SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

Before that Bob co-founded RJ Metrics, where he built a global base of online retailers leading to their acquisition by Magento Commerce in 2016. What were the core mistakes that he made with RJ Metrics? How does Bob think about when is the right time to hire a Head of Partnerships? Loving our podcast content?

Sales Hiring 132

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 132

OPEXEngine

OCTOBER 31, 2019

The metrics that drive SaaS are not GAAP metrics and companies need a strong Finance department to be the one source of truth about the financial AND the operating metrics. Ability to accurately benchmark key metrics against peers and market leaders. Skills & Experience.

Finance 40

Finance CTO Hire Headcount SaaS 40

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

CEO Joel Gascoigne tells us about the decision to invest in new analytics tools and how Buffer sustained long-term growth thanks to growing their ARPA. While Baremetrics was fulfilling the desire for public transparency, internally the team was using Looker almost exclusively to track and report revenue metrics. What is Buffer.

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Outsourcing Services 52

Natalia Luneva

APRIL 30, 2021

Of course, our team is involved to an extent, and we have an external part-time moderator for support. 5 Sebastian Schaeffer, CTO at dofollow.io (B2B PR SaaS) says: “ Our community is primarily on Facebook and Linkedin and it has been live for over a year. My main metric for success is engagement.

Marketing 98

Marketing Social Media SaaS New CTO 98

Point Nine Land

APRIL 9, 2021

Having invested in 9 B2B marketplaces and gathered data from 20+ different investors, here are our findings on what it takes to raise money in 2021 for B2B marketplaces. A technical co-founder or CTO is always a great-to-have at this stage and becomes a must-have as the business scales beyond seed. Market Characteristics ??

Marketplace as a Service 59

Marketplace as a Service Payments B2B SaaS Payments 59

ProfitWell

JANUARY 24, 2020

First up, stop measuring your success by vanity metrics , like views and ‘likes’ on your videos, for example. is a much worthier investment for your 2020. The Athletic 's strategy for the past three years has been to hire top-talent journalists in the sports space, getting people to pay for high-quality journalistic content.

Sales Recruiting 40

Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO Sales Hiring 40

Buffer Resources

JANUARY 30, 2023

Then he became CTO at Bezos Academy, a non-profit organization founded by Jeff Bezos. After leaving Bezos Academy, he decided to start a paid newsletter focused on career development, organization design, and hiring. “ I want to invest as little as possible to get 80% of the value.

Social Media 17

Social Media CTO Coach CTO Hire New CTO 17

SmartKarrot

MARCH 4, 2021

What makes a chief product officer (CPO) different from a CTO or a VP in the product department. Keep in mind that Chief Product Officers (CPO) are different from Chief Technology Officers (CTO) and Chief Marketing Officers (CMO). A CTO is one who investigates the product development aspect. Like what you are reading?

Part-Time CTO 16

Part-Time CTO VP of Engineering CTO CTO Hire 16

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 deep integration from day one of the data pipelines in real time is super critical.

Cloud 172

Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 172

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

They’ve invested in all of these other businesses. Immediately told them to hire 50 reps in a different city, in a different city, and they did. The CEO was deferential because that was 10 times what he’d ever raised before, and did all of it. We might’ve touched on this one too on the hiring and the people.

Sales Hiring 241

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 241

SmartKarrot

AUGUST 16, 2022

Only when some metric goes off the benchmark can you know something is wrong. These annual executive business meetings are a wonderful time to discuss contracts. Top Metrics You need to Consider for EBR/QBR sessions. This process needs to include aspects like overall customer health score and a bunch of other metrics.

Technical Review 10

Technical Review Systems Review Business CTO Hire 10

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2019

We ended up signing that contract in the uber back to the airport on the way home. It was our largest contract to date, kind of helps the other quarter. I had my CTO and everyone would be like, “You can’t do this. For example, I referenced hiring a Chief Revenue Officer, Bill. This is never going to work.”

CTO Hire 162

CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 162

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 24, 2021

A thanks to [Marsh 00:00:34] for stepping in at the beginning of the month, and a great session with our own Jason Warner and Adrian, the CTO of Zendesk. Lionetti, the CMO at Confluent, and most recently, the CTO from Zendesk, Adrian. I wouldn’t say I have an exact metric, but-. Excited to be back emceeing.

CTO Coach 125

CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 125

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Join this panel of investors from Connect Ventures, Blossom Capital, Dawn Capital, The Family, and Indico Partners as they provide an overview of the current investment landscape, and discuss whether the seed stage is emerging as the new Series A. We are a $50 million fund based in Lisbon, and we invest mainly in seed stage.

New CTO 154

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 154

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2019

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. Julien Lemoine | Co-founder and CTO @Algolia. So I’m Julien, Co-founder and CTO of Algolia. Want to see more content like this?

Scale 130

Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 130

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shared with us how they got there — and the top mistakes they made — just 3 quarters after their IPO. We have someone that probably 98 percent of you know virtually or socially in some sense, Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. ” We didn’t do any annual contracts.

Part-Time VPE 227

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 227

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2020

As for Karl, prior to founding the company he spent 6 years at Google in some fascinating roles including Head of Patents, Head of Business Development in China and running Google’s energy investments. How does one know when we need to hire generalists vs specialists? How does Karl structure the hiring process today? What works?

