Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, January 2

• Silicon Valley's obscure unicorns could boost 2017 IPO market: Social media firm Snap Inc may be the highest profile tech IPO planned for 2017, with the potential to raise billions. But more than a dozen expected stock offerings of relatively obscure software firms targeting business customers - little-known names such as Apttus, Tintri and Okta - could be just as important in thawing a long-frozen IPO market, according to investment bankers and advisers who work on IPOs.Such enterprise software companies generally sell their services through subscriptions that produce reliable revenue streams. They aim to sign contracts lasting several years, giving investors more predictable returns than many Internet or consumer-oriented companies that depend on advertising or high volumes of individual transactions. The firms provide a range of back-of-the-house services, such as automating business processes, security, accounting, training software and expense management. Although such companies have moderate valuations, between about $500 million and $4 billion, the sector accounts for most of the tech IPO market. Apttus, for example, helps salespeople give a price quote quickly when trying to close a complicated deal that includes different products.

• Apple to cut iPhone production in first quarter of 2017: report Apple Inc  will trim production of iPhones by about 10 percent in the January-March quarter of 2017, the Nikkei financial daily reported on Thursday, citing calculations based on data from suppliers. The company had slashed output by 30 percent in January-March this year due to accumulated inventory, the paper said.

• Kayako’s CEO on building a bootstrapped business: Kayako isn’t a new company — the bootstrapped business has been around for 16 years — but it does have an interesting story. Kayako is a unified customer service platform, meaning that companies use their software to manage customer feedback and support across multiple platforms, including phone, email, Twitter and Facebook. With fewer than 100 employees (barely), Kayako has never taken outside funding. It has offices in three countries, is profitable and continues to grow. How, you may ask? Shoor saw a pain point and spent over a decade building a product to solve it. He found customers where he could and adapted to a market that moved online. By being flexible, he opened opportunities for himself and his company. There is no clear path to success and stories like his show that the strength of your idea and how you go about growing it are also key to a building a company that lasts. "You can literally go on to Twitter today and see customers complaining about how they keep having to repeat themselves. And that is a symptom of the problem, which is in the market right now. The reason they have to repeat themselves is all these organizations are using separate platforms for feedback and they don’t know what the problem is. The customer might have called before, they tweet, they may have emailed multiple times and they just don’t know. This is what Kayako solves. It brings all that information together in one stream of communication. "