SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2021

A lot has changed since Harry Stebbings launched podcast #001 2016 with Tiago Paiva, CEO of now decacorn Talkdesk, but SaaStr is still on the same mission. With 500+ episodes and almost 5 years behind us, we thought this would be a fun time to share the Top 25 episodes of all time. 1 SaaStr 221: HBS Sr.

Scale 192

Scale Sales Hiring SMB Benchmarks 192

SaaStr

APRIL 3, 2024

Jennifer has been at PagerDuty since 2016, a disruptive company that took automation to the next level before AI was hot in 2024. Experimentation and learning still have to happen, and there is a need for smart, strategic employees to monitor how AI is working to improve the product market fit, application, and safety for their customers.

Generative AI 224

Generative AI AI Technical Review Software Review 224

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Between 2016 and 2023, you see the ACV (average contract value) going up and up. When considering product market fit and seeing value back when Docebo got traction in 2012, they gave away a ton of value with ridiculously low ARR. Instead, it was growth at all costs. Undercharging in the early days is a common story.

Sales Hiring 192

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 192

SaaStr

AUGUST 30, 2022

Great product, driven team, good early product-market fit, great vision. Finally, I wrote a version of this post way back in 2016 when I first encountered this situation. I loved a SaaS company where the co-founder CMO was not just the marketing guru, but the real visionary. Check, check, check and check.

Sales Recruiting 222

Sales Recruiting Technical Cofounder Scale Investment 222

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 10, 2017

I first read about this idea in the 2016 Amazon Shareholders letter. But for most daily business decisions about strategy, product, marketing, engineering and other teams, disagree and commit is a powerful notion to capitalize upon a startup’s principal advantage in a market: execution speed. Disagree and commit.

Management 230

Management Leadership Engineering Startup 230

SaaStr

DECEMBER 9, 2020

2014: Never ran a community before 2016: Never ran own VC fund before 2018: Never ran an events company before 2020: Never ran a digital media company before. Product-market fit isn't one of them. It's generally about 12 months after an investment that I really, truly understand what the startup does.

Sales Hiring 262

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Investment 262

Casey Accidental

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

After product/market fit, most companies’ obsession is not thinking about how to create their next amazing product. Specifically, how do I get this product I know is valuable in the hands of everyone it can be valuable to. As I have discussed in previous essays , product/market fit can be hard to interpret at the time.

Payments 63

Payments Scale Payment Methods Underperforming Technical Team 63

Tom Tunguz

JULY 23, 2016

The answer informs product, marketing and sales strategy. JP Morgan doubled its security budget from $250M to $500M from 2015 to 2016. The security market as a whole is forecasted to grow 10-12% annually, which means there is substantial budget expansion broadly. Third, the company creates a new budget.

Software 100

Software Startup SaaS Forecasting 100

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2023

But this process was also hard: We had to get alignment across Product, Marketing, Sales, CS, and PS on what our end-to-end value (from 30K feet to 30 feet). And then at Pulse 2016, I decided to take another leap. But the spirit was the same: We are the experts on how to get value from our software. And you can see the results.

Sales Hiring 254

Sales Hiring Scale Scaling Customer Success 254

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 17, 2016

And most CIOs foresee only a 1-2% annual increase in total IT outlay in 2016. So perhaps the budgets argument doesn’t hold in every case, but it certainly does in new category creation: marketing automation, customer success, sales lead nurturing and so on. Or Duo’s payments siphon dollars from an extant security budget.

Innovation 100

Innovation SaaS Payments Payment Solutions SaaS 100

The Angel VC

APRIL 1, 2017

At the excellent SaaStr Annual 2016 conference about a year ago, a very experienced SaaS CEO said on stage that an internal recruiter can be a startup CEO’s secret superpower. This point in time will usually coincide with having found a decent level of Product/Market Fit and having raised a larger seed round.

Sales Hiring 168

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Startup Software Review 168

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 16, 2018

Getting through the first product launch requires more than a marketing Band-Aid; it requires instilling a company-wide philosophy that marketing and product aren’t two antithetical forces but two sides of the same coin. In this article, you’ll learn how to: Understand the role of product marketing.

