Jeffrey Paine’s Post

But as billions flowed across the venture capital ecosystem into AI startups, some mere months old, the vaunted, trusted ARR metric has morphed into something much harder to recognize. There’s now a massive amount of pressure on AI-focused founders, at earlier stages than ever before: If you’re not generating revenue immediately, what are you even doing? Founders—in an effort to keep up with the Joneses—are counting all sorts of things as “long-term revenue” that are, to be blunt, nothing your Accounting 101 professor would recognize as legitimate.

5 Mistakes SMEs Make When Building Their First SaaS Product (and How to Avoid Them) Building a SaaS product as an SME can feel exciting… but also overwhelming. Over the past few years, I’ve seen many businesses waste months and thousands of dollars because of a few common mistakes. Here are the big ones 👇 ❌ 1. Trying to build the “perfect product” from day one ➡️ Solution: Start with an MVP in 8–12 weeks to validate your idea quickly. ❌ 2. Overlooking scalability ➡️ Solution: Build on cloud-native architecture so you can grow without rewriting everything. ❌ 3. Ignoring user feedback early on ➡️ Solution: Release fast, get feedback, iterate. Don’t build in a vacuum. ❌ 4. Choosing tech stacks based only on cost ➡️ Solution: Pick tools that balance cost, performance, and long-term sustainability. ❌ 5. Delaying monetization strategy ➡️ Solution: Plan your pricing and revenue model early so your SaaS can fund its own growth. ✅ The SMEs that succeed are the ones who treat SaaS development as an ongoing growth process — not just a one-time project. 💡 If you’re a founder or SME owner considering SaaS in 2025, I’d be happy to share how we help startups validate their SaaS ideas faster and with lower risk. 📅 Book a free 15-min consultation: https://lnkd.in/d9WJYqf4 #SaaS #Startups #SMEs #MVP #SoftwareDevelopment #AI

5 Mistakes SMEs Make When Building Their First SaaS Product (and How to Avoid Them) Building a SaaS product as an SME can feel exciting… but also overwhelming. Over the past few years, I’ve seen many businesses waste months and thousands of dollars because of a few common mistakes. Here are the big ones 👇 ❌ 1. Trying to build the “perfect product” from day one ➡️ Solution: Start with an MVP in 8–12 weeks to validate your idea quickly. ❌ 2. Overlooking scalability ➡️ Solution: Build on cloud-native architecture so you can grow without rewriting everything. ❌ 3. Ignoring user feedback early on ➡️ Solution: Release fast, get feedback, iterate. Don’t build in a vacuum. ❌ 4. Choosing tech stacks based only on cost ➡️ Solution: Pick tools that balance cost, performance, and long-term sustainability. ❌ 5. Delaying monetization strategy ➡️ Solution: Plan your pricing and revenue model early so your SaaS can fund its own growth. ✅ The SMEs that succeed are the ones who treat SaaS development as an ongoing growth process — not just a one-time project. 💡 If you’re a founder or SME owner considering SaaS in 2025, I’d be happy to share how we help startups validate their SaaS ideas faster and with lower risk. 📅 Book a free 15-min consultation: https://lnkd.in/dhb2KDVt #SaaS #Startups #SMEs #MVP #SoftwareDevelopment #AI

ARR was a favorite metric of VCs throughout the SaaS era, widely accepted as a trusted proxy for a stable and growing startup. Now, founders are trying to apply ARR to the AI boom—and it doesn’t fit. To keep up with competitors, founders are counting pilots, one-time deals, or unactivated contracts as “recurring revenue” that are, to be blunt, nothing your Accounting 101 professor would recognize as legitimate. At the center of all this is an essential truth: That we’re going to need to evolve metrics with AI, and how AI companies actually work. #ai #aistartups #aibusiness #founders #accounting #cfo #recurringrevenue #arr #financialmetrics #revenue #revenuestrams #revenuerecognition #revenueintelligence #creativeaccounting #revenuemetrics #aimetrics #vc #investors #venture #saasmetrics #revenuecreators #revenuebuilders #startupvaluation #ainative #businessvaluation #overvaluation #aihype #revenuegrowth #usagebased #revenueretention #revenuemodels #opinion

“Clean code” doesn’t equal a healthy company. I am currently mandated to review a saas startup where: Every microservice is perfectly linted — yet no one knows their unit cost per API call. The observability stack looks beautiful — until we modelled scale and found metrics without meaning. Compliance badges are front and center — while data replicas sit in unmonitored regions. Diligence often checks craft, not consequence. What matters isn’t how elegant the codebase looks — it’s whether the system can survive its own growth. In due diligence, I don’t look for bugs. I look for blind spots. #TechnicalDueDiligence #VentureCapital #Startups #Investing #Scaling #AI #Cloud #Engineering

