Tom Tunguz

JUNE 19, 2022

As of this writing, our shares are down more than 80 percent from when I wrote you last year. As the famed investor Benjamin Graham said, “In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine; in the long term, it’s a weighing machine.” In the meantime, we have our heads down working to build a heavier and heavier company.

Construction 311

Construction Finance Pricing Startup 311

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2023

In my first start-up, there were literally only a handful of engineers who understood our technology. The best we made our CTO. But I pulled our team together and said look — I know no one wants to work with William. But what if our CTO gets hit by a bus? But what if our CTO gets hit by a bus? Well he was toxic.

CTO Hire 221

CTO Hire CTO Technology Engineering 221

SaaStr

JANUARY 31, 2023

There are a few that sort of spit out in which the mothership company is the LP in our case. It truly is the allocation of our balance sheet.” The stickier and more convenient your product is to use along with the ecosystem, the more likely you will be to set up long-term retention. With corporate, that’s usually not the case.

Investment 208

Investment Startup Branding Acquisition 208

SaaStr

DECEMBER 28, 2023

Some of our most notable investments include Figma, Datadog, Discord, Adyen and Roblox. Our current set of funds totals $3.4B. #3. Be careful not to over-rotate based on short-term market dynamics. Profitability is certainly a major area of focus, but don’t forsake future, long-term growth for short-term benefits. #4.

Technical Review 206

Technical Review Software Review Payment Solutions Venture Capital 206

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 6, 2023

“We are seeing signs that the cloud optimization activity from some of our customers may be moderating. of our ARR this quarter…they tend to be mobile [apps]” But because the technology is new, predictability is a challenge. And these customers generated about 86% of our ARR.” Now at 2.5%

Scale 221

Scale AI Cloud Mobile 221

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2023

At SaaStr, our partners are an integral part of our events. We have the platform side which assists with SaaS management – it allows business leaders to get an overview of the tools they currently have in their stack, what the terms are, and when they are up for renewal. Grab tickets here.

Outsourced Development 205

Outsourced Development Acquisition Pricing B2B 205

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2023

It’s a bit of a flag of someone not going big, of not seeing the real win in their equity, not just in a short term contract or two. A CEO who optimizes on short-term comp never really goes the distance. I went to several of our big customers, and asked them to pay more then, and to pre-pay up front. But still — I did it once.

Startup 217

Startup Sales Leadership 217

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2022

So one thing that’s back now is customers asking for longer payment terms. But customers you invoice in many cases are again asking for much longer than classic Net 30 terms. Your champion likely doesn’t benefit from longer payments terms themselves. Make sure you are budgeting at least for longer payment terms.

Payments 230

Payments Payment Services Payment Features Finance 230

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2024

What I missed was Lenny’s own summary of his Top Takeway from our deep dive. A great summary of so many of our learnings. This really summarizes it all in terms of when to hire a VP of Sales. It ended up being super popular, and a fresh take on a lot of topic we talk about a lot on SaaStr. It’s great.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 245

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2024

Population growth Productivity growth Debt growth We know that we won’t see population growth until the medium-to-long term. With long-term success comes some approach towards governance, which includes data and AI governance. With debt growth, at least for the foreseeable future, that’s not a real catalyst.

AI 222

AI Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Government 222

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2021

Congratulations to our team, our customers, our investors, and everyone who has come together to make this happen. Term sheets are not final — valuations can drop and/or investors can pull TS's last minute and your entire round can fall apart. Maybe close that term sheet faster. Times are still great.

Marketing 287

Marketing Innovation Branding Revenue 287

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2024

"We all need more hackers on our team. Building a Brand Building a brand is essential for long-term success. Marketing hackers, sales hackers, product hackers. We lost too much of that. People that want to do the work because they enjoy the work."

Sales Hiring 255

Sales Hiring Startup Marketing Technical Review 255

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2023

Soon, we’ll launch all kinds of PLG/Prescriptive notifications to enable our reps to provide more tailored outreach during trial-driven sales processes. They’ve become a part of our Sales UI. #3. MadKudu : MK does firmographic lead scoring, placing accounts into buckets based on whether or not they fit our various ICP categories.

Consulting 191

Consulting Enterprise Sales Engagement 191

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

Part of this could be conservative guides being called out (Confluent kind of said this about their guide when they said “ if you look at our Q1 and full year guidance, we're not assuming a huge amount of acceleration in the second half of the year. Our goal over the long term is to bring net dilution down to under 2%."

Cloud 195

Cloud Pricing Startup Revenue 195

SaaStr

JANUARY 8, 2024

” or “Our customers love us. Here’s How “Reserves” Work Yes, you’ll hear a ton of stories from founders that had to meet 150 VCs to get 1 term sheet. More on that here: Need a Second Check From Your VCs? I lived that myself, too. But you still have to check most of the boxes to get funded even there.

Startup 318

Startup Investment Business 318

The Daily Egg

MAY 10, 2021

In case you’re allergic to social media and haven’t ever before heard the term, FOMO means “the fear of missing out.” We don’t want to look back on our lives and wonder, “What if?” But what is FOMO marketing? We’re all familiar with the fear of missing an amazing opportunity. Savvy marketers have tapped into […].

