SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

Often, founders are unsure about the headcount split between India and the US. b) Some folks like to invest in the company they advise. For application, it’s more demand gen followed by brand marketing. One can’t start investing in a brand early enough. Putting yourself out there, even a little bit, helps.

Scale 214

Scale Sales Hiring Cybersecurity Underperforming Technical Team 214

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Measuring Usage Since Day One Since the beginning, monday.com built and has used a BI tool called Big Brain — a major investment for that size of company. Big Brain was an internal tool to track revenue, marketing expenses, and usage of the product. If you can start with a true self-service motion, your product will be better.

Scale 161

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Banking 161

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

And for Intercom’s VP of Sales EMEA, Sanj Bhayro , scaling is just what you need to invest in to ensure growth becomes as constant and linear as it can be. Attract and develop talent and invest in supporting resources like onboarding, sales enablement, and sales engineering. The second moment was after I became a leader.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 3, 2022

You’re investing resources in hiring and training the right people, tracking different metrics at different stages, adding more and more complexity with each increase in headcount, use cases, and customers. And I don’t necessarily mean 10X in terms of headcount – I mean 10X in terms of efficiency.

Scale 206

Scale Software Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring 206

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 10, 2020

Sales now accounts for about 7% of the company’s headcount–a similar share of their workforce as marketing or product management. You may have noticed that Atlassian has changed the way they talk about their go-to-market motion, too. The rest of their headcount only grew by 31%. This is a good thing.

Sales Hiring 57

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 57

Sales Hacker

MAY 15, 2023

Hiring a sales team too soon can lead to issues like: Your team tries to sell a product to a market that doesn’t need it or want it. Your company incurs unnecessary expenses before figuring out product-market fit. Keep the costs down Headcount is expensive. Don’t I need to spend money to make money?

Sales Hiring 86

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services Payment Services 86

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

You have to be a little more measured, but what I always think about is a company usually starts up from a product. You have a product idea and, “Wow. I find some product market fit,” and then it starts growing and then my company is my product and my product is my company. Peter : No, no.

Sales Hiring 331

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 331

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

Plus, the Product Marketing Alliance drops the Product Marketing Salary Survey. What’s the return on investment of your mom? And in this article he explains why, and proposes a different approach to thinking about the optimal CSM headcount to help you build a more effective customer success organization.

Scale 43

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 2, 2023

They have design partners or minuscule revenue from other tech companies that scream false positives for product-market fit. You still need a moat and a real, scalable market opportunity. Our RevTech stacks used to be much simpler… today we have an overwhelming amount of tooling and it can be hard to keep up.

AI 79

AI Revenue Scale ChatGPT 79

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

They’ve made tons of great investments. The irony of that story is if that firm would’ve invested $1 million into Podium at that time, today it would be worth over $200 million. Now the first, the only thing when we were going from zero to one, this is in 2014, the only thing we cared about was product market fit.

Scale 112

Scale Sales Hiring Software Review Scaling 112

SaaSX

FEBRUARY 28, 2021

For example, a 1:1 capital efficiency ratio means you’re earning one dollar for every dollar you invest into company growth. Ideally, as a company scales, headcount doesn’t scale exactly in tandem. How strong is the market opportunity? Capital efficiency is the ratio between spend and growth.

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Software Review Software Payments 52

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. Director, Field Marketing (events, etc.). Content Marketing.

Sales Hiring 345

Sales Hiring Headcount Scale Engineering 345

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

MARCH 23, 2020

S Curves At HubSpot we often discussed S Curves - the idea behind them is that all products, markets and business models follow a predictable cycle of growth, maturity and decline (the pattern often looks like an “S”). The lesson here is to view your products in terms of S Curves and ensure you’re investing in your next greatest hit.

Underperforming Technical Team 213

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service 213

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 15, 2021

Invest in great managers early. They write code, author blog posts, publish the website, attract customers, with the goal of achieving product-market fit. Post-PMF, the organization must evolve: it has to grow headcount and then manage that headcount well. On the left, the startup is flat. On the right, three.

Sales Recruiting 359

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Headcount 359

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 3, 2021

Where should you invest your resources? If you’re short on time, here are a few quick takeaways: You can’t balance short-term and long-term investments without considering the existing product strategy. If the product isn’t in good shape, R&D needs to prioritize getting it up to speed before focusing on the next thing.

Strategy 228

Strategy Software Review Development Team Review Sales Recruiting 228

OpenView Labs

JUNE 10, 2019

At product led growth (PLG) companies like Atlassian and Intercom, product management may look very different from a ‘traditional’ SaaS company. These companies have fewer sales reps (or none at all), meaning more resources get invested into product and engineering. 3 Step Guide to Successful Product Management.

