SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2020

Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders? In SaaS, it is recruiting your VPs and management team : SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. SaaS products get too complex to hack a product roadmap too long. You will need a VP of Product to scale your roadmap. She can be your CTO forever.

Part-Time VPE 236

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE Sales Recruiting 236

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

As your SaaS company grows and you go through various fundraising stages, your company size also grows. You’ll need to hire aggressively to get to the next level and continue that rapid growth. But what roles should you hire for, and what will your org chart look like at each stage? David Sacks: SaaS Background and Investments.

CTO Hire 252

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO 252

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2021

Lately I’ve been working with 5+ SaaS companies all hiring their first VP of Product. And critically, most have a really strong CEO-CTO partnership. A few general learnings: A VP of Product that Reports to CTO / Engineering Rarely Meets With That Many Customers. I just see this time and time again.

Part-Time VPE 295

Part-Time VPE Outsourcing Services CTO Hire CTO 295

SaaStr

JUNE 18, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: About 70% of SaaS Public Companies Are New Versions of Existing Categories of Software (Updated) Growth Slowed Down About 33% On Average For Everyone in Q1 The Top 20 SaaStr Tips to Getting a SaaS Start-Up Going When Should You Add a Second Product?

CTO Hire 211

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Scaling 211

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2021

Founded by Sanjit Biswas, former CEO at Meraki and John Bicket former CTO at Meraki[link] Samsara builds software to manage physical operations: truck fleets, mining, food & beverage, oil & gas. 71% is the public SaaS company median. But these contracts produce compelling economics.

CTO Hire 357

CTO Hire CTO Coach Benchmarks Scale 357

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2023

Ode to the $100,000,000 Exit Dear SaaStr: Should You Hire Someone That Seems Good … But Always Job Hops? SaaStr 638: Lessons Learned in Scaling Your Team & Revenue from $1M ARR to $1B+ with Cloudflare CRO Chris Merritt  2. SaaStr 639: Scaling a SaaS Sales Team While Building Culture with Figma VP of Sales Scott Pugh   3.

Scale 212

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 212

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2022

What started as a simple WordPress blog in 2012 has now become the world’s largest community of SaaS executives, founders, and entrepreneurs. And SaaStr Europa brings 2,500+ SaaS execs, founders, and VCs together to Europe every summer. We were the first major SaaS event back in the SF Bay Area. SaaStr is turning 10!

Scale 283

Scale Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO 283

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

Hundreds of thousands of experts are telling you how to succeed in SaaS. On top of that, founders are full of excuses preventing them from scaling. 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. Yes, you do.

Part-Time VPE 188

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 188

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2021

There, Amplitude has become part of the core product stack for many SaaS and software leaders for product analytics. Use overages to renegotiate contracts, not charge per event. They’re growing even faster at scale. CEO Spencer Skates owns 8.5%, CTO Curtis Liu 8.0%. 5 Interesting Learnings: #1.

Scale 272

Scale CTO Hire New CTO CTO 272

SaaStr

JULY 3, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Zendesk and Anaplan: A Tale of Two Very Similar, And Very Different, $10B SaaS Acquisitions. The Ultimate Guide for Hiring a Great VP of Sales. Balancing Growth and Efficiency in Tougher Times | Point Nine Managing Partner Christoph Janz.

CTO Hire 202

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Scale CTO 202

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2021

In the past, we’ve touched on several different ideas to help you scale, to do Even Better: Imagine capital doesn’t matter. And importantly, you need to spend more time with your existing customers (vs. But even if you’ve hired the world’s best VP of Sales … you can’t opt out of sales entirely.

Part-Time VPE 273

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 273

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Confused about trying to understand SaaS roles? SaaS companies have many moving parts, and it can be difficult to determine who does what. TL;DR SaaS, or “Software as a Service,” is a business model that delivers centrally hosted software to subscribers over the internet. What is a SaaS business model?

