SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

I’m talking about product-led growth as an investment strategy, but really my background is 10 years of operating experience in the product-led growth world. Now I’m investing in that. I say investment strategy, but really it’s like how do you build a company that’s focused on product-led growth?

Investment 100

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 100

CloudGeometry

MARCH 3, 2022

Feature value: a function of time investment of users and customers The set of problems that your SaaS solves won’t survive long in the digital age if all it does is cut prices. Solving each customer problem as a function of how much time is saved by a particular feature?

Well Architected Framework 130

Well Architected Framework VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) SaaS Cloud 130

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

SmartKarrot

JULY 27, 2021

Role: Head of Customer Success Location: San Francisco, CA, US Organization: Turn/River Capital As a Head of Customer Success, you will work with the leadership teams at 2 to 3 of the Turn/River portfolio companies to develop and implement retention and growth strategies and build operational best practices.

Development Team Review 10

Development Team Review Technical Review Customer Success Systems Review 10

ChurnZero

AUGUST 11, 2020

Just like in the first wave, your customers’ lives will be turned upside down once the next wave hits. As customers struggle to adjust and manage, they’ll want to know their troubles are being heard by the businesses they interact with. Customer Success teams are in a unique position to listen to their customers’ challenges.

Retention 97

Retention Strategy Underperforming Technical Team Software Review 97

OPEXEngine

JANUARY 11, 2022

Additionally, it is a flexible model that allows customers to buy only what they need (i.e., There are many vendor benefits, too — it is easier to sell and it embodies a customer success solution orientation that drives high customer lifetime value and revenue. Planning and investments. Four pricing models.

Pricing 52

Pricing Payment Solutions Outsourced Development Compensation 52

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Ten years ago, there was nobody who SaaS founders could ask in order to learn how to do, for example, inbound marketing, low-touch sales or customer success. Many of the tactics that everybody is using today hadn’t been invented yet. In the last ten years the playbook has been written and subsequently published.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 31, 2019

The wave of SaaS companies that built themselves on the likes of AWS and Azure have reinforced the pre-eminence of cloud computing. And that changes a lot: how we think about marketing, how we think about what our product is and how we think about what customer success actually is…This shift moves us from brand promiscuity to brand loyalty.”.

Payment Solutions 259

Payment Solutions Payment Methods Software SaaS Payments 259

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

Maria : Yeah, I think, coming from a marketing side and thinking about that as a marketer, marketing is all about investments. There’s none of the brands that you’ve seen get to an IPO or continue on to a Fortune 500 company that is not making some significant investments there. Aaron : And they just have to do it.

Sales Hiring 210

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 210

OPEXEngine

JUNE 11, 2020

In a SaaS model, the customer “rents” the use of a software product – the customer has the right to use the software but does not own it. The product is hosted by the vendor or a 3 rd party (like AWS). The customer has access to a continually updating product and pays the vendor a subscription monthly, quarterly, or annually.

SaaS Payments 52

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Subscription Payment Features 52

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

On an adoption basis, there have been some “green shoots,” particularly with Klaviyo and the impact they’ve had bringing AI from a project siloed or customer interface level and into their core business where they’ve automated 700 humans and over two-thirds of their customer success. Why is Klaviyo noteworthy? What about ROI?

AI Search 213

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 213

SmartKarrot

JANUARY 11, 2023

The pie tastes awful. Lack of success means the customer may cancel their subscription. Or just stagnate and not grow their investment with your money. It’s the Success Outcome, not whether your products or services performed, that determines future revenue. Similarly, let’s consider the pie. It’s a disaster!

Entertainment 19

Entertainment AWS B2B Customer Success 19

SaaStr

OCTOBER 15, 2019

So one place would be in your customer success organization. We were doing more customer support, less customer success. It was less about making sure that customers were happy and individually reaching out to them. So that means retooling your customer success organization. Thanks Allie.

Underperforming Technical Team 157

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring compliance SMB 157

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

And we’re also pleased, now to have almost a hundred thousand different SaaS products listed there, and being backed by a hundred million dollars from LinkedIn and some great investors that do allow us to keep investing in this marketplace. And companies in general, are also right now, investing more in software and digital.

Software Review 185

Software Review Scale Technical Review SaaS 185

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Ed Lenta, the SVP and GM of Databricks, had the rare opportunity of scaling three hypergrowth companies — VMware, AWS, and Databricks. Is there a recipe or formula that will predict the success of a pre-growth, high-potential company? Invest in and put that into the market to start softening the beach. It wasn’t thoughtful.

Scale 195

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 195

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 16, 2020

Whether Customer Success or Sales should own the renewal, expansion, and upsell is a hot-button issue in today’s SaaS sphere. This Customer Success showdown, which took the form of an Oxford-style debate, was held at BIG RYG, ChurnZero’s annual Customer Success conference.

Scale 98

Scale Customer Success SaaS Payments Sales 98

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

Investing at a breathtaking pace. In many ways, your Quality of Life will simply be awful. Your quality of life will simply be awful if your co-founders aren’t as committed as you, and if they aren’t at least close to as good as you. This friend is one of the hardest working people in the industry. Do not pass go.

Part-Time VPE 286

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire AWS New CTO 286

SmartKarrot

MARCH 2, 2023

Here are the top 15 venture capital podcast leaders shaping the industry with their visionary and thought leading podcasts covering a range of topics from startups, investments, trends, interviews, and more! He invested in more than 20 early-stage companies. Azeem is also a creator of the Exponential View newsletter and podcast.

Venture Capital 10

Venture Capital Scale Entrepreneurship EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) 10

SmartKarrot

SEPTEMBER 15, 2022

Scaling through SaaS accelerates this process by offering several benefits that make it easier for companies to grow without having to make major investments up front: Speed: SaaS solutions are easy to deploy and can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, which enables teams to work from any location at any time.

