SaaStr

JANUARY 8, 2025

When Lindsey joined, she inherited an already built-out self-serve/PLG model for small businesses and a mid-market and enterprise sales, customer success, and post-sales team. ” The other thing Lindsey did was bring that revenue and focus into the entire cadence of running the business.

Revenue 286

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Compensation 286

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

Dear SaaStr: Why Are So Many CEOs Former Engineers, or At Least Have Technical Backgrounds? I’ve come to almost exclusively invest in founder-CEOs that are engineers. You need to recruit a great engineering team. You don’t need to be an engineer to do this, but most “salespeople” CEOs can’t pull this off.

Outsourcing Services 286

Outsourcing Services Engineering CTO Scale 286

SaaStr

OCTOBER 23, 2024

In 2006, BILL CEO and Founder René Lacerte set out to define a category around financial operations for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). ’ Bill is approaching half a million customers, so has a good pulse on small businesses. With SMBs, the smallest business is owner-operated. Needless to say, he succeeded. in revenue.

SMB 300

SMB Payment Services Payments Payment Methods 300

SaaStr

OCTOBER 19, 2024

112,000 Views: “What’s New at WordPress with Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic and Co-Founder of WordPress” #3, 79,000 Views: “A Step by Step Guide to Revenue Growth with Mark Roberge, Harvard Business School” #4. 46,771 Views: “From Burn-Out to $100M in ARR with Jason Cohen, Founder of WP Engine” #6.

Acquisition 278

Acquisition Innovation Startup Engineering 278

SaaStr

JUNE 11, 2025

It’s no longer about gut instinct—it’s about understanding the levers of your business and optimizing them for growth. But once you hit scale, the mindset shifts to building a sustainable, repeatable growth engine. Obsession with Metrics and Levers As you grow, you start thinking in terms of dashboards and metrics.

Startup 262

Startup Interviewing Scaling Metrics 262

SaaStr

MAY 12, 2023

Next up is Jason Cohen, founder of $100m+ WP Engine. Two are currently Unicorns; three are still in business. That happened to us at Smart Bear and WP Engine with features and entire products. Doing too much at once We _still_ struggle with this at WP Engine, and it’s still a mistake. Here are my top ten mistakes.

Engineering 285

Engineering Sales Hiring Interviewing Scale 285

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2024

You should find, hire, and manage the VPs of Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Product and Engineering and even Finance yourself. At $8m, $10m, the operational side of the business may be so complex a COO makes sense. ARR you should still be the COO. We can all use a COO a bit earlier these days. A bit earlier.

Sales Hiring 292

Sales Hiring Startup Finance Engineering 292

SaaStr

APRIL 28, 2025

” Despite his engineering background, Sekar helped Meraki build a scalable go-to-market engine for their wireless networking products. CAC Payback Period Predicts Success More Accurately Than Any Other Metric CAC payback period stands above all other SaaS metrics as the most holistic indicator of business health.

Scale 257

Scale Transportation Scaling SMB 257

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2025

The speakers included Mario Rodriguez, Chief Product Officer at GitHub at GitHub, Diego Zaks, VP of Design at Ramp, Dane Knecht, SVP of Emerging Technologies at Cloudflare, and Vincent van der Meulen, Design Engineer at Figma, and Dani Grant, CEO at Jam.dev. His time at Figma actually started outside of Figma, as a fan.

AI Search 305

AI Search AI Strategy Scale 305

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2024

Engineering resources: With thousands of engineers, companies like HubSpot can make substantial AI investments when they choose to 3. Proprietary data access: “We’ve got the zoom data, the calling data, the email data…If you’re a startup breaking in and you want to do some amazing AI work, it’s tricky.”

AI 278

AI Marketing SaaS Interviewing 278

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 6, 2024

50% of Users on Business “Side”, 50% Technical An interesting breakdown across their core products. But as you go more upmarket, and more enterprise, the business users become critical stakeholders and users, too. The Atlassian engine just keeps on running. Yes, Atlassian’s roots are selling to developers.

Enterprise 283

Enterprise Pricing Cloud AI 283

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2024

Here’s what I see most often, the Top 6 Mistakes First Time SaaS Founders Make: Incomplete understanding of business model, and how it will scale. Hire those extra engineers. But they also make mistakes we tend not to make with experience. But then a time comes at $1m, $2m, $4m ARR when you have to let it go.

Scale 300

Scale Social Media SaaS Business Model 300

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 17, 2024

As the co-founder and CEO of Intellimize (acquired by Webflow), Guy brings a unique perspective from his journey through iconic companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Twitter, as well as his background in aerospace engineering. 15:41) Scaling Twitter’s ad business and managing hyper-growth. (26:54) So you are number one.

Scale 98

Scale Engineering Acquisition Scaling 98

SaaStr

MAY 7, 2024

At SaaStr AI Day, Siqi Chen, founder, and CEO of Runway , discussed his belief of why every role will become a prompt engineering role, along with some no-code AI tips showing how to build products without knowing how to code. Why Is Every Role a Prompt Engineering Role Runway is a next-generation finance platform.

Engineering 269

Engineering AI Sales Hiring ChatGPT 269

SaaStr

JANUARY 14, 2025

And how much that dramatically drives up the burn rate and cost of doing business. You can’t pay a great engineer in the Bay Area $60k a year forever. In my experience the one most founders get wrong is how much more employees cost post-initial traction and after your first round of VC financing. Dramatically.

Startup 269

Startup Finance Engineering Investment 269

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 20, 2024

Historically, the burden of customer feedback fell on the solutions engineers and CS architects. A New GTM Mental Model for AI Products That feedback told GitHub that people who weren’t using the GitHub platform still wanted to use Copilot for Business. Be disciplined about prioritizing that feedback and communication.

