SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

Software engineering teams have been early adopters of AI coding assistants precisely because they provide an immediate, measurable lift. This is exactly backward. The winning approach: Start with employee-facing tools that deliver measurable productivity gains. Final Thoughts The AI space is well-funded but still maturing.

Technical Review 184

Technical Review Artificial Intelligence AI Marketplace as a Service 184

SaaStr

JULY 4, 2024

What’s wrong with our business model? There won’t be enough engineers, enough customer success, enough marketing dollars, enough salespeople. Dear SaaStr: We Are Growing Too Fast to Handle the Workload, but We Can’t Afford to Hire New Employees. We’ve all been there. Almost all of us, at least. It will be hard.

Business Model 303

Business Model Engineering Scaling Branding 303

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2022

This is a good business model! Revenue per employee is the ultimate summary of how efficient a business model is. If Figma grows to $1B in ARR by, say, 2026, it will be the future engine of growth for $133B+ Adobe. The core Creative engine is mature now, and Figma is stealing from it. 2,000 plug-ins.

Cloud 61

Cloud Business Model Engineering Acquisition 61

Neil Patel

FEBRUARY 15, 2021

WP Engine is one of the best managed WordPress hosting services out there for website owners wanting to take a hands-off approach to website management. WP Engine Compared to The Best Web Hosting for WordPress. If you believe in the adage that time is money, as we do, it is easy to justify WP Engine’s relatively costly plans.

Engineering 112

Engineering Technical Review Systems Review Software Review 112

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Engineering costs to maintain the trials and trial experience. And once you go down the path of not having a free trial, or not having one anymore … and engineering and sales may push you to take it out … you’ll never get it back. Freemium is a business model. Not necessarily a freemium version, though.

Scale 336

Scale Engineering Enterprise Business Model 336

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2024

Plus, three of the closing sessions will be open to the broader audience of Annual this year: Customer Success in Different Business Models with Slack, Mulesoft, and OpenAI : In this session , these three CS leaders will discuss how customer success strategies differ across various business models.

Benchmarks 299

Benchmarks Finance Business Model Forecasting 299

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

Makes capacity planning harder : With less visibility into maximum usage requirements, engineering teams may struggle to provision infrastructure appropriately. The traditional SaaS business model of annual prepaid contracts based on seats faces challenges when a human is no longer operating the software.

SaaS Payments 283

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 283

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2022

This is the secret sauce to Atlassian’s business model. Atlassian turns around and invests some of that savings in engineering and product. And come join Atlassian’s CRO LIVE at 2022 SaaStr Annual on Sep 13-15 sharing how they scale their unique business model! This is about as low as it gets in SaaS.

Scale 289

Scale Headcount Cloud Forecasting 289

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2025

We are all becoming prompt engineers now. If youre not thinking about how to integrate AI into your product and business model and make it truly 10x better, youre already behind. . — James McGillicuddy (@jpmcuddy) March 20, 2025 #9. Every Interface Will Likely Be a Unified Chat / Voice or Similar Are you ready for this?

AI 141

AI Trends SaaS AWS 141

SaaStr

DECEMBER 15, 2020

It took us 2 years just to figure out our ultimate business model. Because it’s just so hard to get recurring revenue engines going. What you think you do on day 1 may look very different by day 365. — Aaron Levie (@levie) September 11, 2020. It seems like everyone wants to be a SaaS founder these days.

Sales Recruiting 363

Sales Recruiting SaaS Interviewing Consulting 363

Clouded Judgement

JULY 16, 2024

Our Finance-specific AI and machine learning engines are built directly on our unified data model, ensuring seamless integration with our Finance solutions. ” How OneStream Makes Money From the S-1: “Our business model centers on maximizing the lifetime value of a customer relationship.

