SaaStr

MARCH 6, 2024

So Okta is one of our favorite SaaS and Cloud leaders. But like many SaaS and Cloud leaders today, the bigger ones are still growing faster. While many tech SMBs are struggling, finding the gems in the SMB base that can grow into large accounts is still critical. The story is super inspiring.

Fractional VPE 276

Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Scale SMB 276

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

My hope is that this analysis can provide startup entrepreneurs with a framework for how to manage their businesses around SaaS metrics (e.g., It’s worth pointing out that Azure is a bit above the long term trendline, while AWS is still below (but accelerating up). net retention and CAC payback).

Cloud 318

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Customers range from AWS skills-builder platforms with billions of users to Zoom using it for customers and employees. Docebo was started and funded in 2005 and became a SaaS player in 2012. That was the result of an operational motion of building a company that, in the beginning, was meant to address SMBs. Let’s dive into it.

Sales Hiring 270

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 270

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

In the latest installment of SaaStr’s What’s New series – where we sit down with the leaders in SaaS and Cloud for the inside scoop on what’s top of mind and what’s new, SaaStr CEO and Jason Lemkin chats with the CEO of ZoomInfo , Henry Schuck. So, what’s new at ZoomInfo?

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New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 305

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2024

Right now, you may have 3-4-stage sales processes that work for SMB customers. Hopefully, you’ve built a partnership ecosystem for SMB customers, but it’s probably a completely different strategy for what you need to go upmarket for a couple of reasons. So, find sellers inside your sales org who can at least get you started.

Sales Hiring 293

Sales Hiring Scale SMB compliance 293

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

And it’s one of the three large cloud vendors that we all know: Microsoft, AWS, and Google. AWS’s marketplace has seen 1.5 million subscriptions transacted and Google’s marketplace has seen 3X growth in SaaS sales. Like I said, we run 100% of our platform on AWS, so the fit was great.

Scale 256

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 256

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

It’s 2020 and SaaS buyers are more skeptical and suspicious, more disbelieving, more unconvinced than they were in 2019. The SaaS Trust Crisis is making it harder to market and sell software and services than ever before. And what I’d like to talk to you about today is the SaaS Trust crisis we’re seeing.

Software Review 243

Software Review Scale Technical Review SaaS 243

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

I’m going to skip by my life story, and how I grew up as a small child in India, and how the dusty streets influenced my take on unit economics, and SaaS subscription models. Let’s assume the probability of success for a SaaS company is roughly one percent, and that formula is true, given some definition of success, right?

Part-Time VPE 283

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 283

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

My hope is that this analysis can provide startup entrepreneurs with a framework for how to manage their businesses around SaaS metrics (e.g., It looks at the YoY dollar change in quarterly revenue from the hyperscalers (just looking at Azure / AWS because the data goes back further) going back a few years. Is Software Rebounding?

Cloud 184

Cloud Software Azure AWS 184

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 22, 2024

Subscribe now ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) vs ERR (Experimental Runrate Revenue) ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) is one of the most popular SaaS (Non-GAAP) metrics. In it's truest form, ARR is used by pure SaaS business models to describe the aggregate annual value of the entire customer set.

AI 190

AI Cloud Revenue Technical Advisors 190

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

Last year, the message was that it’s harder, so what is the theme for many SaaS companies this year? SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin shares his take on the current SaaS landscape midway through 2024 and what might be coming next in 2025 at the opener to this year’s SaaStr Europa. Just build. To some extent, it’s not clear.

CTO Hire 141

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 141

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

Patrick Campbell’s got thousands of SaaS companies and pricing and issues. Then, we’ll end of the day with me and Stewart Butterfield and obviously Slack is doing well, but Slack also has a massive SMB base and its challenges. We can save companies $100,000 on their AWS bill. That’s how it all works.

Merchant Services 252

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 252

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

To find out which of these features are most common, OpenView surveyed over 500 SaaS companies ranging from pre-revenue to $100 million in ARR. Despite disparities in reporting, self-reported data on CAC payback does reveal a clear trend: The fastest growing SaaS companies report a median CAC payback period of only 8 months.

Headcount 98

Headcount SaaS Compensation Acquisition 98

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 9, 2023

They did call out sequential growth in Confluent Cloud every quarter this year which was a big positive Still seeing elongated deal cycles and less expansion revenue The Bad AWS: Headwinds Getting Worse Their quarter ended in March, but on the earnings call they called out weakening growth in April.

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Trends Cloud Azure AWS 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 111

Cloud Scale AWS Artificial Intelligence 111

How To Buy Saas

MAY 21, 2025

Whether youre a startup , an SMB , or a global enterprise , the right ATS can streamline your recruitment process, save time, and help attract top talent in a competitive market. Its tailored more to SMB use cases. Scaling Limits: For an SMB-focused tool, VIVAHR works brilliantly. complex analytics or deep CRM capabilities).

Systems Review 52

Systems Review Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review 52

OpenView Labs

AUGUST 5, 2019

On paper, the segmented sales model that many SaaS businesses use seems great – who wouldn’t want to copy the success of Salesforce? Otherwise, you’re assuming an awful lot of risk that can hurt your business and then some later. Many startups blindly follow the segmented model because “that’s the SaaS sales model.”

Sales Hiring 58

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales AWS 58

OpenView Labs

MAY 5, 2021

The answer likely depends on your market segmentation, as freemium may ease adoption friction for SMB/mid-market companies. Yes, SaaS is powerful. Yes, SaaS is powerful. Yes, SaaS is pervasive. On-premise (or “cloud-prem”) is still a thing. And yet on-premise deployments are still very common, especially the enterprise.

