Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 2, 2021

For the very first time, we’re releasing Engineer Chats , an internal podcast here at Intercom about all things engineering. Previously hosted by Jamie Osler , a Senior Product Engineer at Intercom for over seven years, it’s now up to Principal Systems Engineer Brian Scanlan to pick up the baton and keep the chats going.

Engineering 178

Engineering Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Systems Review 178

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2022

But a few thoughts on “the hardest part” for the first few stages: From $1-$100k in ARR, the hardest part is often how little revenue you get from each customer. So much work, so little revenue. Enough to pay some salaries and AWS bills, but it’s not that much. It’s just so much revenue to add in absolute terms.

SaaS 350

SaaS Headcount AWS Churn 350

SaaStr

APRIL 14, 2025

Head of AI Dialpad: How to Build AI at Scale GTM/ B2B Speakers: CEO HubSpot Yamini Rangan: Going More Multiproduct, Going More AI, and Going More SMB and More Enterprise CEO Dropbox Drew Houston: DropBoxs Third Act: AI & Content Intelligence CEO Calendly, Tope Awotona Open AMA and AI in 2026 CEO Clio, Jack Newton: Reaccelerating Vertical SaaS to (..)

VP of Engineering 192

VP of Engineering CTO Coach VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) Scale 192

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2022

So follow AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Let’s look a whole level up to the real canaries-in-the-coalmine: AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. And AWS grew 37% at a $74B run-rate , down a bit from 39% the prior quarter but still adding an insane amount of new revenue. That’s the engine we’re all building on.

Cloud 293

Cloud Azure AWS Engineering 293

FastSpring

APRIL 29, 2025

Publishers and developers need a payments partner built specifically to scale with player demand, ensuring reliable transactions and uninterrupted revenue even during the most intense spikes in player demand. When checkouts fail, you miss out on revenue. Below, well cover: Why scalability is important for video games and D2C.

Payment Services 133

Payment Services Payments Payment Solutions Payment Methods 133

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

AWS can’t support 20 partners equally. When partnering with big folks like Drata does with AWS, you have to bring business to them. Drata was one of three companies mentioned on stage by AWS’ Head of Partnerships because they did the most transactions on the marketplace than any other company. Otherwise, it falls apart.

AWS 279

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 279

SaaStr

MARCH 9, 2022

Focusing on smaller developers, in some ways it’s been a bit overshadowed by AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. DigitialOcean doesn’t want to take AWS, Azure and Google on in the enterprise and doesn’t really try. They are only 15% of the customers, but 83% of the revenue. Only 38% of revenue in North America.

Azure 272

Azure AWS SMB Cloud 272

SaaStr

JULY 26, 2021

The “best” sequence for building a repeatable sales engine is roughly: The CEO/founder should close at least the first 10 (or 20 or whatever) customers. Even though you may not have that much revenue or that many leads, he will help you get more leads and maximize the experience of the leads you do have. That way, she knows.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Scale Startup AWS 274

SaaStr

MAY 12, 2019

GAAP revenue in Q1 ’19) because it’s in a space filled with strong competitors. We all know this from AWS and Twilio on down, but Fastly is a visceral reminder. It’s an almost 100% enterprise play — they have 227 customers spending over $100k a year, comprising 84% of their revenues. The lesson?

Outsourced Development 259

Outsourced Development AWS Retention Enterprise 259

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

by Rich Archbold, Senior Director of Engineering at Intercom. In this battle, I’ve found a secret weapon hidden within one of our core engineering strategies, an idea called Run Less Software. When I say “execute”, I don’t simply mean the engineering challenges of building something. The same is true in software.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

JANUARY 25, 2022

But a few thoughts on “the hardest part” for the first few stages: From $1-$100k in ARR, the hardest part is often how little revenue you get from each customer. So much work, so little revenue. Enough to pay some salaries and AWS bills, but it’s not that much. It’s just so much revenue to add in absolute terms.

Headcount 246

Headcount AWS SaaS Churn 246

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

In a fascinating workshop session, Miao shares his thoughts on how finance teams can contribute to company strategy and grow revenue. Strategic Finance optimizes a company’s underlying business model to create long-term value by increasing revenue and decreasing costs. SaaStr Workshop Wednesdays are LIVE every Wednesday.