Benchmarks 295

Benchmarks Data Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 295

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

Strategic finance can be thought of as a project management function for your company’s underlying business model or a BizOps team that operates within a more financial lens. Strategic Finance optimizes a company’s underlying business model to create long-term value by increasing revenue and decreasing costs.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

JUNE 5, 2020

Salesforce’s IPO is also seen as a test of a new business model that could shake up the software industry. The company is the poster child for subscription-based software, a model that’s gaining popularity among corporate buyers. This CNET article captures the uncertainty well: . Don’t VC’s Want This Dealflow?

Venture Capital 291

Venture Capital Technical Review Scale SaaS 291

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

They credit this growth to their global team, a switch to an enterprise business model switch, and flexible work operations. Moving from self-service to enterprise As your product improves, your user demands change, requiring a revamp of the business model to satisfy high-paying customers. Self-service.

Scale 245

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 245

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2024

So, when you’re designing and building a product, think about the problems you’re solving for and the business models to support those products. If you’re lucky enough to find a problem to build a business around and put your first iteration of the product in place, there’s a way to put users on your team.

Scale 313

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Innovation 313

SaaStr

JULY 27, 2022

As a result, they’ve continued perfecting their marketing engine to support automatic or self-guided transitions to eliminate any final sticking points before a conversion. . As Zocchetto said, “It’s very important –– sales hiring planning –– because in a self-driven SaaS business model, it’s what drives growth.”.

SMB 244

SMB Sales Hiring Scale B2C 244

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

Go-to-Market matters because sales and marketing spend remain the biggest proportion of SaaS spend, so honing in on that spend to build an engine and drive growth is paramount. Without it, you don’t have a business. The Early Stage — $0 to $20M ARR The early stage is crucial for GTM.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Outsourced Development 278

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

For context, Mathrubootham shares that everyone in India gets an engineering degree and then figures out what to do with life. So, if he wanted to hire customer support, it could be a biomechanical engineer. Its business model of going global and going inbound from India is the differentiation.

Sales Hiring 289

Sales Hiring Scale SMB SaaS 289

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2021

An open core business model empowers customers and fosters brand loyalty. At GitLab, we run on an open core business model. We have a dollar-based gross retention rate of 97% and it’s in part because of our open core model. Clearly and publicly state your business practices.

Innovation 246

Innovation Business Model Banking Scale 246

ProfitWell

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

Transparency is more of a mindset than a business model. It breaks down different aspects of their business model and present it to the public via articles and blog posts. Equity - Sharing the formula for calculating how much equity every team member receives demystifies a complicated aspect of the startup business model.

Business Model 72

Business Model Technical Advisors Business Scale 72

FastSpring

NOVEMBER 15, 2018

Who is your target market: individuals or businesses? Let’s look at common ecommerce business models, so you can see which is best for your business. As a business, you have three basic selling models to choose from. A key engineer or maybe the CEO? Potential for emotional and impulse purchases.

Business Model 68

Business Model B2C Business Government 68

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

Gusto is a high-velocity, high-scale acquisition and expansion engine, and one we can all learn from. Their hope in sharing this model is to help fellow revenue professionals grow their businesses similarly.

Scale 277

Scale Sales Marketing Construction 277

SaaStr

MARCH 13, 2023

Co-founder and CEO of Scratchpad, Pouyan Salehi, and OpenPhone’s Co-founder, Daryna Kulya, share how they consistently engineer delightful experiences for their customers. The delightful experience should connect to a vital part of the business model. The sweet spot where those two meet is what you should focus on and work with.

Growth Hacking 246

Growth Hacking Social Media SaaS Business 246

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

If you hire a VP of Engineering who wants a $250k comp package, all you have to do is ship two more huge features that let you close two big enterprise deals, and they’ve paid for themselves. PLG aren’t magic letters that fix a broken business model. Hire someone to fill them out so the Sales and Engineering teams don’t have to.

Part-Time VPE 242

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire 242

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

Engineers are more productive because Github’s Copilot writes 50% of code. GenAI and the Business Model Perspective From a business model perspective, a few things are happening. An even more dramatic shift we’re seeing is that many of you are finding yourselves more productive these days. They hope to reach 50%.

