SaaStr

JULY 31, 2022

The Challenge with SMB SaaS: High Growth Can Only Mask High Churn For Just So Long. SMB SaaS has a lot going for it, but one big existential challenge — inherent churn. SaaStr 574: 5 Scale-Up Mistakes for Startups with Dave Kellogg. 7 Secrets to a Successful SMB GTM Strategy with PayFit and Accel.

New CTO 233

New CTO CTO SMB Venture Capital 233

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2024

Sandhya has been in the startup ecosystem for about 15 years, with the last two years heavily focused on investing in AI-native startups, primarily on the application and Enterprise software side. The cost of engineering and shipping products is a moving target for startups. Snowflake is a symbol of usage-based pricing.

AI 187

AI Artificial Intelligence Pricing SaaS 187

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2023

Getting off the ground is one thing — an easy pitch of being an HR tech startup focused on improving hiring. In a year like this, SMB is doing worse, with a lot more churn and startups going out of business. But in other years, SMBs are jumping in the boat, so you get amazing growth long-term with a multi-segment strategy.

Sales Hiring 200

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 200

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2023

Scaling a tech startup doesn’t come easy, and when you’ve tried all the conventional SaaS advice, it might be tempting to give up. It has now secured over $67M in funding and offers a robust platform for mid-market and SMB segments. A mass exodus of engineers limited new deployments. Great Startups Create Their Own Categories.”

Scale 193

Scale Scaling SMB Marketing 193

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2023

In startups, founders and teams often wear many hats — figuring out what to prioritize, developing and implementing all types of demand gen strategies, attending events and networking, and founder-led sales. Your Startup is in One of Four Stages As a startup, you fall into one of four stages.

Enterprise 215

Enterprise B2B Scale SMB 215

SaaStr

OCTOBER 27, 2023

Building and scaling a startup isn’t for the faint of heart and often comes with many ups and downs that SaaS veterans have experience in. Typically, you have to have some kind of sales team or sales engine to run before you can hire someone to run it. But it can be distracting for engineering, product, and GTM teams.

Sales Hiring 233

Sales Hiring Scale Venture Capital Generative AI 233

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2023

You don’t want to overwhelm SMB customers, and Monday made this a focus from day one. Since starting the company in 2014, there wasn’t a lot of money you could raise in a startup. What Converted Customers In The Early Days Both co-founders of monday are unique because they’re both engineers. How do you get over 100 for SMB?

Scale 159

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Banking 159

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 23, 2024

At a16z’s recent Connect/Fintech event, a16z Partner Alex Immerman sat down for a broad conversation with Immad Akhund , co-founder and CEO of banking startup Mercury , and René Lacerte, founder and CEO of financial services company BILL. Alex: Immad has strong feelings about AI replacing engineers. Mind sharing?

Payments 96

Payments Forecasting Payment Services Payment Solutions 96

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2020

Rather than the CEO running around telling the engineers exactly what to build, you now have product managers. Really, the better the startup is doing, the more chaos there is, because they’re growing faster, this isn’t a problem that you solve by not growing fast, this is actually caused by growing fast.

Startup 268

Startup Software Review Scale Systems Review 268

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2023

But you also need them to inject new thinking and new experience into your startup. And all I can tell you, and every other successful startup CEO will tell you, is this — The Desperation VP Hire Never Works Out. Once you have a few strong reps hitting quota, the engine gets pretty efficient in the early days. Well, no.

Sales Hiring 250

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling 250

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

David’s first foray into SaaS was in 1999 when he joined a startup that would become PayPal, starting as the product leader and later as the COO. Positions Needed: Enterprise AEs, Mid-Market & SMB AEs, SDRs, Sales Ops, Sales Engineer. Email * The latest SaaStr updates straight to your inbox. Head of Marketing.

CTO Hire 234

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO 234

Kellblog

MAY 7, 2024

The venture capitalists who invest in startups. If you want to be positioned as an ABM marketer or a post-agile engineering leader, then go lead an ABM marketing or post-agile engineering team. From the VC point of view, there are four types of people: Founders. The entrepreneur(s) who found a company.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Startup 98

SaaStr

JUNE 9, 2021

For the past 18 months or so I had tracked the progress of a startup called HackerRank, and their founder Vivek Ravisankar, whom I met through a mutual friend. What I knew of HackerRank: a good startup that didn’t yet have great sales execution. Just an FYI: I’ve done some iteration of this 4 times in early stage startups.

