FastSpring

APRIL 19, 2019

Starting with the investment from Accel-KKR then expanding into a second office in Santa Barbara, opening a new office in Amsterdam, bringing on 30 new hires, and most recently, welcoming our new CEO David Nachman. It is something our People and Culture team is constantly working on through a variety of initiatives.

Scaling 70

Scaling Company Culture Leadership Education 70

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2022

UserZoom moved to Silicon Valley not to find funding but to be closer to their market. UserZoom invested in a model where they didn’t just provide software, but services, in a model known as SaaS++. Sales and marketing are still significant, but consider dedicating more research and design to the user experience.

Scale 197

Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring SMB 197

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 14, 2022

Start by defining the following: Vision: Compelling company vision that inspires employees, investors, customers, and partners to join you on the journey. This will usually center around PMF (product-market fit) or growth. Set expectations starting at the interview process on company values, pace, and vision.

Retention 130

Retention Leadership Compensation Communication 130

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2019

We invest all over the country and very much in Europe as well including Paris. And the first person doing that was actually Jason Lemkin which was when we grew up we Jason invested and he said no guys now you need to go and do things properly like find the V.P. So traditional companies train people yearly or quarterly.

Sales Hiring 111

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Company Culture 111

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

Dev Ittycheria: And in some ways even though I’ve been a VC, and an operator, in some ways as an operator, I’m just now investing my time, not my money. So when I looked at opportunities to pursue, whether to go back into an operational role, a lot of it was around how big is the market opportunity? So that’s easy.

Sales Recruiting 235

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 235

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2019

How does the product and what you invest in proactively need to change as you move into enterprise? And from that perspective, I do think that there is in view, sort of a proven formal and [inaudible 00:08:17] expand where you figure out your product market fit. What are the benefits of starting in SMB?

Sales Hiring 140

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Sales Recruiting 140

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 26, 2021

Milestone: First traction and product-market fit . At this point you’ll want to seriously interrogate whether your current set of users are going to be the ones to take you public, and whether your total addressable market (TAM) can justify your growth targets and further investment. Hubspot’s CCO on go-to-market success.

Sales Hiring 82

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Marketing 82

OpenView Labs

MAY 18, 2020

Luckily we built the product from the very beginning with a measurement mindset, so we quickly understood our mistake. Build a measurement mindset into your company culture and your product from the start. To tell your investors a story—proof your vision is working and why investment in your company is smart.

Metrics 53

Metrics Startup Investment Company Culture 53

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2019

We help companies understand what data they have, where they can find it, and ultimately that they can really trust it. Product-market fit has been really important. I remember talking to Belgium investors at the time and everybody said, look, enterprise software is dead, there’s no opportunity through investment.

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Government 171

Point Nine Land

JANUARY 9, 2019

But you can also approach content marketing from a branding perspective and focus more on “awareness”: the emphasis is not on lead and revenue generation, but more on how your brand is perceived. When you are pre-Product/Market Fit, better think brand than performance marketing. Company Culture.

Branding 50

Branding Marketing Social Media SaaS 50

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 4, 2020

Similarly, while a mercenary can be invested in the company mission, it’s not ultimately why they want to work for you. These initial hires will influence how you approach each region, how you build off your success, and what your new office culture is. And office culture is invaluable as a new sales team in a new region.

Sales Hiring 99

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 99

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

Hear about the early days of Glassdoor; tactical lessons on scaling—from building a business model and recruiting an all-star management team to advice on building a compelling, innovative company culture; and learn whyGlassdoor’s $1.2 Billion acquisition is just one milestone in the early innings of the company’s story.

Scale 123

Scale SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Payment Services 123

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 26, 2021

We invest in building for the long term and we learn from experimenting in the short term. We love to tackle big problems and break them down into solvable pieces. Our ambition drives us to go beyond what’s thought possible. We start with the problem to be solved in everything we do.

Sales Hiring 138

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Customer Support Engineering 138

Chargify

APRIL 23, 2019

You’ll also hear this stage called validation or the product/market fit stage. As those names indicate, in this phase a SaaS company’s focus should be on finding product/market fit. Finding channel/market fit. You may be less familiar with the concept of channel/market fit than product/market fit.

Scale 74

Scale SaaS Payments Scaling Payment Services 74

Neil Patel

FEBRUARY 13, 2023

Depending on your industry, this may be a great opportunity to track industry trends and see where your business can solve a need in the market. Some product marketing strategies perform much better than others, depending on your target audience and the perceived product value.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Strategy Marketing Social Media 84

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

Eyal Manor : But there is a lot of investment in that direction. Megan Leuders: And when you were talking to CEOs and CTOs today, what do you believe is the biggest technology challenge that they are facing as a SaaS company? So I’ll give you a flip perspective from a sales and marketing standpoint. Megan Leuders: Yeah.

Cloud 165

Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 165

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 4, 2019

If implemented well, it will have mutually beneficial outcomes for the company and customers. We had the right people on our team, but we needed to invest in technology to scale and formalize processes. The customer loves our product, team, and company culture. Q: How have you influenced growth at Bloomfire?

Customer Success 40

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 40

Casey Accidental

NOVEMBER 13, 2019

Changing the goals or creating an independent team with its own set of OKRs does not guarantee marketplace success, but they free you from the temptation of dismantling or impacting teams that frequently need to do years’ worth of work to find product/market fit for a second set of customers. #2

Marketplace as a Service 106

Marketplace as a Service Business Model Business Underperforming Technical Team 106

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

What is your product-market fit? Are you a new product, or are you replacing an existing service? This led them to double their partner relations sales team and to invest in partner programs and automation. Invest in enablement. Enablement is core to creating a culture of learning and productivity. .