Scale 258

Scale AI Scaling Marketing 258

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2025

Owner.com has distinguished itself by consolidating dozens of point solutions into a single, integrated platform that helps small business owners compete effectively online. Her company specializes in API integration platforms that enable SaaS companies to launch integrations faster and automate complex business processes.

AI 209

AI Technical Review Artificial Intelligence Systems Review 209

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2025

The Neon team engineered a new database architecture that offers speed, elastic scaling, and branching and forking. As Vivek Raghunathan, senior vice president of engineering at Snowflake, explained: “The vision here is that Snowflake Postgres will simplify how developers build, deploy and scale agents and apps.

VP of Engineering 183

VP of Engineering AI Search AI Data 183

SaaStr

MARCH 16, 2025

Prior to Datadog, Alex held leadership positions at several high-growth SaaS companies and has a proven track record of building marketing engines that deliver consistent, measurable growth. But the payoff – as Datadog’s growth demonstrates – is marketing that drives significant, measurable business value.

Scale 229

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Marketing 229

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 28, 2025

Any disruption of service at this facility could harm our business… We currently intend to add a second data center facility in 2008, the primary purpose of which is to add capacity. Now, you still had to go out and hire engineers to build the product, build out the GTM team to build brand and distribution, etc.

Cloud 299

Cloud AI Scale Scaling 299

SaaStr

JUNE 16, 2025

” The Money Shift : AI has officially graduated from pilot programs to permanent budget line items in core IT and business units. One leader noted: “all the prompts have been tuned for OpenAI…changing models is now a task that can take a lot of engineering time.”

Enterprise 202

Enterprise AI Benchmarks Innovation 202

SaaStr

OCTOBER 23, 2024

When it IPO’d, commercial customers were a tiny bit of their business. And a true engine of growth. #9. Up From Almost None in 2020 to 295 Today. Palantir is closing big, big deals and its roots are in government and defense. Fast forward to today, they are closing 300 of them. And revenue is up +55%.

Artificial Intelligence 231

Artificial Intelligence Government AI Cloud 231

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2025

They failed for two key reasons: Zero context about your specific business or product No ability to actually do anything beyond generate text The learning? The winners will be the ones who solve the “plumbing” of connecting AI to all your business systems. That’s the difference between a toy and a real product.

AI 229

AI Artificial Intelligence SaaS User Experience 229

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 9, 2025

It is a company-wide evolution that has the potential to completely reshape your entire business & your customer relationships. Join us for a candid conversation with Barr as she shares how Monte Carlo transitioned from ARR to daily revenue as the core operating metric for the business.

Revenue 130

Revenue Business Pricing Metrics 130

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2025

The numbers validated this quickly: 2018: 100 apps, $1M tracked revenue 2020: Series A at $15M 2021: 6,000+ apps, $1B+ tracked revenue, Series B at $300M valuation SaaStr Fund’s bet wasn’t just on the founders or the technologyit was on the inevitable shift toward subscription-first mobile business models.

Payments 273

Payments Payment Solutions Underperforming Technical Team Payment Methods 273

SaaStr

MAY 29, 2025

Tie these directly to their business goals. Adoption rate: How many engineers actively use the tool during the pilot? For example: If we hit these metrics, well be ready to roll this out across your entire engineering team, saving X hours per project and reducing errors by Y%. Get specific. If theyre vague, guide them.

Technical Review 195

Technical Review Software Review Engineering Metrics 195

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 1, 2025

Delivering great AI customer service depends on more than just sophisticated AI models – it relies on real-time data and access to business systems like CRMs, billing platforms, and past conversations. With MCP, businesses can integrate AI faster, scale it across more systems, and deliver better support with less effort.

Data 104

Data AI Business Benchmarks 104

SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2025

If your engineering team, your product team, or your leadership team hasn’t shipped meaningful AI capabilities into production by now, that have led to a material increase in revenue — you don’t have a strategy problem. Because we’ve waited, and seen, and learned. ElevenLabs rocketing to $100m+ ARR powering voice for AI leaders.

AI Search 165

AI Search AI Technical Review CTO Hire 165

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2025

Global Expansion : With customers spanning 135+ countries and continued international investment, HubSpot has successfully created a global business with significant growth opportunities (their TAM is $76B in 2024, growing to $128B by 2029, with <10% penetration across all products). Its not either / or. Or at least, it doesnt have to be.

SMB 267

SMB Scale Education AI 267

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2025

Be consultative, solve problems, and help them achieve their business objectives. If they’re struggling with a feature or need something new, it’s your job to communicate that to the product and engineering teams. You need to connect with customers on a personal level, understand their goals, and align your efforts with their success.

Customer Success 186

Customer Success Management Scale Retention 186

SaaStr

MARCH 17, 2025

It could be a VP of Product, Sales, or Engineeringsomeone who takes ownership of a big chunk of the business and cares almost as much as you do. He brought 20+ engineers with him, with outsized equity packages. If youre business-focused, hire a strong technical lead. Prioritize Great Early Hires.

Sales Hiring 244

Sales Hiring Scale Scaling Engineering 244

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 16, 2025

Engineering teams within AI application startups are much smaller than a classic software company - maybe half the size or less. 1 How would the value of these businesses change? Let’s run an experiment : let’s assume every public software company benefits immediately to the same extent & cuts R&D spending by half.

AI 182

AI Venture Capital Enterprise Engineering 182

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2025

A VP of Sales is there to scale whats already working, not to build the engine from scratch. Misaligned sales incentives can lead to churn, which kills enterprise SaaS businesses. But if you dont already have a repeatable sales process and at least two reps hitting quota, a VP of Sales will just burn cash trying to figure it out.

Outsourcing Services 183

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale Enterprise 183