Sales Hiring 92

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 92

SaaStr

DECEMBER 10, 2020

I hear again and again from SaaS founders growing to $5m, $10m ARR or even more that they don’t need a certain VP — with the exception of a VP of Sales. Basically, in SaaS, everyone “gets” that they need a VP of Sales. in ARR, get to Initial Traction , we then realize we have to scale. But trust me.

Sales Hiring 359

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 359

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2020

They’ll revolt when you make a senior or mid-level hire that as a group, they simply cannot suffer one day longer. He was literally the only person on the planet with the specific scaling experience we needed. It did work — we got the scaling done. You see this all the time. Everyone hated him.

Part-Time VPE 273

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 273

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

These are all full-time jobs by $1m ARR. Fixing it yourself becomes the biggest time sink and excuse for not hiring there is. You end up spending all your time backfilling roles you should have hired. And even worse, you often sort of give up trying to make the hire. Get on a jet, at least twice a quarter.

Part-Time VPE 270

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 270

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

This post will walk you through what SaaS companies need to know about sales tax compliance, how to know when and from which customers you should collect sales tax, and best of all, how to automate sales tax so you can check “Do something about sales tax” off your to-do list once and for all. Why is sales tax such a pain for SaaS companies?

Merchant Services 172

Merchant Services Scale Technical Review Sales Hiring 172

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

WorkOS CEO Michael Grinich, Developer Success Manager Betsy Calender, and VP of Developer Experience Zeno Rocha share how to price your product for developers, how to market it to developers, how to how to support them as they scale and use the products. The contract size grows. Doing Business with Developers. Bottom-up sales.

Underperforming Technical Team 185

Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Development Part-Time VPE 185

SaaStr

APRIL 22, 2019

Hear why he thinks that the next call should not have been to a competitor. “Hiring, Firing and Stretching: How to Build Your First Management Teams” ScaleX Founder and Managing Partner Dilek Dayinlarli and Insider Co-Founder and CEO Hande Cilingir and Atlassian Head of OpsGenie Berkay Mollamustafaoglu. His next call?

CTO Hire 150

CTO Hire Scale Sales Hiring CTO 150

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. First, hire a management coach to work with you as the company grows. The best ways he found to learn leadership skills was to hire a management coach to meet him once per month, to talk through the issues facing him at Optimizely.

CTO Coach 101

CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 101

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

As a global technology provider powering thousands of SaaS companies, Google is at the forefront of driving exciting and innovative technologies to market. You’ll also learn how leading SaaS companies are able to scale and thrive in this complex, dynamic environment. Who’s here on a CEO or more on a business hat SaaS?

Cloud 168

Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 168

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

Well, we did the heavy lifting and highlighted a few here for you… “When to Hire and When to Automate” with Zapier CEO Wade Foster. Wade Foster is Co-founder and CEO of Zapier, a SaaS company that allows users to integrate web applications they use. “The Cadence: How to Turn Your SaaS Startup into an Army.”

Payment Services 100

Payment Services CTO Hire Payments New CTO 100

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

As a SaaS business, Intercom is a data processor: our customers entrust us with their data, which we store and process on their behalf. As we scale, we’re working with larger mid-market and enterprise customers with more complex needs and specifications. Hiring and cultivating incredible talent on our Information Security team.

Data 118

Data compliance Technical Review CTO Hire 118

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

In Today’s Episode We Discuss: * How Sam made his way into the world of SaaS with Dropbox and how that led to his leading the sales and success team today @ Loom. What was Sam’s biggest lesson from scaling the sales team at Dropbox? When is the right time to hire the first sales rep? Should you hire 2 at a time?

Scale 174

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 174

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 11, 2019

Pricing is an incredibly important part of any SaaS product’s go-to-market strategy. At Hired, we started out with a transactional model that was—at the time—a super disruptive approach and one of our key differentiators. And—like everything else in the fast-moving SaaS world—pricing is not a once-and-done task.