Product Marketing 223

Product Marketing Strategy Marketing Sales Recruiting 223

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 15, 2016

A handful of customers are starting to indicate they are willing to pay for the product. Or a content marketing campaign has resulted in a deluge of inbound customer leads. Or your startup might be a series A company that ostensibly attained product market fit. Or the fit wasn’t true, a bit of a mirage.

Startup 100

Startup Scale Sales Hiring SaaS 100

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

So – it has become much easier to develop and launch a SaaS application and get initial traction, but if you have product/market fit in a small niche, which many SaaS companies do, it may be very hard to expand beyond that niche. Update 03/11/2016: I wrote a followup post to the post above.].

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

Casey Accidental

APRIL 18, 2018

Through various methods, Silicon Valley has drilled into the minds of entrepreneurs the concept of product/market fit. But what happens after you find product/market fit? Do you stop working on product? This process should be similar to finding product/market fit, but there are some differences.

Retention 99

Retention Mobile Acquisition Entertainment 99

Sales Hacker

MARCH 15, 2022

In 2016, he founded their executive search division. Asad Zaman : We specialize in helping companies build their go-to-market teams. We went from sales to the entire go-to-market org, practices, technical sales, and executive search. Product marketing, customer success, etc.

Sales Hiring 93

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Acquisition Development 93

Totango

FEBRUARY 22, 2019

He has also been named a top Channel Chief by CRN in 2016 and 2017, and received a Top Channel Chief Award from Channel Partners in 2018. Anne is a strategy, marketing and product leader with nearly 20 years of experience building enterprise-ready, scalable platforms.

Enterprise readiness 50

Enterprise readiness Leadership Consulting Enterprise 50

Brian Balfour

JULY 24, 2023

Here is the actual one I wrote for Reforge in 2016. Common advice is that “the only thing that matters is product market fit.” The first thing I ever created (even before incorporating) for Reforge was a Business Hypothesis Canvas. The Business Hypothesis Canvas helped me: Structure the brain chaos into something coherent.

Pricing 52

Pricing Communication Product Marketing Marketing 52

User Pilot

JANUARY 29, 2021

An excellent user engagement strategy can have a ripple effect on what product marketers’ care the most about: Make your users see the value of your product and its features during the free trial. Stop users from only signing up and then never using the product. billion when Microsoft bought them in 2016.

Engagement 98

Engagement Strategy Onboarding Sales Hiring 98

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 26, 2021

As we’ve grown from a tiny team when I joined in 2016 to the 160 or so folks we have today, there’s still this incredible empathy, kindness, and desire to lift each other up and see each other succeed.”. We always assume good intent, and we deeply value kindness and empathy.

Sales Hiring 138

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Customer Support Engineering 138

How SaaS Works

OCTOBER 15, 2019

A short snippet about Initial State and our IoT applications was subsequently published in the Jan/Feb 2016 issue of Popular Science. Make: magazine, October/November 2016 A major part of our content marketing strategy became clear?—? This exposure resulted in thousands and thousands of inbound Initial State users.

Content Marketing 45

Content Marketing Marketing SaaS Scale 45

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

So much great Sales strategy 💥 “A common theme we came across at SaaStock, sitting in David [Apple]’s session as well as other discussions with speakers and investors, was to focus more on your product marketing and finding your ICP. A roundup of SaaStock 2016. ” ( read more ).

Venture Capital 40

Venture Capital Scale B2B Churn 40

Navint

JANUARY 21, 2019

Salesforce CPQ & Billing, the evolution of Salesforce’s acquisition of Steelbrick in 2016, is the first unified sales and billing platform designed to support the needs of companies looking to generate recurring revenue on the Salesforce platform.

VP of Engineering 40

VP of Engineering Consulting Acquisition Technology 40

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

Before that Bob co-founded RJ Metrics, where he built a global base of online retailers leading to their acquisition by Magento Commerce in 2016. Before that and Bob co-founded RJ Metrics where he built a global base of online retailers, leading to their acquisition by Magento Commerce in 2016. Loving our podcast content?

Sales Hiring 131

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 131

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 30, 2018

She has won various awards such as Top Sales Leader, TAG One in a Millenial Awards 2016 and Power 30 Under 30 winner 2016. Lynne Zaledonis – SVP Product Marketing at Salesforce. Lynne Zaledonis is an experienced cloud leader and marketer, with a diverse background of over 17 years in CRM solutions and sales.

