SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2024

Instead of rushing to hire a VP early in the startup phase, wait until you have established a repeatable sales process and witnessed success with initial sales reps hitting quota. I see way, way too many startups where the VP of Sales doesn’t have a feature budget from engineering / product. Way, way too many founders do this.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 245

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 18, 2022

Sales-driven SaaS startups end up with about half their headcount in sales and marketing. 2x the sales headcount you thought you did to hit the full plan for this year, and Q1 of next year. It sounds high at first, until you realize that's just how the math works. Software itself and other departments get leverage.

Scale 340

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Headcount 340

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 31, 2023

This year has been tumultuous : most startups reduced their bookings, and grinded through the first six months suffering through pipeline shocks - the result of CFO-budget pressure. For the last 3 quarters, startups have been executing on reduced targets, attempting to squeeze more juice from their Meyers.

Headcount 185

Headcount Sales Hiring AI Cloud 185

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 18, 2018

Startups are business machines engineered to grow quickly. Imagine you work at a startup that is growing headcount 125% year over year. This is a simple example but it proves the point of how much a startup can change very quickly. The forces of hypergrowth exert enormous strain on every aspect of the company.

Sales Recruiting 269

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup Headcount 269

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 22, 2023

B2B companies have reduced headcount to a greater extent than at any time since 2020. In the last three years, B2C startups’ ratio of layoffs have dwarfed B2B layoffs. The current wave of layoffs, a difficult component of the innovation boom/bust cycle, differs from the previous years’ dynamics. the number of B2B employees.

B2C 282

B2C B2B Headcount Innovation 282

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

Some of the changes we’ve seen in the last year or two include: CAC reduction Headcount optimization Price complexity Quality of revenue A different environment means a different strategy, and Notion Capital lays out four business model changes that could be helpful based on what peers are doing. You don’t want to be there.

Business Model 248

Business Model SaaS Payments Payments Headcount 248

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 18, 2019

People is the first section because people are a startup’s most important element. This section covers employee satisfaction, headcount, and recruiting metrics. The template is broken into six sections: People, Bookings & Revenue, Cash, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success.

Metrics 209

Metrics Sales Recruiting Startup SaaS 209

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2023

A classic and great deep dive in terms of how to scale your teams, headcount, and orgs: #2. The Cadence: How to Turn Your SaaS Startup into an Army w/Craft Ventures General Partner David Sacks A favorite on now to get the team to deliver more — without breaking them. #3.

Headcount 225

Headcount Startup Scaling SaaS 225

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

We were coming off an environment where startup funding was as fruitful as ever. Do you have to double your headcount to make it from $10M to $20M or even $2M to $5M? For headcount specifically, make sure that the constraint to growing faster is that you don’t have enough salespeople to work the demand that exists for your business.

Sales Hiring 255

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 255

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2024

It’s a SaaS startup that basically fell out of product-market fit after the 2021 boom … but has enough revenue and high enough NRR to keep going. In some ways, NRR Zombies are outputs of the actions of 2023, especially for venture-backed startups. They did layoffs and froze headcount. It’s the “NRR Zombie”. What’s that?

Headcount 221

Headcount Finance Startup Trends 221

SaaStr

AUGUST 1, 2023

And yet many startups even at $100m+ ARR saw growth slow to 0% or close to it. But this time, instead of headcount, it was apps. Yes, some bigger companies went through layoffs too, but in many cases, they hired more folks back, and really just kept headcount flat or slowed its growth. The list goes on. What happened there??

Headcount 213

Headcount Finance Cloud Startup 213

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 19, 2024

Instead of rushing to hire a VP early in the startup phase, wait until you have established a repeatable sales process and witnessed success with initial sales reps hitting quota. Unlike building a product team, there is no efficiency when building a sales org: half of your headcount will be in sales at $10m, $50m, or $100m in revenue.

Sales Hiring 248

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Headcount 248

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2023

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. So if Salesforce invests a few billion in AI startups, and those values at least don’t go down — there’s essentially no cost to Salesforce. What do I mean?