Sales Hiring 40

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Technical Review 40

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

In Today’s Episode We Discuss: * How Bob made his way into the world of SaaS and came to found Crossbeam. * What were the core mistakes that he made with RJ Metrics? * Does Bob agree with the notion that channel sales have completely died in the world of SaaS? At what scale does that become impossible? What did he mean by this?

Sales Hiring 132

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 132

SaaStock

MARCH 29, 2019

Don’t overextend your resources when testing new SaaS growth ideas. Here is what he writes: Kieran Flanagan , VP of marketing at HubSpot, shared some interesting insights on approaching new ideas for scaling up your business. Hire Game Changers to Propel Growth. Sebastian Lambert, picked this key lesson from Kieran Flanagan.

Scale 103

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Social Media 103

SaaStr

MAY 26, 2023

You’ll never truly understand how to lead a SaaS company until you’ve done it firsthand. Dan Robinson, current Advisor and former CTO at Heap , shares five essential learnings from nearly a decade of building a SaaS business. Software is Fractal A SaaS product is richly nuanced and contains multiple layers.

CTO Coach 189

CTO Coach CTO Hire CTO Leadership 189

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.

Part-Time VPE 329

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 329

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

More and more people are hiring leaders, not for past experience, but for capability and capacity. We hire a third-party firm. Q: FranConnect has customers of all sizes, from emerging and growing to scaling and enterprise. They’ve got a proven concept they need to scale. You run the gamut. It gets quite complex.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 5, 2022

In today’s data-driven SaaS scene, these can affect hundreds of millions of users and cause damage in the billions of dollars, and as compliance frameworks become requirements to do business, businesses are turning to third-party services that can help expedite and facilitate the process. Scaling security as a startup.

Scale 211

Scale compliance Software Review Technical Review 211

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. It takes time to be able to be very, very clear about why you’re doing something.

CTO Hire 134

CTO Hire compliance Scale Startup 134

Outseta

OCTOBER 15, 2018

By Geoff Roberts Last year Clement Vouillon of Point Nine Capital wrote an article entitled The Rise of the Non “VC compatible” SaaS Companies. And it expressed a growing sentiment in the world of SaaS start-ups; for the majority of SaaS founders the traditional VC model is a clusterfuck that makes very little sense.

CTO Hire 65

CTO Hire CTO Coach SaaS New CTO 65

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

In Today’s Episode We Discuss: How Erica made her way into the world of SaaS and came to be Chief Revenue Officer @ New Relic. How can founders know when is the right time to make the move from SMB to enterprise? Where does Erica often see founders make mistakes with this scaling? Harry Stebbings: I mean what foresight there.

Scale 173

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 173

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

The question is not whether a CSM is a valuable asset to a SaaS business, but rather, how valuable are they? How many CSMs should you hire? On a global scale, on average, product marketers with strong leadership support earn almost $13k more a year than those without. What is their ROI? Here are a few teasers. And for some U.S.

Scale 43

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

Point Nine Land

APRIL 9, 2021

Over the last few years, we’ve published a number of SaaS funding napkins as well as marketplace napkins. So if you’re a US-based startup, you might be able to shoot slightly higher ;) Unlike SaaS companies which have been around for years, B2B marketplaces are a relatively new category and not many investors have invested in them yet.

Marketplace as a Service 59

Marketplace as a Service Payments B2B SaaS Payments 59

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

Each year, tens of thousands of SaaS fans attend SaaStr Annual. 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. Find and hire two other similar reps.

Scale 248

Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales Recruiting 248

BetterCloud

MAY 17, 2021

Secondarily, I had a chance to chat with [CTO Jamie Tischart ] even before he joined the company. For me, when I’m assessing good hires, I look for some key things that I think can survive any of those things. I want to know how we leverage these technologies to empower automated testing at scale.

New CTO 52

New CTO Part-Time VPE CTO Coach CTO Hire 52