Social Media 328

Social Media Marketing Content Marketing 328

Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 1, 2023

On the cost piece - there were a number of folks who made statements like “we can’t roll out this chatbot / CoPilot to our entire user base becasue our costs would explode!” Looking at the mid to long term, we feel very optimistic about the outlook for strong AWS growth.

AWS 293

AWS Cloud AI Search Cost optimization & reporting 293

SaaStr

JULY 7, 2023

In my first start-up, while the core 3 co-founders were great, we needed an operational COO to really get to market with our customers. So just as we were about to close our venture round, he pulled out. The term sheet went with him. I closed arguably the best COO in the U.S. for the job — or so I thought. Not really.

SaaS 233

SaaS Management Marketing Leadership 233

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2023

Q: How do you stand out in terms of customer acquisition against large competitors who aren’t incorporating AI? We’ve shrunk our sales teams or we’ve kept them flat. So that’s the next frontier that we’ll see if we tackle or if the markets get better and we just pretend our CACs are lower than they are.

Scale 230

Scale Sales Hiring Customer Success AI 230

SaaStr

APRIL 15, 2021

For our First Big Customer, we’d been negotiating a $6m/year contract for quite some time (they always take time). But I didn’t yield on our business model. If I had, it would have been short-term smiles traded for long-term disaster. I had no experience doing any of this. note: an updated SaaStr Classic post).

Sales 292

Sales Finance Pricing Business Model 292

SaaStr

APRIL 22, 2022

We are primarily a software company, but by introducing hardware into our product suite, our customers have more offerings from Samsara.”. Industry transformation takes decades – think long term. As a day-to-day operator, one of the hardest things to do is zoom out and see the long-term organizational picture.

Innovation 240

Innovation Wireless Scale Marketing 240

The Daily Egg

AUGUST 4, 2021

Our guide will cover why holiday parties are important, quick tips on how to improve them, and some long-term strategies to take them to the next level. Holiday parties can be fun and valuable events for employees, but getting them right takes effort. The post The Complete Guide to Holiday Parties appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Strategy 294

Strategy 294

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 25, 2022

We’re serious about delivering the best customer experience with our Engagement OS. We have truly global ambitions to bring our mission of making internet business personal to the biggest enterprise customers across the world. We’re growing alongside our customers. Our tooling allows for high availability.

Scaling 252

Scaling AWS Software Review Technical Review 252

SaaStr

JANUARY 8, 2023

Each week, we round up our most popular content so you can catch up on anything you may have missed. SaaStr 623: Removing Friction: How to Turn More Than 40% of Your Prospects Into Long Term Enterprise Customers with Attentive Co-founder and CEO Brian Long.  . Leveraging Compounding Channels For Long-Term Growth with Demandwell.

VP of Engineering 217

VP of Engineering Scale Sales Hiring Revenue 217

Payrix

APRIL 24, 2024

We hear this from all of our partners. By understanding your customers’ pain points and offering personalized solutions, software companies can strengthen their relationships and foster long-term loyalty. I’ve enjoyed each of the sessions and I’m certainly excited albeit sad to wrap up our topic here today.

Payments 147

Payments Embedded Payments Merchant Services Payment Solutions 147

SaaStr

JULY 27, 2023

Year after year, VCs show up to SaaStr Annual locked and loaded, term sheets in hands , on the hunt for soon-to-be Unicorns to add to their portfolios. So know your numbers, get your lucky pen ready, and come join the ranks of Founders & CEOs who will be signing term sheets during or shortly after the Annual in Q3 2023!

Venture Capital 196

Venture Capital Banking Cloud Investment 196

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

We’re on the brink of one of the biggest technological advancements of our lifetime — AI. If the internet rolled out in 1997, then our current hype cycle is what it was like in 1998. He created a moat for a long-term vision and spent years selling books. This involves balancing long-term vision with immediate practical steps.

AI 255

AI Technical Review Startup Management 255

SaaStr

OCTOBER 20, 2023

Sometimes as founder, we lean on our top individual contributors too much, even inadvertently. We want our top engineer to also be a team lead. Our top SDR to help manage the other SDRs. Our top AE to help guide the rest of the team. We’re all on our own journey. Ask more, and you can breed resentment.

Sales Recruiting 198

Sales Recruiting Sales Startup Engineering 198

SaaStr

AUGUST 21, 2023

So SaaStr itself is a little funky — we only have 9 team members but a fair amount of scale in terms of reach, revenue, and in some cases, software utilization. We mainly use it for legacy reasons, and no one on our current team really wants to use it. We don’t need many CRM seats for example but we do a ton of marketing.

SMB 223

SMB Enterprise Scale Pricing 223

SaaStr

APRIL 3, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What’s The Best Way to Retain Control of Our Startup Once We Start to Raise Outside Capital? Ones that value you and your long term commitment. More on how cap tables look for founders at IPO here: The post Dear SaaStr: What’s The Best Way to Retain Control of Our Startup? Sell less of the company. Then deliver.

Startup 249

Startup Banking Scaling SaaS 249

Totango

APRIL 9, 2024

Our CS and sales experts say, “Neither.” Chris Dishman , SVP of Customer Success for Totango & Catalyst, hosted a roundtable discussion with industry leaders, including Rashmi Chari , Head of Global Customer Success for ThousandEyes, Kevin McIntyre , Chief Revenue Officer for Dealfront, and Madelyn DePrey , VP of Customer Success for Aircall.

Scale 106

Scale Sales Compensation Customer Success 106