SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Many have used Digital Ocean at the cheaper, simpler version of AWS-Azure-Digital Ocean to get going fast and quickly. Or at least, maybe like many, tougher times meant holding the line on costs and people, leading to even more efficiency. But at scale, even the slightly less long version of the tail is where the money is.

Scale 244

Scale AWS Azure Cloud 244

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

The Challenges and Pitfalls of a Partner Ecosystem Drata attributes much of its success to its partner ecosystem, which is an interesting case study for most, so how do they break up marketing, sales, and resource allocation vs. a more direct-sales modeled business? AWS can’t support 20 partners equally.

AWS 222

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 222

Sales Hacker

APRIL 23, 2024

Lessons learned from scaling innovative products and go-to-market motions at AWS. 32:49 – Challenges faced and insights gained during Linda’s time at AWS. Why a modern go-to-market approach requires moving beyond legacy CRM systems. How Common Room unifies siloed data to enable a 360-degree view of the customer.

Sales Recruiting 85

Sales Recruiting Scale AWS Management 85

SaaStr

JULY 26, 2021

Q: Dear SaaStr: Should a Startup Founder Handle Sales Themself When First Getting Started? The “best” sequence for building a repeatable sales engine is roughly: The CEO/founder should close at least the first 10 (or 20 or whatever) customers. It’s to scale a tiny engine into something bigger. That way, she knows.

Sales Hiring 269

Sales Hiring Scale Startup AWS 269

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2023

Pursuing Two Different Segments: The Tale of Startups vs. Google Cloud Platform, on the other hand, is in a very different set that also competes with Microsoft, but AWS is considered their biggest competitor in the market. What they’re seeing with GenAI and Google Cloud is an opportunity to grab share from AWS.

Cloud 254

Cloud Scale AWS AI 254

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: It’s Now Year 2 of the Venture Downturn Clawbacks and Tracking-to-Cash: Two Sales Management Tools to Be Thoughtful With 8 Things That Are Just Harder in SaaS Now Tier 1 VC is Great. But More Money May Be Even Better. What’s Holding Up Buyers?:

Scale 237

Scale AWS Scaling Enterprise 237

SaaStr

MARCH 6, 2024

Seat Contractions Have Brought NRR Down From 120% to 111% While 111% NRR is still quite an engine at this scale, the drop in NRR from seat contractions explains a good chunk of the headwinds Okta has seen. #2. AWS alone generated $175m of contract value for Okta, growing 130%. Way, way too many startups focus 100% on direct sales.

Fractional VPE 232

Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Scale SMB 232

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 9, 2021

This is why we’re seeing more and more SaaS companies—Datadog, Twilio, AWS, Snowflake, and Stripe, to name a few—find success with product led growth paired with usage-based pricing. It requires shifts in go-to-market strategy, sales compensation, financial planning, billing, and much more. Ready to scale to $100+ million ARR?

Scale 98

Scale Pricing Scaling AWS 98

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

CloudKeeper from TO THE NEW, is a cloud spend optimization solution that guarantees to cut down your AWS bills by 5-15%. With CloudKeeper, we have helped 200+ of our customers optimize their AWS spend with a guaranteed reduction in their AWS bills. No lock-ins. Savings from Day 1. RI pricing for On-demand usage.

Cloud spend optimization 220

Cloud spend optimization AWS Scale compliance 220

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

The SaaS sales model seems so well-established, as hundreds of founders build their businesses and raise funding. Mark Roberge, Founder of Stage 2 Capital and Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, shares insights from his years of experience into common SaaS sales missteps and how you can avoid them.

Sales Hiring 202

Sales Hiring Scale Compensation Sales 202

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

Why did sales-driven Qualtrics get to $100m+ in ARR without ever raising a nickel, and generating more than $20m a year in free cash flow ? Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? Sales, done right, should be accretive (although expect sales efficiency to ultimately decline post-Initial Scale).

Scale 286

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 286

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Customers range from AWS skills-builder platforms with billions of users to Zoom using it for customers and employees. When a new sales leader comes in, they usually say the data is messed up, difficult to comprehend, and unclear about where leads are coming from. The bigger you scale, the harder this can be.

