SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

Strategic finance can be thought of as a project management function for your company’s underlying business model or a BizOps team that operates within a more financial lens. Strategic Finance optimizes a company’s underlying business model to create long-term value by increasing revenue and decreasing costs.

Scale 168

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 168

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

It was around that time about 12 years ago that Jeff Bezos launched AWS, and some of you may remember that, when he did this, Wall Street analysts were looking at him and saying, “Why would you take what’s already a very unprofitable business and drive it further into the red by investing in this AWS initiative?”

Cloud 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

OpenView Labs

JUNE 16, 2021

But without careful planning and effective execution, consumption-based pricing can elongate sales cycles, negatively impact customers, and squelch company fortunes. Usage-based pricing is often lauded as the holy grail of SaaS pricing models. In 2020, JFrog and Snowflake went public—and both companies have a usage-based pricing model.

Pricing 64

Pricing Scale Forecasting AWS 64

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 11, 2021

At its core, gross margin (GM) speaks to the relationship between sales and its costs. For example, 84% GM means that for every dollar of product sold, a business keeps 84 cents. Understand the levers of costs, also known as cost of goods sold (COGS) or cost of sales (COS). Scale reveals the depths of operational leverage.

Scale 52

Scale Payment Methods Payment Services Systems Review 52

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 13, 2018

As Workplace’s global head, Julien Codorniou has been spending the past few years exploring how to make his department align with Facebook’s mission while executing an entirely different business model that relies on companies promoting community within their workforce. Workplace is about connecting people.

Scale 151

Scale Marketplace as a Service Mobile Sales Hiring 151

OpenView Labs

DECEMBER 2, 2020

The scale of the company and the size of the problem you were trying to solve kept changing dramatically.”. Luckily, the team at MongoDB was not one to be intimidated by the prospect of playing in the big leagues. Every three to six months, the company was completely different,” she recalled. This kind of scenario happens all the time.

Marketing 54

Marketing AWS Scale Development 54

ProfitWell

MAY 12, 2020

Both companies provide tools that allow businesses to automate their marketing, sales, and customer service efforts. Openshift — Like Google's offering, Red Hat's Openshift can use all the development tools that developers need while providing automatic scaling and deployment of applications created with them.

Cloud 59

Cloud Azure SaaS Underperforming Technical Team 59

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

It wasn’t the case 20 or even 10 years ago, where the business models of the internet were more focused on eCommerce, marketplaces, or even advertising. Customer acquisition is basically how much do you spend in terms of sales people, sales team, and in terms of marketing to acquire a new customer.

SaaS Payments 230

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 230

User Pilot

APRIL 30, 2024

Userpilot is a leading B2B product growth tool that excels at in-app engagement , product analytics, customer feedback collection, customer support, and integrations. It’s suitable for businesses wanting control over their infrastructure and the ability to scale. What are the benefits of the SaaS model?

SaaS Payments 104

SaaS Payments Payment Services Payment Methods Payment Solutions 104

Casey Accidental

DECEMBER 11, 2023

In a previous post , I talked about how product work post-product/market fit shifts from zero to one innovation to features, growth, and scaling work. What became clear after building this model of how Eventbrite grows is that all of this effort would no longer drive the kind of growth Eventbrite needed to be successful on the public markets.

Payments 113

Payments Scale Payment Solutions Technical Review 113

OpenView Labs

DECEMBER 15, 2020

Cloud marketplaces like AWS Marketplace, Azure Marketplace and Google Cloud Platform Marketplace are digital storefronts where companies can list their offerings for software buyers to find, purchase and provision software. . And there are some pretty amazing opportunities for doing business this way.

Marketplace as a Service 52

Marketplace as a Service Cloud Scale B2B 52

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2021

It’s a brutal, awful slog in the start. I would say, it’s always good to call out just how awful it is to be a founder, to be an entrepreneur, because that is a unique perspective that you bring to the board room that no one else shares. Think of the business model behind being an independent board member.

Underperforming Technical Team 240

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring AWS Business Model 240

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 24, 2019

Machine learning can get the right message or recommendation out in a responsive way – not just from the customer’s next best action, but from the sales perspective, too. We’re helping startups and scale-ups that are strategically aligned with Salesforce, which is actually very important in terms of actually delivering solutions.

Scale 151

Scale Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence AI 151

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

Are there types of companies, market segments, industries, or business models where PLG does not make sense? If you have a very complicated product–for example you sell AWS or you sell Snowflake–those are infrastructure products. Those types of tools actually require work in the initial days of the sales motion.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

SaaStr

APRIL 24, 2020

327: John Mellor is Chief Strategy Officer @ Domo, the company that allows you to leverage BI at scale to empower your team with data. As for John, prior to Domo he served as vice president for strategy and business operations for Adobe’s Digital Experience business, driving more than $3 billion in annual revenue.

Scale 218

Scale Leadership Strategy Technology 218

CloudGeometry

FEBRUARY 7, 2022

2020 left no doubt: the growth of cloud computing is firmly grounded in the SaaS business model. It is the secret to effective tiering and scaling. Given the speed and intensity of competition in this market, it’s essential to SaaS success at any scale — and at any point on the lifecycle of your SaaS product offering.

Well Architected Framework 130

Well Architected Framework SaaS AWS Construction 130

Frontegg

JUNE 17, 2021

As explained in the first part of this series, we clearly saw why Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is the way to go when it comes to establishing self-serving applications that can be scaled up and developed fast(er). Lower Maintenance Requirements – All ongoing maintenance costs can be baked into your pricing models.

