and breaking news that I discovered today... a new SQL standard is coming! http://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2023/04/04/sql-2023-is-finished-here-is-whats-new

A blog post by @Tal Borenstein 👑 would like to hear your thoughts https://dev.to/keephq/building-a-new-shift-left-approach-for-alerting-3pj

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Hi Everyone, Hope you're all doing well. I have some very exciting news to share with you - we've just launched our latest product - Embedded Analytics on Product Hunt. https://www.producthunt.com/posts/veezoo-embedded-search I'd be very happy if you took a couple of minutes to check it out and if you like what you see, I'd be very grateful for your support on PH! Have a great day

When Is A Contract Not A Contract? The other day a client, a software vendor, asked me to take a look at their standard proof of concept (POC) contract. It was about 8,000 words long. The full contract – the one they sign when the deal gets done – was about 11,000 words long. So not that much difference between the two. 8,000 words? That kind of defeats the whole point of the POC. When you are proposing a POC, you are in sales mode. You want your potential customer to spend time with your product, decide they really like it, and end up committing to spending the big bucks on it. In legal terms, whoever created the 8,000 word POC contract was correct. In legal terms, there is no real difference between a software licence for 1 day and a software licence for 10 years. But, in business terms, he had totally missed the point. Formally it is indeed a contract, but that’s not really the intent. The intent is to provide a sprat to catch a mackerel. Yes, there’s formality around a POC. Yes, a vendor may also charge for various elements of the POC. And yes, there’s a theoretical risk that the customer may make hundreds of copies of the software and sell them down the market on Saturday. But at the POC stage we are still in sales mode, and the primary objective is to make it as easy as possible for the customer to make the decision to buy. Putting forward an 8,000 word contract is the opposite of that.

Gooood Morning! The latest edition of Hacking SaaS was sent to all our subscribers this morning. This should mean all of you 🙂 Read the results of the ORM survey, how to scale OLTP databases, what's new in SQL 23 and more. If you have questions for the Figma team about their database architecture, feel free to post them here too - so I can ask them when we record a conversation for Youtube. https://hackingsaas.substack.com/p/hacking-saas-17-to-orm-or-not-to

Here's a 25-step checklist to help you optimize your blog post from scratch and ensure it ranks well 40-60% of the times.

New on the SaaS Developer YouTube! @shaharglazner and @Tal Borenstein talk about trends in observability, best practices (and common pitfalls) when setting alerts, and then they share a lot of cool future-looking ideas. Check it out:

Oxford, Comma. A reader drew my attention to the coverage, by the Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, of a dispute that had arisen in the state of Maine. The dispute centred on some legislation which had given rise to two possible interpretations. The ambiguity would have been avoided by placing an Oxford comma in the relevant text. The Oxford comma is the comma inserted before the “and” in the last item of a list (as in shoes, socks, and sandals). Who knew! The report was accompanied by this covering comment from the HLS. “If you tend to leave contract drafting and review to your lawyers, you might think twice about doing so in the future. While learning how to write a contract may not sound like fun, leaving the job to someone else could work against you. For proof, just look at this example of a legal dispute that blew up over a comma—or, rather, the lack thereof.” Which has to be the most bizarre comment I have ever read on the correct allocation of work between a CEO and her lawyer. I look forward to seeing a generation of CEOs and C-level executives checking contracts for commas (and that’s just the start: what about colons; and semicolons?). So, as a corrective, here is a more sensible allocation. CEO: 1. Sets overall objectives and timelines. 2. Identifies key issues. 3. Identifies particular concerns. Lawyer: 1. Identifies key legal issues that the CEO needs to be aware of. 2. Negotiates. 3. Makes sure that the final contract reflects the CEO’s intention, as modified by negotiation.

🎉 New on the SaaS Developer Community: SaaS Community Hero Program! 🥳 Each quarter we'll recognize top contributors to the community - those who shared expertise that is useful and relevant for SaaS developers. You know... advice on APIs, security, SLOs, networking, data architecture, etc. Heroes will get our appreciation, deep personal satisfaction, public recognition, a video interview on our Youtube channel and a keyboard with a lot of personality. You can find all the details here: https://www.notion.so/thenile/SaaS-Developer-Hero-Program-61458797459e46ff90066d93c627dd8a?pvs=4 As any new program, it will probably require an iteration or two to get everything smooth, so feedback and questions are most welcome.

