2024: A SaaSy Year In Review

Next year is bound to be odd.

Well SaaStronauts that’s another year in the books, which means it’s time for the Stay SaaSy Year In Review.

The Numbers

Our audience grew by about 30% this year. What is more valuable to us is the number of really impressive companies and people represented. It’s a joy and an honor to see the domains come into our subscribe list, a who’s who across the SaaS ecosystem.

To everyone who has subscribed - thank you for your readership.

To everyone who has written in - we deeply appreciate your feedback.

Top Posts

Sometimes the dopamine of a good post wears off, and I start to wonder if our content is resonating anymore. Several times this year, this happened, and I looked back a couple of months to see a post that got a lot of good traction. In aggregate, all those 2-month-apart resonators created a nice handful of high traction posts for the year.

Our top posts were essentially an even split of SaaSy PM and SaaSy EM posts. They span topics ranging from core management techniques to networking and beyond. Without further adieu:

• Fixing Broken Teams is all about inheriting a seemingly hopelessly broken team. It’s grueling but doable.

• Advice That I Can’t Get Out of My Head is a collection of some of the most memorable and applicable advice we’ve ever heard.

• Managing High Performers is about managing high performers, instead of just hoping they’re nice to you.

• Executive Presence Part 2 is a continuation of the incredibly popular Executive Presence, adding even more bits of useful advice for how to build your presence.

• Networking for People Who Don’t Network is a SaaSy PM piece about networking. He’s good at it. Check it out.

• Problem-Driven Development is a simple guide to prioritizing engineering initiatives.

Top Tweets

We tweeted a lot this year. We shared shower thoughts and deep reflections, crude jokes and serious analyses. We got in a couple scuffles but tried to remain civil. We poked and prodded and nudged the zeitgeist where we saw it. These are our best tweets of the year.

Musings

Software is at an interesting place right now. AI is eating the world (right?). Companies are expected to be more efficient than the previous era. 2025 is supposed to be a big year for M&A.

Through all of this, we find ourselves at Stay SaaSy headquarters with more conviction than ever that good management is critical. The times are as dynamic as they’ve ever been, and good management is decisive, sure-footed, reactive without being over-reactive, stable without being in stasis. The winners of this phase of software will be a small group of extremely performant and lucky mega-companies (the next centicorns), followed by a very sturdy cohort of extremely well managed companies.

So we wish you a Happy New Year and a great start to 2025. Please keep reading and please keep writing us. Tell us what you want to read about, tell us what we got right, tell us what we got wrong. Stay SaaSy friends!