SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

You have to see: A couple of good hires brought in Improvement on some metrics A big deal or two hanging out there, brought in and closed Things taken off your plate. More time may make them better if they’re already progressing, even if it’s just 10-15% in the first sales cycle. Hiring someone too junior. That often compounds.

Part-Time VPE 185

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 185

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

TL;DR SaaS, or “Software as a Service,” is a business model that delivers centrally hosted software to subscribers over the internet. Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. Engineering Manager: In charge of planning, designing, and overseeing projects.

Sales Hiring 94

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 94

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 15, 2018

On day one as Reddit’s new VP of Engineering, Nick Caldwell faced a dilemma. He had just spent 13 years at Microsoft, most recently as the head of 300 engineers. At Reddit, he led a team of 35 – none of whom knew how to manage other engineers. Building trust can be tough when you’re a new hire in a leadership position.

Leadership 141

Leadership Engineering Part-Time VPE CTO Coach 141

Crafty CTO

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

Yes, I needed to replatform my blog, but I also needed a web presence for my new fractional CTOing entity. In the end, I found a name that I think works well for both (ask me again in 5 years): Crafty CTO / craftycto.com for the entity, with the blog living at CraftyCTO.com/blog.

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Software Engineering 40

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Here’s an overview of the series: Part 1: How to Categorize Expenses in a SaaS Startup v2.0 The gist of it is that Cost of Revenue includes costs that go into providing your Software as a Service. Follow the process for the rest of the categories such as Software & Tools – Sales.

Merchant Services 90

Merchant Services Startup DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Developers haven’t typically been the buyers in enterprise software, so why should you build for developers? 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. The contract size grows.

Underperforming Technical Team 183

Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Development Part-Time VPE 183

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2021

For those who don’t know him, Will has over 10 years of experience in the likes of Yahoo, Digg, Uber, and Stripe, and he’s currently the CTO of Calm , the mindfulness app that helps millions of people to lower their stress levels and sleep better. If you’re a senior engineer and want to further your career, what skills should you develop?

Technical Review 274

Technical Review Leadership VP of Engineering CTO Coach 274

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

Software as a Service is currently taxable in about one-third of US states, and that number is only growing as outdated state sales tax laws slowly catch up with the way we’re doing business today. . Say you sell a subscription-based software but you also send your customers a handy flash drive with a version of your software on it.

Merchant Services 172

Merchant Services Scale Technical Review Sales Hiring 172

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 21, 2021

Will Larson , CTO of Calm. Des Traynor , Co-founder and CTO of Intercom. There are plenty of resources and advice on unlocking the secrets of the engineering management career path. Karen Peacock: In college, I studied math and computer science and engineering. Janeen Uzzell , COO for Wikimedia Foundation.

VP of Engineering 118

VP of Engineering Scale Technical Review Outsourcing Services 118

SaaStock

MARCH 29, 2019

That’s the advice, Petri Hollmén picked up on the more technical side of things from the opening session on Day 2 with Cal Henderson, CTO of Slack. You can use them the next time you need to convince your manager brand investment makes sense. Get marketing and engineering working together. He calls it engineered marketing.

Scale 103

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Social Media 103

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 11, 2019

At Hired, we started out with a transactional model that was—at the time—a super disruptive approach and one of our key differentiators. It would help us establish a more predictable and consistent income based on recurring revenue instead of one-time purchases. Recognizing Your Cue – Opportunities and Conviction. – once.

Sales Hiring 40

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Technical Review 40

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 18, 2012

If your plan is to create a bloated piece of enterprise software with an ugly interface and make it up by hiring a large field sales force from the get-go you might succeed as well, but in that case please don't ask me for advice. :) Let's start with the founder team. . :) Let's start with the founder team. What comes next?

Sales Hiring 121

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup Outsourced Development 121

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 5, 2022

There are enough stories of data breaches and cyber attacks to chill even the savviest security engineer to the core. An aerospace engineer turned entrepreneur, Adam learned early the best way to earn trust was proving you deserve it. Evernote’s CTO on Your Biggest Security Worries From 3 to 300 Employees. Start early.