New in the SaaS Developer Community: Cloudflare is no longer "just" a CDN serving 55M HTTP requests/sec, they are now offering a wide range of cloud services on the edge. These services run on a data layer with 15 Postgres clusters running hundreds of databases. Vignesh Ravichandran, engineering manager of Cloudflare's database team, joined us to discuss the challenges of running this large scale multi-tenant environment - dealing with network partitions, noisy neighbors, floods of connections and even global warming. We talk about the importance of having a good toolset, of practicing incidents and of internally advocating database best practices to a large engineering organization.

Hello, everyone! We, at Mailmodo, are currently preparing a report about free-to-paid conversion strategies in PLG and need experts to share their insights and participate in our survey. If you're interested in being a featured contributor, please fill-up the below attached form. ➡️ https://forms.gle/rdnoKG31Rnya9zmu8 Thank you in advance for your support!

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Renegotiation How do you renegotiate a contract when you don’t have any leverage? The answer is: with difficulty. But here are some suggestions that might help if you are ever in that situation. Build a Narrative Find some kind of narrative which supports your argument for change. A change in the market, or a forthcoming change in the market, is a good place to start. Something like this: when we put this deal together the market was XYX, but now it looks like there’s been a significant shift in 123 and the market is going to move to ABC. Go High Show how the proposed change better supports the strategic direction of your partner. Low Cost/High Value Offer something in return. Try to find some concessions which you can make which are low cost to you, but high value to your partner. Make it Personal Don’t just think of it from the point of view of the company that you are doing business with. Think of it from the perspective of the person you are dealing with on the other side. They are going to have to relay your arguments within their organisation and you will benefit from their support – what arguments can you put forward that make it a good change for them personally?

Hello folks 👋 We're launching a new product to assist product teams in tech companies 🧑‍🎤 Are you someone who is in charge of a tech product? (a Founder in an early-stage company, a Product Manager, a VP of product, CPO, etc.) We'll be super grateful for a short 10 min call to learn more about your responsibilities & challenges🙏 https://calendly.com/viraj-parmar/assisting-product-teams P.S. We'd of course provide you with early access. 🤗

🚀 Ready to optimize your product trials? Check out our latest blog post on the topic! 📈 In the post, we cover: ✅ Key metrics to track during your product trial ✅ How to segment your trial users for better insights ✅ Best practices for communication and feedback during the trial ✅ Tips for analyzing trial data and making data-driven decisions By following these tips, you can maximize the success of your product trial and convert more users for your saas. 🔍 Read the full post here: https://www.louassist.com/blog/how-to-optimize-your-product-trials📖 And let us know which tip you found most helpful! 💬

🎸 Hacking SaaS 18 shipped this morning to our 2455 subscribers 🎸. This edition has content exclusively by members of the SaaS Developer Community. We got: • @Rick Spurgeon on multi-tenant architectures with Kong • Vignesh Ravichandran on performance isolation and running a multi-tenant Postgres at scale • @Jeffrey Sherman on data modeling for user-defined fields • @Felix GV on software complexity • @shaharglazner and @Tal Borenstein on observability and alerting and more! https://hackingsaas.substack.com/p/hacking-saas-18-ideas-from-the-community

Contracts and Making Sales Easier / Part 1 Sales are hard. That’s one of the immutable facts of business life. But what if a B2B business could make its sales easier? Or, if not actually easy, at least less hard? To begin with, some definitions. Sales is the process of taking a customer from State A) indifference, to State B) customer decides to buy. The Sales Contracting Process (SCP) is the process of taking the customer from State B) customer decides to buy, to State C) customer signs the contract (irrespective of whether signing takes the form of clicking, docusign, or wet ink). Those are my usual definitions, but for the purpose of this piece I would like to define Sales as the process of taking a customer from State A) indifference, to State C) actually signing the contract – i.e. include SCP as part of Sales. Which makes sense: signed contracts are the end object of B2B Sales, revenue only arrives from signed contracts, and bringing in revenue is the primary purpose of Sales. If that’s the case, then there are two (and only two!) contract-related ways of making Sales easier. 1. Making it easier for the Customer to decide to sign the contract. 2. Making it easier for the Sales team to bring the Customer to the point that the Customer decides to sign the contract – i.e. some kind of Sales Enablement. So far, so self-evident, you might think. But if it’s so self-evident, why is contract negotiation often such a painful process?