Management 55

Management SaaS Scale Sales Recruiting 55

ProfitWell

MARCH 3, 2020

We invest in business software companies as they’re scaling through the awkward teenage years of that expansion stage—but they’ve found product-market fit, they’ve found some customers, they’ve got a great product, and they’re really ready to 10x their customer base in their teens. “I OpenView is the expansion stage VC.

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS Payments Payment Services 59

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

Initially, most companies start by focusing their marketing on where they have the most product market fit. At this stage, your marketing team should be laser-focused on finding out what resonates with your ICP: what are their needs are, how to serve this market, how to differentiate yourself vs competition.

Scale 195

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Marketing 195

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 30, 2022

This is especially important for small teams, where you need to operate at a scale far beyond your headcount (without burning out your team by working around the clock). And more importantly – which ones are really going to deliver a return on investment for your precious (and limited) budget? Look for tools that can scale with you.

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Startup AWS 163

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

So how did they go from product-market fit to actually scaling a sales org around a repeatable sales process? Despite the exponential growth they’ve gone through, Stripe have been refreshingly conservative about how quickly they grown the company from a headcount perspective. We just were never going to get that headcount.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

SaaStr

JUNE 10, 2020

We’re going through layoffs and furloughs, recession planning and for me as the CMO, facing really massive cuts to marketing budgets and headcount. Second, product market fit. And really our approach to our customers and the market had to pivot immediately. Our workforce is remote. And so we built.

Travel 173

Travel Marketing Scale Outsourcing Services 173

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

These metrics are an indicator of product-market fit. Low churn shows the product is sticky, hard to replace, and truly generating value for customers. The fastest-growing startups allocate only 7% of their headcount to services and supporting their customers (half that of slower-growing startups). .

Headcount 73

Headcount SaaS Compensation Acquisition 73

Hitenism

JANUARY 16, 2017

In 2014, Mixpanel’s Series B pitch deck spelled out the company’s expansion plans over the next two years: 3x sales headcount and rapidly race towards distribution. Double headcount every 6-9 months. Double down on marketing to widen our lead flow to lower cost per acq. It’s not so easy anymore.

Scale 147

Scale Venture Capital SaaS Headcount 147

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 25, 2019

In general, growth is a good problem to have – it means you’ve found some measure of product market fit and you’re generating real revenue from active users. Hiring is one of the biggest areas of investment in your business, so it’s essential to go to great lengths to recruit (and keep) happy employees.

Scale 136

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 136

Outseta

JANUARY 20, 2020

But Buildium had found product market fit , and although I didn’t know it yet, I was stumbling into a great situation. At this point Buildium raised $2M from K1 Capital , investing the money primarily in marketing and hiring. But the company’s early growth wasn’t fueled by a heavy investment in sales.

SaaS Payments 145

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Methods Payment Services 145

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 12, 2018

As VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter, Elad Gil was a key player as company headcount skyrocketed from 90 to 1,500 employees. This wasn’t Elad’s first experience with hyper growth – Google grew headcount 10x during his time as a product manager there – nor the last. The processes are probably new.

Sales Hiring 120

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 120

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

That company, of course, is Slack, and Rachel’s growth marketing team now owns Slack’s full acquisition funnel, from demand generation and team creation to activation and monetization. After I had left, we started to see that we had product-market fit. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our interview.

Growth Marketing 174

Growth Marketing Scale Marketing Outsourcing Services 174

ChurnZero

JUNE 3, 2022

Satisfying expectations for those numbers is an investment non-negotiable. You Mon: Even in more established departments like sales and marketing, you find roles where people [debate] where things should belong. Like sales development reps, should that belong in marketing or sales? Headcount is expensive.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Sales Hiring B2B Technical Review 52

ChurnZero

JUNE 3, 2022

Satisfying expectations for those numbers is an investment non-negotiable. You Mon: Even in more established departments like sales and marketing, you find roles where people [debate] where things should belong. Like sales development reps, should that belong in marketing or sales? Headcount is expensive.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Sales Hiring B2B Technical Review 52

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

JULY 24, 2018

Well, sometimes investing heavily in the pursuit of growth is the right move for a company, especially in a winner-takes-all market, but at other times, particularly in more mature markets, monetization and profit will likely be the right call. Why does growth stage matter? Only now can a discount be discussed.

SaaS Payments 131

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Services Business 131

ChurnZero

JANUARY 13, 2023

First, digital CS will become a way of life due to flat or reduced headcount. With its ability to comb through big data sets like email faster and more accurately than humans, AI will help more product teams maintain product-market fit. A few common themes emerged.

Trends 98

Trends Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring 98

Kellblog

AUGUST 20, 2023

So, when the schmumbleator TOTALs an additive measure, the value for the year will be the sum of the four quarters, whereas when it TOTALs a semi-additive measure, like headcount, the value will not be the sum of the four quarters, but instead the period value for the fourth quarter. It’s not about features XYZ.

Marketing 88

Marketing VP of Engineering Headcount Government 88