SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

In the new episode, Jason sits down with Drata CMO Sydney Sloan to talk about what’s new at Drata, the role of CMO at Drata vs. Salesloft, partner marketing, customer marketing, and more. Sydney pulled someone from Salesloft with a product marketing background who understands operations, running programs, and being strategic.

AWS 276

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 276

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2022

Why Customer Success and Product Should be Best Friends: Lessons Learned with AWS’ Head of Customer Success Harini Gokul. Effective collaboration between go-to-market and R&D teams is critical, and it all starts with understanding how the other side operates. Why Customer Success and Product Should be Best Friends.

AWS 246

AWS Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring 246

Hitenism

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

In 2006, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped pioneer what we now call the cloud, product development changed forever. Today, one-third of daily internet users visit websites built on top of AWS. AWS is now an $11.5B Working backwards isn’t a silver bullet that guarantees you success on the scale of AWS.

AWS 189

AWS New CTO Scale CTO 189

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

But the markets dont love smaller IPOs and especially smaller IPOs that are growing at slower rates. Thats $500m ARR growing 50%. Thats what all the last 5 SaaS IPOs, all the SaaS IPOs since 2021 in fact, were doing at IPO: Rubrik, Klaviyo, ServiceTitan, OneStream and Sailpoint. Add in the ones that shutdown, etc. Yes, you can.

AWS 206

AWS Scaling SaaS Data 206

SaaStr

AUGUST 16, 2022

But even there, to truly scale, they went more enterprise and built out a full enterprise sales and marketing function. The next 5 also always work, but you need someone in marketing that’s done them well before to own them: #1. But third-party events like AWS, Dreamforce, SaaStr, Shoptalk? Partner Marketing.

Scale 329

Scale Sales Hiring Marketing SaaS 329

Tom Tunguz

JULY 28, 2022

AWS announced earnings earlier today and reported 33% growth. AWS’s growth rate is the slowest of the three largest public infrastructure clouds. With about 39% market share, AWS reigns supreme as the largest provider. With about 39% market share, AWS reigns supreme as the largest provider.

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 324

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) AWS Startup Azure 324

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

They use pricing as an offensive tool to reinforce their product’s value and underscore the company’s core marketing message. Startups operate in newer markets where pricing standards haven’t been set. In addition, these new markets evolve very quickly, and consequently, so must pricing.

SaaS Payments 283

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 283

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 28, 2025

Fast forward to the launch of AWS and the public cloud. And now, engineering and distribution (go-to-market) constraints are greatly reduced with AI. Someone could build a better solution in a short period of time and commoditize the market. That juxtaposition is what makes investing in venture markets these days so fun!

Cloud 302

Cloud AI Scale Scaling 302

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 30, 2024

Cloud Capex in Q1 AWS $14 billion Azure $14 billion Google Cloud $12 billion These are not one-time investments, but part of a broader trend that started to occur after the introduction of GPT 3 in mid-2020 Amazon was the first to invest significantly. “Moving to AWS. 8 percentage points increased margins in a quarter is titanic.

Cloud 311

Cloud AWS Azure AI 311

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

I’m watching public company earnings to identify early weaknesses in the software market. A year ago, AWS, GCP, & Azure averaged 44% annual growth. Amazon: We expect [customer] optimization efforts will continue to be a headwind to AWS growth in at least the next couple of quarters. So

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 314

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Cloud AWS Sales Hiring 314

SaaStr

APRIL 14, 2025

AI Speakers: CEO Snowflake + CEO Observe: Where B2B Applications Are Going CEO Box Aaron Levie: AI, Agents and The Next Era of SaaS COO Google Cloud Francis deSouza: Hyperscalers: The Future and More CTO Rubrik: Co-Founder & CTO, Arvind Nithrakashyap CTO Neo4j: Philip Rathle (Valuation $2B+): How Revolut Left Salesforce and More: Rolling Your (..)

VP of Engineering 204

VP of Engineering CTO Coach VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) Scale 204

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 3, 2022

My summary of Venture Markets in Nov 2022: Series B and later even worse than looks in data: 85%+ of investing here has simply ceased. And while AWS’s growth is down a bit, it’s still at epic levels, Azure isn’t even really down, and Google Cloud is growing faster than ever. But only up to a point.

