SaaS influencers worth following in 2026: 8 who publish the numbers
8 operators, investors and analysts who publish SaaS benchmarks, pricing data and AI go-to-market experiments, each with one piece you can open and check before you follow.
I write blunt notes on growth, go-to-market and venture capital, stage by stage. Some of these cost me money before they made anyone else any.
8 operators, investors and analysts who publish SaaS benchmarks, pricing data and AI go-to-market experiments, each with one piece you can open and check before you follow.
9 creators on LinkedIn, X, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and their own blogs who built, funded or ran a startup before they explained one, with the receipt behind each one and the channel where they are worth your time.
8 investors who write in public about how they decide, the one post from each to read before your next pitch, and the date each blog last posted.
8 AI shows picked for what they teach about getting customers and pricing an AI product, with the host named, 1 episode to open from each, and who should listen.
8 people who have built AI into a real company or backed one with their own money, and who can explain how AI changes the way companies sell and grow. Each one comes with what they would say on stage and one talk or interview you can check before you write.
10 creators on TikTok who built or ran a real company, agency or fund before they started explaining business in 60 seconds, with the receipt behind each one, the video to open first and who should follow them.
8 B2B marketing and go-to-market newsletters, each named by its writer and judged on one recent issue that showed a real number or took a real company apart.
8 SaaS shows judged on what a growth leader can act on per episode, with the host named, 1 episode to open from each, and who should listen.
8 writers who show their work on growing a company, one recent issue from each, and the founder question each one answers best.
10 founders who built and sold real companies, or built them past the point where selling was optional, and now talk about it. Each one comes with what they would say on stage and one recording or book you can check before you write.
9 channels on startup growth and go-to-market, named by the host behind each one, with the one video I'd watch first and the problem it helps with.
8 investors and analysts who write down how venture money actually moves, with one recent post from each and the round where each one helps most.
Paid CAC has gone up 4 quarters in a row and the board wants a plan that grows pipeline without growing the ad budget. This is the organic growth strategy I'd run at Series C: 5 channels, in the order to build them, each with a company that made it work.
CAC climbs as a Series B company scales. These 4 moves, in order, bend the line back down, and each one comes with a number you can fail and a company that passed it.
You just raised, and the hiring plan has a cell that says Head of Marketing. Here is who should actually go in it, who comes next, and what the team looks like at $2M, $5M and $10M ARR.
Webflow got 25,000 signups and $5K of monthly revenue in 2 weeks, and 2 years later its co-founder called it a do-or-die moment. Here's how to know if you have product-market fit before the bank account tells you.
If you launched and nobody signed up, here's how to get your first 10 customers: 5 founder-led moves, each with a line you can fail and the B2B company that ran it.
Your revenue chart answers only part of what the partner is asking. Here's what VCs check in your go-to-market at seed, Series A and Series B, from the memos they wrote and the benchmarks they publish.
9 operators and founders worth a place in your LinkedIn feed this year. Each one comes with what they're known for and something you can open and check before you follow.
8 creators on TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn and X who built real companies and teach from what happened inside them, with the receipt behind each one and who should follow them.
8 books I'd hand a founder or a B2B growth lead, ranked on how specific the advice is and whether the author ran the revenue or backed the companies.
8 VC-hosted shows ranked on how much they teach about how portfolio companies actually sold, each with the episode to play first.
8 operators and investors worth putting on a stage in front of founders this year. Each one comes with what they would talk about and a talk or book you can check first.
8 shows about building and scaling a company, named by the host behind each one, with a sourced reason to listen and the stage where it helps most.
8 operators and investors who scaled real revenue and now write down what worked, with the receipt behind each one and who should follow them.
A pre-seed startup gets its first customers by running 5 moves in order. Each move has a line you can fail and a real company that passed it.
Fewer than 1 in 4 of the 2022 seed class had reached a Series A by late 2025. These are the 5 moves I'd make with the round, in order, and the number each move has to clear.
You just raised. Here are the 5 moves that take a B2B Series A startup to its Series B, in order, each with the VC benchmark you can fail and a company that did it.
