article thumbnail

Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders?

SaaStr

In SaaS, once you have even a few million in ARR, the #1 challenge is recruiting top-tier VPs and building a truly top-tier management team: SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. She can be your CTO forever.

Scale 237
article thumbnail

5 Interesting Learnings from Okta at $2.5 Billion in ARR

SaaStr

So Okta is one of our favorite SaaS and Cloud leaders. Founder CEO Todd McKinnon was VP of Engineering at Salesforce and left to start Okta in the depths of the last downturn. But like many SaaS and Cloud leaders today, the bigger ones are still growing faster. Their multi-million dollar contracts are 30%. #5.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Trending Sources

article thumbnail

What’s The #1 Challenge After $1m-$2m ARR?

SaaStr

In SaaS, it is recruiting your VPs and management team : SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. SaaS products get too complex to hack a product roadmap too long. You can’t hack it forever.

article thumbnail

The Founder’s Guide to Developer-led Growth with WorkOS (Video)

SaaStr

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. It might even be months later that a VP of Engineering or a CTO or CFO realizes that they’re built on a new platform. The contract size grows.

article thumbnail

Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot: From Day 0 to IPO. What Went to Plan. What Most Certainly Didn’t (Video, Podcast + Transcript)

SaaStr

I’m going to skip by my life story, and how I grew up as a small child in India, and how the dusty streets influenced my take on unit economics, and SaaS subscription models. Let’s assume the probability of success for a SaaS company is roughly one percent, and that formula is true, given some definition of success, right?