Scale 238

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 238

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2021

million revenue quarter…In reality, though, we were still the founder-led sales company.”. Commoditization From AWS & Google Cloud. Every piece of marketing collateral had to be rewritten, and the needed AE background shifted from an engineering focus to a marketing and business focus. The Graveyard: $10 Million ARR.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Data AWS Leadership 307

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

80% of the revenue is in the Enterprise. If you go back 10-15 years, when people ask about build vs. buy for the long-term, people would consider building their own data center if they were spending $100k/month on AWS. Today, companies spend over $10M/month on AWS — companies like Lyft, Pinterest, and Stripe. It’s not an option.

Enterprise readiness 283

Enterprise readiness Payment Solutions Enterprise Payments 283

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

A Rockstar engineer really is 10x better than the next tier. If you don’t think you need a great VP of Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and Engineering — then all that all that means is you’ve never worked with a great one. He or she doesn’t have to jump start the engine. It’s true.

Sales Hiring 284

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 284

SaaStr

OCTOBER 6, 2022

We help B2B SaaS marketers turn organic search into a source of repeatable revenue through software and coaching. DuploCloud offers an end-to-end DevOps software platform for dev teams that don’t have dedicated DevOps engineers and augments those that do.

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 246

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Azure AWS Enterprise readiness 246

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2023

It’s one of the few still commanding a premium multiple in today’s world, and still growing at tremendous rates: Snowflake is also a barometer of everything in SaaS and Cloud, because a significant amount of its revenue is consumption-based, at least in part. AWS is seeing this, and so is Snowflake. Not none, just less.

Headcount 246

Headcount Scale Sales Hiring AWS 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

It was just a little while ago that Salesforce was doing $1 billion in ARR revenue. How many sales reps, how much marketing spend, how many engineers will you really need? And true enough … freemium only ended up being 20% of our revenue, at least strictly defined. And it’s better than that, these days.

Scale 279

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital AWS 279

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

However, even the savviest entrepreneurs might be unaware of some of the blind spots that could be costing revenue. . Says Roberge, “We’re using a sales comp plan that was invented in the 1980s, and it’s causing our customers to utilize their licenses at a lower rate, and it’s causing revenue contraction.”. Copy your entire product.

Sales Hiring 256

Sales Hiring Scale Compensation Sales 256

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 31, 2021

Have a plan Decide how much DevOps you want in your development Talk to who you’re going to switch to first Make sure you have the right team in place Brace for transition period costs Plan for higher Cost of Revenue. Plan for higher Cost of Revenue. Have a plan. The first mistake we made was taking the brute force approach.

AWS 115

AWS DevOps as a Service Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review 115

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? The renewals, upsells, and pre-paid contracts just are cash engines if you are growing fast enough. So what makes SaaS burn so much cash, once you have enough revenue to cover the costs of the core teams you need to build and service the product?

Scale 293

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 293

Chargify

AUGUST 17, 2020

Backed by an army of developers, data engineers, and finance professionals, this events-based billing model allowed these large companies to directly link the value that their services provided with the cost presented on a customer’s invoice. How AWS Does It. What Amazon Web Services and Twilio Get Right.

AWS 98

AWS Payment Services SaaS Payments Payments 98

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

Until now, Intercom has been a multitenant application hosted in a single region in AWS. In many cases, these projects had turned out to be some of the biggest these companies had ever taken on, taking the majority of their engineering team more than six months to complete. . “We Lesson #2: Stick to your principles.

Scale 234

Scale New CTO Engineering CTO 234

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

“Q3 product revenue grew 34% year-over-year to reach $698 million. ” Unstructured data is the growth engine : 17x growth y/y suggests a small number last year, but phenomenal interest. Non-GAAP adjusted free cash flow was $111 million, representing 7% year-over-year growth.

