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10 Things Startups Get Wrong Selling to Developers and Engineers (from the CRO Who Scaled Databricks from

SaaStr

Selling to developers and engineers isn’t like selling to any other buyer. As CRO of Databricks, he’s built one of the most successful developer-focused sales organizations in the world. ” The Opportunity : Technical founders are often celebrities in developer communities. Understand what they’d pay for.

Scale 261
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A Founder’s Guide to Building and Scaling Marketing Channels: Lessons from Datadog’s CMO and First Marketing Hire

SaaStr

And just like product development, they take time to mature into something stable and reliable. At Datadog, their first focus was sponsored trade shows – specifically targeting the AWS ecosystem. Scaling Success: The Datadog Re:Invent Story Datadog’s experience with AWS Re:Invent demonstrates this approach perfectly.

Scale 233
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How Anthropic Rocketed to $4B ARR — And Why Your B2B Playbook May Already Be Obsolete

SaaStr

This creates several advantages: Immediate scalability : No lengthy enterprise sales cycles Usage-based pricing : Revenue scales directly with customer success Lower customer acquisition costs : Developers can start using APIs instantly Key Pricing : Claude Sonnet 4 is priced at $3 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.

B2B 245
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The Complete Guide to SaaS Pricing Strategy

Tom Tunguz

Price low to minimize adoption friction, grow quickly, and then move up-market after developing broad adoption. Skimming is less common in the software world because few startups develop a product at launch that will be accepted by the most sophisticated customers (and those willing to pay prices that generate the greatest margin).

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NVIDIA Hits $4 Trillion: What Founders Can Learn from the Greatest Growth Story Ever Told

SaaStr

The B2B Parallel : Like the best B2B companies, NVIDIA created switching costs through their software stack (drivers, development tools, APIs). Once developers learned CUDA and game studios optimized for GeForce, moving to competitors became painful. Key Lesson : Don’t just solve the immediate problem.

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Palantir’s +79% vs Bill’s -43%: The AI Divide That Defined SaaS Performance in 1H’25

SaaStr

Veeva Systems (VEEV): +35% YTD Life sciences specialization benefiting from continued pharmaceutical and biotech innovation Specialized CRM and content management solutions indispensable for drug development timelines Domain expertise in highly regulated sector creating strong competitive advantages Accelerated drug development and complex regulatory (..)

AI 204
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The 40% Problem: Do Your Sales Reps Really Cover All Their Accounts? And Is AI The Answer? With Yamini Rangan, CEO HubSpot

SaaStr

Imagine telling your board you’re only using 40% of your AWS infrastructure or 40% of your engineering team’s output. The Productivity Multiplier Effect When HubSpot measures AI adoption in their engineering organization, they’re seeing 95% of developers using some form of AI-assisted code generation daily.

Scale 244