A Series B startup has proved people will buy. These 5 moves, in order, keep revenue climbing without paying full price for every new dollar, and each one comes with a number you can fail.
Your first channel got you here, and it's flattening just as the board starts reading burn multiples. These are the 5 priorities I'd run at Series C, in order, from the cheapest new dollar to the most expensive.
The definition, what it costs, how to measure your own, and the four moves that pay it down.
What still matters from SEO, why AI answers almost never repeat the same brands, and how to measure where you show up.
Eight practices that compound, and a monthly ledger that shows a CFO the audience is lowering the cost of pipeline.
When an AI startup should hire an agency and when it should run founder-led GTM, judged on what you keep when the contract ends.
Nine channels costed in cash and in founder hours for the first 90 days, with the point where each one breaks named.
Nine shows reviewed, plus the investor-hosted ones most founders underweight. Pick by bottleneck, not by guest list.
The average brand is named in 17% of AI answers about its own category. Closing that gap is five moves done in order, and measurement comes last.
A dashboard that tells you you are invisible does not make you visible. Buying the tool feels like progress.
ChatGPT's share of B2B AI referrals fell from about 89% to 63% in under a year while Claude rose to 18.5%.
A two-minute self-check: ask an AI the question your best customer asks before they find you, then read the answer.
94% of B2B buyers now use AI in the buying process and name it their most meaningful research source.
Budgets frozen at 7.7% of revenue, 59% say it is not enough, tenure about four years. The job is the problem.
CAC is up about 60% in five years. Paid is rented attention from the two firms that profit when the rent rises.
The citation gap is the distance between the questions buyers ask an AI and the answers where your brand shows up.
AI-referred traffic converted at 23x for Ahrefs: 0.5% of visitors, 12.1% of signups. The visitor arrives pre-sold.
An AEO tool tells you how often AI mentions you. It does not make AI mention you more. That gap is the whole job.
Owned channels convert demand, they don't create it. Reach follows interest, which lives in rooms you don't own. Grow out there, close in here, and stop confusing the two.
Half the people teaching distribution have never distributed anything cold. The test: take an idea with no reach and make it travel. Vet advice by asking who built from zero.
Dr Pepper got 42M views on a fan's jingle by resharing it as is, not re-shooting it. Borrowing belief that already exists beats manufacturing it from cold.
Under a third of Google searches now end in a click. Tracking click-through in 2026 is counting who walked past your shop. The metric that replaced it is the mention.
Forty percent of workers got handed AI 'workslop' last month. When everyone sounds like a machine, one real human point of view is the rarest thing in the feed. Out-human it.
Before you buy more reach, three owned channels sit idle: the email list you don't mail, the customers you don't ask to share, the threads where your buyer is asking right now.
The most trusted distribution you have is your employees, your customers, your own camera roll. Switch on the channels you already pay for instead of renting new ones.
Every good thing you shipped that nobody can find is distribution debt, and it compounds. Measure it like CAC: the percent of last year's launches your own customers can't name.
An almost-unbelievable true number is a distribution channel. Most founders are too humble to use it. Stop hiding your best stat behind a vague tagline.
The average brand is named in just 17% of AI answers about its own category, and eight models agree on the top pick only 43.9% of the time. Here's how to check yours.
Rank number one under an AI Overview and you still lose about 61% of the clicks. The ranking didn't change; the answer box moved on top of it. Audit your real exposure.
Reach now follows interest, not follower count. A 500-follower account can out-reach a 50,000 one. Why marketing feels insane in 2026, and how small and specific wins.
Google sends one visitor per five pages it crawls; AI bots take thousands per referral. The content deal is over. Write to be the sentence the machine repeats.
The go-to-market motion the AI era makes possible. Organic was never weak, only capped, and the cap is gone.
"Spend more" is the most expensive sentence in growth. Here's what compounds instead, and why most teams never build it.
Every proven framework is old context wearing a tie. Copy it and you arrive late. Build from first principles and you arrive early.
Slop isn't a model output. Slop is a process output. The contrarian move that beats the autonomous content agent.
Earlier essays on content, authenticity, network effects and where go-to-market is heading.
The writing is free. The unfair advantage is in applying it to your actual business.