19th June 2025

Welcome to your fresh edition of SaaS Cat Chronicles. Today we’re going to be blowing dust off your old Bing Webmaster Tools account and figuring out a workflow for validating email addresses.

🐾Around the world on 4 paws

Bitesize pieces of news:

⏺️ 210 SaaS M&A deals closed in Q1 ’25, basically flat QoQ. Consolidators still shopping around. Prime targets are sub-$100 M ARR firms with sticky NRR.

⏺️ AI Overviews now trigger on ~55% of Google queries - up 115% since March. Organic traffic modelling needs a “zero-click” line item.

⏺️ 99% of companies expose sensitive files to external AI tools. Security objections will spike - publish your SOC 2 roadmap before prospects ask.

⏺️ Apple Mail’s iOS 18 auto-categorisation is pushing promotional mail to a secondary tab. Front-load value in preview text & experiment with shorter plain-text sends to dodge the filter.

⏩ The Two-Step Check Before You Wreck Your Sender Rep”

Turns out trusting a single verifier is like locking just one door on the getaway car - looks secure until you hit the first speed-bump. We’ve watched both Instantly.ai and Smartlead.ai wave dodgy mailboxes right past the velvet rope, only to tank deliverability later.

The fix: run every list through two different cleaners (think belt and suspenders), then book a recurring calendar smackdown to re-verify your list every quarter before a promo push.

Need a second (or third) bouncer at the door? Try ZeroBounce for real-time API scrubbing and Bouncer for GDPR-friendly bulk checks; or swap in NeverBounce if you like super-granular status codes. Whatever combo you pick, double-tap first, email later and keep that bounce rate lower than a cat on a marble floor.

🤖 Single-click outreach is nearer than you think

We often talk about the future of AI and how single-click sales or single-click marketing is going to be possible. Guess what, Instantly.ai has moved one step closer to single-click sales outreach with their new AI agent - Copilot. Don’t ask about the name - we had to make a meme to celebrate it! 😹

This moves the “single-click outreach” dream from hype deck to near-term reality. Instead of fiddling with filters, templates and follow-up timers, you tell Copilot what you want (“Find 500 Series A martech CMOs in USA” or “Spin up a re-engagement sequence for dormant trials”) and it assembles the list, drafts the multi-step email flow and schedules the send - all inside Instantly.

Beyond launch-and-forget campaigns, Copilot can auto-summarize weekly analytics, surface fresh campaign ideas and even queue recurring tasks so you never miss a list cleanse or A/B test. For growth teams, that means less spreadsheet gymnastics and more time tweaking strategy; for the rest of us, it’s one step closer to pressing a single button and watching pipeline appear.

But we have to address the name choice. Surely, you must’ve noticed that a small company in Redmond, Washington has already shipped their Copilot to 1.6 billion devices globally?

Allegedly, this is what the naming meeting looked like at the Instantly HQ:

💸 Pricing & Monetisation Moves

• Salesforce will bump Enterprise & Unlimited list prices Aug 1 and bundle more AI into Slack.

• ChatGPT Business adds custom connectors + flexible pricing tiers - pressure is on to show metered value, not seats.

• Chargebee’s new Usage-Based Pricing Playbook argues 78% of SaaS adopting UBP see NRR lift within 12 months.

Action: Tag usage events now; finance will want gross-margin heat maps by the next board packet.

👁️👁️ Peek Behind the Prompt: Eavesdrop on ChatGPT’s Bing Searches for Instant SEO Intel

Fire up your browser’s DevTools, hop to the Network → Fetch/XHR tab and watch the magic unfold: every time ChatGPT decides it needs a fresh real-time web search, it fires a “conversation” call to Bing that you can inspect in real-time.

Inside the response payload you’ll find its literal search query, a shortlist of URLs and titles it pulled, plus snippets of “reasoning” about why those sources were chosen. For SEOs and content marketers, that’s a gold mine - those are the exact phrases and pages the model thinks answer the user’s intent, so ranking for them boosts your odds of being cited in AI answers.

The kicker is that these behind-the-scenes look-ups mirror the new Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflow many LLMs use: they retrieve authoritative content first, then generate a response on top.

Nail the keywords ChatGPT is actually querying and you’re effectively optimizing for the retrieval half of that pipeline - putting your site a step closer to being the source that both bots and humans read.

Time to clean the dust off your old Bing Webmaster account? You betcha! 👍🏻

🔧 Playbooks Worth Stealing

Going back to basics - some great ideas around pricing your product and then to GTM with it.

• Chargebee – “Usage-Based Pricing Playbook”

• AnaB – “Early Stage Startup Marketing Playbook”

Your to-do list

• Resurrect your Bing Webmaster Tools account. If you don’t have it, set it up and import settings from your Google Search Console to save time. Need extra motivation? Scroll back up and read about the RAG 🙂 

• Install the “Wappalyzer” Chrome Extension. Instantly see what tech stack a prospect’s site runs, so you can tailor your pitch (and spy on competitors)..

• Kick off a 14-day trial of SparkToro. Uncover where your ICP hangs out online - podcasts, YouTube channels, newsletters - for laser-focused content syndication and for figuring out their behavior.

• 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

Get your paws on one of the two goodies that we have on offer. Refer 3 people and get an exclusive list of Top 300+ SaaS directories (useful for sales research and/or marketing growth).

Or go all in, refer 10 people and be seen in public wearing our trendy baseball cap! (the red ones with 4-letter wording are out of stock but we have the other design)

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