Acquisition 237

Acquisition Investment Headcount Banking 237

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 31, 2023

Companies & startups in particular begin to report meaningful improvements in productivity from AI, reducing their headcount growth, butn growing revenue just as much as projected. ARR per employee increases 10%, twice the decade long average. ARR per employee increases 10%, twice the decade long average.

AI Search 229

AI Search AI Scale Headcount 229

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 23, 2020

Massive headcount growth presages large software purchases and expansion. To scale, a company must find customers in ever larger numbers. The ideal scenario is one where purely external signals confer a prospect’s propensity to buy. A prospect experiences hypergrowth is perfect example.

Scale 238

Scale Headcount Sales Startup 238

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2023

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. So if Salesforce invests a few billion in AI startups, and those values at least don’t go down — there’s essentially no cost to Salesforce. What do I mean?

Acquisition 206

Acquisition Investment Headcount Banking 206

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2022

And tons of startups, worried about their cash reach now, are doing hiring freezes. For startups, many of even the most capital efficient are slowing hiring to calmly make cash last. In fact, I have a rule for most startups that have a decent amount of funding, and really, for most bootstrapped companies at scale. Keep hiring.

Headcount 208

Headcount SaaS Startup Scaling 208

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 3, 2023

By freezing headcount for a year. Mathematically, if you keep the headcount flat and continue growing 50% like Monday or 30% at $2B like Hubspot, you get wildly more efficient. Controls Around How You Spend Money And Grow Without question, the proper controls for startups and scaleups have gotten worse over the last 8-10 years.

Sales Hiring 229

Sales Hiring Headcount Finance Technical Review 229

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2023

Don’t Tie Revenue To Headcount “You want to get away from a business model where every incremental dollar requires incremental hiring,” says Deatsch. So instead of focusing on scaling headcount quickly, work toward growing revenue quickly. If you don’t instill this practice early on, it’s very difficult to add later.

Sales Hiring 222

Sales Hiring Enterprise Headcount Scale 222

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 20, 2020

Today, we’re answering the question: how do teams grow as a startup scales? We can derive the table above if we look over the entire respondent base and bucket headcount by ARR. The median startup with between 1-5M in ARR will have 12 engineers, 6 in sales and 3 in marketing.

Scale 354

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Software Review 354

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2023

But we have enough revenue now (tens of millions) to think of it as a.bootstrapped startup And the #1 thing I’ve learned is … how different bootstrapping really is. The Right Amount of Headcount Is Far Less Clear When Bootstrapping. Probably Far Less is The Answer. SaaStr has 7 employees. Should we have 70?

Sales Hiring 198

Sales Hiring Headcount Startup Revenue 198

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2023

Without headcount planning for the support team, the company’s response time and customer satisfaction scores dipped. As a startup, it’s hard to know if the timing is right and what to expect. Delivering the best customer experience With the surge in inbound leads, the business was growing exponentially.

Sales Hiring 230

Sales Hiring Payment Services SaaS Payments Scale 230

Tom Tunguz

JULY 21, 2022

Management teams expect to reduce operating expense by 20% predominantly through headcount reductions or hiring freezes - everyone from sardine startups to public megalodons. Software automates manual work, provides leverage, and the total cost is often less than a headcount. Software does more with less.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Headcount Software Finance 145

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 13, 2023

I’m watching public company earnings to identify early trends in the software market to inform startups’ plans for 2023. The surge in pipeline is notable given the uncertainty in the market but the close rates are low & sales cycles slow : another confirmatory data point for startups to plan cautiously in 2023.

Cloud 231

Cloud Azure Headcount Software Review 231

Sales Hacker

JULY 24, 2018

Decreased revenue per rep, High turnover as you scale headcount. We made our machine more efficient even as we scaled, grew headcount, and skyrocketed our revenue. In the first six months of the year, our team’s headcount grew by almost 60%, yet our revenue outpaced that, growing by 142%. The whole process bogs down.

Scale 56

Scale Headcount Sales Hiring Scaling 56

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 6, 2023

State of SaaS Next week I’m giving a talk at the StartUp Grind conference on the “State of SaaS in 10 Charts.” That’s a big difference, especially when you layer in the growth in headcount from 2021 to 2022. Essentially companies grew headcount significantly to add less ARR.

