SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2023

Scaling a PLG company While it’s great to figure out a PLG model that allows you to scale your revenue with inbound, it cannot stop there. Strategy: To get started, identify playbooks that yield the highest revenue. The next hiring focus should be growth marketing. Once this is in place, start investing in paid channels.

Scale 183

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scaling 183

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2022

While startups have ups and downs, if you tell the VCs you’re going to hit $250,000 in revenue this month … make 100 percent sure you hit that projection. Don’t force VCs to find out in due diligence that only 2 percent of the pool, not the customary 15 percent or so, is available for new hires. Half of a VC investment is in the CEO.

Finance 274

Finance Technical Review CTO Hire New CTO 274

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

You have to see: A couple of good hires brought in Improvement on some metrics A big deal or two hanging out there, brought in and closed Things taken off your plate. More time may make them better if they’re already progressing, even if it’s just 10-15% in the first sales cycle. Hiring someone too junior. That often compounds.

Part-Time VPE 175

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 175

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

Which role should you hire for first? For starters, your first hire should be someone who can complement your skills, someone who is strong in areas where you’re weak, but it goes much deeper than that. I am guessing it’s probably the hardest problem to solve, hiring a job, let alone at this level. And for good reason.

Sales Hiring 253

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 253

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2020

Brendon introduces his playbook to hiring the first VP of Sales from his experiences as VP of Sales at LinkedIn, EchoSign, Talkdesk and more. Learn the dos and don’ts to make the correct hire the first time and not rush into hiring the wrong VP of Sales, which can cost the company months or even years. Roughly 90%.

Sales Hiring 151

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire Scale 151

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

As a founder, you’ll just run out of time to properly manage key customers and partners yourself. Hire that person, and make sure they are someone the top customers can really trust and count on. That you can’t have a majority of y our revenue dependent on one customer. ” — Ankit Sindhi, Founder, Spurt.

CTO Hire 267

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 267

Valerian Tech

JULY 5, 2023

Integrating property management systems with other systems such as point-of-sale and revenue management systems optimizes efficiency. Moreover, staff-scheduling software and real-time communication tools streamline workforce management and enhance staff productivity.

Payment Services 52

Payment Services Technology Payment Solutions CTO Hire 52

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. What to do before building a team for your SaaS company You can’t just jump into hiring without some forethought, or you’ll make many mistakes. Before the hiring process, take some time to decide on your current needs and hire as your company grows.

Sales Hiring 88

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 88

SaaStr

MARCH 15, 2019

I remember my CTO once arguing with a Fortune 500 company on a “security” concern they had which really made no sense. More here: I Never Lost a Customer I Actually Visited | SaaStr Not hiring a full-time RFP person. Not hiring a full-time Chief Security & Compliance Offer. Didn’t matter. They were concerned.

Sales Hiring 169

Sales Hiring Enterprise CTO Hire CTO 169

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

But as time went on, we shared lessons, what best practices were in customer success and revenue retention and all these things are, right. They were aware of it, but startups that I work with closely or invested in, if they got all the way to 25 million with 75% NRR, I would tell them to quit today. I want to invest in her.”

Outsourcing Services 180

Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 180

Andreessen Horowitz

DECEMBER 4, 2023

To improve the efficiency of spend on cost of goods sold (COGS), most growth-stage leaders can optimize seat-based spend or renegotiate consumption-based contracts in a quarter or 2. Focus on performance management of your product and engineering teams as early indicators for what R&D investments are working, and which aren’t.

Underperforming Technical Team 118

Underperforming Technical Team Benchmarks CTO Hire New CTO 118

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

They’ve invested in all of these other businesses. Immediately told them to hire 50 reps in a different city, in a different city, and they did. The CEO was deferential because that was 10 times what he’d ever raised before, and did all of it. We might’ve touched on this one too on the hiring and the people.

