SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2025

Fresh data from Ramp’s AI Index suggests that the meteoric rise in business AI spending might be showing signs of deceleration, raising questions about whether we’re witnessing market maturation or beginning to hit a potential adoption ceiling: The numbers tell a nuanced story. businesses has reached an incredible 41.7%

AI 275

AI Payment Services Payments Scale 275

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2024

Okta’s VP of Engineering, Monica Bajaj, and Senior Director of Platform Product Marketing, Priya Ramamurthi, share Okta’s playbook to PLG, developer experience, and Enterprise ARR. How do you build a stellar developer experience and continue to scale when the user base skyrockets overnight? Let’s start with product-led growth (PLG).

Underperforming Technical Team 276

Underperforming Technical Team Enterprise Scale Payments 276

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 3, 2020

The 9 Disciplines of Great SaaS Companies remains one of the most popular posts on marketing on this blog. Each bucket has a set of disciplines that the team scores. First, it enumerates the important priorities for a marketing team. company positioning: what is the narrative of the business? Business Development.

Underperforming Technical Team 340

Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Scale Social Media 340

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2025

“Even with a bad hand, if the potential reward is great enough, taking a risk can make mathematical sense.” As second-time founders, Atiyah and his team raised an outsized seed round for Ramp, giving them the capital to tackle a space that most startups couldn’t touch. But this challenge also presents opportunity.

CTO Hire 204

CTO Hire CTO Coach Scale CTO 204

SaaStr

AUGUST 31, 2022

The $100 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) mark is a magnificent milestone for companies that indicates sustainable business growth. Scalability is about capability, so businesses need to understand whether they have the capacity to grow and whether their infrastructure and team can accommodate growth.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Company Culture 246

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2020

Do a lot more Business Development and Partnerships. Underperformers found it harder to hide after Covid, and many have already left or moved on. Respectfully move on from any other underperformers by year-end. Not only is office space half off now … but you can get a cool office. Finish this exercise.

Underperforming Technical Team 328

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Travel Cloud 328

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2025

About Dave Kellogg Dave Kellogg brings a rare combination of marketing and executive leadership experience to his analysis of SaaS businesses. You founded a product company, but you’re running a distribution business. You assembled a talented team, built an amazing product, and established a growing SaaS business.

Sales Hiring 195

Sales Hiring Marketing Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 195

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2025

While competitors invested in huge sales teams, Atlassian actually restricted direct customer interaction. The “Feature Request Arbitrage” Strategy Hidden gem in their marketplace origin: They turned their biggest product weakness (feature request backlog) into their greatest strength.

Sales Recruiting 201

Sales Recruiting Marketplace as a Service Underperforming Technical Team Scale 201

SaaStr

MAY 22, 2025

Be prepared to talk about the team youve builtwho you hired, why you hired them, and how they performed. Be ready to share specific examples of how youve developed and executed sales strategies that drove revenue growth. Bring Energy and Vision : Show that youre not just here to manage a teamyoure here to scale the business.

Sales Recruiting 195

Sales Recruiting Interviewing Sales Hiring Scale 195

FastSpring

APRIL 24, 2025

How new global laws like the European Accessibility Act will impact digital businesses. If you’re a founder, marketer, or product leader looking to grow your business while doing the right thing, this episode is a must-listen. You know, get them out of your blog posts and over to where they actually buy, that kind of thing.

Business 107

Business Software Review Underperforming Technical Team AI Search 107

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2022

Developing a product that solves a customer’s pain point provides a sense of pride and can drive the positive, emotional moment of awe that retains customers for the long haul. Business model. This approach gets to the heart of the subscription-based business model. Every business is a people business. Motivation.

Underperforming Technical Team 49

Underperforming Technical Team Business Scale Business Model 49

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Developers act, think, and behave differently than your average customer. As an API-first company, WorkOS focuses on selling primarily to developers. Doing Business with Developers. Developers haven’t typically been the buyers in enterprise software, so why should you build for developers?

Outsourced Development 207

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 207

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

If you own a SaaS or other digital product business such as a Slack plugin, Chrome extension, online publishing business, mobile app, or even a blog and youre looking to exit, you may have a lot of questions about how best to go about it. How selling an investment business is very different from getting VC funding.

Scale 119

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 119

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

So let’s take a look back to a deep dive with the CEOs on what they learned building their first senior teams: ———-. As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. What makes you feel that you need to level up your management, set up your first management team?

Sales Hiring 258

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 258

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2025

Parker Conrad, founder and CEO of Rippling (and previously Zenefits), makes a compelling case that the “focus above all” mentality is not just limitingit might be fundamentally wrong for many businesses. Payroll in the UK, like many business processes, is complex and interconnected. ” The compound startup alternative?

Startup 152

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cloud 152

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

How To Build A High-Performing Team And Retain Top Talent. Every leader needs to have a strategic playbook to build high-performing teams and retain top talent,” says Guan Wang, Global Director of Market Intelligence for Snowflake. . Stage 3: Employee Development. The Playbook For Building And Retaining A High-Performing Team .

Underperforming Technical Team 246

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Acquisition Company Culture 246

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2025

Companies can meet stringent quality requirements at a fraction of the cost of in-house teams, while accelerating their AI initiatives. Why It Matters : Customer support teams are drowning in tickets, with resolution times getting longer, not shorter. Think of us like Apollo/ZoomInfo but for local business/POI data.

AI Search 170

AI Search AI Startup Scale 170

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

Lexi Reese, Gusto COO uses her 20+ years of experience to provide advice on building high performing teams using authenticity, empathy and logic. Lexi explains the importance of team trust, driver and passenger mindsets, and much more. Gusto now serves 100,000 small businesses. Who was the highest engaged teams?