Cloud 130

Cloud Headcount Subscription Payment Features 130

SaaStr

APRIL 3, 2024

As a startup, you can look at it a few ways. They differ from startups because they’re Fortune 100 companies with a lot of legacy, incumbency, and regulation. As startup and tech leaders, we need empathy for where they’re coming from. How do I leverage GenAI in my operations to become more efficient?

Generative AI 234

Generative AI AI Technical Review Software Review 234

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2024

Jeff is the co-founder of a new stealth startup, a previous CMO at Snyk, and an operator at Elastic, Zuora, and Salesforce. 1: Capital As an operator, your job is to take money and add headcount and programs to drive the growth engine for your company, You might think of capital as fundraising and budget.

Headcount 203

Headcount Scaling Finance Engineering 203

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

The speed of learning is really the key – speed is currency in the startup world. Avoid These 3 Things 3 pitfalls to avoid when growing and scaling a sales team 1) Thinking that more sales headcount = more revenue This is a pitfall and simply not true. I’ll be the first to raise my hand and say: I’ve made plenty of mistakes.

Sales Hiring 107

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 107

The Angel VC

MARCH 22, 2012

It's a simple plan for an early-stage SaaS startup with a low-touch sales model – a company which markets a SaaS solution via its website, offers a 30 day free trial, gets most of its trial users organically and through online marketing and converts them into paying customer with very little human interaction.

Startup 189

Startup SaaS Payments Payment Methods Payment Solutions 189

Tom Tunguz

MAY 14, 2014

Customer success (CS) within SaaS startups is a relatively new idea. Customer success teams must justify the investment of building a CS team, often at the expense of headcount in another team. Gainsight Pulse Presentation by Tom Tunguz.

Customer Success 100

Customer Success Startup Headcount Compensation 100

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 11, 2016

As SaaS startups scale, sales execution becomes the most tangible metric of a business’ success, and the one by which the business’ health is benchmarked. Imagine our hypothetical startup’s sales team grows to 20 people. Each startup will have to decide their own strategy. And how much should a business invest?

Scale 100

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Headcount 100

OpenView Labs

JUNE 3, 2021

Anyone who’s ever worked at a startup knows it’s a “get the job done” environment where your title means little and what you do means a lot. Alternatively, some startups resort to defining the roles by their deliverables. Note: This post was originally published in January 2016 and was updated in June 2021. Engineering manages IT.

Product Marketing 93

Product Marketing Sales Hiring Startup Scale 93

The Angel VC

MARCH 23, 2016

Almost exactly four years ago I published a financial plan template for SaaS startups based on a model that I had created for Zendesk a few years earlier. The original v1 model was a very simple plan for early-stage SaaS startups with a low-touch sales model. You can remove, change or add roles in column H.

SaaS Payments 217

SaaS Payments Headcount SaaS Payment Methods 217

SaaStr

DECEMBER 11, 2021

And it’s been fun to see lots of startups and bigger companies internalize this. They wait for two reasons: first, it’s another headcount, which costs money, which can seem expensive when you have say just $5k-$10k a month in MRR and 6 months of runway left before you’re out of cash. Yet still … people wait.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Customer Success Headcount Churn 274

SaaStr

AUGUST 13, 2021

And there are just so, so many startups today. You think all they do is look for startups like yours? And most importantly, now that initial pitches are all over Zoom, VCs are meeting with 2x-5x more startups than they used to. In fact, it’s harder? The bar has gone up. But you can bend the odds. You can make it easier.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital Headcount 278

Kellblog

NOVEMBER 2, 2023

With capital scarce and expensive, with companies increasingly trapped in Schrödinger’s startup paradox , and with more startups than ever focused on positive cashflow and The Rule of 40 , it’s safe to say that Silicon Valley is still very much in a cost-cutting mood. It’s been a tough year. No backfill policy.

VP of Engineering 107

VP of Engineering Travel Underperforming Technical Team Headcount 107