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

SaaStr

Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders? You will need a VP of Product to scale your roadmap. 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.

Scale 260
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What Order Should You Hire Your Management Team In?

SaaStr

IME, rough order to make hires in: VPM: $0.2m He asked which to hire first. If you have a few nickels in the bank, and you somehow find a great VP a half stage or even full stage early, just hire her. Hiring is so hard as it is. And set you up for a ton more success, earlier. Make the hire now.

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Scaling a Product-Led Growth Model with 1Password, Apollo.io, Sentry, and Lightspeed (Pod 634 + Video)

SaaStr

Lightspeed Partner, Anoushka Vaswani, is joined by Raj Sarkar, CMO at 1Password, Kim Walsh, SVP, Sales, Partnerships and Customer Success at Apollo.io, and Chris De Vylder, CRO at Sentry, to pass along key lessons from their growth journey. To do that, define what success means for you and your customers.

Scale 200
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VPs That Can’t Hire … They Aren’t Real VPs. At Least, Not Yet.

SaaStr

Perhaps the single most important thing you can ever do in SaaS, at least after $1m in ARR or so, is hire the best VPs you can. We’ve talked a lot over the years about how not to hire a wrong VP of Sales — 70%+ of the first VPs of Sales don’t make it even 10 months. You need to hire up-and-comers. Get on jets?

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

SaaStr

Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders? You will need a VP of Product to scale your roadmap. 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. She can be your CTO forever.

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The Cold, Hard Truths About SaaS In 2023: Part 1 AMA with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

SaaStr

Startups come in all shapes and sizes on various stages of a timeline, yet it’s not surprising how many have the same questions and concerns about how to scale from x to y to z, the right time to hire and fire, and how to keep a team motivated during hard times. But I’ve almost failed every time.”

CTO Hire 190
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If You Don’t Think You Need a VP of Product, VP of Marketing, Etc. — Then You Haven’t Worked With a Great One

SaaStr

in ARR, get to Initial Traction , we then realize we have to scale. Hire not just 1-2 reps, but 10. That it’s time to bring in someone that knows. But I’ve found many great SaaS founders take longer, too long, to decide to hire the other VPs. My CTO and dev team is building all the features we need.