5th June 2025

Welcome to your fresh edition of SaaS Cat Chronicles. Today we’re going to be waving goodbye to cold email marketing, looking at ways to hire 4,000 people based on bad SEO signals, and trying to split a Google doc in halves…

🐾Around the world on 4 paws

Bitesize pieces of news:

Mozilla is shutting down Pocket on 8th July. Oh well, no big deal unless you’ve been relying on it for saving content. Here’s a cool list of alternative apps. Not sure how MS OneNote ended up on the list but, hey, the rest of them are cool.

While the Digg reboot might be old news, what surprised us this week was the fact they've grown their initial "groundbreakers" audience to a whopping 23,000 members by... wait for it... introducing a $5 friction fee. Can scarcity and FOMO help drive business? You bet. Watch out for next edition where we'll be looking at how Superhuman, Gmail and other SaaS products utilized friction to get traction!

Compliance tooling is the new martech - investors predict 3× YoY total addressable market growth as NIS2 compliance deadline looms. While NIS2 doesn’t directly apply to US & UK, it will shift the trend globally.

The five AI features everyone is shipping in 2025 (native copilots, autonomous agents, predictive pricing, AI-generated dashboards & no-code prompt builders). If your SaaS roadmap doesn’t hit at least two of these in the next two quarters, competitors will.

📧Cold email is dead… no, seriously

Or at least dead in the way most of us, marketers, have used it until now.

• Gmail & Yahoo announced they would now hard-cap spam complaints at 0.3%. Put it in perspective - you send 1,000 messages and 3 prospects mark you as spam, that’s it, you’re done.

What’s working? 🏆 The winners are obsessing over:

• BIMI - nothing to do with Bahamas or drag queens 👢 Keep an eye out for our next edition for a bit of a deep-dive.

• List hygiene. Kind of obvious, still everyone’s getting this wrong. Verify & re-verify your list religiously! Also, if your message targets CROs, please exclude HR guys!

• Check your copy with spam checker. This one’s as good as the other one.

• Use an outreach platform that is capable of AI-generated spintax to make your seed copy appear more varied. Smartlead is one of them but there are others.
  

❌SaaS M&A multiples benchmarked at 8.6x annual recurring revenue

This guy tried to benchmark SaaS acquisition and concluded it was 8.6x median and 9.8x ARR multiple average.

These values are for companies with acquisition prices in billions. More realistically, a SaaS company with moderate growth (20-40% ARR) and moderate ARR might be valued at 6x its ARR or even lower.

Still, a good read if you like to look at figures that include lots of zeros! Or should it be zeroes? 🤔 0️⃣

❓General knowledge Q for you. Where were we at the SaaS peak of 2021? Right, 18x. Those were the days and they’re never coming back.

Lame advice of the year:

“Just slap on a freemium tier and the revenue will magically follow.”

That mantra gets parroted on every podcast but the numbers say it’s a mirage. 🦜

• 👎🏻Vanishingly few free users ever pay. free-to-paid conversion rate is as low as 2%.
  

• 👎🏻Free users ain’t free. They file tickets, burn server resource and inflate P-metrics.
  

• 👎🏻Most founders who test it kill it. Even high-profile experiments (e.g., spreadsheet startup Equals) have already rolled back their freemium.
  

• 🏆What’s working? Free trials stomp it on pure math. A time-boxed trial converts 10–25% of sign-ups!

Gung-ho SEO: This is what happens when you base your hiring decisions on Google traffic spikes

You might wonder how this is an SEO insight but 🐻 with me. It was announced Business Insider, yet another glorified article directory, has laid off almost a quarter of their staff due to, ahem, “traffic sensitivity” - AKA Google Core Update effects.

Have a look at the graphs. The top one is SEMrush organic keyword pool estimation and the bottom one is BI’s hiring dynamics. End of 2023, their organic traffic produces a spike, and they ramp up hiring people.

In less than 6 months, traffic starts dwindling just as they’re in the middle of executing their HR campaign, growing from 5,000 employees to 9,600.

When will we learn? SEO is not guaranteed. Don’t base your business around Google’s spikes. Bad decision.

Why did BI lose so much traffic? Well, mostly because of utter dross like this. Have a look at Archive.org to see what the article was originally, we can see they’ve tried to tone down the affiliate links and mess around with H1 and Title.

But hey, making minor tweaks won’t get you out of Core Update trouble. Only a major quality overhaul might.

Authority matters

When it comes to old-school SEO, it’s fundamentally about 2 things: content & links. Turns out the same rules apply when you think about ranking higher on ChatGPT and other AI answer engines.

Please note it doesn’t mean that ChatGPT takes Google ranking into account. All this means is that both engines use similar authority signals.

@TomekRudzki analyzed 25,000 real user queries across AI search & Google search, and found that if your website ranks within Top 10 in Google’s traditional results, you have a much higher chance of being surfaced in ChatGPT references & in AI Overviews.

Let’s go build more backlinks!

Playbook of the week

Two playbooks, actually:

• Medium case study - “How I Scaled an AI-SaaS with Google Ads Across 5 Campaign Types”

• Salesmate - “How to Achieve Product-Led Growth in 2025? [With Examples]”

Your to-do list

• Make a meme

• 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.

• Download this amazeballs browser extension: Google Docs SplitView. Helps you edit two docs side by side. Ideal if you have a nasty “before-and-after” job or if you’re humanising AI content 😹

• Download Tango walkthrough browser extension. Document workflows and how-tos for your team and clients.

• Run your social selling health-check on LinkedIn. Worth keeping an eye on it if you want to stay on Li’s good books. Don’t mean to brag but I rank in Top 1% ha!

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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