SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

At Glasswing Ventures, they tell their AI-native companies not to lead with AI because it’s such a superficial indication of interest. When you take the data, you may have a business goal of making more sales or delighting the customer. What should founders know about the modern AI stack that Enterprises can scale on?

AI Search 209

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 209

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2023

Alison brings the perspective of all sides of a startup, from investing to SaaS to Cloud. Google Cloud Platform, on the other hand, is in a very different set that also competes with Microsoft, but AWS is considered their biggest competitor in the market. Right now, 70% of the GenAI startups are using Google Cloud.

Cloud 235

Cloud Scale AWS AI 235

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

The Challenges and Pitfalls of a Partner Ecosystem Drata attributes much of its success to its partner ecosystem, which is an interesting case study for most, so how do they break up marketing, sales, and resource allocation vs. a more direct-sales modeled business? AWS can’t support 20 partners equally.

AWS 204

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 204

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 247

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring AWS 247

SaaStr

MARCH 6, 2024

Seat Contractions Have Brought NRR Down From 120% to 111% While 111% NRR is still quite an engine at this scale, the drop in NRR from seat contractions explains a good chunk of the headwinds Okta has seen. #2. AWS alone generated $175m of contract value for Okta, growing 130%. Way, way too many startups focus 100% on direct sales.

Fractional VPE 213

Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Scale SMB 213

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

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2022

As SaaStr Europa 2022 drew to a close, attendees took one more opportunity to ask Jason questions about topics like how to navigate the current market, the future of work, playing in a crowded space, and hiring your first VP of Sales. It was funny for Henry to say he segmented his sales team at 80 million in ARR. Transcript.

Sales Hiring 202

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling 202

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 185

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AWS 185

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. . #1: At scale, this is a jigsaw puzzle,” he said. I can leave my horrible sales job making $240k OTE and be a solopreneur.

Sales Hiring 224

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 224

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

LLMs are fantastic first-pass filters and phenomenal classifiers that extract insight or build machine learning features from unstructured data like customer support conversations or sales calls. Software startups are rising to meet the need. Looker did this within the context of a BI system.

Artificial Intelligence 172

Artificial Intelligence Trends Data Software Review 172

SaaStr

AUGUST 4, 2021

3 days, more than 100+ sessions and 300 expert speakers, who will be sharing their best practices to help you scale faster, build smarter, and close more customers. From AWS to Vimeo: this year’s speaker lineup is packed with incredible speakers and content. We just launched the entire SaaStr Annual 2021 Agenda !!

Scale 256

Scale AWS B2C SaaS 256

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 25, 2021

The Intercom team is looking forward to showcasing our latest features and improvements to the world’s leading Business Messenger and powerful customer support product. Our leading customer communication platform is used by the most innovative companies worldwide, such as Unity, Spendesk, (add approved customer logos in here).

AWS 198

AWS Scale Innovation Startup 198

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 309

Scale AWS Consulting Sales Enablement 309

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2024

In B2B, you also have fixed costs, but you can diversify monetization based on tokens or seats, or in the case of AWS, however you like. You also don’t want to get someone half-integrated and then tell them to contact sales. Consumer SaaS has a lot of drawbacks, but it also has the benefits of scale. You’ll lose people.

Subscription 259

Subscription Payment Features B2B Mobile 259

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Call me when it scales.” Starting a new company is always hard and most SaaS startups never get to $1-2 million in ARR. The point is that getting to $1-2 million in ARR probably has less predictive value concerning a company’s ability to get to true scale than most people think – or at least thought some years ago.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

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

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

A problem many founders are trying to solve right now is going upmarket to Enterprise, and Lemkin and Grinich have a passionate perspective that every startup should take steps to check those Enterprise boxes in their first year. If the company wasn’t built around this purpose, it would be hard to scale. It’s not an option.

Enterprise readiness 221

Enterprise readiness Payment Solutions Enterprise Payments 221

FastSpring

NOVEMBER 9, 2023

Since 2016, SaaS North has been recognized as THE Canadian hub for rapidly-scaling SaaS founders and their teams. 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.

Merchant Services 158

Merchant Services SaaS Payments Payment Methods Payment Services 158

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2019

When it comes to seamlessly scaling your applications, a top-notch engineering team will be your foundation. Julian Lemoine, Co-Founder, and CTO of Algolia will share his lessons learned on how to stay focused and innovative as you scale while also avoiding the innovation for innovation’s sake pitfalls. Of course, not at scale.

Scale 123

Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 123

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

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2019

In this session, Anna and Sameer will highlight SendGrid’s journey from growth stage through acquisition and why focusing on people and culture is mission critical to success as a company goes through the scaling process. We were signing up hundreds of new paying customers every month with five sales reps. Anna Khan | VP @ BVP.

