43 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
AI-powered WordPress hosting and website building platform — providing automated website creation, managed WordPress hosting, and performance optimization — targeting small businesses and agencies.
Howie Liu's San Francisco no-code database and app-building platform — combining the flexibility of a database with the usability of a spreadsheet — one of the most widely used no-code tools.
Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar's Sydney software company — creator of Jira, Confluence, Trello, and Bitbucket — one of the most successful enterprise software companies ever built without significant VC funding.
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson's Chicago project management and communication tool — notable for its bootstrapped (no VC) approach, remote-first culture, and opinionated workplace philosophy.
American growth practitioner who was VP of Growth at HubSpot and co-founded Reforge — the most rigorous professional development program for senior product and growth leaders — known for frameworks on growth loops, retention, and product-market fit.
Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht's Australian visual design platform — providing drag-and-drop design tools to non-designers — one of the most valuable private SaaS companies globally.
Shishir Mehrotra's productivity platform combining documents, spreadsheets, and databases — providing a flexible building block environment for creating operational documents.
Developer experience platform that measures engineering productivity through continuous surveys and DORA metrics — helping engineering organizations identify and fix friction points in the developer workflow.
American entrepreneur who co-founded HubSpot with Brian Halligan — the inbound marketing and CRM platform — serving as CTO — and who created HubSpot's famous Culture Code (a 128-slide document defining company values) that became a model for tech company culture transparency.
Luis von Ahn's Pittsburgh language learning app — the most widely used language learning platform in the world — notable for its gamification design, streak mechanics, and the Duolingo owl meme.
Growth executive who has led growth at SurveyMonkey, Miro, Amplitude, and Duolingo — and who is one of the most prominent voices on product-led growth (PLG) and self-serve SaaS business models — known for her frameworks on growth loops, monetization, and the transition from sales-led to product-led.
Experimentation and feature management platform for data teams — built by former Airbnb data scientists — providing A/B testing infrastructure integrated with data warehouses.
Embedded analytics platform enabling SaaS companies to add data dashboards and analytics to their products without building custom analytics infrastructure.
Dylan Field and Evan Wallace's browser-based collaborative design tool — the dominant tool for product and UI design in tech companies — notable for real-time collaboration (before Google Docs-style collaboration was common in design tools).
Dutch-American executive who has led three data-focused software companies to massive outcomes — Data Domain (acquired by EMC for $2.4B), ServiceNow (scaled to $10B+ market cap), and Snowflake (largest software IPO in history at $70B) — becoming the most successful serial enterprise software CEO of his era.
Amit Bendov's revenue intelligence platform — recording, transcribing, and analyzing sales calls using AI to improve sales performance and forecasting.
Alex Shevchenko's Kyiv-founded, San Francisco-headquartered AI writing assistant — providing grammar checking, style suggestions, and now generative writing assistance — one of the first mass-market AI writing tools.
Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah's Cambridge, Massachusetts CRM and inbound marketing platform — creator of inbound marketing as a category — providing CRM, email, content, and sales tools to SMB companies.
Eoghan McCabe's Dublin customer messaging platform — providing chat, email, and support automation for B2B SaaS companies — early mover in AI-powered customer support.
American entrepreneur who founded WP Engine (managed WordPress hosting) and Smart Bear Software — and who writes the ASmartBear blog — known for rigorous thinking about SaaS business models, pricing, and bootstrapping vs. VC funding.
Atlassian's product discovery tool — providing a dedicated space for product managers to capture ideas, prioritize features, and create roadmaps — built on the Jira platform.
Shahed Khan's San Francisco async video messaging tool — enabling users to record screen-and-camera videos and share them as links — acquired by Atlassian in 2023.
Unified API platform enabling SaaS companies to integrate with hundreds of third-party applications through a single API — covering HR, payroll, accounting, CRM, and other categories.
Usage-based billing infrastructure for software companies — enabling flexible pricing models (per-seat, usage-based, hybrid) at scale.
Andrey Khusid's Perm-founded (Russia), San Francisco-headquartered visual collaboration platform — providing infinite online whiteboards for distributed team collaboration — the dominant tool for remote workshops, design sprints, and visual planning.
Ivan Zhao and Simon Last's all-in-one workspace combining notes, docs, databases, wikis, and project management — one of the fastest-growing SaaS products, particularly in the startup community.
Business intelligence and analytics platform focused on making data exploration accessible to both technical and non-technical users.
CSV and data import infrastructure for SaaS companies — providing a configurable import experience so companies can onboard customer data without building custom import tools.
Embedded integration platform allowing SaaS companies to add native integrations to their products without engineering custom connectors.
Identity verification and KYC (Know Your Customer) infrastructure platform — enabling companies to verify user identities, prevent fraud, and comply with regulations.
American fintech company offering corporate cards and spend management software — which reached $100M ARR faster than any company in history — by aligning incentives with customers to actually reduce spending rather than maximize it.
American corporate card and expense management company founded in 2019 — which grew to $100M ARR faster than any company in history — by making it easy for companies to save money rather than spend it, inverting the typical corporate card incentive.
Marc Benioff's San Francisco cloud CRM company — the first major cloud-native enterprise software company — creator of the SaaS model and the Salesforce 1-1-1 philanthropy model.
Sanjit Biswas's San Francisco IoT platform for physical operations — providing GPS tracking, video safety, and operations data for fleets, equipment, and facilities — the dominant IoT platform for physical world businesses.
Open-source error monitoring and performance monitoring platform for developers — one of the most widely used developer observability tools.
Tobi Lütke's Ottawa e-commerce platform — enabling merchants to build online stores — the dominant SMB e-commerce platform globally, with its merchant ecosystem being its core product.
American cloud data warehousing company founded in 2012 — which had the largest software IPO in history at $33B in 2020 — by building a cloud-native data platform that separated storage and compute, enabling truly elastic scaling.
In-product user research platform enabling product teams to run surveys and interviews directly within their product.
Security compliance automation platform that helps companies achieve SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and other certifications faster — by continuously monitoring their infrastructure and automatically gathering evidence for auditors.
WordPress-focused managed hosting company — providing optimized hosting for WordPress sites — became controversial in 2024 after a public dispute with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.
American entrepreneur who co-founded Zapier — the no-code automation platform connecting 5,000+ web apps — building it into a profitable bootstrapped company reaching $140M+ ARR before taking any outside investment, one of the most successful bootstrapped SaaS companies in history.
Developer platform that provides enterprise-grade authentication, authorization, and identity features (SSO, SCIM, RBAC) as a service — allowing SaaS companies to add enterprise features without building them from scratch.
Henry Schuck's Vancouver, Washington B2B data and sales intelligence platform — providing contact data, company intelligence, and prospecting tools for sales teams.