Scale 211

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales 211

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2019

Prior to Harness, Stephen was VP of Marketing at Glassdoor, managing a team of 52 in product marketing, helping grow B2B revenue from $19m to $90m in just 2 years, leading to their $1.2Bn acquisition. What does Steve believe is the right culture for devops teams? Does it differ from traditional dev teams?

DevOps as a Service 100

DevOps as a Service Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 100

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

And so much time, quarters and quarters spent on recruiting, spent on fundraising, spent on kind of kicking the can down the road on major issues around things as fundamental as what does it really look like to have product market fit in this market? Really it’s more like product market fit solves all problems.

Sales Hiring 131

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 131

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

So Algolia started out mostly as a inbound long tail company. I looked back at our investment memo, it was a 2K ACV when Jason invested after Y-C. So mid-market, we’re about 40 to 50K ACV enterprise. Gaetan Gachet : … structure for sales and at product market fit? Laura Bilazarian : Yeah.

Scale 132

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 132

SmartKarrot

SEPTEMBER 11, 2020

SaaS companies no longer need “hot” locations like Silicon Valley. If the product-market fit can be found online, it hardly matters where the company is located. Recurring revenue is the safety net of a business that can be leveraged for investing further into new acquisitions.

Customer Success 10

Customer Success SaaS Company Culture Acquisition 10

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2019

I had one offer to go with this great Italian guy who was spinning off a technology from an Italian software company in an incubator in San Francisco. And the other job was to be an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. I mean, definitely a lot of skill, but I was lucky I went to that great company early.

Scale 127

Scale VP of Engineering Mobile Scaling 127

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2023

Recruit diverse leaders The goal of hiring a revenue leader is to put gasoline on finding product market fit success. Hire a leader who will not only agree with you but someone you can disagree with in a respectful and productive way. Prioritize demand discovery Demand is a strong indicator of product market fit.

Sales Recruiting 198

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 198

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2020

And, the second system is what I call the product marketing system. What I find is that if you think about the product marketing calendar this way, it makes it a little bit more like the sales finance calendar where sales is about selling to customers, sales don’t work unless a customer buys what you’re selling.

Startup 263

Startup Software Review Scale Systems Review 263

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 25, 2019

Paul Graham puts it like this: “A startup is a company designed to grow fast”. In general, growth is a good problem to have – it means you’ve found some measure of product market fit and you’re generating real revenue from active users. Making sure culture scales as you grow. Are you prepared to invest?

Scale 136

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 136

SaaStr

OCTOBER 21, 2022

Navigate market dynamics over time—from employee base to customer investment—instead of making hasty decisions. Growing sustainably over time requires a balance between how much you pay to grow today and where you invest for the future. Braze has witnessed other companies lose focus in trying to claw up the growth curve.

Mobile 185

Mobile Technology Investment Innovation 185

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

They’ve invested in all of these other businesses. And now they’re sitting in your conference room at your little company, and telling you, “Hey. You should go fix that, so that you have the opportunity to make these types of investments along the way, but totally get that it’s not for today.”

Sales Hiring 235

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 235

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 23, 2020

To date, the company has raised $349M in funding from some of the best in the business including Bessemer, Redpoint, True Ventures, IVP, Mayfield, TCV and GGV to name a few. As for David, prior to Hashicorp, he held some incredible roles, including VP of Marketing at Github and Hortonworks. What do I say next?”

Scale 175

Scale Leadership Underperforming Technical Team Scaling 175

SmartKarrot

MAY 17, 2022

Working on the MVP and improving the core features, so you achieve the right product/market fit Hiring the key personnel who understand the mission/vision Getting the payment from customers Collecting the seed money. This will not only slow your growth but will also impact your company culture.

Startup 10

Startup SaaS Payments Payment Services Sales Hiring 10

Buffer Resources

SEPTEMBER 12, 2023

“When senior management shows it’s OK to share thoughts, and it’s ok to invest time in your personal brand, people start posting too,” Olga says. Employee advocacy is organic If you’re familiar with Buffer, you know company culture is something we take pretty seriously.

Branding 114

Branding Social Media Engagement Company Culture 114

SaaStr

MARCH 6, 2020

So we were doing super high touch marketing activities in the sense of CMO events where we would rent a private jet and take 25 CMOs on a day trip somewhere. We would generate 10 X like what we invested into that based on those people. And I think that that’s just such a mistake, culture is very much filled at that seed stage.

Scale 209

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 209

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2019

So we invested in that product, built out a couple of key features, opened up our APIs and launched that product. And when we launched it, we put it on the market for $1,000 a month. Three times the price of our original product. Show it to them in the context of your existing product.

Scale 191

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Strategy 191

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2020

I look at my experience through those companies, and I learned a lot about enterprise software sales, about buying patterns, about functions like product management and product marketing, and how they fit into a well functioning and operating company. Harry Stebbings: What does the word company culture mean to you?

SaaS Payments 237

SaaS Payments Scale Payment Services Payment Solutions 237

SaaSOptics

MAY 6, 2022

Accurate and up-to-date financial records display the current state of your business, help you maintain GAAP/IFRS compliance, and prove to potential VCs that your company is worth the investment. Invest in budgeting and forecasting tools. Background checking software. Expense reimbursement . Protective Infrastructure.

SaaS 76

SaaS Scale Underperforming Technical Team Forecasting 76

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2020

I think when we were still small below that, we were really connected to HQ and would travel back often, and we’re trying to bang on doors and meeting rooms just to get remembered because it was a pretty Zoom culture. You really have to invest, because early on, the enablement resources aren’t as strong.

Sales Hiring 185

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Technical Advisors 185