Scale 211

Scale compliance Software Review Technical Review 211

OpenView Labs

JULY 2, 2020

Time and time again SaaS companies are promising customers that they will save hundreds of thousands of dollars, but their pricing strategies are only capturing a tiny fraction of that savings. How to Screw Up Your Software Pricing and Packaging Completely. Building a Self-Funding Product Qualified Lead Engine.

Pricing 135

Pricing SaaS Payments Payments SaaS 135

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

More and more people are hiring leaders, not for past experience, but for capability and capacity. They have a core philosophy that you cannot have a successful high-growth software company if your core metrics around Customer Success are not strong, including NPS. We hire a third-party firm. They give us NPS goals.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

Hacking Revenue

AUGUST 4, 2016

We can put together a WordPress website and we have some fancy badges in CodeAcademy, but no CTO in his right mind will let either of us touch their production environment and/or keyboard. We know the tools, we know the methods and we know how to hire and manage people. With the full BOOK of instructions, we get busy hiring.

Software 75

Software CTO Hire Scale New CTO 75

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

Join us for a fireside chat between Google Cloud and Zenoss, a leader in software-defined IT operations, as we discuss the most common and emerging challenges facing SaaS companies today for both technical and non-technical backgrounds. Eyal Manor – VP, Engineering @ Google Cloud. They wanted real-time results.

Cloud 168

Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 168

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

How does Bob think about when is the right time to hire a Head of Partnerships? Where do most startups go wrong both in hiring for partnerships and in the engagements themselves? Bob Moore: And I was t nerdy engineer in college, so getting the opportunity to have to pitch, it’s really a sales job at the end of the day.

Sales Hiring 132

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 132

SaaStr

JANUARY 17, 2020

What other elements of the contract should startups really spend a lot of time focusing on? 300: When it comes to seamlessly scaling your applications, a top-notch engineering team will be your foundation. As I said, you’ve witnessed, and bought hundreds of different software providers in terms of like the red flags.

CTO Hire 133

CTO Hire compliance Scale Startup 133

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 13, 2018

OpenView is thrilled to announce our recent $9M Series A investment in Loopio , a software platform that helps sales teams respond to RFPs, RFIs, and security questionnaires seamlessly with up-to-date, accurate, and approved content. Loopio co-founders from left to right: Matt York, CTO; Jafar Owainati, COO; Zakir Hemraj, CEO.

Investment 40

Investment CTO Hire New CTO Sales Hiring 40

Mattermark

AUGUST 23, 2017

Fred Wilson counters the argument that Resource Constraints make it difficult to succeed as a startup, saying that great operators are never limited by a lack of funding or engineers. Our CTO Kevin says: “It’s like the beginning of people’s imagination with computer games, which is awesome.”

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire Startup CTO Travel 40

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

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?

Part-Time VPE 327

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 327

SaaStr

MAY 26, 2023

Dan Robinson, current Advisor and former CTO at Heap , shares five essential learnings from nearly a decade of building a SaaS business. What Your Job Is (And What It Isn’t) Your Job is to Make the Company Win A CTO may imagine their primary job is to provide technical expertise, lead engineers, and help build the product.

CTO Coach 187

CTO Coach CTO Hire CTO Leadership 187

OpenView Labs

JUNE 18, 2020

I tell them that I do what I do with music, but with software engineers. And hiring people who are better than you. ICYMI: Meet Mailchimp’s CTO Eric Muntz. How do you explain what you do to your parents, friends, kids, or non-industry people? What’s your elevator pitch? I struggle to do that well.

CTO Hire 52

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Software Engineering 52

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

Joel had what he calls “an honest conversation” with Buffer’s CTO Dan. One interesting thing that Joel shared with us, was that he realized implementing these software tools would require a large investment, but he consciously made that decision: I would gladly spend $100,000 on a tool if that would allow me to avoid hiring.

