SaaStr

JUNE 29, 2025

Forecast is not only about headcount planning but also revenue numbers—to hit the revenue numbers, what kind of resources do we need?” We test all of them with very light investment, very simple models. But during this uncertainty, we need to find some ways to measure certainties.

Payment Services 189

Payment Services Sales Hiring Payment Solutions SaaS Payments 189

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 20, 2025

There are many CEOs, some of very large public companies, who have commented on what AI means for their headcount plans. This is for information purposes and should not be construed as an investment recommendation. Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S. Past performance is no guarantee of future performance.

Cloud 157

Cloud AI Headcount Pricing 157

SaaStr

MAY 2, 2025

He believes AI investments should come directly from line-of-business budgets, with business unit leaders held accountable for efficiency, productivity, and employee augmentation through AI. AI Budgets Are a Red Flag Where are AI budgets actually coming from? Top 4 Mistakes Marc Made 1.

AI 248

AI Enterprise Scale Airlines 248

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2024

To set the stage, if you talk to any VC out there today, they will tell you that half of their investments which were growing at epic rates in 2021 are barely growing today. A small startup Jason invests in called MangoMint is coming up on $20M ARR with 100% growth for salon spa software. Sorry, But There’s No Downturn.

Sales Hiring 317

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS AI 317

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2025

The Budget Reality : Budget sources: 48% from R&D (down from 59%), 39% from business units, 47% from innovation budgets, 57% from headcount budgets (up significantly), 27% net new budget. The Tactical Insight : Don’t just buy AI tools—invest in change management. in 2024, scaling to $60.4M

AI 202

AI Software Review Technical Review Scale 202

SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2025

When examining headcount changes over the past 12 months, SDR/BDR teams experienced the most dramatic shifts of any sales function: 36% of companies decreased their SDR/BDR headcount in the last year—the highest percentage among all sales roles surveyed. This suggests something more complex than a wholesale abandonment of the role.

B2B 167

B2B Headcount Development Sales 167

How To Buy Saas

MAY 21, 2025

Just be ready to invest a little time in training your team on the systems nuances. In short, choose Greenhouse if you need a powerful, enterprise-ready ATS and are prepared to invest time and resources to leverage its full potential for a more optimized and fair hiring process. Cons Premium Pricing: Lever is an investment.

Systems Review 52

Systems Review Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2025

Have we lost interest in investing in the human side of sales? Salesforce: Actually We’re Going to Hire 2,000 Sales Execs Now To … Sell AI At most B2B companies, 35%+ of the headcount is in sales and its often the largest functional area. But the investment all around them in AI. It sort of seems like it.

Sales Hiring 329

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount AI 329

SaaStr

JUNE 17, 2025

” Strategic Framework : AI excellence requires sustained investment—top AI-native companies allocate 56% of R&D to AI development vs just 28% for adopters. Companies treating AI as a feature rather than core competency will be out-invested and out-innovated by truly native competitors.

Scale 194

Scale AI Investment Scaling 194

SaaStr

JULY 8, 2025

Add in expert trainers from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, plus opportunity cost, and you’re looking at a $12-15M investment. Shopify : CEO Tobi Lütke just issued an ultimatum to all employees: “Teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI” before asking for more headcount and resources.

AI 278

AI ChatGPT Headcount Software Review 278

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2025

Here’s the unvarnished truth about what’s working, what’s not, and what requires more investment than most founders realize. The Training Investment: Plan to spend at least two weeks of intensive training, just like onboarding a new hire. The Investment Required : This isn’t about deploying a chatbot.

AI 227

AI Sales Hiring Scale B2B 227

SaaStr

JUNE 25, 2025

57x revenue growth with only 3x headcount growth). Why It Worked : “Sticking with a pure-play digital advice offering while continuing to scale has helped Wealthfront reach profitability earlier than its peers,” according to David Goldstone, investment research manager at Condor Capital Wealth Management.

Scale 238

Scale Headcount Business Model Acquisition 238

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 7, 2025

Okay, let’s go on invest. Scott Barker: Do you think AI is going to reduce our overall headcounts on revenue teams? So that means you’ve got the right economics and then you use your, I would say, a high-end resource towards a bigger segment where you know you will have better return on investment with bigger deals.

