SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2022

When you think of scaling up, many things may come to mind, like hiring, culture, marketing, and sales. But what are the essentials of scaling up, and how do you navigate obstacles along the way to function as a high-impact organization? Does PLG really help scale by a large amount? The go-to-market playbook.

Scale 164

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales Recruiting 164

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2023

Hiring a “VP” of Sales before you have 2 scaled reps and a repeating process. Hire stretch reps if you want, but someone without any closing experience likely can’t close at your startup no one has ever heard of. Those companies are way, way too big. Startups are a journey and you need reps that want to be on the journey.

Sales Hiring 212

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Marketing 212

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

While many startups aspire toward unicorn status, only a few achieve it. Unicorn companies often need to scale quickly to meet the demands of their rapidly growing customer base. Drift co-founders David Cancel and Elias Torres share their insights on steering a company to a $1 billion valuation. Lesson 8: Win on brand.

Scale 195

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 195

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2021

It’s been great to have the CEOs of Qualtrics join us multiple times over the years, as it scaled from a late-stage startup to IPO to $8B+ acquisition. Fast forward to today, and Qualtrics is now worth $20B and CEO Zig Serafin joined us to share his lessons in scaling with Julia Laroche, Correspondent at Yahoo Finance.

Scale 163

Scale Scaling Business Model Company Culture 163

SaaStr

AUGUST 28, 2023

Discover how three breakout SaaS companies scaled from an idea to hundreds of employees and $1B+ valuations, all while living their values along the way. As we dive into these three highly successful companies, we’ll talk about their values, the process of creating them, and the right time for founders to create their own values.

Company Culture 186

Company Culture Scaling Interviewing Startup 186

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2022

Find the People: Find the team that is equipped to help you build your product, sell it, and run company operations. Build the System : Create your execution strategy with repeatable processes designed to scale your business. . McJannet shared five rules of system-building that drive company growth. Early Scale.

Scaling 190

Scaling Leadership Startup Product Marketing 190

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2023

Not all startups follow the same trajectory for getting off the ground. As a self-proclaimed accidental entrepreneur, Browder shares a few unconventional ways to scale your company. What he found was a graveyard full of companies that had tried and failed because their focus was too narrow.

Scale 190

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Entrepreneurship 190

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2022

The life of a startup is not a smooth ride. Starting with his time as an investment banker and later working in SaaS, Yancey Spruill, CEO at DigitalOcean , watched venture capitalists invest in seemingly strong companies, only to sell them off. Process is a friend, not a foe, in order to scale. Start-ups can be chaotic places.

Startup 230

Startup Leadership Innovation Scaling 230

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2020

Hiring a “VP” of Sales before you have 2 scaled reps and a repeating process. Hire stretch reps if you want, but someone without any closing experience likely can’t close at your startup no one has ever heard of. Startups are a journey and you need reps that want to be on the journey. This never works out in the early days.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Marketing 363

SaaStr

DECEMBER 12, 2022

But once you begin to scale your business, you realize that you also need principles in place to strengthen your appetite for growth and expand profitably. Every SaaS company strives to adapt to the emerging changes in the market as soon as possible and achieve sustainable growth. The company culture you build.

Payment Methods 166

Payment Methods SaaS Payments Company Culture Payment Solutions 166

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2023

When it’s early days in the startup world, you don’t have many formal processes. And it’s part-and-parcel of startup life. Lesson: Startups need true believers. People who find the unique energy and pace of a startup exhilarating, and are chomping to climb aboard the rocket ship and feel the Gs. It’s called winging it.

Technical Review 167

Technical Review Leadership Company Culture Startup 167

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2020

So, the company starts getting divided up into functional areas, or silos, product management, sales, customers support, marketing and so on, and this siloing of the org chart I think means that not everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and there’s a general feeling of disorganization or chaos in most startups.

