with Local Search Association’s VP of Strategy and Insights, Greg Sterling about the small business ecosystem. Specifically, they talked about the impact of mobile...
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#CloudSummit: How to Use Net Promoter Scores to Improve the Customer Experience
As a company selling to SMBs, if you’re not paying attention to your Net Promoter Score (NPS), then you’re missing on a critical lever to manage churn. Dan Slagen, CMO of Alignable, walked through case studies yesterday at the LSA’s SMB Cloud Summit, showing how some...
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#CloudSummit: Cisco Explains How to Sell & Market SMB Cloud Services
Kicking off the LSA’s first SMB Cloud Summit, Jen Allen, who is the Go To Market Lead for the SMB Segment at Cisco, discussed the insights and findings from her research at Cisco on how to sell and market cloud-managed services to small businesses. The Evolving SMB...
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#CloudSummit: SMB SaaS Disruption Comparable to Mobile’s Impact on Local Search
This morning in San Francisco at the SMB Cloud Summit, industry veteran and LSA Tech Adoption Index advisor Neal Polachek presented a forecast for the SMB software-as-a-service (SaaS) sector. One of the biggest takeaways was that SaaS adoption will be as potentially...
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Survey: Efficiency Driving SMB SaaS Adoption Not Cost Savings
Charles Laughlin lead off with the opening presentation for LSA’s Cloud Adoption Summit today in San Francisco. The title of the session was “SMB Cloud Shift: Why and So What?” He presented early data from LSA’s second SMB-SaaS adoption survey wave (n=1,000) and set...
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Study: 48% of SMBs Have Upgraded Computer Software in Past 2 Years
New digital technology and software are transforming all areas of business for SMBs. From fundamental things like digitizing business records, to more complex integrations like marketing automation, SMBs are embracing technology in meaningful ways. A new study shows...
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Is CRM the Heart of the New SMB Cloud-Tech Stack?
Yesterday Charles Laughlin, Neal Polachek and I presented a webinar about the evolution of the SMB market and cloud services. Check it out here. LSA has also created a dedicated program (Tech Adoption Index) examining changes in the SMB market and the expanding scope...
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A New Era: SMBs and the Cloud_Shift
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools are transforming how small businesses manage HR, payroll, marketing, finances, supply chain, customer engagement and more. New LSA data shows that this shift to “the cloud” is gaining momentum and all SMB marketing services providers...
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SIINDA Conf: 10,000 Americans Will Turn 65 Everyday until 2030
The small and medium-sized business (SMB) market is undergoing a technological and generational shift. From the management of basic business operations (accounting, payments, marketing, etc.) to the way consumers make purchases decisions, digital media and technology...
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Survey: 72% of SMB Amazon Prime Members Use it for Business
Digital technology and “the cloud” are transforming the way small businesses (SMBs) manage their operations. As one example, Amazon has started to disrupt the supply chain. According to a new LSA survey, roughly 70% of SMB respondents said they are members of Amazon...
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On Target Podcast: “The Beginning of a Fascinating Ride”
Events in the tech world are increasingly validating the LSA’s decision to launch the Tech Adoption Index, an initiative that measures and analyzes the small business shift to the cloud to manage all aspects of their business operations. On this week’s On Target...
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Google Pushes into HR Software Market with Hire
Google has pushed its way into the HR software space with Google Hire, a tool that helps SMBs recruit talent. The idea behind Hire is to give companies a platform for tracking progress in hiring a candidate — including email communications, interview notes, etc. With...
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Study: 22% of SMBs Use Cloud-Based Solutions for Marketing
Nearly half of small businesses have adopted cloud-based tools and many more will in the next 12 to 18 months. This shift to the cloud may be the most disruptive trend yet facing local marketing and media sellers. As it stands today, a new study found that 22% of SMBs...
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Tech Adoption Index: Tracking SMB Usage of Cloud-Based Services
Nearly half of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have adopted cloud-based tools in at least one area of their businesses and many more will over the next 12 to 18 months. As SaaS businesses establish trust with their SMB customers they will expand into adjacent...
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Study: Tech Adoption Linked to Revenue Growth for Small Business
From not having a website to using digital tools that analyze purchase behaviors, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) span the entire spectrum of digital adoption. However, in today’s market, effective usage of digital technologies is directly related to revenue...
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Powered by the Local Search Association, The Tech Adoption Index (TAI) is designed to measure the SMB market’s shift to cloud-based services through a quantitative tracking study. The study is a bi-annual survey with a sample of 1,000 SMBs in each wave.