I’m trying to be useful to developers solving SaaS software scaling problems. Does anyone have a problem they’d like to discuss? Free! With the caveat that I’ll probably turn an anonymized version of the problem into a blog post on https://shermanonsoftware.com

hey! would really appreciate your support on our vision/roadmap - https://twitter.com/keepalerting/status/1654057801138798595

Anyone working on LLM security aspects? Would love to know what others thinking. This blog I found interesting. https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/2/prompt-injection-explained/

This is peak content day 🙂 We have a new post on our community YouTube! The Pinot team at Uber wrote a great paper about the real-time analytics platform that they built. In it, they share insights on the different requirements of real-time data products, the use-cases they enable and the different types of scalability challenges they faced. They presented a useful framework that will help anyone pick the right technology for their use-case based on high level requirement analysis. @Chinmay Soman formerly a principal engineer at Uber and now head of product at StarTree, joined me for a conversation. We discussed the challenges they encountered at Uber, the solutions they came up with, the platform they built and how to best apply their experience to companies much smaller than Uber.

Hey fam! We are fans of YT lectures/ podcasts but short on time 🤣 So, we built YouTube Summarizer - a tech demo that helps you quickly skim and find the best bits in YT videos. Share your fav summarized links in the discussion thread https://www.producthunt.com/posts/youtube-summarizer-by-spext

Contracts and Making Sales Easier /Part 2 I wrote last week about making Sales easier (an expanded definition of Sales which includes the Sales Contracting Process – SCP). Some weeks ago, I defined easier as moving customers from Hi Touch to Lo Touch, and from Lo Touch to No Touch. All this falls under the rubric of GCCQ – Good Contracts Closed Quickly – which should be the mantra of every business that is interested in maintaining an effective Sales Contracting Process. How do you make it easier for the Customer to sign the contract? There are a number of ways, but here’s one of the more fundamental ones – in two parts. Part 1. Work out what issues the customer will be most concerned about in the contract. This will vary from business to business, but it’s basic stuff. If you don’t know what the key sticking points are for your customers, then you are going to have to relive it each time. Part 2. Address these issues ahead of time so that they don’t cause holdups when it comes to signing the contract. There are loads of different ways to address this. It can be FAQs, it can be dedicated pieces, it can be video – for example, a video on why your information security is so good, and how you test it regularly. Every customer that is moved from Hi Touch to Lo Touch, or from Lo Touch to No Touch, is a win for making Sales easier. A faster and more transparent SCP doesn’t necessarily mean making it easier for the other side’s lawyers to agree but done well and with the right levels of forward planning you’ve minimised the number of points that your customer’s lawyers have to get involved with. The only really surprising thing is how few businesses take the trouble to address their customers’ concerns ahead of time.

Just published Hacking SaaS #19: With a big shoutout to @Jeffrey Sherman and @Lalit Pagaria - SaaS Developer Community Heros for this quarter! Plus the usual interesting content for SaaS developers - Is Postgres the best DB? or the worst? Can it be both at the same time? https://hackingsaas.substack.com/p/hacking-saas-19-expert-saas-developers

Note: there was an issue while syncing membership between Slack and the newsletter, so if you joined this Slack in the last 2 weeks, you'll need to subscribe to the newsletter manually. Sorry about this!

Please virtually clap for our very first community heroes:

@Jeffrey Sherman Jeffrey Sherman drives scaling and performance at ActiveCampaign through his role as a Staff Engineer. In addition to hands-on coding, he teaches problem decomposition, iterative delivery, and his philosophy of never doing greenfield rewrites. If you hang out in the community Slack or follow this newsletter closely, you may be familiar with his blog https://shermanonsoftware.com or his podcast https://www.neverrewrite.com/podcast. One of his earliest conversations in the community was around scalability - especially how you ensure production upgrades won’t cause issues to your biggest customers. Jeffrey’s LinkedIn tagline showcases his customer-centric view of performance engineering: “I help SaaS Companies keep their biggest clients from churning.”

@Lalit Pagaria Lalit is the founder of Oraika, an AI feedback analytics startup. He has an extensive professional background working with companies such as Brocade, Ola, and Careem (Uber). His expertise covers diverse areas, including technical architecture, natural language processing (NLP), identity solutions, infrastructure security, and cost optimization. Lalit does not (yet) have a blog, but identity, security, and cost optimization are some of the hottest topics on the SaaS Developer Slack - and Lalit generously shared his advice and experience. As an ML expert, Lalit shares useful lines with practical suggestions, thought provoking ideas and exciting tools - both in the community and on Twitter. Very few people are at the crossroads of ML, identity, security, and costs, which means that Lalit has a unique angle on cutting-edge technology. If you haven’t yet read the article he shared about Prompt Injection, this is a great time to do so.

Congrats @Jeffrey Sherman and @Lalit Pagaria