Outsourcing Services 114

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development AWS 114

ChurnZero

JANUARY 17, 2025

When your CFO doesnt see the direct link between customer success and the financial metrics they track, its harder to persuade them to invest in CSwhich can ultimately lead to preventable churn. And its all too likely that your two teams operate in silos, speaking different numeric languages and prioritizing distinct objectives.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Benchmarks Headcount Scale 52

BetterCloud

MARCH 17, 2025

Get ready to turn those monthly charges into strategic investments that fuel your business growth. By following these steps, you can create a software budget that aligns with your business goals and maximizes your return on investment. Whats the ROI of investing in this software? What is SaaS budgeting?

Technical Review 52

Technical Review Strategy Marketplace as a Service SaaS 52

BetterCloud

APRIL 24, 2025

Strategic staffing: Investing in strategic staffing and training programs can ensure that the IT department has the necessary skills and resources to meet the organization’s needs. Organizations must adapt to this new reality by investing in the right tools, technologies, and talent. Save your seat. Book a demo today.

Cybersecurity 52

Cybersecurity Artificial Intelligence Headcount Government 52

Sales Hacker

MAY 13, 2025

And with the advent of more tools, what does that do from a headcount perspective, Mike Walrath: Yeah, so I’m not a big believer that, this is a huge destroyer of jobs. So if I think about the way, so Yext, I, I started, I invested in Yext in 2008. Sophie Buonassisi: [00:23:00] Yeah, those silos are disappearing.

AI Search 72

AI Search AI ChatGPT Software Review 72

OpenView Labs

DECEMBER 18, 2023

Follow-on prediction : Interest rates will remain high, cheap money will be scarce, and discretionary marketing budgets, headcount, and software investments will continue to be scrutinized heavily in 2024. This was also born out via data from OpenView’s recent SaaS Benchmarks report. However, there’s a caveat.

B2B 52

B2B Trends Artificial Intelligence Marketing 52

Sales Hacker

JULY 8, 2025

55:09 The new math of headcount: scaling to $100M+ with fewer hires. I, you know, had another year to kind of hang out and invest if I wanted to at LinkedIn, but I was kind of you know, I try to always optimize for learning and my learning curve felt like it was flattening at LinkedIn. And just they think at a different level.

Sales Recruiting 78

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AI Search Scale 78

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 19, 2024

We needed a structured approach to monitor customer engagement, assess feature adoption, and ensure that clients were fully leveraging their investment, says Robin Driver, NinjaCat’s vice president of customer success. We also expanded our ARR by almost 25% without needing to add any CSM headcount.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Scale Underperforming Technical Team Innovation 52

Sales Hacker

JUNE 24, 2025

’cause you have limited resources to invest and Go-To-Market. And, and you need to invest, I think, far more than people think when you hack together something over the weekend to really be sustainable. We’re very engineering product heavy from like a headcount perspective. So where you focus your time is important.

AI 69

AI Sales Hiring Scale Technical Review 69

SaaStr

MAY 7, 2025

It’s a leaner, meaner Twilio, focused again on its core, with more AI but less headcount than before. Headcount Efficiency Has Improved Over the past 12 months, Twilio has reduced headcount by 10%, following a 25% reduction the year before. Twilios investments in AI-powered self-service tools are paying off.

Headcount 175

Headcount AI Scale compliance 175

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 11, 2025

Um, in the old world, you basically downloaded a list of accounts and those accounts had things like industry, employee, headcount, headquarters, founded date, you would then get a list of contacts. Like, you know, this Scott, the only person you ever want to invest in is someone that actually did the thing. I always want free.

ChatGPT 81

ChatGPT AI Payment Methods Payment Services 81

Sales Hacker

APRIL 4, 2025

Companies are redesigning their operating models around automation, data orchestration, and system-level thinking to unlock efficiency, reduce manual work, and scale without adding headcount. There are four primary ways that teams have been building their GTM AI OS systems: 1. OfferFit – has been acquired by Braze.

AI Search 103

AI Search AI Outsourcing Services Scale 103

Sales Hacker

JUNE 3, 2025

Or how do I in a limited resource and limited headcount way, how do I go about choosing the allocation of different headcount? You gotta figure out where your opportunity is and invest for that opportunity. Because they’re going to help you create investment cases.