Scale 242

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Leadership 242

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

sales team. Well, let’s go to the business school at Michigan.” I did all sorts of things there from sales, to project management, to running the engineering team, hiring. This is where I got my chops in growing and scaling enterprise sales teams. We have team selling here that extends beyond the sales team.

Scale 290

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 290

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2024

So with that, let’s dive into what’s new at WordPress: Is Blogging on the Decline? Matt shares that blogging did decline for a while, and it does seem to be all over social how folks are quitting blogging or vlogging these days. What people love about a blog is a person’s voice and their story.

Underperforming Technical Team 327

Underperforming Technical Team Social Media Government Subscription 327

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

If a VP of Sales has a $500k+ OTE and a big team to manage, does it even make senses to sell courses on the side? Owning an airbnb, doing a podcast, coaching a team, volunteering or trading cards – that’s a hobby and a side-hustle and very much encouraged). Be that including their businesses and personal relationships.

Underperforming Technical Team 316

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 316

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2025

Manage Team Expectations – Balance transparency with the need to keep the team focused on building the business. Different buyers value different aspects of your business – some want your technology, others your team or customer base.

Technical Review 201

Technical Review Software Review Development Team Review Sales Hiring 201

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

Lesson 1: Everything is about your team. Every startup needs strong team dynamics to pull through tough times. It’s all about the team 99% of the time and 1% product and process. Without great teamwork, business productivity is next to impossible to achieve. Starting a business is a huge undertaking.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 246

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2021

So when it comes to building your technical strategy, you need to assess each component in relation to what success will look like for your business. Even thinking about implementing a multi-cloud architecture is prematurely optimizing for practically all businesses – especially startups – and not a trap you want to fall into.

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 25, 2024

There are so many questions to answer when considering how to scale a customer success team. What about team leads? When do I split my one team into two teams? How do I split one team into two? And I know you want to scale your customer success team in the right way. I know it’s a lot of pressure.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Customer Success Scaling 52

Stax

MAY 5, 2025

In recent years, businesses have seen this massive shift from desktop to mobile devices which has forced them to develop apps with built-in integrated payment gateways. A bad payment experience can lose customers and damage your brand. There are many different gateways available, each with its strengths and weaknesses.

Payments 88

Payments Payment Services Merchant Services Payment Solutions 88

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

The underperformers who aren’t putting in the effort get a conversation, and if things don’t change, it’s not a good fit. Jameson and Sam also recommend that across the org: sales, marketing and CS — the early and sooner you can get the entire team re-focused on creating their own pipeline, the better. Guess what?

Sales Hiring 275

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 275

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

That’s the one fundamental fact on which we can base our businesses. As companies begin to succeed, they sometimes develop a tunnel vision towards the customers who have brought them their success. But just the fact that your company is generating ideas can help product teams, sales, success, marketing – everyone – to do better.

Underperforming Technical Team 278

Underperforming Technical Team Company Culture Customer Success Product Marketing 278

Buffer Resources

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

It’s particularly hard (and confusing and incredibly time-consuming) if you’re relatively new in business. This process can provide you with valuable insights to identify opportunities and threats, and ultimately improve your own business strategies. Competitor analysis can be hard.

Social Media 123

Social Media Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring 123

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2024

It’s one thing to invest in an area where only 5% of your business is today. Then, you’ll have enough folks and experience to put a small team on a new initiative / segment / market. Micromanaging Your First (and Second) Management Team. Bad operational model / misunderstanding the burn rate. And stymie all of them.

Scaling 294

Scaling Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Market Segmentation 294

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 7, 2023

There’s an assumption that as a founder or Head of Product, you need a deep understanding of the business domain your users are in — how they think and want to work, regulatory and reporting requirements, etc. To build an app for that industry, you need to know a business to build SaaS for it. #2 What’s the data model?

Generative AI 286

Generative AI AWS Artificial Intelligence AI 286

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

So how feasible do you think that works for a typical B2B SaaS business that probably our user-base is not too knowledgeable about [inaudible] on the internet for something specific in their day-to-day use case? You could watch it on YouTube or search on SaaStr on the blog about how ClickUp leveraged it. That’s a great example.

Scale 286

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 286

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

It wasn’t the case 20 or even 10 years ago, where the business models of the internet were more focused on eCommerce, marketplaces, or even advertising. The second constituent there is the developer. Why do developers love SaaS products? The last kind of constituent here is investors and business owners.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

SaaStr

DECEMBER 18, 2019

Why are you struggling to grow your business when everyone else seems to be crushing their goals? Doubling the size of your business, tripling it, even growing 10 times larger isn’t about magic. Growth exposes your weaknesses, and it will cause more problems than it solves – until you make sales scalable.

Underperforming Technical Team 251

Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Development Software 251

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Even as a three person team, we went through an exercise to figure out what do we stand for, as a team? Sam : This is not my insight, but someone else says… I really do believe it, that the team you build is the company you build.

VP of Engineering 286

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 286

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

The highs and lows always come, usually involving the people on your team. For Erica, the bad days are when they’re not executing or achieving growth the way they want. They also come in the form of people she cares about leaving the business or struggling to succeed because they don’t have the tools they need.

Scale 293

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 293

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2024

These nine sales concepts, when done correctly, will greatly improve your sales and sales teams. #1: In a way, you’re diagnosing the biggest opportunities for the business within sales and conversion rates. Most people think you need to hire more salespeople in a demand-poor environment. That’s the wrong answer.

Sales Recruiting 284

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 284