SaaStr

JULY 14, 2022

What started as a simple WordPress blog in 2012 has now become the world’s largest community of SaaS executives, founders, and entrepreneurs. SaaStr began in 2012 as a simple WordPress blog and a few answers on Quora sharing Jason Lemkin’s learnings of going from $0 to $100m ARR at EchoSign. SaaStr is turning 10!

Scale 272

Scale Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO 272

SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2020

Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders? You will need a VP of Product to scale your roadmap. You can smother customers with love alone in the early days, but as you scale, you need a seasoned customer success team and VP that has done this before. She can be your CTO forever.

Part-Time VPE 231

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE Sales Recruiting 231

SaaStr

JUNE 18, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: About 70% of SaaS Public Companies Are New Versions of Existing Categories of Software (Updated) Growth Slowed Down About 33% On Average For Everyone in Q1 The Top 20 SaaStr Tips to Getting a SaaS Start-Up Going When Should You Add a Second Product?

CTO Hire 195

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Scaling 195

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Does Anyone Want To Be a Unicorn Anymore? Ode to the $100,000,000 Exit Dear SaaStr: Should You Hire Someone That Seems Good … But Always Job Hops? TAM is Great. Top Podcasts This Week: 1. SaaStr APAC 2023: Stage A Streaming LIVE 5.

Scale 196

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 196

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2021

Lately I’ve been working with 5+ SaaS companies all hiring their first VP of Product. And critically, most have a really strong CEO-CTO partnership. A few general learnings: A VP of Product that Reports to CTO / Engineering Rarely Meets With That Many Customers. I just see this time and time again.

Part-Time VPE 283

Part-Time VPE Outsourcing Services CTO Hire CTO 283

SaaStr

JULY 3, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Zendesk and Anaplan: A Tale of Two Very Similar, And Very Different, $10B SaaS Acquisitions. The Ultimate Guide for Hiring a Great VP of Sales. with Jenn Knight, Co-founder and CTO of AgentSync, and Daryna Kulya, Co-founder of OpenPhone.

CTO Hire 188

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Scale CTO 188

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2023

The best we made our CTO. But what if our CTO gets hit by a bus? He scaled up our technology in a way folks for years had thought was impossible. They feed on each other, hire other toxic people, and turn the company against the mission and each other. Sometimes, still hire them. Well he was toxic. For a while.

CTO Hire 213

CTO Hire CTO Technology Engineering 213

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2021

The first 2 scaled reps you hire that hit plan (some may churn before then) get special training. They get CTO training. Without training, reps 3-10 scale more slowly, if at all. And they see the CEO sort of judging them for not scaling quickly. Simplify to a 1 page contract. They get CEO training.

Scale 335

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 335

SaaStr

JUNE 12, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: What All First-Time CEOs Should Know About Fundraising. SaaStr 559: Secrets to Building Your Marketing Engine To Drive Scale with Airtable CMO Archana Agrawal. 5 Interesting Learnings from Zoom at $4.3B Top Videos This Week: 1.

Scale 164

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire CTO 164

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2020

He joined StubHub as CTO, but didn’t get nearly as much equity as the other CTO — because he “wasn’t committed enough.” If your customers love your product now, hire reps. ” Times of crisis are actually great times to find hard problems to solve.

CTO Hire 336

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Airlines 336

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2021

Some leaders like Slack have seen the same, but most Cloud leaders at scale with high NRR end up getting more and more of their revenue from their existing base, not new customers. Use overages to renegotiate contracts, not charge per event. They’re growing even faster at scale. More on that here.

Scale 257

Scale CTO Hire New CTO CTO 257

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

You’ll need to hire aggressively to get to the next level and continue that rapid growth. But what roles should you hire for, and what will your org chart look like at each stage? David considers product to be its own department that should also report directly to the CEO, instead of falling under the CTO. CTO (40 Employees).

