SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2024

Here’s what I see most often, the Top 6 Mistakes First Time SaaS Founders Make: Incomplete understanding of business model, and how it will scale. Hire those extra engineers. But hiring folks that haven’t done it at all doesn’t scale past a few million in ARR. You have to pay folks market.

Scale 307

Scale Social Media SaaS Business Model 307

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 17, 2024

As the co-founder and CEO of Intellimize (acquired by Webflow), Guy brings a unique perspective from his journey through iconic companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Twitter, as well as his background in aerospace engineering. 15:41) Scaling Twitter’s ad business and managing hyper-growth. (26:54) So you are number one.

Scale 101

Scale Engineering Acquisition Scaling 101

SaaStr

JANUARY 3, 2025

You may think competition matters, but a great head of engineering and product will outpace the competition. Our head of product, head of engineering, like pretty much everybody in leadership. A bunch of them we hired out of business school, or out of engineering school, and came up through our farm system.”

Sales Hiring 284

Sales Hiring Scale Systems Review Interviewing 284

SaaStr

OCTOBER 23, 2024

This potential for a decade of growth at scale here helps justify the high revenue multiple Palantir trades at. #4. Profitability Has Increased Even as Growth Has Reaccelerated Do you have to do it all today, at least once you are at scale? And a true engine of growth. #9. Grow AND be more efficient?

Artificial Intelligence 236

Artificial Intelligence Government AI Cloud 236

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2024

And what you can see is there is really almost no liquidity for startups and scale-ups in SaaS and Cloud at the moment. Now, to some extent, the issues here have been masked by several factors: The VC engine continues, more or less, and has been re-energized by AI. Just less so for start-ups and scale-ups. Epic times.

SaaS 312

SaaS Acquisition Cloud AI 312

SaaStr

JANUARY 8, 2025

In addition to flipping comp plans from bookings to revenue, Lindsey also implemented a process step for Checkr’s presales team, and solutions engineers to sign off on product commitments in a deal before it closes. Implementing tighter feedback loops between customers and product/engineering teams.

Revenue 293

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Compensation 293

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2025

Theyll help you scale the team from 2 reps to 10+ and build a repeatable sales process. What Makes a Great VP of Sales and How to Hire One: The Complete Guide $3 M t o $ 10M ARR: Scale the Team Sales : By now, your VP of Sales should be hiring aggressively. This is usually around 1 M 1.5M AI can’t do it all.

Sales Hiring 250

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Scale 250

SaaStr

OCTOBER 13, 2024

She should hire leaders for Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Product and Customer Success, or at least most of them. But now, I see that if you can hire a great COO as soon as possible after that, you can scale faster. is one of the top ways to help all of us scale faster. Hiring a strong COO between Management Team 1.0

Sales Hiring 260

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Startup 260

SaaStr

APRIL 19, 2024

How do you reverse-engineer your first million as a SaaS startup founder? SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin chats with Sam Parr on the popular YouTube channel and podcast My First Million about what’s required to make it on the map for a $100M exit and then reverse engineers the steps to get there. 50 or $1.

Engineering 300

Engineering Business Model Pricing Scaling 300

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 28, 2025

Starting and scaling a software company was really hard. Starting and scaling a software company was really hard. If you wanted to scale users and growth, you needed to scale a physical data infrastructure footprint. ” This used to be how companies scaled! It wasn’t very elastic. What does this mean?

Cloud 299

Cloud AI Scale Scaling 299

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2024

From startup to $500M CARR, Spencer Burke, SVP of Growth at Braze, shares how Braze scaled a growth and customer success team. In this AI moment we’re in, there are still many moments in scaling a company where intuition still matters. You don’t have to leave as the organization scales. This isn’t new.

Scale 291

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Startup 291

SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2025

Turn Your Customers Into Your Marketing Engine The second breakthrough was making customer success the core growth engine. The learning: When you solve a genuinely hard problem, you get three moats for free: Technical advantage through innovation Legal protection through patents Thought leadership in the space 2.

Technical Review 263

Technical Review Payment Solutions Scale Payment Services 263

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2024

There’s always someone a few years ahead of you on the scaling journey who can share their lessons learned. Robbie O’Connor, the GM EMEA at Notion and the first European hire at Asana and Dropbox takes the stage at SaaStr Europa to talk about the building blocks required to scale GTM teams and operations. Timing is also essential.

Scale 310

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Innovation 310

SaaStr

OCTOBER 14, 2024

Yes, as you scale you do need to maintain efficiency in sales and marketing. Give that VP of Sales / Marketing / Engineering more time. Your customer acquisition costs need to be low — in all segments of the market. Here’s a subtle but very important mistake so many VCs, blogs, social media, etc. where your playbook is still evolving.

Scale 297

Scale Social Media SaaS Acquisition 297

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

Dear SaaStr: Why Are So Many CEOs Former Engineers, or At Least Have Technical Backgrounds? I’ve come to almost exclusively invest in founder-CEOs that are engineers. You need to recruit a great engineering team. You don’t need to be an engineer to do this, but most “salespeople” CEOs can’t pull this off.

Outsourcing Services 293

Outsourcing Services Engineering CTO Scale 293

SaaStr

DECEMBER 22, 2023

At the SaaStr Annual, Kiren Sekar, Samsara’s Chief Strategy Officer and founding chief Product Officer shared five lessons he learned along the way from scaling six products to $100M+. Lesson 1 — The Magic “Scale or Pivot” Metric With so many different SaaS metrics out there, which metric can really steer a business?

