SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

Yes, it does not scale, but the beauty is the product. I mean so simple that you get so much time and mind share to polish the product to create best in class, which compensates for a lot of competition that you don’t inherit with the business that grows with customer. In terms of the product market fit falling apart.

Scale 125

Scale SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Payment Services 125

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Jason now has 5 investments at $200m+ ARR that are all cash-flow positive (which is necessary today), and there’s one clear trend he’s seen in today’s new efficient world: The New Normal is 700 Employees at $200,000,000 in ARR (or $300,000 per employee) at the average public SaaS company. This starts to get tough.

Sales Recruiting 269

Sales Recruiting Trends Sales Hiring Software Review 269

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 236

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 236

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 7, 2019

At Spendesk I am currently head of sales, so my main missions are about hiring and building the sales department on one side, and I also work around like all of the go-to-market strategy. When I joined we had just an MVP, 10 beta customers and no pricing. We are now between the growth and the scale, based on the different markets.

Scale 162

Scale Payment Methods Payment Solutions Marketing 162

ProfitWell

MARCH 3, 2020

We invest in business software companies as they’re scaling through the awkward teenage years of that expansion stage—but they’ve found product-market fit, they’ve found some customers, they’ve got a great product, and they’re really ready to 10x their customer base in their teens. OpenView is the expansion stage VC.

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS Payments Payment Services 59

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2019

Ticket prices go up March 1st! 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. You have to invest in H.R.

Sales Hiring 112

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Company Culture 112

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2019

As for Tom, he joined Redpoint in 2008 and has since led investments in Kustomer, Looker, Expensify, and Gremlin all prior guests on the show, I hasten to add. Before joining Redpoint, Tomasz was the product manager for Google’s AdSense social-media products and AdSense internationalization. What is Tom’s favorite book and why?

Scale 112

Scale SMB Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 112

ChurnZero

JULY 12, 2019

Both solutions cost pretty much the same (if you only consider price per user for apps). Exactly as your promotional material might be the first point of contact with your brand, your onboarding process is the first point of contact with your product. Why is that? Both solutions are cloud-based. Don’t Delay Interaction.

Scale 75

Scale Onboarding Customer Success Underperforming Technical Team 75

Buffer Resources

OCTOBER 2, 2023

and as far away as Morocco Initial capital invested: $5,000 Financial support for business: Sold stock from a former employer for startup costs; $7,000 loan from family Revenue streams: The Global Grant Writers Collective : An online course, community, and coaching program priced at $500 per month. Tell us about your team.

Payment Methods 114

Payment Methods Sales Hiring Payments Business 114

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

5 Reasons I Hate the Rule of 40 by Mikael Johnsson, SaaS Nordic While not necessarily completely useless, I would strongly argue that R40 is a metric applicable to the world of PE and public markets investing and is not a good metric for assessing the quality of venture-stage companies. Because this drives investment decisions.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SaaS 52

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

There’s no amount of positive output that can compensate for someone who’s outputting negativity because their blast radius is so big, and it actually affects the core team that is actually getting stuff done. We ended up so totally nailing product market fit because we were laser focused on the customer.

VP of Engineering 244

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 244

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. How can a CEO determine when is the right time to fundamentally invest in devops? billion acquisition.

DevOps as a Service 100

DevOps as a Service Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 100

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

Usage-based pricing (UBP) , also known as consumption-based pricing, allows customers to pay for products according to how much they use. In 2021, we saw that fast growers were nearly 3x as likely to use a largely usage-based pricing model versus slow-growing peers. These metrics are an indicator of product-market fit.

Headcount 73

Headcount SaaS Compensation Acquisition 73

Incredo

NOVEMBER 1, 2019

maintain healthy atmosphere in your Smarketing team, make smart choices regarding your SaaS sales model, strategy, pricing, . better understand Inbound, and learn about major tactics that you can implement, master your SaaS pricing page and increase your conversions. (We And from SaaS sales models to SaaS pricing. SaaS Pricing.

SaaS Payments 157

SaaS Payments Payment Methods Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 157

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

And diversifying, if you’re still early, before 10, 20 or 30 million revenue, that could be a sign that things just aren’t working, that you don’t actually have product market fit, which is unfortunate, but you need to be honest about it. You need to be honest, if you have product market fit.

Scale 195

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 195

SaaStr

AUGUST 5, 2020

We invest in companies that transform the way people work. We mostly do seed-stage investments and a little bit if Series A. The verticals we focus on are obviously the office productivity, dev tools, but also some of the more antiquated industries, including construction, agriculture, manufacturing, et cetera.

Technical Review 142

Technical Review Payment Methods Travel Development Team Review 142

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2020

What does David believe is the crucial step missing in B2B when it comes to finding product market fit? How should founders think about sales rep compensation? What have been David’s learnings on how to integrate sales and marketing so tightly? How does marketing and customer success intertwine to be successful?

Scale 186

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 186

Baremetrics

APRIL 16, 2021

Sweat equity and credit cards, personal lines of credit, direct cash investment into the business in the form of an equity stake or a related-party loan to the company, deferring cash-pay compensation. Future capital providers love to see that you’ve invested more than your time into your endeavor. Company Stage. Typical Amount.