Scale 267

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales 267

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2022

There are deals where realistically, the startup will likely never be a huge success. But once growth slows consistently to under 50%, for more than a year … startups basically never recover. They are flywheels and momentum engines. I see this too often in high-burn-rate startups. Or expanding its TAM. Looks great!

Venture Capital 276

Venture Capital SMB Startup Investment 276

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2023

Personality, startup skills, and softer skills are all important — grit and resilience are key for Pugh and should be for any startup SaaS salesperson. For SMB mid-market, it’s typically around 2-3 months. Let’s look at five tips to consider for successful recruiting. Define your hiring profile. Focus on the hiring profile.

Scale 211

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scaling 211

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 26, 2017

Customer segmentation is a powerful tool to divide your startup’s customer base. Customers may fall into SMB, midmarket, enterprise. Meanwhile, the current customer base, an SMB segment, received much more tactical campaigns. Meanwhile, the current customer base, an SMB segment, received much more tactical campaigns.

Startup 100

Startup Marketing SMB Enterprise 100

Baremetrics

AUGUST 29, 2021

Let’s say your ICP is a web developer running a startup on the East Coast. Using Sales Navigator’s search engine, you can filter results by plugging in various titles, locations, industries, company headcounts, and so on, to come as close as you can to your ICPs. To prospect for startups, Crunchbase Pro 's database is the place to go.

Scale 97

Scale Startup Sales Hiring Sales 97

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 18, 2015

In the Innovator’s Dilemma for SaaS Startups , I outlined the path of many software companies, which disrupt incumbents by first serving the small-to-medium business and then move up-market by transitioning to serve larger enterprises with outbound sales teams. Only the SMB marketing team is permitted to acquire new leads.

Innovation 141

Innovation Startup SaaS Sales Hiring 141

SaaStr

JULY 8, 2022

Half of Gorgias’ almost 10,000 SMB customers come from partners. From Burn-Out to $100M in ARR with Jason Cohen, Founder of WP Engine. #15. The Cadence: How to Turn Your SaaS Startup into an Army w/Craft Ventures General Partner David Sacks. #19. A classic SaaStr Annual session here that has resonated 58,400 times. #4.

VP of Engineering 225

VP of Engineering Scale Outbound Sales Team SMB 225

Tom Tunguz

JULY 15, 2019

It’s a coaches poll of the top enterprise startups broken into early, mid and growth stage. Engineering dominates with 37%. Engineering barely made the list. 5 of the 11 companies selling to engineering are open source - about half. published the Enterprise Tech 30 last week. Many is the next category.

Enterprise 193

Enterprise Payments Payment Solutions SMB 193

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Their CEO will join us at SaaSr Scale 2021 on December 15 to talk about using data to get to 10,000 SMB customers! I asked Aasif Osmany to share his learnings as a top-performing SMB VP of Sales, below. Four years ago, after launching and failing my first startup I realized I had a lot to learn. 7 Tips to get 7,000 Customers.

Scale 251

Scale Sales Hiring Sales SMB 251

SaaStr

OCTOBER 6, 2019

Why SMB and Enterprise Sales Have Nothing In Common | SaaStr. Pitch, a presentation startup from Wunderlist’s founders, raises $30M more to take on PowerPoint – TechCrunch. Brex wants to replace startup bank accounts with Brex Cash – TechCrunch. Google turns 21: A look back at the search engine giant’s iconic life.

Cloud 137

Cloud Banking SMB Startup 137

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

So to serve both segments at the simultaneously, ZoomInfo has been rolling out a Product-led sales motion, that gives the ability for an SMB customer to sign up directly on their website for a free trial and grow into a paid customer, without ever having to talk to an sales rep or go through a demo process.

New CTO 237

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring AWS 237

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

They had been building toward an SMB audience, so hiring 50 people in sales against a product that wasn’t ready for a specific audience would’ve been a mistake. In a startup, you might have a strong hypothesis, but it might not work out. Next, think about product maturity. Experimental vs. Scale.

Scale 247

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 247

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2021

Yesterday Harry Stebbings and I caught up for an upcoming podcast on sales, startups, venture, and more. Many top VP of Sales candidates are now waiting for at least $10m ARR or a big Series A ($30m+) to join a startup — it just makes sense for them. And at scale, you pay 3x-5x bookings for SMB-enterprise.

