SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

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. Jason Lemkin: 50 reps in a new city that you’ve never met, and hired in 60 days when you’re in the low millions ARR.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 246

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 287

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 287

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

This allows you to have like a really cheap acquisition for customers, but the billing model is typically a little bit different as well with usage-based and consumption-based models. It might even be months later that a VP of Engineering or a CTO or CFO realizes that they’re built on a new platform. The contract size grows.

Underperforming Technical Team 208

Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Development Part-Time VPE 208

Outseta

APRIL 11, 2019

Why most SaaS companies are blind to some of the best talent on the market By Geoff Roberts 9 min read I believe that most SaaS companies are missing out of a major opportunity when hiring—the opportunity to hire more part-time help, where the employee acts as a fully integrated (albeit part-time) member of the team on an ongoing basis.

CTO Hire 52

CTO Hire Sales Hiring B2B New CTO 52

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. For example, I referenced hiring a Chief Revenue Officer, Bill. This is never going to work.”

CTO Hire 173

CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 173

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. Sam Jacobs: Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. We went through an acquisition and we got bought.

Scale 117

Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach Scaling 117

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 98

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

I think it’s more around a consciousness of what you know, or what you may not know, and then hiring around it to become successful. ” I’m kind of like, “Even if you make one or two sales in the next couple of months, with your VP sales, it’s going to take you three months to go and hire.”

New CTO 173

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 173

Teamgate

JUNE 11, 2025

Sara Cowie, Head of Customer Acquisition at Syncano , emphasizes the importance of these features: “Uptime and performance are vital to us. Sarah Kim, CTO at GrowthCraft, highlighted the cost efficiency: “As our system grew to hundreds of services, our previous monitoring solution became prohibitively expensive.

Scale 52

Scale Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Payments 52

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 24, 2021

A thanks to [Marsh 00:00:34] for stepping in at the beginning of the month, and a great session with our own Jason Warner and Adrian, the CTO of Zendesk. Lionetti, the CMO at Confluent, and most recently, the CTO from Zendesk, Adrian. Excited to be back emceeing. That was the start of the Month of Scale. I do my own reference calls.

CTO Coach 164

CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 164

Panintelligence

JUNE 7, 2024

In this blog, we asked Panintelligence CEO Zandra Moore and CTO Ken Miller what they think are some of the most frequent mistakes in SaaS development and offer actionable insights to help you steer clear of them. We often see companies too focused on customer acquisition, and not enough on retaining customers. We’re complex.

CTO Hire 98

CTO Hire SaaS Business Underperforming Technical Team 98

OpenView Labs

JULY 2, 2020

Time and time again SaaS companies are promising customers that they will save hundreds of thousands of dollars, but their pricing strategies are only capturing a tiny fraction of that savings. If you’re offering freemium in hopes of increasing customer acquisition, you might want to reconsider your pricing strategy.

Pricing 138

Pricing SaaS Payments Payments SaaS 138

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

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. Eric Yuan: Because, at that time, we really needed a product.

Sales Hiring 139

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 139

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 111

Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 111

ProfitWell

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

When Co-founder and CTO of Chargify , Michael Klett isn’t brewing his own beer, he’s crafting billing experiences. This can range from help with pricing, retention, and churn, as well as providing subscription financial metrics so a customer can see everything that is going on from acquisition all the way through to retention.

CTO Hire 98

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 98

OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

To stay on top of the fast paced, evolving digital world, issues like hiring and managing a diverse and highly skilled SaaS workforce, as well as security and privacy concerns impacting everything from customer contracts to product strategies and new market development, HR and security management is being elevated into in the C-Suite.

Part-Time CTO 69

Part-Time CTO CTO CTO Hire Management 69

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

You’ll need Cost of Revenue to calculate your Gross Margin, which in turn you need to calculate Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Payback Time and to understand your company’s unit economics in general. While not a GAAP-metric, it’s widely adopted and understood (examples here , here and here ).

Startup 90

Startup Merchant Services DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

ProfitWell

JANUARY 2, 2020

Because the contracts are typically much higher in these sales agreements, B2B subscriptions often require a much longer sales process before your customer will consider making a purchase. Traditional sales teams live mainly on the acquisition stage in the cycle. Contract length. B2C contract length. B2B contract length.

B2C 52

B2C Subscription Payment Features Payments 52

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

More and more people are hiring leaders, not for past experience, but for capability and capacity. We hire a third-party firm. We also measure NPS, and we benchmark that across all acquisitions. Q: Based on your acquisition experience, are for-sale businesses focusing on the customer and NPS? That would just be crazy.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

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

Point Nine Land

APRIL 9, 2021

A technical co-founder or CTO is always a great-to-have at this stage and becomes a must-have as the business scales beyond seed. In other words, suppliers start generating more and more of their total revenue via the marketplace over time (or buyers start spending more and more of their budget on your marketplace).