AWS 351

AWS Venture Capital Azure Cloud 351

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

The team is typically highly cross-functional, working together with sales, product, engineering, and marketing, and the goal is to help the other teams make better decisions through data and financial modeling. In 2014, storage had historically been Dropbox’s most significant cost driver, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on AWS.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

DECEMBER 7, 2020

3. “Atlassian and AWS Say: Maybe Worry a Little Bit. Atlassian and AWS, two of the greats, may hold a clue: Atlassian and AWS Say: “Maybe Worry a Little Bit” 4. “A Framework For Your First SaaS Sales Comp Plan” A SaaStr Classic, still going strong in 2020. ” A SaaStr classic.

Venture Capital 333

Venture Capital Sales Hiring AWS Cloud 333

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

1: How Sales and Marketing Have Shifted Since 2020 Expectations and the types of people working in SaaS have shifted over the past few years, and much more in sales, marketing, and customer success. He had a friend help him hire an email marketer to send ticket emails to the events. As a marketer, do the easiest thing.

Sales Hiring 299

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 299

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

These early conversations helped shape Databricks product, pricing, and go-to-market strategy. Because thats how their customerswho were used to AWS, Azure, and GCP pricingexpected to buy. For any startup looking to go from $1M to $100M and beyond, Rons playbook is clear: Hire technical sales talent if youre in a technical market.

Scale 173

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 173

SaaStr

APRIL 24, 2021

220m in ARR, $13B market cap. Shopify has exploded to $3B+ in ARR and a $135B Market cap, growing an incredible 96% during Covid. Snowflake is growing 100%+ at $700m in ARR, with a $65B market cap. First, Snowflake rolls its large customers into fixed comittments (as does AWS and many others), and bills them in advance.

Merchant Services 360

Merchant Services SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 360

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 18, 2023

Something that’s both not surprising but also pretty impactful: 57% of venture-backed startups will have to go “back to market” in 2024 to raise more capital. Shopify , Datadog, Crowdstrike , Google Cloud-Azure-AWS, Snowflake , etc. What does Pilot’s latest data say? Many have already raised a bridge round.

Startup 357

Startup Venture Capital Azure AWS 357

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2021

But are AWS, Azure and Google Cloud just too big for us to learn from? The Cloud Market as Google Cloud defines it has grown at a jaw-dropping rate, from $85B in ’15 to $290B in ’20. AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud is one of the greatest case studies of all time. So I think there are some good learnings!

Cloud 292

Cloud Azure AWS Scale 292

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

CloudKeeper from TO THE NEW, is a cloud spend optimization solution that guarantees to cut down your AWS bills by 5-15%. With CloudKeeper, we have helped 200+ of our customers optimize their AWS spend with a guaranteed reduction in their AWS bills. Join these incredible companies to experience all the value of SaaStr!

Cloud spend optimization 259

Cloud spend optimization AWS Scale compliance 259

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 30, 2020

Prior to HashiCorp Adam was the Head of Worldwide Developer Marketing at AWS and held senior positions at Pivotal, VMware, and SpringSource. On Wednesday, July 15th at 10 AM PT, Redpoint Office Hours will welcome Adam FitzGerald, the VP of Developer Relations at HashiCorp. My partner Astasia Myers will be leading the discussion.

Development 317

Development Scale AWS Scaling 317

SaaStr

APRIL 21, 2023

Now, he has five more marketing strategies that are sure to generate more leads if done right. If you aren’t spending money on marketing, it’s time to step it up. Most SaaS companies don’t spend enough on marketing, and that’s a mistake best avoided. Yes, it’s expensive — a booth, flying SDRs out, buying swag. It’s too much.

Outsourcing Services 257

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development Marketing 257

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2021

This post is an adaptation of a talk I recently gave at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) community day event in Dublin about the technical strategies I’ve experienced that don’t work and the ones that have helped us to grow and scale at Intercom. At Intercom, we’ve found success running Lambda as glue code between AWS services.

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 28, 2022

That’s much more work than the automatic credit card payment with AWS. Perhaps this dynamic drives consolidation in the market, paralleling the web2 infrastructure hypermarts of AWS, GCP, and Azure. It’s too much complexity for a simple static blog. Third, software engineers decentralize only a subset of the app.