Sales Hiring 239

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 239

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2020

Hiring managers are also just trying to sell as well. Users come to us all the time and they say, Hey, this company looks awesome. Are they hiring? That goes to the hiring manager. And if you get hired, RepVue will actually pay you $500. And it’s easy to inflate that for companies during the hiring process.

Marketplace as a Service 96

Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 96

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

Well, we did the heavy lifting and highlighted a few here for you… “When to Hire and When to Automate” with Zapier CEO Wade Foster. David Sacks has a long history in tech from his time as a Founder and CEO of Geni.com and Yammer to his stint as COO of Paypal. So, how do you choose amongst the stable of unicorns?

Payment Services 100

Payment Services CTO Hire Payments New CTO 100

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Here’s an overview of the series: Part 1: How to Categorize Expenses in a SaaS Startup v2.0 Cost of Revenue Let’s start with your Cost of Revenue. The gist of it is that Cost of Revenue includes costs that go into providing your Software as a Service. Jason Cohen breaks down the question in his Quora post.

Merchant Services 90

Merchant Services Startup DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2019

We ended up signing that contract in the uber back to the airport on the way home. It was our largest contract to date, kind of helps the other quarter. I had my CTO and everyone would be like, “You can’t do this. Our Chief Revenue officer, another one of our senior leadership lives in Scottsdale, Arizona.

CTO Hire 154

CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 154

Sales Hacker

MARCH 25, 2019

Simmone talks about her experience building Gilt City and Kidpass as a woman of color and how she advises companies to build diversity and inclusion into their hiring practices and sales teams. How to build diversity into your hiring practices. How to Increase Revenue by 19% [36:37]. How to Increase Revenue by 19%.

Sales Hiring 69

Sales Hiring Revenue CTO Coach CTO Hire 69

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

CEO Joel Gascoigne tells us about the decision to invest in new analytics tools and how Buffer sustained long-term growth thanks to growing their ARPA. While Baremetrics was fulfilling the desire for public transparency, internally the team was using Looker almost exclusively to track and report revenue metrics. What is Buffer.

Payment Solutions 113

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Social Media 113

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shared with us how they got there — and the top mistakes they made — just 3 quarters after their IPO. We have someone that probably 98 percent of you know virtually or socially in some sense, Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. ” We didn’t do any annual contracts.

Part-Time VPE 211

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 211

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Join this panel of investors from Connect Ventures, Blossom Capital, Dawn Capital, The Family, and Indico Partners as they provide an overview of the current investment landscape, and discuss whether the seed stage is emerging as the new Series A. We are a $50 million fund based in Lisbon, and we invest mainly in seed stage.

New CTO 144

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 144

SaaStr

JULY 19, 2019

Previously, Peter was also the CTO/CIO of CBS Interactive where he brought CBS into the cloud. At Sun, Peter was the CTO of the Liberty identity consortium that designed SAML 2. Why is it no longer to come into large enterprises with a small contract and expand? How has Peter found the transition from CTO to CEO this time?

VP of Engineering 130

VP of Engineering CTO Hire Technical Review Sales Hiring 130

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2020

As for Karl, prior to founding the company he spent 6 years at Google in some fascinating roles including Head of Patents, Head of Business Development in China and running Google’s energy investments. How does one know when we need to hire generalists vs specialists? How does Karl structure the hiring process today? What works?

Sales Hiring 215

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach 215

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

More and more people are hiring leaders, not for past experience, but for capability and capacity. It can be hard to convince PE firms to invest in the customer. How did you get your PE colleagues to invest in the customer experience? We hire a third-party firm. Find the hardest problems to solve and you will succeed.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

Adam Risman , a former host of the podcast, asked Rachel what made that point when Rachel joined Slack in 2016 the right time to invest in growth marketing? And so we hired somebody who had a lot of experience and could recommend ways to build the team. They had occasional advertising here and there. Here’s Rachel.

Outsourcing Services 215

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

SaaStr

JANUARY 14, 2020

That was our first transitionary moment, and from that point forward, we began investing heavily in building a way to teach people technology skills outside of a physical classroom. So we kept investing, we knew we were onto something, and little by little we saw our traction improve. We were not an enterprise company yet.