French AI startup Ewake, which is building intelligent agents to improve software reliability, has raised €2 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Connect Ventures, with participation from 2100 Ventures, Notion Capital, Insiders, 50partners, and several angel investors including Amirhossein Malekzadeh. 𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗗 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗗𝗘𝗧𝗔𝗜𝗟𝗦 👉 https://lnkd.in/d5CxJV_H Pooné Mokari Omid Gosha Murat Cengiz Cian Duffy Tomaz Medrado #Startups #Software #Founders #FundingNews #Founders #VentureCapital

Interesting read. 𝐓𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲: AI startups often stretch the definition of Revenue (ARR) to fit the 🚀 expectations of investors. A 🫧 waiting to burst. https://lnkd.in/ex376QTt

100Days of Datapreneurship Day 19[October 10, 2025]: Automating Reports on a Budget Even bootstrapped startups can automate reporting without heavy expenses. Utilizing free cloud tools, lightweight scripts, or no-code platforms enables founders to deliver timely, error-free reports that save time and reduce manual workload. Automation frees teams to focus on strategy and innovation. Automated reporting ensures consistency and accuracy, preventing costly mistakes often caused by manual data handling. Startups benefit from reliable metrics delivered on schedule, supporting faster, data-driven decision-making and operational efficiency. Smart automation practices empower startups to maintain lean operations while scaling insights. This cost-effective approach builds discipline and agility, reinforcing growth without straining budgets. #Automation #Reporting #CostEffective #StartupTech #BusinessEfficiency #TransparentEducationForEveryone

Referencing this article in Fortune (and other sources), there appears to be a trend for AI startups to report ARR incorrectly. This has been seen by including pilots, short-term deals and one-time deals as ARR. I've always assumed, and this article makes clear, that the middle R of ARR stands for "Recurring". That means at least a one-year contract with an open end to renew. Otherwise, the revenue is not considered recurring (either as a metric or in reality) and shouldn't be included. This did crop up with some SaaS based revenue companies, but per this article, has become widespread with startups trying to get an edge from their AI companies. What do you think? https://lnkd.in/gtmDpJem

Supernova just lit up the funding sky with a $9.2 million Series A, and this is not your standard-issue enterprise SaaS headline. This raise lands like a pressure drop in a crowded club, sudden, electric, and impossible to ignore. Jiri Trecak and Oskar Koristka didn't set out to build another design-to-dev handoff tool. They built an AI-powered vibe-coding platform that fuses design, code, and product workflows into one living, breathing system. The idea was born in 2018, when Jiří Třečák, who had already steered digital platforms for governments that don't tolerate downtime, and Oskar Koristka, who had architected enterprise systems for global clients, saw the same pain play out everywhere. Teams drowning in siloed tools. Data scattered across docs, #codebases, and design files. Endless hours wasted updating requirements that were outdated by the time they shipped. Supernova emerged from that frustration, a platform designed not to juggle the chaos, but to end it. Now the company is backed by a powerhouse syndicate. Taiwania Capital led the round, with J&T Ventures, Reflex Capital, Credo Ventures, EQT Ventures, KAYA VC, Wing Venture Capital, and Y Combinator returning to double down. That kind of lineup doesn't just throw cash at hype, they place bets where the enterprise foundation is shifting. And the foundation is shifting fast. Supernova tripled its user base in the last year. Revenue followed the same curve. Customers like Air France, KLM, Kraft Heinz, Paramount, Mozilla, LaunchDarkly, Mews, and Skyscanner don't adopt experiments. They deploy what keeps planes flying, products moving, and systems stable. When Supernova says "enterprise-grade," it is speaking the language of survival. The platform's edge is its automation. AI agents handle requirements syncing, documentation updates, and design enforcement before teams even realize the work needs doing. It integrates cleanly with Figma, GitHub, VS Code, and Slack, embedding into the workflows enterprises already run. No rip-and-replace, no cultural overhaul. Just velocity unlocked at scale. With Series A funding, Supernova is setting up a U.S. headquarters in New York, expanding #gotomarket muscle, and doubling down on AI capabilities inside the Portal. The roadmap is ambitious: predictive analytics, workflow optimization, and integrations with giants like Azure DevOps and Atlassian. The focus is clear: #finance, #retail, and #manufacturing enterprises that can't afford bloat or lag. #Startups #StartupFunding #EarlyStage #VentureCapital #SeriesA #AI #AIAgents #DigitalTech #Collaboration #Enterprise #EnterpriseTech #EnterpriseAI #SaaS #Data #DataDriven #Technology #Innovation #TechEcosystem #StartupEcosystem #Hiring #TechHiring If software engineering peace of mind is what you crave, Vention is your zen.