CTO Hire 237

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO 237

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

These are all full-time jobs by $1m ARR. Fixing it yourself becomes the biggest time sink and excuse for not hiring there is. You end up spending all your time backfilling roles you should have hired. And even worse, you often sort of give up trying to make the hire. Get on a jet, at least twice a quarter.

Part-Time VPE 258

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 258

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2021

In the past, we’ve touched on several different ideas to help you scale, to do Even Better: Imagine capital doesn’t matter. And importantly, you need to spend more time with your existing customers (vs. But even if you’ve hired the world’s best VP of Sales … you can’t opt out of sales entirely.

Part-Time VPE 272

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 272

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2020

They’ll revolt when you make a senior or mid-level hire that as a group, they simply cannot suffer one day longer. He was literally the only person on the planet with the specific scaling experience we needed. It did work — we got the scaling done. You see this all the time. Everyone hated him.

Part-Time VPE 273

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 273

SaaStr

DECEMBER 10, 2020

in ARR, get to Initial Traction , we then realize we have to scale. Hire not just 1-2 reps, but 10. That it’s time to bring in someone that knows. But I’ve found many great SaaS founders take longer, too long, to decide to hire the other VPs. My CTO and dev team is building all the features we need.

Sales Hiring 351

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 351

SaaStr

DECEMBER 23, 2019

From large scale mainstage sessions to intimate workshops and even a dedicated lounge, we are carving out some of SaaStr Annual just for developers and engineers. ” When to Hire and When to Automate” with Zapier CEO Wade Foster. ” When to Hire and When to Automate” with Zapier CEO Wade Foster.

CTO Coach 142

CTO Coach Engineering CTO Hire Development 142

SaaStr

APRIL 28, 2020

In fact, right after that we hired a roundtrip employee as our CTO in my first start-up and it was amazing. It was magical to have an A+ team member also be almost 100% scaled up his first day. Especially in tougher times, folks may be knocking on your door again. Roundtrip hires can work. Life changes.

CTO Hire 252

CTO Hire CTO Scaling Management 252

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

On top of that, founders are full of excuses preventing them from scaling. You have to see: A couple of good hires brought in Improvement on some metrics A big deal or two hanging out there, brought in and closed Things taken off your plate. But after a couple million in ARR, you can afford any hire if they’re accretive.

Part-Time VPE 174

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 174

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. What to do before building a team for your SaaS company You can’t just jump into hiring without some forethought, or you’ll make many mistakes. Before the hiring process, take some time to decide on your current needs and hire as your company grows.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

WorkOS CEO Michael Grinich, Developer Success Manager Betsy Calender, and VP of Developer Experience Zeno Rocha share how to price your product for developers, how to market it to developers, how to how to support them as they scale and use the products. The contract size grows. Doing Business with Developers.

Underperforming Technical Team 173

Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Development Part-Time VPE 173

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

Rich Archbold , Senior Director of Engineering, has been at the forefront of codifying and scaling this philosophy over the past few years. The concept was the foundation for his popular talk and ultimately his classic, long-form blog post. Ciaran, our CTO , came up with this magical line. Recodifying Run Less Software at scale.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

SaaStr

APRIL 22, 2019

Hear why he thinks that the next call should not have been to a competitor. “Hiring, Firing and Stretching: How to Build Your First Management Teams” ScaleX Founder and Managing Partner Dilek Dayinlarli and Insider Co-Founder and CEO Hande Cilingir and Atlassian Head of OpsGenie Berkay Mollamustafaoglu. His next call?

CTO Hire 149

CTO Hire Scale Sales Hiring CTO 149

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

hiring in-house talent). Scaling companies that need insight can get it easily with the help of a specialized platform that guides them through all the necessary and applicable sales tax obligations and processes. . Leverage automation to support scaling. “But with AutoFile, we’ve scaled to doing taxes in 40+ states.”

Merchant Services 171

Merchant Services Scale Technical Review Sales Hiring 171

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

Well, we did the heavy lifting and highlighted a few here for you… “When to Hire and When to Automate” with Zapier CEO Wade Foster. Deep Dive Session: “The New Key Hire: Chief of Staff” with LaunchDarkly Chief of Staff Delores Brown. So, how do you choose amongst the stable of unicorns?

