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. The first place to start is to learn to sell your startup’s product well. The first place to start is to learn to sell your startup’s product well. Here are my notes. Where to Start.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 20, 2023

We’ll have dozens and dozens of workshops, braindates, and much more! It will be the #1 place to talk SaaS, learn SaaS, and share SaaS learnings in APAC in 2023!

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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? Questions to ask.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

AWS can’t support 20 partners equally. It’s a defensible strategy to create differentiation when you and that partner build out specific integrations. When partnering with big folks like Drata does with AWS, you have to bring business to them. Pick your strategies, invest in them, and start tiering. It won’t work.

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AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 273

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

It’s even harder if you don’t know all of the armies on the field, their strategies and weapons, or even who’s a friend and who’s a foe. In this battle, I’ve found a secret weapon hidden within one of our core engineering strategies, an idea called Run Less Software. Innovative startups. The first army are innovative startups.

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Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

The startup I invested in that were acquired by PE in the 2020-2021 Boom were acquired for 8x in one case, 12x in another, and 15x in a third. Products that are as close to an annuity as possible, that are amenable to efficiency gains. So what do they pay on average? The prices would be lower today for the latter two I suspect.

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AWS SaaS Pricing Acquisition 313

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 1, 2019

. “Michael is the rare CFO who also leads up marketing, which makes him the perfect person to talk us through the company’s trajectory” As the head of Intercom’s Early Stage program for Startups, the fast-growing fintech startup is one company I’ve been keeping my eye on. From Wall Street to startup. billion dollars.

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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. This function can be outsourced in the early days of a startup, but it is usually brought in-house after Series B. Growth Strategy Identify and implement new growth opportunities and revenue streams.

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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. Crowdstrike.

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SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

TJ Nahigian, co-founder and Managing Partner of Base10 Partners, and Luci Fonseca, Partner, deep dive into the current GenAI landscape, incumbents vs. startups, and the six questions founders should ask themselves to drive value from GenAI. Startup platforms are OpenAI, Hugging Face, and Cohere. How are they doing this?

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Generative AI Outsourcing Services AI Software Review 286

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2023

It provides updates on Microsoft’s products and strategies and fosters collaboration among partners. AWS re:Invent : AWS re:Invent is Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) annual conference, focused on cloud computing and SaaS-related services. It explores strategies for retaining and expanding customer relationships.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 4, 2021

From AWS to Vimeo: this year’s speaker lineup is packed with incredible speakers and content. A Marketer’s Playbook for Building a Sustainable Growth Strategy with Datadog’s CMO Alex Rosemblat. Check out the full detailed agenda here. There’s content that everyone on your team can learn from.

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SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Ed Lenta, the SVP and GM of Databricks, had the rare opportunity of scaling three hypergrowth companies — VMware, AWS, and Databricks. You need to marry your go-to-market strategy to specific commercial structures that you, as a SaaS company, decide to offer your customers. Of course, we all know how that turned out.

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Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 255

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

That includes all of our cloud strategy, cloud operations, backend engineering, IT and security. I started at Amazon before they had Amazon Web Services (AWS) so I was lucky enough to see AWS born out of the guts of all of the great operations work done for the amazon.com retail website. What it means to Run Less Software.

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Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

I’m an investor in maybe 30 SaaS startups. Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? More on dominant strategies in SaaS competition here. I’m doing a lot of this financial planning now. Some are barely burning any cash. So is SaaS cursed? I’m not sure you can, in many cases.

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Scale SaaS Banking AWS 286

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2021

We’d rent a car, get on the road, and go to all kinds of startups and give talks on Apache Spark to build up a community around it. 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.

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Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 4, 2014

Most startups play defense when discussing pricing with customers. Startups operate in newer markets where pricing standards haven’t been set. But throughout this turmoil, startups must adopt a process to craft a good pricing strategy, and re-evaluate prices periodically, but at least once per year.

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How To Buy Saas

JUNE 18, 2025

Whether you build enterprise SaaS or run a startup, understanding the global AI landscape (and its products and platforms) is key to staying ahead. SaaS and startups rapidly embed AI: many Silicon Valley companies now use models like GPT-4 and Claude via API to power features in chatbots, analytics, coding assistants, etc.

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SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

2: What Keeps Someone Motivated In The Startup World Jason has been successful, has had exits, has invested in great companies, and has built SaaStr into what it is, so what motivates him and other founders to keep going? 7: Having the CMO Report to the CRO is a Terrible Idea Having marketing under a CRO is an awful idea for two reasons.

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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. And what are the different pricing strategies? That’s typically the AWS model, depending on how much space you take, service space, you will pay more.