Payment Solutions 113

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Social Media 113

Crafty CTO

JULY 21, 2023

They are likely also want the LLM to work locally (at least partially) on their devices using the Neural Engine which adds further engineering complexity to their project. They could even be timing the LLM’s launch around a hardware release capable of running the model (M3, M4, etc…).

Artificial Intelligence 40

Artificial Intelligence Technical Review Generative AI AI 40

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. He did it, and anyone can do it if they’re a product-focused founder who uses software.

Scale 245

Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 245

Kellblog

JANUARY 29, 2020

Unlike traditional databases, our technology is built using a hybrid of database and search engine technology and thus provides excellent capabilities for storing, indexing, and rapidly querying both structured and unstructured data. Big successful enterprise software companies have definitionally employed a lot of people.

Startup 99

Startup Sales Hiring CTO Hire New CTO 99

OPEXEngine

NOVEMBER 11, 2020

“Our renewal rate looked great, but as we began to dig into data, we realized it was because of our CS team and their high levels of service—it wasn’t necessarily a reflection of our software, our product/go-to-market fit, or the pain we were solving in the market,” he says. “We Get it done faster. To start, you can simply test out Excel. “In

Startup 91

Startup Scale Systems Review Technical Review 91

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 27, 2018

Uptime is influenced by many factors such as the software architecture and the quality of day to day operations. On call work like this can be a powerful customer orientated activity that connects engineers to the value customers get from your product. Our on call went from being spread across more than 30 engineers to just 6 or 7.

Engineering 209

Engineering Software Review Technical Review Systems Review 209

Upscope

JANUARY 5, 2020

When an engineer turned marketer helps position multiple companies to grow from, for example, $2 million to $70 million in 18 months, it's time to listen. 10 companies show you their positioning strategy How Superhuman achieved positioning by creating an engine Upscope's SaaS positioning lesson? This is not one of them.

Strategy 128

Strategy Marketing Sales Hiring Engineering 128

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2024

It’s a little brutal, but if folks want to get rid of half their contact center that are people and replace it with software, you’d probably get budget for $50k. Is the CTO involved in these decisions? Is the CTO involved in these decisions? All the great software companies are built on 80% word of mouth.

AI 240

AI Pricing Artificial Intelligence Scale 240

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2020

Brendon introduces his playbook to hiring the first VP of Sales from his experiences as VP of Sales at LinkedIn, EchoSign, Talkdesk and more. Learn the dos and don’ts to make the correct hire the first time and not rush into hiring the wrong VP of Sales, which can cost the company months or even years. Roughly 90%.

Sales Hiring 156

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire 156

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

Joel had what he calls “an honest conversation” with Buffer’s CTO Dan. One interesting thing that Joel shared with us, was that he realized implementing these software tools would require a large investment, but he consciously made that decision: I would gladly spend $100,000 on a tool if that would allow me to avoid hiring.

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Outsourcing Services 52

Outseta

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

The challenge in each case is the same—the company is hiring you at a lower level of commitment than a full-time hire, usually with the expectation that they will see some ROI relatively quickly. Full-time Head of Marketing I’ve been hired to lead marketing teams at four companies in a full-time capacity now.

Sales Hiring 50

Sales Hiring CTO Coach CTO Hire Underperforming Technical Team 50

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

.” It’s a better use of time and a much more efficient sales cycle to focus the team on expanding and attracting these Enterprise accounts, rather than having them follow up and call every person when they could sign up for the platform now themselves. The worst emotion for software sales is uncertainty.

New CTO 255

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring AWS 255

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2019

When it comes to seamlessly scaling your applications, a top-notch engineering team will be your foundation. Julian Lemoine, Co-Founder, and CTO of Algolia will share his lessons learned on how to stay focused and innovative as you scale while also avoiding the innovation for innovation’s sake pitfalls. Join us at SaaStr Annual 2020.

Scale 124

Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 124