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 187

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Azure Data Startup 187

Clouded Judgement

SEPTEMBER 27, 2024

Subscribe now Foundation Models Are to AI what S3 was to the Public Cloud Many people look at 2006 as the birth of the public cloud - the year Amazon launched AWS. Microsoft launched Azure in 2010, and Google launched GCP to the public in 2011 (they launched a preview of Google App Engine in 2008, but made it publicly available in 2011).

Cloud 176

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) AWS Azure 176

Blulogix

MAY 20, 2025

From statewide digital transformation initiatives to university research platforms running on AWS and Azure, cloud services have become essential infrastructure. Schedule a demo with a BluLogix billing expert today and take the first step towards revolutionizing your revenue management. Schedule a Demo Today Cloud Is Usage-Based.

Cloud 59

Cloud Azure AWS Government 59

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2024

When you go upmarket, they’ll likely want you to integrate with some legacy technology, like MS Dynamics or AWS. Technical integrations and partnerships are almost as important as commercial ones, and you want to make sure your product and engineering team can support that. Finally, don’t forget about service partners.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Scale SMB compliance 300

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

They had open cores and created enterprise features around it to protect the business model until it got torpedoed by AWS early on. But eventually, it becomes engineering. Now, it’s a revenue function, and to have a healthy, high-performing revenue function, you need a very precisely defined segmentation.

Scale 243

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 243

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

If revenue is the North Star metric, everything you do should drive towards that. 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.” in order to keep a seat at the revenue table.” Meaning, revenue is a team sport. Have a great weekend!

Metrics 120

Metrics Revenue Scale Marketing 120

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

A senior engineer posted on LinkedIn that they worked at Spotify for four years and quit on the spot. You’ve got a billion in revenue per year at Box, and yes, some of it goes to hosting and storage. 7: Having the CMO Report to the CRO is a Terrible Idea Having marketing under a CRO is an awful idea for two reasons.

Sales Hiring 302

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 302

Sales Hacker

MARCH 29, 2021

Building the right partner tech stack can dramatically increase the revenue flowing from your partners, even if your partnership team is small. The growing role of partnerships in driving revenue. Ensuring partnerships, sales, product, engineering, and customer success teams have the information they need when they need it.

Payments 112

Payments SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 112

How To Buy Saas

MAY 29, 2025

For instance, companies like Sephora and Amazon have deployed AI-driven recommendation engines. AWS explains that intelligent automation (IA) is the process of using artificial intelligence (AI) to make self-improving software automation. Executives also leverage generative AI for idea generation and reporting.

Artificial Intelligence 59

Artificial Intelligence Payment Services Payments SaaS Payments 59

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2021

We weren’t focused on revenue, we were focused on winning developers one-by-one, and that was the key to success for us. For us, the SaaS model Amazon Web Services (AWS) offered was an amazing one to look at. For the first twenty employees, we were working on developer relationships.

Enterprise 246

Enterprise AI SaaS AWS 246

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

This last quarter announced revenue was up over 100% in the quarter, and now they’re a top five company in the world by market cap. Engineers are more productive because Github’s Copilot writes 50% of code. For incumbent founders wanting to drive value and new GenAI revenue streams. A perfect example is NVIDIA.

Generative AI 293

Generative AI Outsourcing Services AI Software Review 293

Blulogix

MAY 19, 2025

Schedule a demo with a BluLogix billing expert today and take the first step towards revolutionizing your revenue management. Chargeback as a Compliance Engine A true Chargeback platform doesnt just show what departments are usingit bills them based on real, metered consumption, using defendable pricing and allocation rules.

Traceability 59

Traceability Payment Features compliance Finance 59

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 17, 2014

The chart above plots the revenue growth of a hypothetical SaaS company for a year. Total Revenue in December 919 1592. Mean Cohort Revenue in December 77 133. In the 5% monthly churn case, the startup exits 2014 with $919 in MRR (monthly recurring revenue) and the typical customer is worth $77. AWS S3, EMR, etc).

Churn 124

Churn AWS Startup Revenue 124

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Average Revenue per Customer. And basically SaaS revenue models is just magical for investors and for businesses. And you can basically predict revenue ahead of time and therefore raise money early on to grow even faster. First one and the most important one is obviously the MRR, monthly recurring revenue. MRR, obviously.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246