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. sales enablement: how strong are the materials sales teams use to pitch? Comms Marketing.

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 196

CTO Hire CTO Coach Scale CTO 196

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. The common thread?

Sales Recruiting 199

Sales Recruiting Marketplace as a Service Underperforming Technical Team Scale 199

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2025

A smaller number of high-quality leads that convert at higher rates is vastly superior to a flood of poor-fit prospects. You assembled a talented team, built an amazing product, and established a growing SaaS business. Mix in the classic conflict between sales and marketing teams, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

Sales Hiring 192

Sales Hiring Marketing Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 192

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2025

The First Rule About Building Software Is Wrong “If there’s one rule that almost everyone universally agrees with about building software, it’s that focus is really important,” Conrad explains, citing Silicon Valley luminaries Bill Gurley and David Sacks who consistently advocate for narrowing your focus.

Startup 154

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cloud 154

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 208

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 208

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 25, 2019

When trying to solve a problem with software, it can be tempting to build an exciting, complex solution. At our event Building Intercom in Dublin, I argued that when it comes to building software, we should avoid excitement and embrace boring. When it comes to software, boring is best. How do we develop with it locally?

Software 168

Software Underperforming Technical Team Technology Engineering 168

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. and now very big in the case of, say, a zero, which is cloud accounting software.

Scale 121

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 121

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

Incredo

DECEMBER 12, 2019

How many software review sites are you present at? Why software reviews are your best friends and why you need them? #1 Bad reviews teach, good reviews sell Not all of your reviews will be positive. And you know why people are subscribing to your software. When something goes wrong, it’s time to voice what happens.

Software Review 37

Software Review Systems Review Software Social Media 37

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

Yet competition and the exponential rate of change in software are pushing against that mission. Enter our philosophy of Run Less Software. It means reducing choices amongst engineering teams and standardizing technology, so our team can spend as much time as possible delivering value to customers.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

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 260

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 260

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2021

Although they may seem like strong opinions, many of these tips echo the main tenets of software engineering: work with you’ve got, design solutions as needed, don’t repeat yourself, and keep it simple, stupid! Don’t add to your stack unless you’re certain that your use case will not be satisfied by existing software.

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

sales team. We disrupted this space and ended up pushing out software vendors that had been doing this for 25, 30 years. 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. Good afternoon.

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 284

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 329

Underperforming Technical Team Social Media Government Subscription 329

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

As companies begin to succeed, they sometimes develop a tunnel vision towards the customers who have brought them their success. If you don’t work to keep your knowledge of the market fresh and current, you may be left with a narrow view that will inevitably catch your sales and product teams flat-footed. Verify product-user fit.

Underperforming Technical Team 281

Underperforming Technical Team Company Culture Customer Success Product Marketing 281

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. Take baby steps, learn as you go, and be realistic about the commitment required.

Technical Review 195

Technical Review Software Review Development Team Review Sales Hiring 195

User Pilot

OCTOBER 31, 2024

Which product feedback software should you choose for your SaaS? In this round-up, I cover 21 of the best product feedback software solutions. In this round-up, I cover 21 of the best product feedback software solutions. Social listening tools : Software for monitoring online conversations, brand mentions, and trends.

Software Review 52

Software Review Software Social Media Underperforming Technical Team 52

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 7, 2023

It’s expensive and time-consuming to build software. 2 It’s expensive and time-consuming to build software. The good news is you have a big backlog, and the bad news is you have a big backlog. All these developers will have agents to help them write faster and faster. Go-to-Market is expensive and labor-intensive.

Generative AI 290

Generative AI AWS Artificial Intelligence AI 290

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

PlanGrid builds beautiful, simple software for the construction industry. 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? Getting the team right is so key here.

VP of Engineering 290

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 290

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! The other thing is I’ve studied enterprise software for literally 30 years. I was an intern at IBM mainframe software when I was 20 years old. “Look, here’s enterprise software. I was a software developer, a product person.

Sales Hiring 338

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 338

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

They supply their customers with a full marketing suite and customer data software for thousands of SMB, e-commerce businesses. There wasn’t software that did this back in the 2010s when Klaviyo was founded. And we actually asked them, like, well, what software matters, and they all said marketing. Is there a downturn?”

Revenue 304

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 304

SaaStr

DECEMBER 18, 2019

Growth exposes your weaknesses, and it will cause more problems than it solves – until you make sales scalable. Develop a culture of initiative, not adequacy, by embracing employee ownership. From Impossible to Inevitable helps you take impossible goals and turn them into inevitable successes for your business and team.