Scale 10

Scale Cloud Enterprise Scaling 10

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Flex is a finance super app built around a credit card with unique Net-60 day terms that enables businesses to make an investment today and pay it back 60 days later with zero percent interest. There are still marketing teams that don’t own a revenue number, which is crazy. in order to keep a seat at the revenue table.”

Metrics 93

Metrics Revenue Scale Marketing 93

SmartKarrot

OCTOBER 18, 2021

A good product with lousy support is the same as an awful product with good support in terms of customer retention. Even if your company has impeccable customer service, testimonials from happy customers make all the difference. It’s a specific opinion they’ve formed after a few interactions with a company.

Social Media 10

Social Media Technical Review AWS Branding 10

Chart Mogul

DECEMBER 6, 2023

Capital will return to SaaS markets, and M&A activity will accelerate Yoram Wijngaarde , CEO and Founder of Dealroom “VC investment into SaaS companies could start growing again in 2024. SaaS investment will close at around $100B this year, a four year low, and down from $264B in 2021.

AI Search 52

AI Search SaaS Generative AI ChatGPT 52

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 18, 2023

As always, you’ll hear real stories/strategies/tactics from real revenue operators spanning: sales, marketing, customer success, operations/enablement, product and hiring. Seth Hammac , Global Partnerships & Alliances @ AWS Ok so what CAN you do to set yourself up for success?

Scale 68

Scale VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Enterprise 68

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

We have, as you all should have, the customer success teams. They’re onboarding, and their job is to make the customer successful and help them use the features of the product. The investment in business process change and workflows gets so complicated that who the hell is going to build Salesforce again?

Part-Time VPE 222

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 222

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Low touch you’re gonna talk a lot about what we call customer success teams. Customer success teams are basically about building at scale this self-serve engine. I believe pricing is not enough … There’s not enough investment from companies going into pricing and thinking about pricing.

SaaS Payments 231

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 231

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2019

Most recently Yousuf was the CIO & VP of Customer Success @ Moveworks, the advanced AI built for enterprise providing automatic resolution of IT issues. Most recently, Yousuf was the CIO and VP of Customer Success at Moveworks, the advanced AI built for enterprise, providing automatic resolution of IT issues.

Technical Advisors 154

Technical Advisors Scale Technical Review Payment Solutions 154

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

Usage-based pricing (UBP) , also known as consumption-based pricing, allows customers to pay for products according to how much they use. AWS and other infrastructure providers have been using UBP for nearly a decade. This should include both customers that show leading signs of potential churn (i.e.

Headcount 73

Headcount SaaS Compensation Acquisition 73

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

We’ve all seen AWS and what they’ve done with their platform. One of the early co-investments with my prior firm in Bessemer was in Shopify. If you look at companies like Cornerstone OnDemand, which we invested in a long time ago, it took them some time to get to 100 million of ARR. It is staggering.

Sales Hiring 157

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 157

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

We can save companies $100,000 on their AWS bill. Everybody wants to save $100,000 on their AWS bill right now. We want to tell anybody that listens, you can save $100,000 on your AWS bill and demos are actually as high as they’ve ever been in late stage tech. We found something that works. Jason Lemkin: Got it.

Merchant Services 180

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 180

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 24, 2019

There are plenty of companies that actually have that initial success. It’s less expensive than it’s ever been in terms of actually getting a product to market, whether it’s leveraging platforms like Salesforce or GCP or AWS or Heroku. “We’re really trying to accelerate success.

Scale 151

Scale Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence AI 151

Sales Hacker

MARCH 10, 2020

Tackle can give you access to the AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud platforms and your end customer can purchase your solution through those marketplaces, which can streamline the entire process and help you skip a bunch of steps. It’s an investment in a function. Sam Jacobs: Hey everybody, it’s Sam Jacobs.

Sales Hiring 73

Sales Hiring Scale Marketing AWS 73

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 14, 2021

And our more traditional marketing and then a ton of engineers because we’re working on product every single day and that investment needs to be big. I actually was supposed to go to AWS and he called me and he said, “Hey, I’m going to go work for Paul Allen.” I was working with HR on his behalf, of finance.

Sales Recruiting 81

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 81

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2019

Innovation is about empathy with your customers. It’s all about customer obsession! In this session, Sandy Carter, AWS Vice President will hone your superpower – not of customer focus, or customer driven, but customer obsessed. Then you can talk about driving efficiency.

VP of Engineering 153

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Technical Review Development Team Review 153

OpenView Labs

JUNE 25, 2019

Obviously, this calculation assumes you have a firm grasp on your sales & marketing expenses, MRR by customer, and gross margin (don’t forget, expenses for customer success resources focused on onboarding should be included in your Cost of Goods Sold). If you haven’t already nailed those down, you need to start there.

Scale 40

Scale Development Team Review Software Review Benchmarks 40

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 7, 2021

Invest in your development internally and externally. Again, I am a big believer in the power of customer storytelling for helping sales outcomes. Find a company that will allow you to be your best professional self and also invest in your personal life – it doesn’t have to be one at the expense of the other! Hang Black.

Scale 130

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 130

SmartKarrot

JANUARY 18, 2022

India has seen exponential growth in SaaS investments in the last decade. Zoho is committed to offering outstanding customer service. Instead of marketing, Zoho invests in R&D and customer service. The company offers a data analytics platform based on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Clouds, and Microsoft Azure.

SaaS Payments 11

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Methods Payments 11

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 27, 2020

But now we have the data that actually shows our customers are managing to set up loads of answers and get resolutions. When we talk to them, it’s somebody from customer support or customer success who’s doing this frequently, someone a little more on the technically sophisticated end of the team.

Machine Learning 23

Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Scale User Experience 23