DevToolsDigest: Issue #148
This digest includes news and resources from Airtable, Netlify, Bessemer, Scale VP, Gatsby, Amplitude, and more.
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The Week in Developer Tools
Airtable: Custom Blocks
With the Blocks SDK, developers can build apps using javascript and React on top of the Airtable database and create their own integrations, visualizations, and internal tools. You can sign up for the beta and participate in their $100k developer contest.
Netlify: Build Plugins
Build Plugins allow you to automate build tasks, customize your build process, and make your development process even easier. As a user of Build Plugins, you can take advantage of the one-click installs to cache files, check for broken links, trigger testing, and more.
Industry Research
Bessemer Venture Partners: Cash Conversion Score for Cloud Companies
Throughout Bessemer’s history of investing in cloud computing, they’ve recommended that companies track their business’ progress using the five C’s of cloud finance. After months of analyzing the data from the portfolio companies they've funded, they’ve identified the Cash Conversion Score as a new metric that is a signal for future success.
Scale Venture Partners: What Just Happened? Flash Report on Q1 SaaS Sales
The wide dispersion of outcomes shows there are two forces acting at the same time. The first is an overall downward trend on everything from the shutdown. The second force for some is an upward lift driven by IT prioritization of initiatives in response to the shutdown.
Oren Yunger: 6 CISOs Share Their Game Plans for a Post-Pandemic World
Like all business leaders, CISOs have shifted their roles quickly and dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, but many have had to fight fires they never expected. This unprecedented situation reveals once and for all that security is not only about preventing breaches, but also about ensuring fundamental business continuity.
Developer Venture News
Gatsby, Website-Building Startup Raises $28 Million
The demand for cloud-based website and app development services has spiked as the Covid-19 pandemic has driven offline businesses — particularly brick and mortar retailers — to build an online presence. Berkeley-based Gatsby, which launched a platform last year to provide a suite of tools for website and app development, raised $28 million in a recent series B funding round.
Amplitude, Cloud Startup That Tracks Online User Behaviors, Is Now Valued At $1 Billion
San Francisco-based Amplitude Analytics, which provides software to companies that helps monitor which online products and features jive with customers, raised $50 million in a series E funding round. Demand for its product has spiked as the Covid-19 pandemic has forced companies to work out how best to engage customers on their online platforms.
From The Heavybit Library
Enterprise Pricing and Packaging During COVID with Donnie Berkholz
If you have any sort of enterprise sales motion in place, you’ve likely felt the impact of COVID on your sales cycle. Most enterprise organizations have pumped the brakes on growth initiatives in the last few months, as their teams navigate remote work and they adjust their priorities and budgets to the new normal.
Austin Smith: Optimizing for Enterprise Software Adoption
In the past, to sell enterprise software you just needed to convince the analysts to recommend your product to a CIO or other exec. Now it’s all different. The rank-and-file in an organization have stronger opinions/standards for the tools they use, and they have more familiarity with the tools that exist (because so many of them are free to try).