Underperforming Technical Team 253

Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Development Software 253

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

You could watch it on YouTube or search on SaaStr on the blog about how ClickUp leveraged it. Jason Lemkin: You certainly can hire a whole content team and build 10,000 pieces of content, but I will tell you what I have always seen work is one incredible piece a week. Jason Lemkin: But usually your teams can’t do that.

Scale 289

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 289

FastSpring

APRIL 24, 2025

Since 2010, she’s been leading teams, building websites, web applications for nonprofits, K through 12, higher education, government, businesses of all sizes. You know, get them out of your blog posts and over to where they actually buy, that kind of thing. So important, regardless of ability.

Business 108

Business Software Review Underperforming Technical Team AI Search 108

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

They are hiring leaders, building teams, and attracting advisors in the US while devouring the SV SaaS playbook. Software demand is softening. AI is likely the next platform, dev tools are strategic given the scarcity of developers, cybersecurity is front and center for enterprises, and the data stack is still going strong.

Scale 289

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cybersecurity 289

Frontegg

MAY 23, 2025

Over time, advancements in cryptographic algorithms and widespread adoption of mobile devices shifted OTP generation to software-based methods. The development of Time-based OTPs (TOTPs) further improved upon HOTP by eliminating the need for user action to increment counters.

Underperforming Technical Team 52

Underperforming Technical Team Cybersecurity Mobile Education 52

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2021

If you’re a senior engineer and want to further your career, what skills should you develop? Moving forward in your career, avoid the trap of doing work that feels high-impact, but it’s actually not , or work that makes you look good at the expense of the project and the team. How do people move into staff engineering roles?

Technical Review 274

Technical Review Leadership VP of Engineering CTO Coach 274

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 12, 2018

By early 2018, Brinker had updated it with almost 2,000 more vendors — that’s nearly 7,000 marketing software companies fighting for the same buyers’ attention. The reasons for this growth – high-velocity economics of software innovation, the migration of money from old media to new media, etc. Alternatives: AdRoll, Quantcast.

Technical Review 223

Technical Review Technology Scale Marketing 223

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 15, 2018

Will Larson has managed infrastructure teams for some of the biggest names in software. Partnering with the Infrastructure, Data and Developer Productivity teams, his group builds the tools that support every Stripe engineer and keep Stripe reliable and performant. One of the blog posts was about this Yahoo!

Engineering 214

Engineering Management Merchant Services DevOps as a Service 214

Incredo

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Precisely – about SaaS affiliate programs… SaaS partner programs entice both software providers and affiliate partners for various reasons: 1) SaaS products are usually low-cost. 2) Software companies can pay high commissions because they don’t sell physical products. 5) Everyone minds his own business.

SaaS Payments 139

SaaS Payments Payment Methods Merchant Services Sales Recruiting 139

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

This is the recipe for a mediocre sales team. Like a sports franchise, a top team should be both collaborative and competitive. The team has grown quite a lot, but it’s still tiny: we’re now close to 40 people in 13 different countries. On this week’s episode, I caught up with Steli to chat all things sales.

Sales Hiring 184

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 184

Totango

NOVEMBER 23, 2021

Whether you’re not using a customer success platform yet or you’re using an aging CS tool, there comes a time when you need to upgrade CS software. They can store customer contact data, identify sales opportunities, schedule sales appointments, record notes from sales meetings and manage sales teams. You Can’t Evaluate Customer Health.

Software 98

Software Underperforming Technical Team Churn Customer Success 98

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

You can have the great product and a great team, but the market of small or very niche. The second one is the team, obviously depending on how earlier the team has a huge factor because you may be so early in your journey that there’s nothing else to point to, but the track record of the team. Jyoti Bansal: Yeah.

Sales Recruiting 260

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 260

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2020

Sam Blond, CSO at Brex explains why recruiting, networking and employee happiness is the key to this playbook on recruiting your sales team. I’m doing The Playbook To Recruiting Your Sales Team. Once again, amazing job to the SaaStr team. I’m really honored to share this stage with some really bad ass speakers.

Sales Recruiting 186

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 186

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 13, 2019

In a recent talk at UX London , I discussed some lessons learned while growing the design team at Intercom, reflecting on the technology industry’s obsession with tools, and pointed out how our sense of tools as objects or apps blinds us to the reality that the processes we adopt and develop are also, in effect, tools.

Underperforming Technical Team 223

Underperforming Technical Team New CTO CTO Hire Technology 223

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2023

Co-founder and CEO at Greenhouse, Daniel Chait, sits down with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin to share what’s new at Greenhouse, a successful recruiting software company at $200M in ARR today. Hiring is complicated, so you have to build a lot of software to get to $200M ARR. Daniel’s team is an anti-gravity device.

Sales Hiring 277

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 277