Sales Hiring 214

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 214

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2023

Still, always helpful to see how any leader does free to paid at scale. Spending a Hefty 50% of Revenue on Sales and Marketing. They spend a pretty high 50% of all revenue on sales and marketing — and that’s up from last year. And interesting to see they are growing the top of the funnel, Free, faster than Paid: #3.

Scale 209

Scale AWS Scaling Revenue 209

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Even If It’s Awful for Series A-E Rounds. SaaStr 628: Revenue Alignment: How to Pull Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Together with Divvy CRO Sterling Snow  2. SaaStr 629: CRO Confidential: Sales Recruitment in 2023 For Candidates and Hiring Managers With Flexport’s Ben Braverman   3. Really, Really, Low.

Sales Recruiting 198

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AWS 198

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2023

AWS is seeing this, and so is Snowflake. But it’s the $1M+ ones that are fueling the big numbers at this scale. Also you can see sales & marketing headcount is basically flat, while hiring is almost all in engineering / R&D. So when CFOs and others tighten budgets, they’ll also try to buy less Snowflake.

Headcount 211

Headcount Scale Sales Hiring AWS 211

SaaStr

APRIL 21, 2023

In this post , SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin shared five super simple ways to generate more leads and grow your company that always work. Now, he has five more marketing strategies that are sure to generate more leads if done right. Now, go find 30 other prospects exactly like them. Customers and prospects will come.

Outsourcing Services 211

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development Marketing 211

Hitenism

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

In 2006, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped pioneer what we now call the cloud, product development changed forever. Today, one-third of daily internet users visit websites built on top of AWS. AWS is now an $11.5B Working backwards isn’t a silver bullet that guarantees you success on the scale of AWS.

AWS 189

AWS New CTO Scale CTO 189

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Amazon on AWS : “…customers are continuing to shift their focus towards driving innovation and bringing new workloads to the cloud. The hyperscalers benefit from massive scale, distribution, trust and depth of customer relationships in ways no other software companies do. Follow along to stay up to date!

Cost optimization & reporting 161

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Azure AWS 161

SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2024

Some things to think about as you craft your offer are: Does it align with your sales motion? You don’t want conflict with the sales team. This is where they started, but startups weren’t adopting the product as much with a discount, and there was a lot of conflict with the sales team. A free term.

Startup 196

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team AWS 196

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 30, 2020

Prior to HashiCorp Adam was the Head of Worldwide Developer Marketing at AWS and held senior positions at Pivotal, VMware, and SpringSource. My partner Astasia Myers will be leading the discussion. With two decades of experience, Adam is well-versed in developer evangelism. She writes often on topics like these on our blog Memory Leak.

Development 312

Development Scale AWS Scaling 312

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Call me when it scales.” The point is that getting to $1-2 million in ARR probably has less predictive value concerning a company’s ability to get to true scale than most people think – or at least thought some years ago. Being a seed investor I’m trying to find SaaS companies that can scale before they have scaled.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

SaaStr

AUGUST 4, 2021

3 days, more than 100+ sessions and 300 expert speakers, who will be sharing their best practices to help you scale faster, build smarter, and close more customers. From AWS to Vimeo: this year’s speaker lineup is packed with incredible speakers and content. We just launched the entire SaaStr Annual 2021 Agenda !!

Scale 258

Scale AWS B2C SaaS 258

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 25, 2021

The Intercom team is looking forward to showcasing our latest features and improvements to the world’s leading Business Messenger and powerful customer support product. Our leading customer communication platform is used by the most innovative companies worldwide, such as Unity, Spendesk, (add approved customer logos in here).

AWS 198

AWS Scale Innovation Startup 198

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

If you don’t think you need a great VP of Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and Engineering — then all that all that means is you’ve never worked with a great one. Here again, we have the same problems as the Customer Success lead hire, but worse. To me the first question is — do you have leads?

Sales Hiring 278

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 278

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 31, 2021

When you first get started, effectively any hosting setup will do the trick: your application is small, you have relatively few customers, and perhaps (depending on your sales process) expectations around performance and reliability are a bit lower during the beta phase. Are you growing and want to scale? Over time all of that changes.

AWS 115

AWS DevOps as a Service Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review 115

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2021

So we’ve had a lot of fun in our 5 Interesting Learnings profiling the top SaaS and Cloud companies at scale, from Slack to Zoom, from Shopify to Datadog, from Box to DropBox. But are AWS, Azure and Google Cloud just too big for us to learn from? And it’s gone much more aggressive in its sales motions.