B2B 132

B2B B2C Scale New CTO 132

Andreessen Horowitz

MARCH 20, 2024

You could either spend, you know, you raise some venture funding, you could either spend some of that funding on hiring out a whole team and developing all those competencies, or you can spend that on making your model even better. And so almost no other platforms provide this kind of revenue share today. Adam: Yeah.

AI Search 138

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 138

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

Last night I read this question on Quora : In general terms, what is the ideal size and make-up of a team for a pre-revenue SaaS startup? I think the second part of the question is more important. This can be a huge advantage, especially for a bootstrapped startup that can't afford to hire many people.

CTO Hire 106

CTO Hire Startup Sales Hiring New CTO 106

SaaStr

JANUARY 17, 2020

What other elements of the contract should startups really spend a lot of time focusing on? Julian Lemoine, Co-Founder, and CTO of Algolia will share his lessons learned on how to stay focused and innovative as you scale while also avoiding the innovation for innovation’s sake pitfalls. This episode is sponsored by Brex.

CTO Hire 132

CTO Hire compliance Scale Startup 132

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

Obviously if you target enterprise customers, you usually have a very large ACV (Annual Contract Value) and the product usually is complex. We talk about using the product complexity, your target customer size, your contract value, and whether there's individual use case–those four things--to help you decide if PLG is a fit.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

We were talking to Sean Place, who was the co founder and CTO, and it turned out that they were just giving gift cards to these drivers, but they had no way to authorize the right transaction at the right time for the right amount. And we were doing great in revenue. We doubled revenue every year since 2015.

Merchant Services 75

Merchant Services Payment Methods Payments Payment Solutions 75

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

Erica Schultz is Chief Revenue Officer @ New Relic, the company that gives you the real time insights your software driven business needs to innovate faster. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: How Erica made her way into the world of SaaS and came to be Chief Revenue Officer @ New Relic. Welcome to Episode 214!

Scale 161

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 161

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

When is the right time to hire the first sales rep? Should you hire 2 at a time? What does one look for in their first sales hire? Does it have to be tied to a number related to revenue? We were hired into the same role, same start date, competed head to head. Bret was formerly the CTO at Facebook.

Scale 169

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 169

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

CEO Joel Gascoigne tells us about the decision to invest in new analytics tools and how Buffer sustained long-term growth thanks to growing their ARPA. While Baremetrics was fulfilling the desire for public transparency, internally the team was using Looker almost exclusively to track and report revenue metrics. What is Buffer.

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Outsourcing Services 52

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

And then, invest your energy and time into the product. Mallun Yen : So, you were an engineer by training and then you became an engineering leader, as the CTO of Webex, and then you became a CEO. You’ve got to learn about sales, about marketing and, otherwise, you need to hire a lot of other people around you to help.

Sales Hiring 129

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 129

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

How does Bob think about when is the right time to hire a Head of Partnerships? Where do most startups go wrong both in hiring for partnerships and in the engagements themselves? In just four years, Podium has raised almost $100 million, with annual recurring revenue increasing to almost $60 million.

Sales Hiring 131

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 131

SaaStock

MARCH 29, 2019

That’s the advice, Petri Hollmén picked up on the more technical side of things from the opening session on Day 2 with Cal Henderson, CTO of Slack. You can use them the next time you need to convince your manager brand investment makes sense. Hire Game Changers to Propel Growth. People were already looking for it.

Scale 103

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Social Media 103

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 21, 2021

Will Larson , CTO of Calm. Des Traynor , Co-founder and CTO of Intercom. On this episode of Scale by Intercom, we spoke with Farhan to learn more about where the future of customer support is heading, and how understanding customer behavior can help to drive revenue in the future. Janeen Uzzell , COO for Wikimedia Foundation.

VP of Engineering 118

VP of Engineering Scale Technical Review Outsourcing Services 118