Sales Hiring 87

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 87

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2023

But with that out of the way, let’s talk just enough about financial accounting to explain why Big Tech Companies both acquire smaller ones — and do corporate VC investment. Because in the short-term, it often costs basically close to nothing to acquire a smaller startup with cash on hand, or do a corporate VC investment.

Acquisition 299

Acquisition Investment Headcount Banking 299

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 15, 2021

Invest in great managers early. Post-PMF, the organization must evolve: it has to grow headcount and then manage that headcount well. Because talent is the most valuable part of a startup and also the greatest cost (recruiting and salaries), investing in the infrastructure to attract and retain talent is good business.

Sales Recruiting 363

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Headcount 363

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2023

But with that out of the way, let’s talk just enough about financial accounting to explain why Big Tech Companies both acquire smaller ones — and do corporate VC investment. Because in the short-term, it often costs basically close to nothing to acquire a smaller startup with cash on hand, or do a corporate VC investment.

Acquisition 260

Acquisition Investment Headcount Banking 260

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2021

Let’s say you are at $10m ARR and decently funded, you’ll probably have 100 headcount by this point, or at least, by $15m ARR. You’ll probably want to add field sales (for Big Deals) by $10m ARR or so, another 2-3 headcount here, minimum. Let’s assume that takes 5 headcount, minimum, ideally 6. >>

Sales Hiring 349

Sales Hiring Headcount Scale Engineering 349

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 20, 2020

We can derive the table above if we look over the entire respondent base and bucket headcount by ARR. Software companies invest in engineering early and then the product matures, complement that engineering and product investment with go to market teams to commercialize the product.

Scale 363

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Software Review 363

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 6, 2022

PLG companies R&D spend hasn’t produced new business at the same rate as a dollar invested in sales & marketing post-Covid. Some about the data: PLG companies R&D spend hasn’t produced new business at the same rate as a dollar invested in sales & marketing post-Covid.

Headcount 344

Headcount Market Research Acquisition Education 344

SaaStr

AUGUST 18, 2023

Yes many public SaaS companies have done some sort of layoffs the past 12 months, they were often more really reorgs, though, without any net decrease in headcount. Monday has always been a break-out leader but has invested heavily in sales and marketing to SMBs. The key was “simply” keeping headcount flat. #3.

Scale 245

Scale Headcount Point of Sale SaaS 245

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 30, 2024

What I do know is many of the billion+ SaaS companies I invested in a decade ago would not be remotely competitive today. But it’s already starting in the contact center, where leaders from Zendesk to Gorgias to Intercom to Talkdesk are automating away 30%-50% of contact center headcount. And that’s how it should be.

AI Search 300

AI Search SaaS Headcount AI 300

Clouded Judgement

AUGUST 16, 2024

Today, IT budgets are roughly broken down into: ~50% headcount / personnel, ~25% software, ~15% hardware, and ~10% outsourcing / consultants. As software grows as a percentage, I think we see headcount / outsourcing shrinking. This is for information purposes and should not be construed as an investment recommendation.

Outsourcing Services 274

Outsourcing Services Cloud Software Outsourced Development 274

SaaStr

JUNE 6, 2021

A third review around Year 2 or s o: when the acquirer decides how much to invest going forwar d. This can result in shrinking the team down if it’s underperformed, or investing more if it’s performed well. Even if the decision is made to invest more, future headcount is often sourced from internal team members and processes.

Acquisition 254

Acquisition Technical Review Headcount Finance 254

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2024

The quicker you can be smart and make early investments that pay off, the better off you’ll be. Headcount isn’t the right story for them, though. Braze invested in this, and the leadership team agreed to do so. Eventually, this team moved out of growth, so their success wasn’t dependent on budget or headcount.

Scale 291

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Startup 291

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 26, 2022

The difference is starkest in headcount: Coinbase employs more than 5,000 people while Uniswap counts fewer than 100. We need standardized reporting for tokens and equivalent shareholder rights to compare equities to tokens: an essential step to enticing more investment in web3. Centralized exchanges hold or custody user accounts.

Benchmarks 308

Benchmarks Headcount Government Business Model 308