SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2023

I’m using Google Workspace (Gmail, Drive), AWS , Vercel , Slack , Figma , Notion , Salesforce , HubSpot , Secureframe , Clari , and Zapier. #2. Last week we had a great one with Luca Penati, CMO & CCO of BEE, check it out here. This week we have Shrav Mehta, Founder and CEO of Secureframe! #1. What’s your core stack of apps today?

AWS 228

AWS compliance AI Startup 228

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2023

AWS re:Invent : AWS re:Invent is Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) annual conference, focused on cloud computing and SaaS-related services. The event brings together developers, architects, and IT professionals to explore the latest AWS developments.

ChatGPT 222

ChatGPT AWS SaaS CTO 222

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Even If It’s Awful for Series A-E Rounds. Why VCs Love Founders That Respond to Email Almost Instantly 90%-95% of Salespeople Won’t Make It At Your Startup. SaaStr 628: Revenue Alignment: How to Pull Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Together with Divvy CRO Sterling Snow  2. Really, Really, Low.

Sales Recruiting 187

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AWS 187

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Datadog, ZoomInfo, Atlassian, AWS: Epic Growth — But Some Real Headwinds For The First Time. The Simple Reason Startups That Just Raised $100s of Millions Are Doing Layoffs. 5 Interesting Learnings from Duolingo at $360,000,000 in ARR.

Sales Recruiting 222

Sales Recruiting AWS Compensation Enterprise 222

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

So for the audience, cloud giants are turbocharging startup sales, and the predominant reason for this is because they’re fundamentally changing IT budgets at the customers that we’re all selling to. And it’s one of the three large cloud vendors that we all know: Microsoft, AWS, and Google. Jabari Norton.

Scale 199

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 199

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Here’s an overview of the series: Part 1: How to Categorize Expenses in a SaaS Startup v2.0 Even without any breakdowns, obviously the CEO was fully aware of the company’s increased spending in sales and marketing. Even without any breakdowns, obviously the CEO was fully aware of the company’s increased spending in sales and marketing.

Merchant Services 90

Merchant Services Startup DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

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 177

Cloud Software Azure AWS 177

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2020

The first place to start is to learn to sell your startup’s product well. To make a partnership successful, your startup will need to teach another sales team to sell your product. The sales team asks for more leads. These sales teams go by many names: agencies, system integrators, value-added resellers.

Scale 319

Scale AWS Consulting Sales Enablement 319

SaaStr

AUGUST 4, 2021

From AWS to Vimeo: this year’s speaker lineup is packed with incredible speakers and content. Mastermind Masterclass: The Most Common SaaS Sales Potholes and How to Avoid Them with Mark Roberge, Founder @ Stage 2 Capital. Check out the full detailed agenda here. There’s content that everyone on your team can learn from.

Scale 256

Scale AWS B2C SaaS 256

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 30, 2024

Previously, Amit led marketing efforts at startups like Tact AI (1st AI Assistant for Sales backed by AWS, Microsoft, and Salesforce), HP Inc (next-gen computing) and Spire AI (Human Capital SaaS). 35:57) Advice for startups entering a market with established incumbents. (43:00)

AWS 79

AWS AI Advertising Finance 79

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

I’m an investor in maybe 30 SaaS startups. Why did sales-driven Qualtrics get to $100m+ in ARR without ever raising a nickel, and generating more than $20m a year in free cash flow ? Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? In fact, great sales teams are accretive. Why was Netsuite?

Scale 280

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 280

FastSpring

NOVEMBER 9, 2023

It is the largest in-person event in the country—2,000+ attendees, 800+ companies, and 100+ speakers—along with features such as Betakit Keynote Stage, AWS Pitchfest, Workspaces Tradeshow. The conference is jam packed with networking opportunities too! Schedule a demo now or at SaaS North in person!

Merchant Services 135

Merchant Services SaaS Payments Payment Methods Payment Services 135

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

Innovative startups. The first army are innovative startups. I’m referring to the full spectrum of business execution, from product management to design to engineering to marketing to sales to support and all the other functions needed to scale a business. Understand the potential consequences of outsourcing to young startups.

