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Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders?

SaaStr

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. Or churn will increase, NPS will stagnate and decline, and upsell and revenue retention will be a fraction of what it could be. You’ll need more than 5–10 engineers to go big.

Scale 259
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What’s The #1 Challenge After $1m-$2m ARR?

SaaStr

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. Or churn will increase, NPS will stagnate and decline, and upsell and revenue retention will be a fraction of what it could be. She can be your CTO forever.

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The Founder’s Guide to Developer-led Growth with WorkOS (Video)

SaaStr

They’re able to actually swipe a credit card, and what starts off similar to a freemium self-serve product can turn into a six-figure contract in just a few months. It might even be months later that a VP of Engineering or a CTO or CFO realizes that they’re built on a new platform. The contract size grows.

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How to Hire A Great VP Sales: The Full Video and Transcript

SaaStr

If you’ve hired the VP of Engineering, impossible hire, but when they love something, they jump. My real point is with the VP of sales you’re probably not going to get the perfect hire. Maybe you’ll get that in your VP of engineering or VP of product, possibly, your VP of marketing.

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SaaStr Podcast #356 with Atrium Co-Founder Pete Kazanjy

SaaStr

Like a VP of engineering would go to some conference, and hear someone on stage talking about how they need to be spending all their time doing recruiting, etc, etc. ” Then it turns out that a VP of engineering doesn’t have time in their day to do searching, and writing outbound emails, and so on and so forth.

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Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot: From Day 0 to IPO. What Went to Plan. What Most Certainly Didn’t (Video, Podcast + Transcript)

SaaStr

Hire the VP of Marketing, MBA, the VP of Sales, MBA, the VP of Customer, MBA, the VP of Engineering, MBA, and now, the odds of any semblance of survival, let alone success, are vanishingly small at this point. The issue the SMBs had was, “Well, I’m a 20-person consulting company.