Venture Capital 66

Venture Capital Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team SaaS 66

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2019

And the other job was to be an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. And I was talking to my dad, and he said, “I don’t think you’re an investment banker, Leyla,” which was good advice. Leyla Seka: So I ultimately ended up in Salesforce 11 years ago, and a lot of that was luck.

Scale 129

Scale VP of Engineering Mobile Scaling 129

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2019

Before that Manny was a Senior Product Manager @ Amazon where he engineered the compensation system for Amazon Associates and Web-Services which accounts for 15% of Amazon’s traffic. That is a sign that the market is a little bit more ready than you otherwise would. Take your product, sell it. Nothing happened.

VP of Engineering 146

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Technical Review Development Team Review 146

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2020

Peter Kazanjy: So at TalentBin, that was kind of like my first training wheels, SaaS business, and also the place where I started to learn and appreciate go to market. So I went from being a business generalist founder, so prior to that I was in product marketing and product management at VMware, so big enterprise software company.

Part-Time VPE 188

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 188

Unbounce

JUNE 16, 2020

Affiliates usually receive some kind of compensation (more on this below) for their work. Treat it like a checklist: First, have you achieved some level of product-market fit? Partners need to trust that you have a stable and reliable product if they’re going to invest in you. Exclamation point and all.).

Outsourcing Services 131

Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting Scale SaaS 131

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

The three stages are product-market fit, then go-to-market fit and lastly growth and moat. So that’s what I wanna throw out there today, is a framework on how to think about it deeper than just, hey let’s get product market fit and then lets add 20 reps. We’ve been working on product market fit.

Scale 204

Scale Sales Hiring Revenue VP of Engineering 204

Outseta

OCTOBER 12, 2020

We’ve all read the tales of founders wrestling for years to find product market fit , of co-founders squabbling over equity, of the CEO riddled by anxiety as he drains his infant daughter’s college fund to keep his start-up afloat for another month. Nobody was having fun working on the product anymore. Their reason?

Venture Capital 144

Venture Capital Entrepreneurship Scaling SaaS 144

SaaStr

JANUARY 3, 2020

As for Tom, he joined Redpoint in 2008 and has since led investments in Kustomer, Looker, Expensify and Gremlin all prior guests on the show I hasten to add. What time frame from SAL to closed lead suggests product market fit? And then I went to work at Google for about three years as a product manager in ads.

SMB 26

SMB Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 26

SaaStr

AUGUST 27, 2019

Depending on size and stage, variable compensation can be one of a company’s highest expense items, and a thoughtful approach is key. We invest in enterprise startups throughout the country and you know we live and breathe enterprise tech, by how much we nerd out on sales completely, with all of our enterprise portfolio companies.

Sales Recruiting 130

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 130

User Pilot

FEBRUARY 21, 2023

Then there’s also the price that needs to match your budget. On the flipside, Walkme is punishingly expensive – with the on-demand only pricing reportedly starting at $55,000. This compensates a bit for the lack of in-depth analytics but means you need multiple subscriptions.

Software Review 52

Software Review Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Onboarding 52

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

The company went public in 2009 and was acquired by Yahoo in 2012 for $270m, a 50% premium on existing share price. The company went public in 2009, and was acquired by Yahoo in 2012, for $270 million, a 50% premium on the existing share price. Why did Michael make the move to CRO 8 months ago? The good, the bad, the ugly.

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors Systems Review 171

OpenView Labs

JUNE 25, 2019

A “best-in-class” CAC payback period is highly dependent on your go-to-market motion and customer type and must also be put in the context of two other metrics: logo retention and net dollar retention. If you can get people talking about your product, you won’t have to spend as much on expensive marketing campaigns.

Scale 40

Scale Development Team Review Software Review Benchmarks 40

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2019

Harry Stebbings: I totally agree and it actually very much reminds me of Rahul Vohra’s Superhumans discussion on how to find product market fit and really constraining how you view the ideal user of your product. So we have a high enough price point that we don’t have thousands of customers.

Sales Hiring 131

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Technical Advisors Scale 131

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2019

Why does Allison believe product marketing and customer success are the new sales and marketing? Actually there was now a business imperative to invest in the client experience and ensure that these companies were avoiding a leaky bucket. How does one tie their strategic plan to their financial plan?

Engineering 26

Engineering Scale Underperforming Technical Team Customer Success 26

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

Patrick Campbell’s got thousands of SaaS companies and pricing and issues. Sam Blond: It was a combination of product marketing, marketing and then relationship management. Sam Blond: Sort of related, first thing that comes to mind is I would say invest in making sure that people are successful on the free trial.

Merchant Services 169

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 169

Sixteen Ventures

DECEMBER 31, 2019

Understanding Customer Success Management Compensation Models. Every company has an initial catalyst for investing in Customer Success. But you must build a system around the customer lifecycle to, at various milestones, work with your customer to create marketing based on their success with the product.

Customer Success 136

Customer Success SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 136