Startup 262

Startup Software Review Scale Systems Review 262

SaaStr

MARCH 10, 2020

Hiring senior leaders can set companies up to fail and see how sticking with a current, successful model can be the key to hypergrowth. Rely on your success, know you are doing something right and scale faster. We’ve scaled it pretty far pretty quickly. We founded the company five years ago. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Scale 189

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 189

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2023

Mistake: On the other hand… not betting on the team that got me there “Everything will be fine once we get a new head of [X]” -every startup CEO ever (also me, frequently) When you launch a company, the initial team is usually whoever you can get. To run a startup, you have to make bets. Of course, sometimes that is indeed true.

Sales Hiring 243

Sales Hiring Scale Scaling Customer Success 243

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

So a playbook on scaling high performance organizations in 30 bit minutes. So sort of going from older to more and more startup land. That felt startup to me relative to Amex, but I know we can joke about that. So big, big scale. Why does this happen a lot in startups? Want to see more content like this?

Scale 171

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Leadership 171

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2019

Scaling the company’s employee base, sales teams, marketing, and operations—all while preserving its culture—has required a laser focus on first principles, smart processes, and effective hiring. In this talk, Claire will share these and other lessons for scaling high-growth organizations. Manual processes first.

Scale 148

Scale Payment Services Payment Methods Scaling 148

SaaStr

MAY 5, 2023

Do you want to avoid the common pitfalls of scaling a startup? Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, shares part two of his 10 top mistakes in 10 years at the company. Scaling a business will be different for everyone because every business is different. The fundamental problem is a growth business is valued on its growth.

Scale 197

Scale Leadership Scaling Customer Success 197

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2023

In 2020-2021, many SaaS startups faced a unique challenge. With teams spread across the globe, they had to find new working patterns to scale their businesses in a distributed environment. Wiz, one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies focused on security solutions, was one of them.

Sales Recruiting 197

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 197

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2023

Deel scaled the sales team from two to 250 account executives, but issues with productivity and enablement of the account executives cropped up. Deel solved this by scaling the revenue operations team in conjunction to support sales, design quotas, and go-to-market strategies, and leverage data to identify the best strategies.

Sales Hiring 209

Sales Hiring Payment Services SaaS Payments Scale 209

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2019

Over Leyla’s incredible 11 year journey with Salesforce she has seen the team scale from 1,800 to over 40,000 and revenue scale from $500m to over $16Bn. What were Leyla’s biggest learnings on people and business model through seeing the first hand hyper-scaling of Salesforce from $500m to $16Bn?

Scale 127

Scale VP of Engineering Mobile Scaling 127

Chargify

APRIL 23, 2019

How long is a startup a startup? It came up because people regularly refer to Chargify as a startup, but our company has been around since 2009. Are we still a startup? There are specific stages a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company moves through during its life cycle. Pre-Startup.

Scale 74

Scale SaaS Payments Scaling Payment Services 74

SaaStr

JULY 3, 2020

349: Startups can get messy. And, wouldn’t it be nice if somehow we could turn this s**t show into an army where instead of having this startup chaos, we could get the team working in lock step. Rather than having this feeling of disconnected functional areas, everyone in the company knows what to work on.

Software Review 174

Software Review Systems Review Scale Startup 174

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2019

She will share her top 5 lessons learned in building and scaling SaaS businesses from $1M to $500M in ARR including expanding to serve upmarket customers, moving from product to platform, and how to hire well to drive breakthrough customer experiences and business growth. And by that I mean, put people in the job. Putting people in the role.

Scale 191

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Strategy 191

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 24, 2018

I joined intercom remotely two years ago as the first person in Sydney, and since then we have scaled the APAC team (lovingly referred to as the APAC Alliance) to almost 20 people across 4 countries. Due to our rapid growth, we needed to scale the team remotely before opening an office.

Sales Hiring 149

Sales Hiring Company Culture Scale Customer Support 149

SaaSX

AUGUST 9, 2020

Strategic planning is an area that many startup leadership teams struggle with. It’s often something companies want to do but don’t make time for. Until you have gone through a few cycles of planning, it can be hard to create the discipline to do it in your company. Startups typically need half or annual plans.

Startup 59

Startup Systems Review Leadership Communication 59

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2022

I’d previously worked as an engineer with Squad , an Indian startup. Coming to Intercom, I was keen to have an impact straight away, and see real results from my input – my time at a startup meant that I was used to working quickly and effectively. The company had passed its initial startup phase and was (and still is!)

