12th June 2025

Welcome to your fresh edition of SaaS Cat Chronicles. Today we’re going to be unpicking your 10-year-old SEO dashboard, figuring out how your logo can improve your email marketing and doing some panic mongering around the Fed rates.

🐾Around the world on 4 paws

Bitesize pieces of news:

HubSpot ships the first CRM “deep-research” connector for ChatGPT - customer data inside the chat window. Drags ChatGPT into the rev-ops stack; expect your ops lead to ask for parity.

F5 buys Fletch to fold agentic-AI threat intel into its platform. Even infra vendors are becoming AI-data plays; your security buyer now asks about “agentic coverage.” F5 isn’t alone - Tenable also snapped up AI-security startup Apex last week; consolidation heats up.

Linear (dev-workflow) hauls $82 M Series C at a $1.25 B valuation (Accel, 01A) The “Jira-killer” story now has unicorn backing - and 15K AI-first customers (vs. Jira’s 40K) to prove pay willingness. Linear’s 280 % YoY profit pop says design + speed still converts in crowded PLG markets.

78% of SaaS firms that adopted usage-based pricing did so in the last 5 years - and the curve is still steep.

🛝Will Fed rate kill multiples again?

Fed rate call  - a surprise hike will shave SaaS multiples overnight. 

If the rate goes up, the present value of future cash flows is marked down. High-growth SaaS names have duration profiles closer to 15-20 years unlike the S&P’s ~9 years, so every 25 bp rate rise slices a visible chunk off SaaS price-to-sales.

When the 10-yr Treasury climbed from ≈1% in 2021 to 4% in 2024, median public-cloud multiples cratered from 18× to ~9× ARR on Bessemer’s Cloud Index.

Your SEO Dashboard is so last decade

Are you still fussing over bounce rates and other SEO metrics that mattered in the 1990s?

Generative-AI search is turning the classic SEO dashboard on its head. Instead of ten blue links, Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity now pull answers directly from content chunks, meaning clicks and average position no longer reflect true visibility.

Practitioners need to think in terms of “generative-engine optimisation” (GEO): how often your text is ingested, selected and cited by large language models, rather than how high it ranks on a SERP.

Hop over to this SearchEngineLand article that proposes 12 fresh KPIs to track our changing SEO reality, including:

• chunk-retrieval frequency (how often a specific paragraph or block is surfaced)

• attribution rate in AI outputs (percentage of generative answers that name–check your brand)

• vector-index presence (share of your pages indexed in vector databases) and

• AI citation count across LLMs.

Other metrics - like embedding-relevance score, retrieval-confidence score, zero-click surface presence and machine-validated authority - shift focus to semantic quality and technical accessibility (structured data, clean crawl paths) rather than keyword density.

Together, they ask marketing teams to audit whether content is machine-readable, semantically rich and source-worthy, then rebuild reporting stacks around those signals before legacy KPIs mask a steady loss of share in answer-first search.

BIMI Rundown

As promised in the previous edition, we’re going to explore BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) - an email standard that lets companies display their verified logo next to their messages in the inbox, but only after they’ve proven the domain is fully protected with SPF, DKIM and a strict DMARC policy - essentially turning strong email authentication into a visible trust badge.

• Logo-in-inbox is trust-tech, not eye-candy. BIMI only shows when a domain’s DMARC policy is set to p=quarantine or p=reject, so it becomes a public signal that your authentication is locked down.

• Certificates now come in two flavours. Gmail insists on a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) or the newer Common Mark Certificate (CMC) - the latter dropped the trademark requirement in Oct 2024, widening access. Yahoo/Fastmail still display logos without any cert. But what can you expect from Yahoo?

• Inbox real estate ≠ guaranteed delivery. BIMI doesn’t bypass spam filters; it simply boosts brand recognition and open-rate by ±5–10 % in most studies.

Technically, BIMI is implemented just like DMARC, via your DNS. The txt record goes something like this:

default._bimi.yourdomain.com

v=BIMI1; l=https://cdn.yourdomain.com/logo.svg;

a=https://certs.yourdomain.com/yourdomain.pem   # omit the “a=” tag if no cert

BIMI To-do list

• Tighten email auth first - Pass SPF & DKIM and move DMARC to at least p=quarantine; pct=100 after 30 days of monitoring. valimail.com

• Create a BIMI-ready logo - Square SVG, ≤32 KB, solid background, no gradients/fades. Accessibility wins here too.

• Sort out your trademark - getting your trademark sorted should be a pretty obvious no-brainer for any business. Getting a CMC doesn’t require a trademark and costs around $450. We would suggest opting for VMC - requires a trademark and costs $1,200.

🕵🏻‍♂️ Prospecting on LinkedIn SalesNav sucks - here’s what to do instead

Let’s be honest: hunting in LinkedIn Sales Navigator feels like panning for gold with a spaghetti strainer 🍝- no matter how many filters you set, you still wind up sifting through “Head of Synergy” job-hoppers and last week’s interns. Then comes the soul-sucking ritual of clicking Save to List a few hundred times before you can even think about outreach. Your mouse deserves hazard pay.

Instead, flip the workflow. Fire up that same SalesNav search, but pipe it straight into SkyLead and launch a discovery-only campaign. SkyLead hoovers up all the profile data without sending a single “hey 👋” message, giving you a tidy sandbox of prospects while sparing you the carpal-tunnel-inducing vetting clicks.

Now export the discovery campaign to Google Sheets, whip out the filter icons, and slice the list like a sushi chef - title, industry, experience, whatever floats your ICP boat. Tag the keepers, dump the drifters, and re-import the chosen sample into a real SkyLead sequence. Voilà: you’ve cut a days-long slog down to a meme-scroll-length coffee break, and your outreach list is as clean as Sunday-morning inbox zero.

🔧 Playbooks Worth Stealing

Some loud ideas like counterintuitively shrinking ICP focus, meter trial time-to-value and bake referral loops into every activation flow.

• UserJot – “The SaaS Marketing Playbook (2025 Edition)”

• Pocus – “Focus Beats Volume: The Secret Sauce of Pocus AI”

• RevTek – “9 Proven SaaS Growth Strategies to Scale Your Company”

Your to-do list

• Export your old LinkedIn messages to CSV, select contacts you’ve not messaged in the last 3 years and reach out to them, see how they’re doing. You might find that old friends are the best ones.

• Get ChatGPT to act as a psychologist and ask you questions to create your psychological portrait and find out what makes you tick. Playing to your strengths helps with mental health.

• Download this amazeballs browser extension: Clipboard History Tool - store, sync and manage your copy buffer. Forget that sinking feeling when you’ve copied something important only to overwrite your buffer with that next important thing.

• Share this newsletter with friends & colleagues (and get closer to earning swag)

• Scroll down to the quiz and let me know why you hated this edition.

Swag for you

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