Software Review 224

Software Review Outsourcing Services Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

That you absolutely, positively, have to only hire “Rockstars” in your startups. 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. Head of Sales – What Corners Can I Cut?

Sales Hiring 272

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 272

Chart Mogul

MARCH 2, 2021

Further reading: How to Prepare Your Startup for Acquisition. It might be awful. It might be easier to tolerate post-sale commitments, therefore, as you have better control of the outcome. It’s tempting to rush into your next startup when you miss the feeling of running a company. You’re hot stuff. It might be awesome.

Startup 52

Startup Acquisition SaaS Scale 52

Chart Mogul

MARCH 2, 2021

Further reading: How to Prepare Your Startup for Acquisition. It might be awful. It might be easier to tolerate post-sale commitments, therefore, as you have better control of the outcome. It’s tempting to rush into your next startup when you miss the feeling of running a company. You’re hot stuff. It might be awesome.

Startup 52

Startup Acquisition SaaS Scale 52

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2023

Tech companies realized that this cloud thing might be for real, but the word on the street was that AWS was too hard and complex for customers to realize its benefits. Startup folks are lean and mean, so they were going to iterate. It didn’t impact sales at all. That’s when OpDemand was born. Can you guess what happened?

Sales Hiring 130

Sales Hiring Development AWS Engineering 130

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2021

You’re in sales. Folks with bigger investor wallets may be OK with this, but when I’ve invested in SaaS startups at the late seed-stage who just have too high a burn rate … it never works out. CEO Doesn’t like Sales — and The Hunt. This is sort of awful. And/or Late. I’m out.

Sales Recruiting 336

Sales Recruiting Scale AWS Investment 336

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 31, 2023

The majority of COGS (revenue less COGS = gross profit) fall in hosting costs (ie AWS), and some customer support. They have massive distribution (installed customers + sales teams), and margin to play around with. Startups and younger companies don’t have this luxury. What do I mean by this? The list goes on.

Cloud 130

Cloud Sales Hiring AI Headcount 130

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

When you take the data, you may have a business goal of making more sales or delighting the customer. If it is a small startup, it may just be a single GPU, or it’s bigger with a cluster of GPUs where you need infrastructure management. You want a culture that focuses on your metrics and evaluating what’s important to you.

AI Search 211

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 211

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2022

Liam: Was it challenging to get to this point with Mode in the startup journey? Every startup is going to be a challenge, and Mode is no different. They could solve that by saying, “Hey, let’s put our product in more data centers in AWS,” or in whatever hosting product they were using. Benn: For sure.

Data 151

Data Airlines AWS Underperforming Technical Team 151

Kellblog

AUGUST 19, 2022

I’ve run sales for 18 months across two startups in this mode and I learned a ton.). By involving fewer people you disregard a process that, among other things, helps vet the quality of candidates. If the candidate turns out a mishire you are going to feel awfully alone. Run with an interim.

Sales Recruiting 87

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AWS Company Culture 87

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 24, 2018

Together we felt like we were growing something from scratch, everything from our work processes to our team identity contributed to a strong sense of being part of “a startup within a startup”, related to but distinct from the broader Intercom family. Working on your own also makes you incredibly resourceful.

Sales Hiring 149

Sales Hiring Company Culture Scale Customer Support 149

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 14, 2019

For a long time, I thought my inability to bluff would hamstring me in sales, but now I see it differently. I’ve come to view authenticity as a kind of sales superpower. The old world of sales was akin to a high stakes poker table where buyers and sellers wore dark sunglasses and headphones to avoid tipping their hand.

Software Review 162

Software Review AWS Social Media Machine Learning 162

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Starting a new company is always hard and most SaaS startups never get to $1-2 million in ARR. Whether starting an Internet startup has really become 10x cheaper depends on how exactly you phrase the question and is debatable. Let me rephrase that. Every founder who accomplishes this deserves a huge amount of respect.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 25, 2013

This is as true for their books business as their infrastructure business, AWS. Many acquirers will pursue attractive larger, revenue generating startups with an aim to keep running the business as is (without changing the economics of the business). What do you think? Message me on twitter with your thoughts.