Sales Recruiting 111

Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering Scale Sales Hiring 111

Buffer Resources

MARCH 1, 2024

All their wisdom fell into two buckets: Making the most of your time and taking care of yourself, so I’ve broken it down based on these categories.

Technical Advisors 16

Technical Advisors Travel Software Engineering Company Culture 16

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2019

Prior to their IPO in 2016, Twilio had raised over $250m in VC funding from some of the best in venture including USV, Bessemer, Salesforce, and Techstars just to name a few. You know, you spent a lot of time in product marketing divisions, running product marketing teams. On voice, SMS, Whatsapp, or video.

Scale 137

Scale Sales Hiring SMB Interviewing 137

OpenView Labs

AUGUST 18, 2020

Going back to my story about struggling to see value in the product I discovered in an article, you can manage the empathy gap (and scalable growth) by: Leaning towards product led growth. Leveraging the product led growth single point of truth framework. Leaning towards product led growth.

Management 116

Management Payment Features Subscription Churn 116

ProfitWell

OCTOBER 1, 2019

Today, Zuora's Amy Konary creates a world in which subscribers are at the core, because she knows success is no longer measured simply by products sold. Plus, Recurly raises dough, Medium talks product marketing, and Beyond Pricing helps the common folk make a buck. Your top subscription news. Recurly raises $19.5M.

Technical Review 40

Technical Review Sales Recruiting Airlines Payment Features 40

Hitenism

DECEMBER 26, 2016

2016 has been a year where knowledge has become freely available for anyone interested in knowing about all things SaaS. Brian Balfour , You’re Too Focused on Product/Market Fit. This slide deck comes from Brian’s brilliant SaaSFest 2016 presentation. Thomas Smale , How to Value a SaaS Business in 2016.

Scale 152

Scale SaaS Marketplace as a Service SMB 152

ProfitWell

OCTOBER 16, 2019

While the data’s a tad older, Totango’s 2016 SaaS Metrics Report lists a wide band of churn rates across its respondents, with the median annual churn rate falling somewhere in the 5-10% range. For established companies and enterprise products that have found product-market fit, revenue churn should be low and stay low.

Churn 55

Churn SaaS Payments Payments Payment Methods 55

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 10, 2020

From its bootstrapped founding in 2002 all the way to a $5 billion valuation in 2016, Atlassian famously had no sales people. ‘No The software company’s stated strategy was to offer great products paired with low pricing and self-service purchasing, a Product Led Growth (PLG) recipe that fueled the company’s sustained profitable growth.

Sales Hiring 57

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 57

OpenView Labs

MAY 19, 2021

She followed her time at Twilio with several similarly pivotal marketing roles at other companies serving developers: Director of Marketing at Parse, Product Marketing Manager (for Parse) at Facebook, Head of Developer Marketing for Google Maps at Google, and CMO at GitLab , a SaaS application that enables developers code, test, and deploy together.

Underperforming Technical Team 52

Underperforming Technical Team Development Technical Review Marketing 52

ProfitWell

MARCH 3, 2020

We invest in business software companies as they’re scaling through the awkward teenage years of that expansion stage—but they’ve found product-market fit, they’ve found some customers, they’ve got a great product, and they’re really ready to 10x their customer base in their teens. “OpenView is the expansion stage VC.

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS Payments Payment Services 59

SaaSOptics

MAY 19, 2022

You have poor product/market fit. Your product roadmap is misaligned with customer needs. Your Customer Success, Sales, and Marketing teams aren’t nurturing accounts effectively. From its bootstrapped founding in 2002 all the way to a $5 billion valuation in 2016, Atlassian famously had no salespeople. .

Acquisition 59

Acquisition Scale Strategy Software Review 59

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2019

How did you all get to product-market fit ? Rick : I heard a great analogy that when you’re in pre-product-market fit, you can feel like you’re in a desert. “When you’re in pre-product-market fit, you can feel like you’re in a desert. Rick : That shift came about around 2016.

Scale 156

Scale Scaling AI Search Underperforming Technical Team 156

Aaron Beashel

OCTOBER 31, 2016

So for instance, here’s a shortened version of what the Vision might look like for a B2B SaaS marketing team. In 3 years time, our team of 10 across inbound, paid acquisition, product marketing, PR & operations has successfully built out an optimized growth engine.

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Scale Underperforming Technical Team B2B Marketing 100