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SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

Cockroach Labs’ CEO Spencer Kimball shares hard-won lessons from scaling from $0 to $5B and his time as an angel investor for more than 80 different startups. And his answer, like many answers in startups, is it depends. What Matters Most When Raising In Early Rounds? How hot is the space, and what is the product category?

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User Pilot

SEPTEMBER 1, 2024

Looking for SaaS pricing examples to get inspiration for your own strategy? Hopefully, by the end of the article, you’ll have ideas on how to design a pricing strategy that contributes to product growth. Here are some types of SaaS pricing strategies: 1. Why is a SaaS pricing strategy important? Let’s dive in!

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Pricing Strategy SaaS Scale 104

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 28, 2021

Startups are designed to grow quickly, but high growth rates can generate huge costs as new infrastructure is introduced and scaled to meet demand. As a result of our reactive strategy, we are gifted with a backlog of cost optimization opportunities. Our philosophy is to ship first and optimize later. Prioritize by impact.

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Management Government Cost optimization & reporting Engineering 211

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 17, 2014

The concept of negative churn is a bit amorphous so let’s illustrate the impact on a startup. This startup acquires 100 customers per month, each paying $1 per month to use the product. In the 5% monthly churn case, the startup exits 2014 with $919 in MRR (monthly recurring revenue) and the typical customer is worth $77.

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Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 25, 2013

This is as true for their books business as their infrastructure business, AWS. Bezos has explicitly stated this strategy and it’s the one that has led to Amazon’s massive success in many different lines of business. Over sushi, a friend explained to me that this strategy might also extend to the way the company views acquisitions.

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Acquisition Pricing AWS Startup 100

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 30, 2024

Amit Pande is CMO and EVP of Strategy at Aviso AI, a leading revenue intelligence platform. 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).

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AWS AI Advertising Finance 105

Crafty CTO

JUNE 18, 2025

State of Startups and AI 2025 Speaker: Sarah Guo ( Conviction ) – Session video Sarah wins the “best save” award when AV fails, leaving her with no slides … she still pulls off a great presentation, and doesn’t even run over. Excellent overview of the state of AI, the pace of progress, trends.

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SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

It has a portion of its revenue that’s very sensitive to the economy and a lot of startups in the customer base, good and bad, right? Then Jason, on your comment around SDRs needing to be more thoughtful and sophisticated in communication and strategy, definitely. We can save companies $100,000 on their AWS bill.

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Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 24, 2019

Mike has been in and around startups for the better part of three decades: as a consultant, as a co-founder and now as the Managing Director of Salesforce Incubator, which propels new startups into the marketplace. He joined me for a chat that ranged from the role of AI to how they choose startups to incubate. Short on time?

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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

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Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 6, 2023

Without a holistic strategy like this, I actually think that AI has the ability to do more harm to your business than good. Enterprise AI startups: Companies focused on safely implementing AI for enterprise-specific use cases, especially privacy and security. After that, it goes to the entire organization.

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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. Once you have that information, you can create a strategy. That’s when OpDemand was born.

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Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 14, 2019

Products like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the rise of engineering talent globally have reduced the barrier of entry for software startups in recent years. In meetings, for instance, there’s an expectation that we will honestly and openly discuss what’s working, what isn’t, and what our strategy is moving forward.

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Software Review AWS Social Media Machine Learning 162

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

This is especially critical for startups and younger companies, who don’t have the resources of a large scaled marketing team. More for your eardrums : Amit Pande is CMO and EVP of Strategy at Aviso AI, a leading revenue intelligence platform. Here are 20 groundbreaking campaigns dating back to 1984. Have a great weekend!

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Metrics Revenue Scale Marketing 119

Neil Patel

SEPTEMBER 22, 2020

Just understand that this is a marketing strategy the card companies use to entice new sign-ups. 3 – Brex Mastercard Corporate Review — The Best Business Credit Card For Startups. This card is branded as “the first corporate card for startups.”. The business Mastercard from Brex is a popular choice for tech startups.

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Payment Methods Airlines Business Travel 145

Chargify

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

These forward-thinking businesses are using diverse monetization strategies to better serve their customers and differentiate their offers from the competition. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a poster-child for the Relationship Economy—they truly understand the modern B2B customer. Salesforce is another great B2B example.

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Payment Features Subscription AWS Scale 75

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 16, 2022

This is why our customers – from small startups to massive, complex enterprises – put their trust in us. Part of the program strategy aims to identify, prioritize, and mitigate risks that would threaten our availability. Here’s how we do it. Availability is embedded our culture.

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