Product-led growth methods, such as freemium and free trial systems, are the latest silver bullet.  This OpenView report doesn’t exactly challenge the trend, but it does show it works better in some situations than others.  Did you know that activation rates are twice as high for single-user products than products requiring collaboration?

Marketers are getting smarter about buying software, and one increasingly common practice is to test software before buying it.  TestBox promises to make that easier by offering preconfigured test installations of selected systems, complete with synthetic data.  They currently offer test versions of several customer support systems but plan to add new categories over time.  The service is free to users, with revenue coming from vendors who pay TestBox a commission on sales.  They just raised a $10 million seed round.

CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million.  It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge.  (See this blog post for more analysis.)