Payment Services 100

Payment Services CTO Hire Payments New CTO 100

SaaStock

MARCH 29, 2019

Here is what he writes: Kieran Flanagan , VP of marketing at HubSpot, shared some interesting insights on approaching new ideas for scaling up your business. The Gold: these are very rare and hard to achieve at the scale-up stage, so you’ll mostly encounter them with startups. The best part? Hire Game Changers to Propel Growth.

Scale 103

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Social Media 103

SaaStr

JUNE 16, 2022

Miguel Carranza, CTO at RevenueCat, shares ten learnings from firsthand experience in architecting an API & SDK that is currently on 5,000+ apps and has seen 3x growth Year-over-Year. . But at scale, people will use your API in crazy ways that you might not imagine, so some margin of the unexpected is unavoidable.

CTO Hire 212

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Scaling 212

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

So you were the first sales hire. Talk to me about the sales hires that you made back in the early days and talk to me about how it changed through the different stages. So my first sales hire was beginning of 2015. The very first few sales hire are I would say not your typical reps. Laura Bilazarian : Awesome.

Scale 136

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 136

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

At what scale does that become impossible? How does Bob think about when is the right time to hire a Head of Partnerships? Where do most startups go wrong both in hiring for partnerships and in the engagements themselves? Bob Moore: All those things the first time you do them they are painful and difficult to formulate.

Sales Hiring 131

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 131

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

Perhaps the single most important thing you can ever do in SaaS, at least after $1m in ARR or so, is hire the best VPs you can. We’ve talked a lot over the years about how not to hire a wrong VP of Sales — 70%+ of the first VPs of Sales don’t make it even 10 months. You need to hire up-and-comers. Get on jets?

Part-Time VPE 314

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 314

SaaStr

MAY 26, 2023

Dan Robinson, current Advisor and former CTO at Heap , shares five essential learnings from nearly a decade of building a SaaS business. Register for SaaStr Annual and join 12,500 Cloud and SaaS Founders, VCs, and Execs at SaaStr Annual for three full days of workshops, sessions, and networking — all to help you scale faster.

CTO Coach 175

CTO Coach CTO Hire CTO Leadership 175

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

But after years of research and thinking about this problem at typeform.com and Notion , David decided to write a blog post explaining why this question is so hard to answer. How many CSMs should you hire? On a global scale, on average, product marketers with strong leadership support earn almost $13k more a year than those without.

Scale 43

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2023

Scaling a PLG company While it’s great to figure out a PLG model that allows you to scale your revenue with inbound, it cannot stop there. Outbound fury is about getting customer attention through tactics like viral tweets, fun videos, controversial blog posts, and a constant presence in the media.

Scale 182

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scaling 182

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

You’ll also learn how leading SaaS companies are able to scale and thrive in this complex, dynamic environment. And so we actually had to make some major adjustments and look for an alternative way to deliver the software which clearly meant that we needed to move to the cloud full-time. Want to see more content like this session?

Cloud 168

Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 168

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. There are no Cloud magicians, and you can’t hire a PLG magician. Let’s jump right into the questions.

Scale 232

Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 232

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 15, 2018

He had to quickly determine which team members displayed a potential for leadership and teach them the fundamentals of management so they could make new hires and scale – without ruining the culture. Building trust can be tough when you’re a new hire in a leadership position. Sponsorship vs. mentorship.

Leadership 141

Leadership Engineering Part-Time VPE CTO Coach 141

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2020

Brendon introduces his playbook to hiring the first VP of Sales from his experiences as VP of Sales at LinkedIn, EchoSign, Talkdesk and more. Learn the dos and don’ts to make the correct hire the first time and not rush into hiring the wrong VP of Sales, which can cost the company months or even years. Roughly 90%.

Sales Hiring 152

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire 152