Payment Solutions 268

Payment Solutions GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Startup Payment Features 268

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

It’s worth pointing out that Azure is a bit above the long term trendline, while AWS is still below (but accelerating up). What I’ve shown below is the market-adjusted stock price reaction. This means I’ve removed any impact of broader market shifts to isolate the company’s earnings impact on the stock.

Cloud 320

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 320

SaaStr

DECEMBER 9, 2020

At @Mailchimp , US customers’ email marketing activity is up 15% since the beginning of the pandemic compared to the same time last year. Given that, realize if your outbound sales team isn’t performing at all, maybe it’s not your app, or the competition, or the market, or that there are too many vendors in the space.

Sales Hiring 356

Sales Hiring Outbound Sales Team AWS Engineering 356

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2023

With the marketing team, there are a lot of the classic functions — brand marketing, product marketing, and partner marketing. When it comes to marketing Workspace, Alison shared they’re double down on showing off the value off of Duet AI, Google Workspace’s AI assistant.

Cloud 306

Cloud Scale AWS AI 306

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2020

Recently, we welcomed Lisa Lawson to SaaS Office Hours to talk about building a channel go-to-market strategy for SaaS companies. OEM relationships can be a good way to get to market quickly. Marketplaces: AWS marketplace, Heroku marketplace, Salesforce marketplace. Here are my notes. Where to Start.

Scale 349

Scale AWS Consulting Sales Enablement 349

IT World

DECEMBER 5, 2022

Apple’s growing status in enterprise IT expands just a little more with news that cross-platform device management company JumpCloud,now offers its service via Amazon’s AWS marketplace. Identity, platform agnosticism, and the future of IT.

AWS 96

AWS Marketplace as a Service Enterprise Marketing 96

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 6, 2023

If you’re selling sales and marketing software, like Zoominfo, it can seem a lot tougher than 12-18 months ago. Growth in public cloud services (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Snowflake, etc.) If you’re selling cloud infrastructure, for the most part, growth may be down a smidge but is still strong, e.g., MongoDB.

Merchant Services 304

Merchant Services Azure Software AWS 304

SaaStr

MAY 21, 2022

Sprout Social IPO’d in Dec 2019 at an $800m market cap. years later, in a market down 50% …. The markets for SaaS and Cloud stocks are down 50%+ in just a few months, and it hasn’t spared even the leaders. A few case studies: * Sprout Social IPO’d in December 2019 at an $800m market-cap. The markets are brutal.

AWS 286

AWS SaaS Cloud Scale 286

SaaStr

MARCH 9, 2022

Focusing on smaller developers, in some ways it’s been a bit overshadowed by AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. But it’s a great case study on how nailing a niche, and staying focused on a core ICP in a huge market, can pay off. So DigitalOcean is the quiet Cloud platform that keeps on growing.

Azure 270

Azure AWS SMB Cloud 270

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2024

Another 5%-7% go to core infrastructure costs (AWS, Azure, Snowflake, etc). It’s your top marketing and customer retention investment. Typically support consumes about perhaps 5%-7% of your revenue at scale (excluding customer success) in most SaaS models. It could be more or less, but that’s a rough way to think about it.

Azure 270

Azure AWS SaaS Customer Success 270

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 14, 2021

After all developer interest is a key step in the go-to-market motion. Head of developer relations at Temporal , Shawn has worked on React and serverless JavaScript at Two Sigma, Netlify and AWS. Developer relations tops the list of priorities for many infrastructure companies. How does a team scale and measure a devrel team?

Outsourced Development 281

Outsourced Development Development Scaling AWS 281

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2023

SaaStr 644: Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks with Databricks SVP and GM Ed Lenta  4. Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks 5. SaaStr 643: What’s Holding Up Buyers?:

Scale 246

Scale AWS Scaling Enterprise 246

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2024

Now if events are a sales function budgeted by marketing, then at first this seems to make sense. Even if you are deep on AWS, you go to Reinvent. Sales wants to use SDRs in their boots to qualify leads. Just like they do with digital leads. But so many times, this is a waste. The leaders in security have been going to RSA for decades.

AWS 304

AWS Sales Data Marketing 304