ECS (Elastic Container Service) 97

ECS (Elastic Container Service) multi-cloud Kubernetes K8S orchestration (Kubernetes) Scale 97

Chargify

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

These forward-thinking businesses are using diverse monetization strategies to better serve their customers and differentiate their offers from the competition. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a poster-child for the Relationship Economy—they truly understand the modern B2B customer. Salesforce is another great B2B example.

Subscription 75

Subscription Payment Features AWS Scale 75

Chart Mogul

OCTOBER 18, 2019

This is already at play — services like AWS, Stripe, and others have brought down the cost of starting and running a business to a fraction of what they used to be just a decade ago. Consumerizing even more parts of the activities of a typical business (logistics-as-a-service, etc.) doubling the number of leads).

Scale 71

Scale SaaS Automotive AWS 71

Chart Mogul

OCTOBER 18, 2019

This is already at play — services like AWS, Stripe, and others have brought down the cost of starting and running a business to a fraction of what they used to be just a decade ago. Consumerizing even more parts of the activities of a typical business (logistics-as-a-service, etc.) doubling the number of leads).

Scale 52

Scale SaaS Automotive AWS 52

Outseta

JANUARY 20, 2020

In this post I’m going to share the most important lessons about growing a SaaS business that I learned at Buildium—collectively, these things had an awful lot to do with the company being valued so highly. In light of the sale of Buildium last month I figured now is as good of a time as any to reflect on the most important ones.

SaaS Payments 145

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Methods Payment Services 145

ProfitWell

NOVEMBER 5, 2019

Yes, they might kick the can down the road a little longer, but they only delay the inevitable while giving customers an awful experience in the meantime. The key feature separating subscription businesses from their more standard counterparts is the recurring nature of payments. Of course, you know better.

Payment Features 49

Payment Features Subscription Payment Methods Merchant Services 49

OpenView Labs

MAY 5, 2021

Other businesses, like LinkedIn and Netflix, have strong histories of being producers of open-source projects, which provides a strategic recruitment and retention tool for top-tier engineering talent. Related podcast episode: How MongoDB Scaled Their Open-Source Product with a Bottom-Up and Top-Down Sales Motion.

Business 52

Business SMB Scale DevOps as a Service 52

OpenView Labs

JUNE 25, 2019

CAC encompasses all of the sales and marketing costs that a business has to shell out to land a single new customer (calculated as total sales & marketing expense in a period / total customers acquired in a period). Collectively, these expenses are referred to as Customer Acquisition Costs, or CAC for short.

Scale 40

Scale Development Team Review Software Review Benchmarks 40

SaaStr

AUGUST 22, 2020

Justin Bedecarre: And then another client of ours is an international company that has decided that they truly want to scale up in San Francisco. We don’t know when we’re going to be able to get safely back at scale. I need like sales, procurement, collaboration. Some of them are like a wait and see approach, right?

Sales Recruiting 148

Sales Recruiting Cloud CTO Hire Scale 148

ProfitWell

SEPTEMBER 25, 2019

One of the most famous lines from Citizen Kane is, “It's no trick to make an awful lot of money, if that's all you want is to do is make a lot of money.” That’s never been truer for software businesses in particular than in the past 10-15 years, with the internet stimulating an explosion in the number of viable revenue models.

Payments 40

Payments Revenue Payment Methods SaaS Payments 40

Hacking Revenue

FEBRUARY 26, 2016

While these services significantly lowered the costs of starting a new business, I believe that the people who said that sentence were missing the point of starting a business – to build an always growing, sustainable brand. was praised among young and leading-edge consumers once it was launched and immediately became a hit.

Outsourcing Services 53

Outsourcing Services Branding Outsourced Development Scale 53

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2019

In this session, Anna and Sameer will highlight SendGrid’s journey from growth stage through acquisition and why focusing on people and culture is mission critical to success as a company goes through the scaling process. We were signing up hundreds of new paying customers every month with five sales reps. Anna Khan | VP @ BVP.

Scale 137

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 137

Andreessen Horowitz

MARCH 5, 2024

Where we say, there’s also something called scale capture. So when we all talk about changing the healthcare industry, how messed up it is, and how it’s awful and everybody hates it, you know who’s responsible for it being a mess? You know, I did a bunch of reading leading up to this. How did we get there?

Healthcare 108

Healthcare Government Entrepreneurship Pricing 108

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2020

I’ve held a bunch of technology leadership roles in startups, in rocket ships and turnarounds, including about 10 years at Google, and just over three years leading efforts at Evernote. The first will be sharing five perspectives and things that I found to be useful in adjusting sales in the midst of a crisis or a turnaround.

Scale 189

Scale Sales Hiring Pricing Sales Recruiting 189

Point Nine Land

JANUARY 30, 2019

In my article “SaaS” is not to be understood as an industry, but rather as an innovation wave (product and business model innovation) which impacted the B2B software industry in the 2000s and came after the “on-premise” wave. As a side note, the “bigger picture” is the B2B software industry here. Infrastructure. Integration.

AI Search 70

AI Search AI B2B Software 70

SaaStr

MAY 21, 2019

It had about 100 people in the room and, at the time, it was most of the leading public and private cloud CEOs. Microsoft’s recent appointment of Satya as CEO, he was the head of cloud business and he’s driving the cloud agenda there, which is what’s lead to their massive market cap appreciation.

Cloud 169

Cloud Scale Finance Retention 169