Small businesses are moving their operations steadily into the cloud, they are seeing real benefits from doing so, and yet they are substantially underutilizing the capabilities of the software they’ve purchased. At this week’s LOCALOGY ENGAGE: SaaS/SMB event, I unveiled our new Modern Commerce Monitor™ (formerly Tech Adoption Index) SMB survey data using this three-part…
At next week’s Localogy: Engage event in Washington DC, we’ll present findings from Wave IV of our proprietary SMB research. The new data show additional SaaS adoption momentum, with meaningful differences by age of business owner. Ahead of that data, here are some of the macro trends and forces that we believe are shaping the SMB-SaaS market: Generational shift: The research…
Are we in an era of “subscribe or die?” Not exactly. But this article in The Atlantic argues that we now live in a world full of subscriptions. As the writer correctly points out, subscriptions were originally the province of magazines and newspapers but have now extended to a host of other things, including household…
LSA’s upcoming Localogy Engage: SaaS SMB event (June 3 – 4, Washington DC) is unique among industry conferences. Most gatherings about SaaS or SMB advertiser acquisition and retention deal in vicarious abstractions — you hear about SMBs, not from them. At Engage, you’ll hear SMBs tell their own stories. We’re trying to facilitate a conversation between local business…
While advertising and media remain important, the new frontier is the adoption and use of technology by SMBs to deliver better customer experiences and drive more favorable business economics. LSA has been at the forefront of doing this with the launch of the Tech Adoption Index. The latest Wave and discussion of key SMB metrics…
Earlier today Google’s Area 120 products group announced CallJoy, a virtual agent SaaS offering that will answer calls, filter spam (including inside sales) and help consumers accomplish their desired goals (store hours, food ordering, booking). If it works, many SMBs will gladly pay the $39 monthly fee. I haven’t seen it in action nor have I spoken to Google…
With bountiful opportunities available, investors are allocating a great deal of money into SMB SaaS companies. According to SurePath Capital Partners, SMB-focused software companies raised roughly 1.3B in March and around 2.2B in February of this year. The investments ranged from restaurant management platforms to cloud-based HR software. Despite all the capital, these SMB SaaS…
I saw an ad this morning for SurePayroll, which triggered me to learn more about the company. I was intrigued because while I had heard of SurePayroll, I had not realized it was part of the larger, more established small business payroll company Paychex. I discovered that SurePayroll was acquired in 2010 by Paychex for…
During a recent LSA webinar, Charles Laughlin of the LSA’s Tech Adoption Index and Tehsin Daya of Uberall discussed the trends driving local, digital marketing. Based on Charles’ white paper “2019 State of Location Marketing,” the webinar focused on the rising impact of voice, video and syndication. Location marketing by definition is the collection of…
Intuit has been gauging interest among small businesses for an on-demand bookkeeping service called Live Bookkeeping and is expected to launch the service in the near future. This has caused some consternation in the accounting world, sparking fears that Intuit is going into competition with its bread and butter — the community of accountants who serve…