Scale 178

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 178

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 10, 2012

Performance marketing is a skill every startup should hone as a core competency as quickly as possible. Building a growth engine. The expected value of a customer changes dynamically as a function of the amount and kind of data a startup can collect about a user. The more data, the better the expected value prediction.

Startup 100

Startup Marketing Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 100

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 21, 2017

This sea of SaaS startups have reshaped the market. Salesforce for Sales, Workday for HR & Finance, ServiceNow for Operations, Atlassian for Engineering and so on. Segmentation - focus on SMB, Mid-Market, or Enterprise, to play where competition isn’t present. The chart above shows them by buyer.

SaaS 187

SaaS Venture Capital Finance Machine Learning 187

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2020

317: Rachel Hepworth is VP of Marketing @ Pilot, the startup that offers the best bookkeeping, tax and CFO services for growing businesses. 318: The first step in success with SMB clients is to recognize that it’s not a one size fits all scenario. Because at a startup, you figure out how to be scrappy and get things done.

SMB 173

SMB Scale Startup Marketplace as a Service 173

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2022

Jason Lemkin: So you have like a great profile irrespective of what your startup’s doing. And so combine all that, the stress, markdowns… Blackbird today announced they’re marking down Canva, which is one of the most iconic startups out there. Colin here, CEO of a startup, B2B SaaS, and raising a seed round right now.

Scale 187

Scale SaaS Payments Scaling SaaS 187

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

Hila Qu joined Mucker’s Tony Yang for an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) conversation about Product-Led Growth (PLG) for Startups to kickoff the 2023 Mucker Growth Series. Hila Qu has been the Head of Growth or VP of Growth at a number of different companies and startups, most notably Acorns and GitLab. That is a natural hurdle for PLG motion.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

SaaStr

JULY 11, 2019

You and five engineers in Lisbon. Jason Lemkin: You’ll get to see some early stuff that you don’t usually get to see with a startup. You go from the leanest organization and very small SMB, to closing seven figure TCVLs for enterprise. Doing a product for SMB is fairly simple. It was just you. Tiago Paiva: 95.

Sales Hiring 255

Sales Hiring SMB Scale Cloud 255

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 26, 2020

Our Chairman and Co-founder, Eoghan McCabe , sat down for a chat with Harry Stebbings on the Twenty Minute VC podcast to discuss his startup journey and the lessons he learned while building Intercom. We built a hundred million dollar business with SMB. Can’t do it. You can’t reach these people. They won’t pay enough.

Leadership 211

Leadership Scale SMB Innovation 211

SaaStock

JANUARY 25, 2019

from 500 Startups, Redpoint eventures, and others. Omie main goal is to bridge the efficiency gap in Brazilian SMB, helping customers to be more prosperous. Omie is the only SaaS company figuring among 100 fastest growing SMB in Brazil, according to Deloitte Consulting, ranking #3. CEO : Tiago Dalvi. Founded : 2015.

SaaS Payments 257

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Methods Payments 257

Casey Accidental

MARCH 29, 2022

A common issue leaders in product management, design, or engineering face is justifying investment in the “non-sexy” stuff. Our new strategy is to be a fantastic self-service experience that rivals the best SMB tools on the market, but we know we have a long way to go to get there. We then set a goal.

Investment 139

Investment Underperforming Technical Team User Experience Scale 139

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 30, 2019

Vikas is a well-respected sales leader in NYC and comes from a sales engineering and product background, with more than 20 years experience. We hear what makes a great entry point for sales and sales engineering and why having deep authentic technical product knowledge actually works in sales. What You’ll Learn. We’re on iTunes.

Sales Hiring 50

Sales Hiring Startup Scale Sales Recruiting 50

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 22, 2021

There are about 20,000 active SaaS companies today, startups, pre IPO. Okay, you’re small, you’re early, you’re a startup, there’s so much you want to do to raise awareness. But now you’re at a startup and that’s not your reality. So let’s take a look at the numbers. Raising awareness.

B2C 272

B2C Scale Consulting Software Review 272

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2019

How does this differ when comparing enterprise to SMB? How does this differ when comparing SMB to enterprise? Is it fair to always surmise that when serving SMB one will always have a higher rate of churn? How does this differ when comparing SMB to enterprise? When I was about 17 I got my first taste of startups.

Scale 113

Scale SMB Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 113