Acquisition 100

Acquisition Pricing AWS Startup 100

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 25, 2015

SaaS startups are either competing within these categories or creating a new category. Sales teams, always looking for an edge, also belong to the early adopter segment and buy CRM and online meetings software. PagerDuty, AWS and New Relic are the three listed in Okta’s reports.

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting SaaS Data AWS 100

Sales Hacker

MARCH 4, 2019

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we interview Dan Fougere , CRO of Datadog. Dan is a 20+ year veteran of technology sales and has seen 4 of his last 5 companies become unicorns. Dan talks about the key qualities of great sales leadership and how to be an effective executive in addition to being a great sales leader.

Leadership 62

Leadership Scale Sales Hiring Sales 62

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 30, 2022

By building a strong business tech stack for your startup – covering everything from incorporation to growing long-lasting customer relationships – you can not only win back time and establish best practices, but create a solid foundation for your business to grow. Ready to take your startup to the next level?

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Startup AWS 163

Chart Mogul

JUNE 23, 2022

SaaS startup growth has taken a hit as well as we noted. You might be hard-pressed by your AWS bill but you’re not going to start replacing the engine to lighten the load mid-flight. The last 2 years of SaaS twitter summed up sales into two simplistic formulas for achieving growth: PLG & raising prices.

SaaS 52

SaaS DevOps as a Service Marketplace as a Service Forecasting 52

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2019

292: Manny Medina is the Founder & CEO @ Outreach, the market leading sales engagement platform that turns your team into a revenue driving machine. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: * How Manny made his way to found the leader in sales engagement from product management at Amazon and Business Development @ Microsoft. *

Scale 141

Scale Sales Hiring Construction Education 141

OpenView Labs

JANUARY 29, 2020

HubSpot now offers freemium versions of their CRM, Marketing and Sales products. Low-touch freemium models can work in concert with an inside sales or field sales model. For certain customer profiles or market segments, it may be necessary to combine freemium with a sales team. Find out here.

Pricing 82

Pricing Payments SaaS Payments Payment Solutions 82

Frontegg

OCTOBER 14, 2020

Before AWS, engineering teams had to scale their own infrastructure. Spanning early-stage startups and hyper-growth unicorns, Frontegg is already integrated within the production environment of numerous customers and is looking to expand its North American customer base in the upcoming quarters.

DevOps as a Service 52

DevOps as a Service K8S orchestration (Kubernetes) Innovation New CTO 52

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Before I joined the venture capital industry many years ago, I was a software developer, and I worked for a startup around the 2000 time period. Retail was mentioned twice, that’s it, and AWS was mentioned 78 times, so it’s probably not surprising that they’re doing this. Usually, it requires an outbound sales motion.

Cloud 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

ChurnZero

MARCH 31, 2022

Following the webinar, we invited Dave to give his rapid-fire takes on tracking the retention of auto-renew customers, calculating customer lifetime value as a startup, comping CSMs on expansion, determining the importance of measuring time to value, and much more. tech ops, AWS, technical support). BUT NO ONE DOES THAT.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Metrics Technical Review Scale 98

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

So to serve both segments at the simultaneously, ZoomInfo has been rolling out a Product-led sales motion, that gives the ability for an SMB customer to sign up directly on their website for a free trial and grow into a paid customer, without ever having to talk to an sales rep or go through a demo process. So, what’s new at ZoomInfo?

New CTO 250

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring AWS 250

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

And so, she can, and Anthony just finished up basically going from the first sales hire at Gainsight at almost 100 million in revenue and has just retired. Maria : It’s like saying, “Hey, you want a sales rep to carry 10 times the quota they do today. You can’t, you have to invest in that sales infrastructure.”

Sales Hiring 205

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 205