Scale 306

Scale Scaling Strategy Sales Hiring 306

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

Speaker Bio Jason Lyman leads marketing at Customer.io, where he’s helped scale the platform to power over 35 billion customer interactions for 7,000+ high-growth companies. Before Customer.io, Jason built and scaled marketing teams at several B2B SaaS companies, with a focus on customer engagement and revenue operations. .

Scale 271

Scale SaaS B2B Scaling 271

SaaStr

AUGUST 5, 2024

How do you create a predictable, repeatable renewal engine that provides a good jumping-off point for growth? You can partner with your engineering team to get that data in the hands of your CS team or, even better, in the hands of the customer. How do you make your customers really successful and show them you’ve made them successful?

Scale 284

Scale Customer Success Scaling Revenue 284

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2024

Bitly CEO Toby Gabriner and CPO Kelsey Stevenson share the three secret ingredients that helped them when scaling to $100M ARR and what they could have done differently. It became a self-fulfilling organic engine that started to proliferate throughout the web. Bitly had a huge inbound funnel created early on, and it continues today.

Scale 300

Scale Scaling Underperforming Technical Team User Experience 300

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

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. She can be your CTO forever. As are you.

Scale 274

Scale Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE 274

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Scaling to $150M ARR and beyond is no simple task. Will this change as Grafana Labs scales? But they’re still one of the last remaining open-source companies at scale. Companies often hide engineers from customers with buffers and processes, which can be dangerous. How did it come to be? Probably not.

Scale 291

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 291

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2025

ServiceTitan, the operating system for the trades, continues to scale impressively, with $772M in FY25 revenue, $800m+ ARR and a clear path to $1B ARR. This shift has been critical to scaling beyond $500M ARR. Lesson for SaaS Founders : SMBs are a great starting point, but scaling to $1B ARR often requires moving upmarket.

Payments 144

Payments Payment Services SaaS Payments Payment Solutions 144

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

Dear SaaStr: How often will a sales engineer also wear a customer success hat in an early stage of an SaaS startup? The “traditional” role of a sales engineer is to support the sales team through the close of a deal. And as you scale, the role should likely end there. The biggest issue often is this just doesn’t scale.

Scale 274

Scale Engineering Customer Success Startup 274

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2025

But how did they scale so quickly? Here are the five channels that worked for Rupa: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Social Proof and Trust Building Educational Partnerships and Rupa University Conferences and Event Sponsorships Outbound Sales and Data Quality Lets dive into each. Its about creating high-quality content at scale.

Scale 229

Scale AI Search Sales Hiring Acquisition 229

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2025

A Cash Generating Engine Today, Expect to Generate $200m+ in Free Cash Flow This Year Freshworks has gotten lean, but even as it has done so, it has modestly re-accelerated growth in both revenue and net new customers. #10. It can handle a lot of routine issues, quickly. Beyond that, many are handing off to a human today. #9.

Scale 271

Scale AI SMB B2B 271

SaaStr

APRIL 8, 2025

Many of the early break out leaders in AI for B2B and otherwise have been “small but mighty teams” Honestly we’d all love it if that scaled. Net net, if the average RevenueCat engineer is twice as efficient as before AI dev tools (and it’s not that simple. And can it sell and scale sales?

AI 283

AI Sales Hiring Scale B2B 283

SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What are the signs that an enterprise SaaS startup is ready to scale by hiring more sales people? Put differently, after $10m in ARR or so, if you have a real engine going, the yes,more salespeople will = more sales, to an extent. The post Dear SaaStr: What Are The Signs We’re Ready to Hire More Sales People to Scale?

Sales Hiring 301

Sales Hiring Scale Scaling Sales 301

SaaStr

MARCH 17, 2025

He brought 20+ engineers with him, with outsized equity packages. These hires will define your companys DNA and help you scale faster [5][6]. Youll just need to be more deliberate about building a team that can help you scale and finding ways to stay sane along the way. Prioritize Great Early Hires.

Sales Hiring 247

Sales Hiring Scale Scaling Engineering 247

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2024

There wasn’t a sales organization then, so they knew they needed SDRs, AEs, sales engineers, the whole works. Once you make it to the right-hand side of the image above, you have product market fit, and your focus is on feeding the beast and scaling as quickly as possible.

Scale 312

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Development 312

SaaStr

MAY 12, 2023

Next up is Jason Cohen, founder of $100m+ WP Engine. That happened to us at Smart Bear and WP Engine with features and entire products. Doing too much at once We _still_ struggle with this at WP Engine, and it’s still a mistake. We’ve done a ton of this content over the years, but never on a consistent basis.

Engineering 292

Engineering Sales Hiring Interviewing Scale 292

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

When I was running it, it was a lot smaller than that, but scaled that up very, very quickly. the reason being is YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. And that’s substantial scale in. So it tends to be that they are not valued as high as businesses which have that liquidity or have achieved that scale.

Scale 120

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 120

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2025

Here’s a deeper dive into SaaStr Annual and why it’s considered the top SaaS event: Core Elements: Takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area (usually Silicon Valley) Features over 300 speakers across multiple tracks Focuses exclusively on SaaS metrics, growth strategies, and operational excellence Typically runs for 3 days with pre and (..)

Software 243

Software Scale Venture Capital SaaS 243

SaaStr

MAY 1, 2025

They dont need to be engineers, but they need to learn your product inside and out. But if you get it right, theyll help you scale to the next level. They almost always need far more support, training, and onboarding than you have. Do They Understand Your Product? And Can They Demo It Before They Start?

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Interviewing 261