Cloud 223

Cloud Azure AWS Scale 223

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 6, 2023

If you’re selling sales and marketing software, like Zoominfo, it can seem a lot tougher than 12-18 months ago. Growth in public cloud services (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Snowflake, etc.) If you’re selling cloud infrastructure, for the most part, growth may be down a smidge but is still strong, e.g., MongoDB.

Merchant Services 282

Merchant Services Azure Software AWS 282

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2020

To make a partnership successful, your startup will need to teach another sales team to sell your product. The sales team asks for more leads. After scaling sales enablement successfully, the next step is to understand where your customers are. Here are my notes. Where to Start. Types of Partnerships.

Scale 317

Scale AWS Consulting Sales Enablement 317

Clouded Judgement

OCTOBER 27, 2023

Subscribe now Cloud Giants Report Q3 ‘23 Not a great signal for software this week from the Cloud Giants (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud)…After Q2 (3 months ago), the tone from the Cloud Giants around optimizations was largely: optimizations have started to ease, and net new workloads have picked up. Staggering scale already.

Cost optimization & reporting 152

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Azure AWS 152

SaaStr

JUNE 18, 2022

Patricia Hanna, VP Americas Sales Ops @ Confluent. Shradha Kothari, Chief of Staff, SVP & GM North America Sales @ Twilio. Jen Dawson @ AWS. Dale Chang, Operations Partner @ Scale Venture Partners (panel). Patricia Hanna, VP Americas Sales Ops @ Confluent. Lars Nilsson, VP, Global Sales Development @ Snowflake.

CTO 223

CTO Scale New CTO AWS 223

FastSpring

NOVEMBER 9, 2023

Since 2016, SaaS North has been recognized as THE Canadian hub for rapidly-scaling SaaS founders and their teams. It is the largest in-person event in the country—2,000+ attendees, 800+ companies, and 100+ speakers—along with features such as Betakit Keynote Stage, AWS Pitchfest, Workspaces Tradeshow.

Merchant Services 135

Merchant Services SaaS Payments Payment Methods Payment Services 135

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

How can that scale over time? How many sales reps, how much marketing spend, how many engineers will you really need? Does it make sense, and scale, from an input-output perspective? Worth hiring a sales team, raising some venture capital (even a modest amount). What will your ACV really be? appeared first on SaaStr.

Scale 220

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital AWS 220

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

It looks at the YoY dollar change in quarterly revenue from the hyperscalers (just looking at Azure / AWS because the data goes back further) going back a few years. If we break this down and look at Azure and AWS independently (graphs below), you’ll see how the AWS “swings” were a lot more volatile.

Cloud 177

Cloud Software Azure AWS 177

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2022

Patricia Hanna, VP Americas Sales Ops @ Confluent. Shradha Kothari, Chief of Staff, SVP & GM North America Sales @ Twilio. Jen Dawson @ AWS. Dale Chang, Operations Partner @ Scale Venture Partners (panel). Bonney Pelley, SVP, Strategy + Operations @ New Relic. Farrah B, VP Business Operations @ Cribl.

New CTO 196

New CTO Scale CTO AWS 196

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

Alex has deep experience building market-leading companies, having been a major player at QuanticMind (where he helped grow ARR by 800%) and Salesforce, where he was part of a team that doubled revenue from $1.5 are all-in on personalization and the massive potential to serve customers more intimately at scale. billion to $3 billion.

Scale 181

Scale Marketing AWS Machine Learning 181

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 26, 2020

All of Intercom’s production infrastructure is provided as a service to Intercom by Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is the leading cloud provider in the industry, and we leverage their portfolio of globally redundant services to ensure Intercom runs reliably. We are dedicated to helping you and all of your customers.

AWS 192

AWS Scale Business Cloud 192

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 22, 2024

This is why the consumption players (Snowflake, Mongo, Confluent, Azure, AWS, etc) so more variability in the macro slowdown. This brings me to AI (everything leads to AI these days…). But this is changing - many categories are becoming commoditized leading to massive pricing pressure. Do you have ARR or ERR?

AI 183

AI Revenue Cloud Technical Advisors 183