Business 64

Business SMB Scale DevOps as a Service 64

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

We’ve all seen AWS and what they’ve done with their platform. Everyone knows Shopify for what it is today, but in the earlier days, it really was the best SaaS platform for SMB eCommerce providers. We’re all a little bit woke to the power of debt in SaaS if you do it right. It is staggering.

Sales Hiring 227

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 227

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

But if you target SMBs or consumers, PLG is a fantastic way, and you have a very large user base to reach out to as well. If you have a very complicated product–for example you sell AWS or you sell Snowflake–those are infrastructure products. Figma made the product SaaS-based. The pricing for SaaS is much more complicated.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

SaaStr

APRIL 24, 2025

OnRamp is hosting a CCO Happy Hour from 5-7 ahead of the CCO Summit on Wednesday The AI Frontier Scaling Agents & Driving Innovation in SMB and Enterprise side event from 6-8pm in Mountain View with Nebius, CEO of Otter.ai, VP AI at EvenUp, CEO HeyBoss AI, and more. CFOs and VPs of Finance with tickets are invited! Will be fun!

AWS 167

AWS SMB AI Innovation 167

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2023

18 Billion of SaaS M&A During A Banking Crisis. SaaStr 644: Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks with Databricks SVP and GM Ed Lenta  2. Lessons Learned in Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies: From VMware, AWS and Databricks 2. 74% of You Say No!

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AWS Scale Sales Hiring SMB 243

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 7, 2025

With a background that includes leadership roles at AWS, Microsoft, and Lenovo, Fred brings a wealth of experience in building high-performing teams and driving revenue growth. And I know you’ve had some great experience, particularly while you were at AWS, running different partner sales, channel sales. They cannot resell.

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Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development AWS 113

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 13, 2025

Each segment, whether SMB, mid-market, or enterprise, has its own nuances, but they all share a familiar core. To scale this support and extend it beyond our portfolio to the broader SaaS ecosystem, weve partnered with Pursuit – a leader in go-to-market talent acquisition. Culture becomes the engine.

Scale 104

Scale Sales Hiring Artificial Intelligence SMB 104

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 13, 2018

Whereas Facebook’s overall vision relies heavily on third-party developers having access to user data, Workplace wants to be the app that’s connected to all your other apps and a highly curated marketplace that has the best SaaS applications in the world. Because I had a background in SaaS, I had the opportunity to join the team.

Scale 151

Scale Marketplace as a Service Mobile Sales Hiring 151

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

And then, we ripped it out and Aaron went and talked to some of the top SaaS companies from today and added the case studies. Maria is one of the top SaaS leaders in marketing, just finished up the CMO Vanna plan, which IPOed. This is the best of times in SaaS, right? We wrote a book together. Aaron : Yeah. Maria : Yeah.

Sales Hiring 235

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 235

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2022

I just thought that if there was anybody left at the end of day two that had anything they wanted to talk about, scaling SaaS, fundraising, hiring, anything, and I could be helpful, we could do a little extra Q&A. Now there are 20 or 30 public SaaS companies we can learn from. But the downturn in SaaS, at best, is uneven.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling 246

Casey Accidental

DECEMBER 11, 2023

Let’s look at an example in SaaS. Canva was more of a single player and SMB tool. Companies build a deep understanding of how they achieved product/market fit in the first market, and make as few tweaks as possible to adapt the product/market fit to these adjacent audiences. They needed those new products to work, and they did.

Payments 113

Payments Scale Payment Solutions Technical Review 113

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 7, 2021

Cassie spent the first pre-SaaS chapter of her tech career in growth roles in subscription and marketplace businesses (TheLadders.com, GLG). are just as critical as understanding the fundamental SaaS metrics such as LTV/CAC, payback, etc. It took me a long time to admit to myself that I don’t enjoy transactional SMB sales.

Scale 136

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 136

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 14, 2021

Amy: We’re a SaaS offering and we’ve been around for almost 14 years, building what we think is the best HR software in the world for small and medium businesses. 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.” Give us the pitch.

Sales Recruiting 103

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 103

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 18, 2023

Lots of SaaS companies have great products, but they don’t position them into a big enough business problem to break through the noise at an enterprise level. Seth Hammac , Global Partnerships & Alliances @ AWS Ok so what CAN you do to set yourself up for success? There are two main challenges that I see; 1.

Scale 87

Scale VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Enterprise 87

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2025

We’ll have 1000+ speakers, braindates, workshops, and 1-on-1’s, but here are some of the core speakers for this year: AI Speakers: CEO Snowflake Sridhar Ramaswamy + CEO Observe: “Where B2B Applications Are Going” CEO Box Aaron Levie : “AI, Agents and The Next Era of SaaS” COO Google Cloud Francis deSouz a: “Hyperscalers: (..)

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VP of Engineering VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) AI Scale 257

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2019

In Today’s Episode We Discuss: * How Liat made her way into the world of SaaS and came to be VP of Customer Engagement at one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups in Airtable. Jason’s interview with Loren: Announcer: You’re listening to SaaStr’s podcast, the best in SaaS content to help you scale up and grow faster.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Underperforming Technical Team 157

OnStartups

JULY 7, 2021

The strategy behind it, I think, is strong in terms of it gets HubSpot into a thing which is where I think the future of SaaS companies is going to be heading. And then I met Brian in grad school and we both have this kind of shared passion for SMB. It's like, okay, you've got an AWS instance somewhere that's costing you.

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Payment Methods Technical Review Software Review Payment Solutions 140

OnStartups

JULY 7, 2021

The strategy behind it, I think, is strong in terms of it gets HubSpot into a thing which is where I think the future of SaaS companies is going to be heading. And then I met Brian in grad school and we both have this kind of shared passion for SMB. It's like, okay, you've got an AWS instance somewhere that's costing you.

Payment Methods 40

Payment Methods Technical Review Software Review Payment Solutions 40