TechEmpower SaaS

JULY 31, 2023

One way to approach that last question is to use this simple model: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) How will your business reach prospects? Look at different customer acquisition channels, how they are converting, and the expected lifetime value of customers acquired through those channels. What does the business do?

Metrics 390

Metrics Startup Scale New CTO 390

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2022

There’s been a run of incredible M&A, from Salesforce buying Slack for $27B, to Qualtrics’ $8b acquisition by SAP (and later IPO at $20b+), to Github’s $7.5b Some folks will prefer post-acquisition life. Most surprisingly, my CTO — the most start-up-ey guy I know — is still there. It is breathtaking.

Payment Solutions 349

Payment Solutions New CTO Payments Payment Services 349

SaaStr

JULY 4, 2022

2018’s Top 50 Acquisitions in SaaS. Some folks will prefer post-acquisition life. Most surprisingly, my CTO — the most start-up-ey guy I know — is still there. You may be asked to own new stuff beyond just what your company / app does. It’s a lot of change. The pressure is off. Not all of it. See previous point.

SaaS Payments 300

SaaS Payments New CTO Payment Solutions Payments 300

SaaStr

JANUARY 22, 2021

Ciara Peter (Gainsight VP of Product & Design) and Mickey Alon (CTO & Founder of Gainsight PX) share their practical tips for product leaders looking to achieve business growth. A product-led growth strategy relies on the product itself as the primary vehicle for customer acquisition, conversion, retention, and expansion.

Scale 284

Scale New CTO CTO Acquisition 284

TechEmpower SaaS

AUGUST 21, 2023

Common Signs You Need a Technical Review We’ve already mentioned the most common signs that you might need a technical review: Slow or late delivery: “I’ve authorized two new developers, and we’re still behind.” Are you preparing to expand, take your business in a new direction, or take on new partners? And what causes that?

Technical Review 390

Technical Review Software Review Development Team Review Systems Review 390

SaaStr

JANUARY 3, 2021

What a next level acquisition! Salesforce is good at mega-acquisitions. They know how to take an established brand and grow it faster, and build or expand a new core offering around it. Salesforce may not be great at creating brand new things anymore. Bret Taylor is President and COO of Salesforce — and Facebook’s ex-CTO.

VP of Engineering 187

VP of Engineering New CTO CTO Acquisition 187

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2022

With Aaron Levie, Stewart Butterfield, David Sacks (fresh off Yammer’s acquisition for $1b+, which seemed so high at the time), Leyla Seka from Salesforce, David Ulevitch from OpenDNS (who sold to Cisco just a few months later for $800m, which again seemed enormous at the time), and the list went on. It was awesome.

Scale 307

Scale Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO 307

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

5/ Moving from CTO-led -> VPE-led dev team. Most of us hire a VP of Engineering to take over from our CTO because we see the CTO is getting burnt out, or has trouble building a dev team > 8-9 folks, or gets disinterested in solving technical debt, bugs, etc. That’s when you want to lean in. More here.

Part-Time VPE 293

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 293

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Since 2010 we’ve seen more startups, funds, and capital than ever before, but with this drastic increase, investors are seeing unexpected new trends reshaping the future of the industry. The panel that we are in is called Is Seed the New Series A, and this is a question that I’ve been asking informally yesterday and today.

New CTO 177

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 177

SaaStr

JULY 2, 2025

The escalating pace of job cuts is particularly striking given Microsoft’s strong financial performance and comes after CEO Satya Nadella revealed that up to 30% of the company’s code is now written by AI, with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott predicting that number could hit 95% by 2030.

Technical Review 206

Technical Review AI VP of Engineering Azure 206

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. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!

Part-Time VPE 290

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 290

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

We’ll also hear Andrew Chen, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, talking about the changing landscape of customer acquisition. For Slack, that was clearly the engineering and dev communities, who love new tools. And it was very successful. We have a lot of people going to slack.com, and it’s very simple to start a team.

Outsourcing Services 215

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Well, in the past several years, there’s been a tremendous number of companies that have built specifically for developers and use this as a way to get into these new markets, to displace incumbents and disrupt the competition. You have the opportunity to upsell new features and capabilities to them. The contract size grows.

Underperforming Technical Team 210

Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Development Part-Time VPE 210

FastSpring

DECEMBER 22, 2020

With this new investment, we are already increasing our pace of innovation and have a very exciting roadmap of things to come over the next 12 months. As the worlds of sales rep driven commerce and ecommerce converge, the acquisition of SalesRight will help us create a leading solution to enable this trend. We acquired SalesRight.

Payment Methods 131

Payment Methods Payment Services Payment Solutions Payments 131

Stax

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

As CTO, Sundt will accelerate the delivery of new products, features, and functionality that unlock and drive increased value for Stax customers and partners. As CTO of Clearent by Xplor, he helped grow its transaction processing from $2 billion to over $20 billion annually. To learn more about Stax, visit staxpayments.com.

CTO 88

CTO Stax Payments Merchant Services 88

User Pilot

MAY 1, 2024

. “Localmind” experienced steady growth until Airbnb made an acquisition offer in 2012, which Lenny accepted. Following the acquisition, he transitioned from engineering to the product team , marking a pivotal moment in his career. This requires rapid cycles of building, shipping, gathering feedback , and iterating.

Underperforming Technical Team 102

Underperforming Technical Team New CTO Interviewing CTO 102

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

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. When we made the acquisition, I remember being in a meeting with our senior executives. About four months after we made the acquisition, we announced to the team we were changing the name.