Scale 132

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 132

SaaStr

AUGUST 4, 2022

And inflation is awful. And startups that had planned on a big up round this year are in many cases, really struggling. Alteryx, a leading public SaaS ETL company, announced it was growing 33% at $730m in ARR! . — Jason 2022 SaaStr Annual Sep 13-15 Lemkin (@jasonlk) August 3, 2022. So are we in a downturn in SaaS?

Venture Capital 282

Venture Capital AWS Cloud Scale 282

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

An open discussion with Sam Blond, CSO at Brex, and Kristen Habacht, VPS at Atlassian, about adjusting their sales process during Covid-19. Kristen Habacht runs EDR sales at Atlassian, which I got a check today, $40 billion-$50 billion company. Four, people in the sale? Kristen Habacht: Well, there’s none in sales.

Merchant Services 175

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 175

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. Best in class Late-stage Startups (e.g. Mid-stage startups.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

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. Day one of your startup is probably not the time to be learning Kubernetes.

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Check out this 2018 Europa session with Guillaume Princen, Head of France and Southern Europe @ Stripe, where he talks about the metrics you need to be focused on in your startup. Customer acquisition is basically how much do you spend in terms of sales people, sales team, and in terms of marketing to acquire a new customer.

SaaS Payments 233

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 233

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

Hila Qu joined Mucker’s Tony Yang for an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) conversation about Product-Led Growth (PLG) for Startups to kickoff the 2023 Mucker Growth Series. Hila Qu has been the Head of Growth or VP of Growth at a number of different companies and startups, most notably Acorns and GitLab. You need a lot of education.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

Casey Accidental

DECEMBER 11, 2023

In a previous post , I talked about how product work post-product/market fit shifts from zero to one innovation to features, growth, and scaling work. You can read parts 1 and 2 here and here. But a question founders and teams often ask is when do we start layering in innovation work again that creates new value props.

Payments 113

Payments Scale Payment Solutions Technical Review 113

SaaStr

MAY 14, 2019

First of all, do we have any European SaaS startups here today? And there were no startup communities. No startup environment. Mikkel : Well again, the public cloud, AWS, was the dominant leader. So if you are a startup today what we spend nine months, twelve months initially, you could do that in like weeks today.

Cloud 182

Cloud Sales Recruiting Scale AWS 182

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 1, 2018

The EU was kind enough to provide a stress test for our email delivery pipeline during the GDPR surge on a scale that I doubt our engineering team as a whole would have agreed to, and we passed. That resulted in the email delivery pipeline operating at high output for several days leading up to and following the GDPR deadline.

Scale 204

Scale Engineering AWS Scaling 204

OpenView Labs

MAY 20, 2019

That’s certainly true in developer tooling (AWS), sales and support (Salesforce), MarTech (Adobe), commerce (Square), HR tech (Workday) and even vertical markets (Veeva). This begs the question: how much room is left for emerging startups? The median growth rate of startups with $1-2.5M

Scale 70

Scale Startup Technical Review Software Review 70

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 31, 2019

The scale is extraordinary. It will take some time to discern just how fundamentally our political and social discourse will be changed by the likes of Facebook and Twitter, but just as with every revolution, it will lead to both positive and negative outcomes, to both delight and disillusionment. There are about 3.2

Payment Solutions 259

Payment Solutions Payment Methods Software SaaS Payments 259

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 4, 2016

For hundreds of startups in the as-a-service world, the scores of product launches at last week’s Amazon Web Services Reinvent Conference each were a warning shot across their bows. And because of their scale, they can do it at a fraction of the cost by the startup would. What is this all mean for startups?

Startup 100

Startup Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence AWS 100

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2020

333: Bridget Gleason is the Head of Sales and Customer Success @ Tidelift, the company providing managed open source, backed by maintainers. Before Tidelift, Bridget was VP of Sales @ Logz.io and before that was VP of Corporate Sales @ Sumo Logic where she drove ARR up by a record 237%.

Sales Hiring 194

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Review Outsourcing Services 194

Chart Mogul

MARCH 2, 2021

What will fill the void left by the business you worked hard to build, scale, and sell? 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. You’re hot stuff. It might be awesome.

Startup 52

Startup Acquisition SaaS Scale 52

Frontegg

JUNE 17, 2021

As explained in the first part of this series, we clearly saw why Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is the way to go when it comes to establishing self-serving applications that can be scaled up and developed fast(er). Scale up (or down) fast Better Latency – Access points all around the world for better performance.

ECS (Elastic Container Service) 97

ECS (Elastic Container Service) multi-cloud Kubernetes K8S orchestration (Kubernetes) Scale 97

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