New AWS Communication Service Amazon Chime Available: Newsletter February 17, 2017

ImageA new Amazon Web Services communication product called Amazon Chime is now available for all customers that facilitates video conferences, messaging, calls and sharing content among your colleagues and clients. Amazon ensures exceptional audio and video quality that works across desktop and mobile. Speaking of Amazon, we have just listed an affiliate business package that includes two websites in the woodworking and oil diffusers industry. Also featured in Deal Highlights is a high-quality private label travel accessory FBA business. More interested in Saas? Check out the current seven listings here.
After a great conclusion to SaaStr Annual last week, we’re already excited to head back in 2018. Jason Lemkin of SaaStr has promised a more in-depth fourth series next year and has claimed SaaStr Annual as the best global event for SaaS founders and VCs. If you missed the event this year, don’t worry, we’ve recapped all the highlights in the summary below. In upcoming events, Founder Thomas Smale will be in Saigon next weekend speaking at DCxSGN. If you’re attending make sure you look for his talk on the schedule about “Scaling and Growth Strategies to Make Your Business Sellable.” If you aren’t able to make it out to Vietnam, watch for the video release on our YouTube channel.
More details on the conclusion of SaaStr Annual and Facebook retail ads below.
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Deal Highlights

Affiliate – Power Tools & Oil Diffusers – $3K gross/mo

  • 5.1K keyword rankings
  • Over 100,000 page views in the last four months
  • 8.2% compound monthly growth rate over last seven months
  • 100% outsourced content creation

Yearly Net Profit: $33K
Asking Price: $72K
Amazon FBA – Travel Accessories – $38K gross/mo​

  • High-quality, private-label brand
  • Strong gross and net margins
  • Multiple suppliers reduce concentration risk
  • Fast growing $48B/year niche
  • Multiple well-defined opportunities for growth

Yearly net profit: $164K
Asking price: $440K

Sold:

Affiliate – Power Tools – $2.2K net/mo​

In the News…

SaaStr Annual 2017 Recap

Jason Lemkin of SaaStr released a wrap-up of this past SaaStr Annual. In its third installment, 10,000 SaaS fanatics flew out to San Francisco to learn how to scale their businesses. This currently makes SaaStr the biggest global gathering for B2B SaaS founders, executives and VCs. Lemkin even talks about his goals for the next one and how it will be even better than this year.
The theme of the conference was “Scale Together” with content ranging from big name SaaS players such as Slack to SaaS metrics and funding. Positive feedback centered around the improvement in quality of content. Many attendees enjoyed the 1:1 interviews that emulated real conversations.
For this year’s event, there was a lot of attention to detail. The SaaStr Annual 2017 App, powered by DoubleDutch, was the main social platform for making connections and networking with other attendees. Attendees could track what events other attendees were attending, where workshops and sessions were taking place and the schedule, and directly message attendees.
For 2018, Lemkin hopes to provide deeper tactical content, more SMB and $1M-$10M ARR topics, and specific content focusing on CS, product sales, marketing and engineering. Our team is already excited for the next SaaStr Annual. You should join us and plan to attend as well.

Facebook Shoppable Feed Ads

Facebook has been consistently trying to improve shopping on its platform. Recently, it has been beta testing product ads that show lifestyle or multi-product imagery on the News Feed accompanied by multiple products in the ad, called Facebook Shoppable Feed ads. The imagery is represented as the main image or video. The second page then contains images of individual products that may be featured in the main image or video. So, when a user clicks on the ad, it will not redirect to the publisher’s website. On the second page where there is the list of products, the user can click and then be brought directly to the brand’s site.
Retailer advertisers may be concerned that this creates an additional step away from their websites, however it is important to keep in mind that a user rarely converts into a buyer the first time they land on your website or see an ad. Marketing Land argues that this ad format will lead to an overall increase in conversions because the overall user shopping experience is improved. With a smooth and straightforward experience, users are more likely to remember the experience and recall your brand.
If you’re an e-commerce owner or retailer on Facebook, it would be helpful to look out for the official release of the format update to see how you can leverage the advantages.