Sales Hiring 247

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 247

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Customer Onboarding Specialist: Responsible for helping new customers get up and running with the company’s products. Time to Market for New Products : Also known as velocity, this metric measures the CTO’s effectiveness and speed in rolling new products /features. Come up with product and new feature ideas.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

ProfitWell

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

RevOps isn’t new—some form of revenue operations has been around for a very long time, it simply lacked a title. When Co-founder and CTO of Chargify , Michael Klett isn’t brewing his own beer, he’s crafting billing experiences. Said hops came from a new cultivar out of the Pacific Northwest called Cascade. Key takeaways.

CTO Hire 98

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 98

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 5, 2021

In conversation with Blake Bartlett , she walked us through how B2C and B2B growth strategies compare across each phase of the customer journey from acquisition to retention and expansion. At Acorns, my team included user acquisition, CRM marketing, and growth product.” Acquisition. Defining Growth . Hila explains. Activation.

B2C 97

B2C B2B New CTO Acquisition 97

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.

CTO Hire 98

CTO Hire SaaS Business Underperforming Technical Team 98

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

What’s their new CAC Payback Time? New Gross Margins? 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. Let’s start with Payroll – Support.

Startup 90

Startup Merchant Services DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2019

The catch was he had just moved his family four kids to New York city. We had no New York city presence. I had my CTO and everyone would be like, “You can’t do this. So, we decided to be flexible and through that we actually opened a New York office. Real connection, but there was a catch. This was a problem.

CTO Hire 176

CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 176

OpenView Labs

JULY 2, 2020

New for 2020: SaaS Pricing and COVID-19. In this brand-new report, we finally answer the question “Freemium or free trial?” Pricing Low-Touch SaaS: How to Approach Pricing and Packaging a New SaaS App, by Example. SaaS pricing is one of the most important (but difficult) decisions a new business makes.

Pricing 138

Pricing SaaS Payments Payments SaaS 138

OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

To combat this and be more agile, SaaS management is morphing and restructuring functional management and multiplying the number of new C-Suite titles like Chief Customer Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, and Chief Product Officer, not to mention Chief Performance Officer and Chief Security Officer. Chief Product Officer.

Part-Time CTO 69

Part-Time CTO CTO CTO Hire Management 69

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2020

And by the time the song comes out, you’re not even going to really appreciate it because you’ve written 20 new songs, and those are the ones that you can’t wait to hear. And I always just also love to hear about companies that are started outside of New York City and San Francisco. So it’s a great story.

Marketplace as a Service 111

Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 111

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 24, 2021

Great to see a lot of repeat attendees and some new ones. 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. I’m Travis Bryant.

CTO Coach 161

CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 161

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

Major challenges facing a new CEO [19:40]. We went through an acquisition and we got bought. I got into the game there, obviously went through the acquisition, that’s how we came up with the idea for the company. It really lended itself to being this new category, this post signature type of contract product.

Scale 117

Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach Scaling 117

ProfitWell

FEBRUARY 14, 2020

For example, if you subscribe to the New York Times , you pay a flat price per month or year. Spotify, on the other hand, added discounted tiers for Spotify Premium in a bid to increase acquisition and retention. What is flat rate pricing? Who is using a flat rate pricing strategy? The reason for this success? And lots of them.

Pricing 59

Pricing Technical Cofounder Scale New CTO 59

Outseta

APRIL 11, 2019

Think of the best CTO-level software developers that you know—do you think your product would progress faster if they were building it 2-3 days per week, or if you hired an average developer in a full-time capacity? . ” For example, maybe your company sells its products primarily online using a low-touch customer acquisition model.

CTO Hire 52

CTO Hire Sales Hiring B2B New CTO 52

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

And also, we always prioritize the features requested by our existing customers over the new prospects. 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 know, earlier today we talked about creating a new category. Welcome Eric.

Sales Hiring 141

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 141

Point Nine Land

APRIL 9, 2021

So if you’re a US-based startup, you might be able to shoot slightly higher ;) Unlike SaaS companies which have been around for years, B2B marketplaces are a relatively new category and not many investors have invested in them yet. Economics and Acquisition ?? Economics and Acquisition ?? Market Characteristics ??

Marketplace as a Service 59

Marketplace as a Service Payments B2B SaaS Payments 59

Point Nine Land

SEPTEMBER 7, 2021

There are several reasons for this line of thought: The US is by far the largest market, it’s relatively homogenous (compared with Europe), and it’s where you’ll find most early adopters of new technology. It led to a 3x increase of MRR within a few months and created the foundation for a scalable, profitable customer acquisition engine.

Venture Capital 52

Venture Capital New CTO Scale CTO 52

ProfitWell

JANUARY 2, 2020

Not only does your sales team need to bring new customers through the door, but they also need to ensure that what they’re selling matches up exactly with those customers’ expectations. Traditional sales teams live mainly on the acquisition stage in the cycle. That’s what makes subscription sales so difficult. Marketing efforts.

B2C 52

B2C Payment Features Subscription Payments 52

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

This acquisition reinforces Sprinklr’s mission to define and lead the customer experience management industry with the world’s first Unified Front Office. This helps brands manage customer-facing functions in their entirety, from marketing and advertising to research, care, and social engagement. Congrats on the collaboration, friends.

Scale 43

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

If you're generating something that's brand new, like a brand new category, nobody understands about it. In my past roles at ACORN, GitLab, whenever I started as a head of growth, one of the data points I will look into is what's the percentage of new users coming back the second day or coming back second month?

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

Additionally, “leapfrog” candidates—those who come from a level below the C-suite, such as senior vice presidents—now make up roughly 5% of new chief execs. 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?

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52