Engineering 118

Engineering Scale Sales Hiring Company Culture 118

ChurnZero

JANUARY 20, 2022

As a Customer Success leader, you know you should invest more time and resources into planning and executing the long-term initiatives your team needs to scale. Rod Cherkas, CEO of HelloCCO, joined us for a webinar to share his approach to ensure your Customer Success team stays ahead of your company’s growth.

Scale 52

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales 52

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 5, 2022

Suddenly, the team got to know SOC 2 Reports all too well and realized just how burdensome and unscalable it could become, especially for high-growth startups. We’ve gathered a list of articles, videos, and podcasts you can check out: Score Your Company’s SOC 2 Readiness. Scaling security as a startup. How does that feel?

Scale 211

Scale compliance Software Review Technical Review 211

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2019

Scaling the company’s employee base, sales teams, marketing, and operations—all while preserving its culture—has required a laser focus on first principles, smart processes, and effective hiring. Here’s what Claire talks about: How to avoid trapdoor decisions when scaling. Lessons for scaling high-growth organizations.

Scale 113

Scale Payment Services Payment Methods Sales Hiring 113

SaaStr

OCTOBER 28, 2020

A beloved CEO of a beloved startup. People end up not scaling or not wanting to scale. Your need a VP of Sales, Marketing, Product, Engineering and Customer Success by this stage just to scale. Be honest about if every VP can scale at least 6 months from today — or not. ” Oh goodness, I thought.

Sales Hiring 229

Sales Hiring Scale Management Scaling 229

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2023

“Startup culture, whether it’s in Silicon Valley or not, tends to lean heavily towards pulling all-nighters, running on coffee and lack of sleep, pretty much working yourself to the bone. It’s at every scale of abstraction. Do you see this ageism issue in other companies? It was starting to cost me.

Sales Hiring 226

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Scale 226

SaaStr

APRIL 28, 2023

Former CEO and founder of Yext and current CEO and founder of Roam, Howard Lerman, shares successful strategies and lessons learned building two successful startups with Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund, in this week’s episode of CRO Confidential. 100% of scaled companies are distributing. They have people across the world.

Scale 180

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Business 180

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2020

When is it right for SaaS companies to turn down potential customers? How should startups decide which customer segment to focus on? * How should startups think about implementing partnerships? There was a small startup scene. I was working on a startup that was an early mobile payment platform.

SaaS Payments 236

SaaS Payments Scale Payment Services Payment Solutions 236

SaaSOptics

MAY 6, 2022

How do you scale SaaS startups from the seed stage to mature industry leaders? Wish you had a SaaS startup checklist to guide you on your journey to IPO? Founder of SaaS Gurus , Anthony Nitsos, showed us the personal blueprint he uses to advise SaaS startups. You’re in luck. Financial Core. People/HR Core.

SaaS 76

SaaS Scale Underperforming Technical Team Forecasting 76

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2020

And so, I consult and advise for startups about 35 startups over the last three, three and a half years. So talking about hiring your first VP of Sales is obviously everybody knows the stat about what percentage of startups fail. What percentage of startups ultimately will not make it? Anybody want to share that?

Sales Hiring 148

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire 148

Mucker Capital

SEPTEMBER 7, 2023

In one of the recent Mucker’s Growth Series Webinars, we proudly invited one of the previous MuckerLab Partners, Todd Emaus , a serial founder, author of the book Scale Without Losing Your Soul , and currently a partner at Evolution. The webinar delved into the crucial topic of company culture for early-stage startups.

Scale 52

Scale Company Culture Scaling Leadership 52

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 14, 2019

In 2010, he became one of the Co-Founders of Warehouse Investimentos, a prominent Brazilian VC company. Talk: Scaling & Exiting: Dreams, Designs & Dramas. Eduardo then served as the CEO of Oversea Consulting, helping companies in the U.S. He’s been running SaaSholic, a blog where he writes about startups and SaaS.

Technical Review 207

Technical Review Scale Entrepreneurship Sales Hiring 207