Marketplace as a Service 59

Marketplace as a Service Payments B2B SaaS Payments 59

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2025

China Is Playing a Different Game Entirely The Models Youve Barely Heard Of: DeepSeek R1: 93% performance of OpenAI’s o3-mini at fraction of training cost Alibaba Qwen 2.5-Max: As Andrew Bosworth (Meta CTO) noted: “This is our space race…there’s very few secrets. 80% cheaper than predecessor, costs 0.2%

AI Search 257

AI Search AI CTO Hire ChatGPT 257

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

How many CSMs should you hire? This acquisition reinforces Sprinklr’s mission to define and lead the customer experience management industry with the world’s first Unified Front Office. The question is not whether a CSM is a valuable asset to a SaaS business, but rather, how valuable are they? What is their ROI? Weekend Wisdom.

Scale 43

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

Outseta

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

The challenge in each case is the same—the company is hiring you at a lower level of commitment than a full-time hire, usually with the expectation that they will see some ROI relatively quickly. Full-time Head of Marketing I’ve been hired to lead marketing teams at four companies in a full-time capacity now.

Sales Hiring 50

Sales Hiring CTO Coach CTO Hire Underperforming Technical Team 50

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

We know, by persona, by ICP, how people respond to what, for a long period of time, and how we can, more specifically, get meetings with these individuals,” because that was the name of the game. We brought in this brilliant CTO who’s got a PhD in informatics. I see this online all the time. ” Seriously?

Scale 87

Scale Artificial Intelligence Sales Recruiting Consulting 87

SaaStr

DECEMBER 16, 2023

You really need a great CTO, not just a good business team. A mediocre tech team, a part-time CTO, or even just a decent CTO just doesn’t get you there. Finally you have great customers and traction — but you can’t afford to hire all the people you need to meet their needs. True in B2C too of course.

Part-Time VPE 291

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Sales Recruiting VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) 291

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 225

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire Scale 225

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2025

Co-founders Dharmesh Shah (CTO) and Brian Halligan (Chairperson) shared at SaaStr Annual the unfiltered truth on building an SMB powerhouse, pivoting to product-led growth, and why the “M” segment is SaaS gold. The company had to retrench and restart their global efforts multiple times.

Scale 188

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Scaling 188

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2024

Public valuations are still at a fraction of their 2021 peaks, but seed rounds are more expensive than ever. He says that there are three main reasons for this: The cost of customer acquisition has gone up. The Qualities of Great CTOs (00:15:54) To identify great CTOs, it may take interviewing 20 candidates.

CTO Hire 288

CTO Hire Development Team Review Software Review Technical Review 288

SmartKarrot

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

She is active on LinkedIn, where she helps SaaS companies optimize their customer acquisition, demand generation, product positioning , and growth plans. He is known for his knowledge and expertise in SEO, SaaS demand, and paid customer acquisition. One of the top SaaS influencers is Dharmesh Shah , co-founder, and CTO of HubSpot.

VP of Engineering 10

VP of Engineering Scale SaaS Venture Capital 10

SaaStr

APRIL 18, 2019

And I thank a lot of that to actually Met Gourniak, who I hired at that time. And the wave we’re riding at G2, the wave we’re all riding here at Saster is this fourth industrial revolution which really means everything in business is being automated and companies rather than hiring people they are now automating everything.

Sales Recruiting 229

Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering Scale SaaS Payments 229

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2019

And this is not just about something you do in a later stage, when you raise that $120,000,000 that PJ from Sherpa had done, but something you can do at the series A stage when you’re doing small hires to build out your team. I used to be a CTO and operator, co-founder of a SaaS start up. So we think a little bit differently.

Outsourcing Services 110

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Technical Review 110

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

As for Sam, prior to Loom, Sam spent over 4 years at Salesforce following their acquisition of Quip, a startup Salesforce acquired for $750M where Sam was also the 1st sales leader. 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?

Scale 239

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 239

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2018

At our inaugural SaaStr Europa last June, podcast host-with-the-most Harry Stebbings sat down with MuleSoft Founder and CTO Ross Mason to discuss the organization’s sales strategy, building a strong company culture, how to think about international expansion, and much more. dollar acquisition. Harry : We’ve had a billion?dollar

Technical Advisors 220

Technical Advisors Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 220

OPEXEngine

JUNE 16, 2020

Hired CEOs: It’s the Board’s Company vs. It’s My Company to Run. You become a hired CEO primarily through one path — climbing the corporate ladder at a large tech company [5a], reaching the GM or CXO level, and then deciding to branch out. 6] Like it or not, it’s not a bad three-part formula for climbing the corporate ladder.

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Venture Capital Technical Advisors 59

OnStartups

JULY 7, 2021

And I think part of it's because you've been in the game for a while and you're incredibly successful. Is your title CTO? Dharmesh: Yes, CTO. How do you have time to have your hands in all this different stuff? HubSpot has not done a lot of acquisitions in the past. We can switch off The Hustle acquisition.

Payment Methods 140

Payment Methods Technical Review Software Review Payment Solutions 140

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. 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?

Sales Hiring 157

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Scale CTO Hire 157