Generative AI 298

Generative AI Outsourcing Services AI Software Review 298

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 29, 2019

At Intercom, we have benefitted from customer segmentation in these ways: Describing customers in a common way across go-to-market, product, and engineering. Leadership: Create a shared language for product, engineering, and go-to-market to describe customers. Beyond a certain size, it’s impossible to do without.

Business 184

Business B2C Scale Headcount 184

Payrix

DECEMBER 18, 2024

Software companies are increasingly integrating payments as a core component of their business models rather than treating them as ancillary features. Her 13+ years of experience in payments implementations and product solution engineering enables a unique lens on the end-to-end journey of a software company and its clients experience.

Payments 130

Payments Embedded Payments Merchant Services Payment Services 130

OPEXEngine

NOVEMBER 22, 2022

“Industry-Centric” SaaS business models offer an alternative SaaS company categorization to the “Customer-Centric” SaaS model, which is defined based on the “go-to-market” strategy used by a management team. When SaaS business models originated, the most successful venture-backed startups used a horizontal model.

Business Model 52

Business Model Business SaaS Scale 52

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

They had open cores and created enterprise features around it to protect the business model until it got torpedoed by AWS early on. But eventually, it becomes engineering. Engineering is where customer success is horribly underrepresented. That would have been counterproductive.

Scale 243

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 243

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 14, 2019

At that point, do you continue the business you have or compete with your customers? Rather, they masquerade as an agency with a completely different engine, one powered by algorithms. Many AI Agencies start with one model and then migrate to a second. Second, how to price the product relative to the competition?

AI 203

AI Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Machine Learning 203

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2024

What’s the Business Model Behind Automattic and WordPress? A year later, they created Automattic as a commercial services business around WordPress. What if, instead of doom-scrolling, we ask ourselves what kind of person we want to be? We say what we want to learn more about and are given that to consume.

Underperforming Technical Team 333

Underperforming Technical Team Social Media Government Subscription 333

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

How do you drive business around that? They want the overall pie to be as big as possible, and their entire business model is predicated on capturing a small piece of what is hopefully an extremely large pie. Companies often hide engineers from customers with buffers and processes, which can be dangerous.

Scale 297

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 297

SaaStr

DECEMBER 6, 2023

The consumer side is ten times more stressful because you don’t have recurring revenue, and a single change in the platform can alter the entire dynamics of your business model. They get to talk to brand-new businesses in completely different industries all the time. He believes Enterprise software is the most exciting thing.

AI 291

AI Sales Hiring Scale Artificial Intelligence 291

SaaStr

MAY 12, 2022

Offering its services as a freemium-based model, CircleCI recognizes driving trials as the cornerstone of a go-to-market strategy for any developer tool. . Jim Rose, CEO of CircleCI, leverages his experience marketing to software developers to discuss the merits of moving from a subscription-based to a usage-based business model.

Scale 264

Scale Payments SaaS Payments Payment Services 264

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2024

The growth engine from both sales and marketing should to be working before you add gas to it. Rev Ops and Enablement Are Two Important Hires Now you have the basics of economics that make sense, replicability in your BDR or pipe gen motion, and it’s time to get busy in infrastructure. They’re the engine of the business.

Scale 306

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Sales 306

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 29, 2014

Instead, the true and still unrealized potential of IoT is to transform business models; it’s enabling companies to sell products in entirely new and better ways that benefit both the company and the customer. In short, subscription business models empower tremendous growth with terrific capital efficiency.

Airlines 113

Airlines Payment Services Business Payments 113

Casey Accidental

OCTOBER 27, 2020

This is part three of a three part series on sequencing business models. In part two of our Sequencing Business Models series , we talked about the different types of marketplaces and what needs to be built to be effective in each of them. Ask your own engineers. This post is a collaboration with Gilad Horev.

Payments 56

Payments Business Model Payment Solutions SaaS Payments 56