Sales Hiring 222

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach 222

SmartKarrot

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

Ben Murray is a Certified Public Accountant whose passion for SaaS metrics, financial performance, subscription economy, forecasting, and SaaS operations drove him to kick start blogging on the same. You can follow Ben to manage your SaaS startup finances and calculate growth metrics accurately. Dharmesh Shah. Marc Benioff. Neil Patel.

VP of Engineering 10

VP of Engineering Scale SaaS Venture Capital 10

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

When I was a couple of years into my tenure at Oracle, I moved down to Latin America to Argentina, sight unseen actually, and built out a telesales group in Argentina and then later in Miami, hiring about 100 people from 11 different countries and that early building experience really whet my appetite. I came back to North America.

Scale 171

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hacker

JUNE 12, 2020

This is a relationship worth investing in. If you are trying to overcome no brand and market, you can’t ask somebody for a three year contract. Or, if you do ask for a three year contract, have some terms in there that show that you’re going to prove ROI. Down the road, you can say, “ I demand a two year contract.

Enterprise 69

Enterprise CTO Hire Startup Technical Cofounder 69

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

Obviously if you target enterprise customers, you usually have a very large ACV (Annual Contract Value) and the product usually is complex. We talk about using the product complexity, your target customer size, your contract value, and whether there's individual use case–those four things--to help you decide if PLG is a fit.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

SaaStr

MAY 2, 2019

Jonathan : And so the people that you’re looking for, you wanted them to resonate with that idea that you already have this amount of money in revenue as opposed to looking for other metrics that they might be interested in for a start-up? Okay, so what were the stages of investment rounds that you took? Vlad : No. Jonathan : Okay.

Scale 151

Scale Business Sales Hiring CTO Hire 151

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2020

Interesting for a couple reasons, but Sunil’s been investing in cloud internet since before almost anybody. So, not that many people have started so early in the career, so long in the space, and great investments that we know like Datadog and Fastly, and good at it. GP and founder of Amplify Partners. Jason Lemkin: Crazy.

Sales Recruiting 176

Sales Recruiting Development Team Review Technical Review Sales Hiring 176

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

And we’re constantly aligning the metrics in that business plan back to the technology and understanding which dials we need to turn, which types of implementational product feature functions do we need to use that will directly equate to these types of things. As announced today, that’s a public metric.

Payment Methods 201

Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 201

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2020

So the external one is, the metrics bore out that we have made the right decision here. Is there hiring decisions? Paul Rosania: So let’s imagine I went to you as a CTO. Tell me, what’s the hardest role to hire for today? Were there lessons from it? In what ways do you think the writing is so powerful?

CTO Coach 182

CTO Coach Sales Hiring Software Review CTO Hire 182

OPEXEngine

NOVEMBER 11, 2020

This made it hard to chart a clear course: Jebbit’s message to the market was a bit too broad, causing Sales to bring in customers across a range of personas, prompting CS to invest extra resources to keep a wide variety of customers engaged.”. Let’s say you’re working on retention, and you have eight usage metrics with substantive volume.

Startup 91

Startup Scale Systems Review Technical Review 91

Outseta

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

And many CEOs simply fail to understand the nuances of the role and the future building benefits of marketing investments made in areas like “brand” where the return on investment is not immediately recognizable on the balance sheet. This is empowering and allows me to execute at a dramatically fast pace than I otherwise could.

Sales Hiring 50

Sales Hiring CTO Coach CTO Hire Underperforming Technical Team 50

Hull

JANUARY 22, 2019

These roles are filled by engineers that roll up to the CMO/COO (not CTO) as part of a growth team. Brianne Kimmel made the move from marketing through growth to advising and investing. Since this is a post about engineering, here's the obligatory "we're hiring" plug, including growth engineers.

SaaS Payments 77

SaaS Payments Technical Advisors Engineering Payment Solutions 77

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

Which role should you hire for first? For starters, your first hire should be someone who can complement your skills, someone who is strong in areas where you’re weak, but it goes much deeper than that. I am guessing it’s probably the hardest problem to solve, hiring a job, let alone at this level. And for good reason.

Sales Hiring 258

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 258

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2022

Don’t force VCs to find out in due diligence that only 2 percent of the pool, not the customary 15 percent or so, is available for new hires. And if they are seed investing in the round (surprisingly common) — disclose it! Half of a VC investment is in the CEO. If you don’t know who that really is, it’s difficult to invest.

Finance 289

Finance Technical Review CTO Hire New CTO 289

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2024

At SaaStr Annual we had a great session with HubSpot Founder & CTO, Dharmesh Shah, and their Chief People Officer, Katie Burke, on building happier employees. So, for those of you thinking, “Hey, I’m going wait on the ROI of our culture, or I’m going to wait to invest in our employee experience,” wait no longer.

Part-Time CTO 266

Part-Time CTO CTO Hire CTO Coach CTO 266

OnStartups

JULY 7, 2021

And I think part of it's because you've been in the game for a while and you're incredibly successful. Is your title CTO? Dharmesh: Yes, CTO. How do you have time to have your hands in all this different stuff? We're going to talk about why you invest in what you invest. You can invest in things.

Payment Methods 140

Payment Methods Software Review Technical Review Payment Solutions 140

OnStartups

JULY 7, 2021

And I think part of it's because you've been in the game for a while and you're incredibly successful. Is your title CTO? Dharmesh: Yes, CTO. How do you have time to have your hands in all this different stuff? We're going to talk about why you invest in what you invest. You can invest in things.

Payment Methods 40

Payment Methods Software Review Technical Review Payment Solutions 40