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Posts by Charles Laughlin

October 29, 2019

Kabbage Offers New Solution to Improve SMB Cash Flow

Helping small businesses collect money faster is a huge opportunity in the small business fintech space. Kabbage, one of the big kahunas in online SMB lending, last week launched Kabbage Payments, a payment-processing tool recently out of beta that’s designed to cut short the invoicing process. Kabbage said two-thirds of its 200,000 customers rely on…

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October 28, 2019

New Podcast: “Share of Ear, Unicorns, and More” with the LSA Analyst Team (Video)

Our latest Above the Cloud podcast features an LSA analyst team “around the horn” session touching on a range of topics in the news and covered on the LSA Insider blog.  We kicked around the future of privacy, defined “share of ear”?, asked why boards of directors aren’t the real villains in the unraveling of…

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October 24, 2019

Online Reviews Almost as Trusted as Personal Recommendations

A new report that mined GMB profile data from 64,000 businesses across four countries (US, UK, France, and Germany) is adding to the growing conversation about the critical importance of reviews, including how reviews can level the playing field among brands and small businesses. The report, “The Reputation Management Revolution” was published this week by…

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October 22, 2019

Have the Unicorns Jumped the Shark? (Video)

Investor trends are as fickle as fads. But with much bigger consequences. There seems to be a growing backlash against companies, many of them solidly within or adjacent to the SMB space, that have outsize ambition, but very little hope of making money. We know these companies. Uber, Lyft, and of course, most recently WeWork,…

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October 17, 2019

Are Food Delivery Apps the Chain Restaurants’ Trojan Horse?

Restaurant delivery app Olo Founder & CEO Noah Glass has been making the rounds to talk up his company’s recent integration with Google, which he is positioning as an alternative path to working with popular delivery apps like GrubHub, DoorDash, and Uber Eats. He argues the delivery platforms (or marketplaces as he refers to them)…

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October 16, 2019

Restaurant, Legal Tech Still the Big Stories in SMB SaaS M&A

SMB software deal volume was a little slow in Q3, but big deals in restaurant and legal tech show the smart money is still chasing a winner in those two prized verticals. Every quarter, SurePath Capital Partners releases its State of SMB Software Report, chronicling the ebb and flow of investor dollars into companies trying…

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October 15, 2019

Tricks for Selling Tech to SMBs

Technology companies would do a much better job of selling their services to small businesses if they would keep things simple and treat SMBs more like consumers. This is one of the leading insights from a recent article on selling tech to SMBs by the consulting firm AT Kearney. The article mirrors much of what…

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October 11, 2019

Are Brands Fully Optimized for Proximity Search?

Yesterday we wrote about the growing prevalence of unbranded search as a reflection of how consumers’ behavior on the path to purchase is changing, and how brands need to adapt. The context for this conversation arose from last week’s webinar with MomentFeed CEO Nick Hedges called “Proximity Search Optimization is the New Norm,” which outlined…

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October 10, 2019

The New Normal of Unbranded Search

On last week’s LSA webinar with MomentFeed CEO Nick Hedges, “Proximity Search Optimization is the New Norm,” a number cited in the course of the discussion stood out. According to MomentFeed, two-thirds of web searches conducted today are “unbranded”, meaning the consumer did not enter a brand name in the search query. And unbranded search…

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October 7, 2019

Google-backed Indian “Concierge App” Dunzo Raises $45 Million 

Dunzo, a Google-backed Indian rough equivalent to DoorDash has raised a $45 million D round, bringing its valuation to $200 million, according to Tech Crunch. Investors in this new round include Google, Lightbox Ventures, STIC Investment and STIC Ventures, and 3L Capital. Dunzo was launched four years ago, initially as a What’sApp-based service, to deliver…

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