SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 29, 2023

Lattice has launched four product suites in the last eight years, and the ideas that drove their growth apply to most companies today. Many of you are familiar with this visual, most likely created by an investment firm. This showcases a narrow segment of a niche market, and it’s missing a lot of startups.

Scale 222

Scale Scaling Startup Sales Hiring 222

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 14, 2022

In a special presentation, Secureframe COO Seema Kumar shares common leadership challenges in today’s modern workforce, best practices, and tips for talent retention. Startup Leadership Challenges. But the modern workplace presents a few key leadership challenges that must be overcome to boost employee retention.

Retention 130

Retention Leadership Compensation Communication 130

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

In leadership, there’s a great expression that “to those who much is given, much is expected.” Failure #4: Not Investing In Systems This is a big mistake many make in the beginning, and it can be challenging to recover from. Invest in back-office systems early. It requires: Alignment across Product, Marketing, Sales, CS, and PS.

Scale 227

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Scaling 227

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2023

Overcoming challenges by optimizing for success In the early stages of setting up your SaaS business, it’s always a good idea to invest time thinking about the direction you want to take. You may have a one-person representative in each continent who does the job of an SDR, closes deals, takes care of partnerships, marketing, and more.

Sales Hiring 219

Sales Hiring Payment Services SaaS Payments Scale 219

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. There are two moments in my career that I remember.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2024

This is a mistake many entrepreneurs make once they have the tiniest bit of product-market fit. If you got 10, 50, 100 businessess to actually buy Yet Another SaaS Product — that is something. In my toughest times, it was always adding one great leader that turned things around in the end. Just one great one.

Startup 297

Startup Investment Product Marketing Revenue 297

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2022

Build the baseline by checking leadership assumptions. However, they were wrong about these assumptions, which kept them from identifying gaps and assessing the extensibility of their Enterprise product-market-fit. Simply because their product was being used in a professional setting didn’t mean it was a product-market fit.

Scale 197

Scale SMB Enterprise Sales Hiring 197

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 4, 2022

One hour, every other month for seed companies or companies that are pre-product market fit. Having your board meet and interact with the senior leadership will also help the board give you advice on your team and org structure. . (Public companies unfortunately require longer meetings.)

Sales Hiring 232

Sales Hiring Scale Leadership Startup 232

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

For instance, Founders Fund doesn’t really invest in AI, health tech, or edtech, even if you’re growing 5x. If you’ve stalled, it means you’ve fallen out of product market fit. Learnings as a Partner at Founders Fund Some nuances prevent deals from happening that Sam wasn’t aware of at the beginning.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 245

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2023

But what I learned, after years of procrastinating on tough moves for our leadership team, is that the leaders’ teams suffer greatly through that inaction. And if you didn’t invest proactively in systems like CPQ early, you create a byzantine mess that’s impossible to scale. Invest in back-office systems early.

Sales Hiring 255

Sales Hiring Scale Scaling Customer Success 255

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

From an R&D perspective, they invested in what they called vertical solutions to support those new use cases. So, Calendly decided to invest in going Enterprise. Kate has a simple framework for going upmarket: Product, People, and Process. From a product standpoint, you might think you have product market fit.

Scale 217

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 217

Kellblog

JULY 17, 2022

Create a product. Get product-market fit (PMF), i.e., determine some problem you solve for some person with some product. Go sell some software to prove there’s a market. Let’s understand what these three elements mean and think about how much to invest in them. Go sell some software.

Branding 132

Branding Startup Software Sales Recruiting 132

SaaStr

JUNE 30, 2023

Braze didn’t find a true product-market fit until around 2014-2015. If you’re struggling to see product-market fit, it can be nerve-wracking. But if the market isn’t ready, it isn’t ready. If you spend too much too early when you lack product-market fit, you’re pushing rope.

Scale 188

Scale Mobile Venture Capital Scaling 188

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2020

Nick has vast experience when it comes to B2B and B2C, which is why we asked them to share their best tips for growing product and engineering orgs from 0 to IPO. When founders are starting companies, it’s crucial to have product-market fit. However, the expectations for leadership are quite different from that of management.

Engineering 219

Engineering Part-Time VPE Scale B2C 219

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2020

You said before, to me, it’s the believing in kind of participatory leadership over servant leadership. I don’t subscribe to the servant leadership model. Harry Stebbings: I think that participation and leadership is almost like a luxury of later stage companies. Andy MacMillan: Yeah. Let’s do it.

Sales Hiring 190

Sales Hiring Scale Leadership Sales Enablement 190

SaaStr

MAY 29, 2019

Ellevest is on a mission to close the gender investing gap by leveraging a robo-advisor designed especially for women. Dave Kellogg has a lengthy history in tech from his start in product marketing at Ingres Corp in 1985 to his ensuing leadership positions at Versant and Business Objects.

Payment Methods 220

Payment Methods Payment Solutions Payment Services Banking 220

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 9, 2020

She started off in product marketing at Google, helping launch Google Chrome and Android. It is easy to be a micromanager, but instead what really helps is service-level leadership where the people under you don’t need you to tell them how to do their job.

Startup 258

Startup Management Systems Review Leadership 258

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2022

David Sacks uses the phrase “default investible”. As you scale to later stages, measurable metrics become much more important than qualitative things like your team, product, market, and competition. If you can’t become “default alive”, become “default investible”.

Scale 224

Scale Management Metrics Startup 224

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 23, 2023

Why do product managers need them? That’s what Dave Martin , a product leadership coach, has talked about in his talk at this year’s Product Drive Summit hosted by Userpilot. Dave Martin on how product roadmaps kill outcomes. In other words, the product-market fit becomes weaker for some of the target audience.

Scale 100

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting Software Review 100

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 24, 2023

The previous version was almost five years old, and we knew that we needed an ambitious and clear vision to bring a next-generation Messenger to the market. Surveying the landscape First, we zoomed out from day-to-day execution and evaluated Messenger across multiple dimensions – product, market, customers, and business.

Leadership 118

Leadership Branding Engagement Interviewing 118

SaaStr

OCTOBER 13, 2023

If the answer’s no, is it still worth investing in at the expense of profitability? If your product has effortless growth or a word-of-mouth motion and momentum, it automatically takes care of one of your biggest cost drivers: sales and marketing. Is it truly scalable? Can it have a meaningful impact? Is it a positive ROI?

Outsourcing Services 231

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale SaaS 231

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 4, 2021

Seed: “What investors are looking for at the seed stage is some sign of product-market fit. What we are looking for is that there are some happy users that we can use as a proxy, and that can give us the confidence that product-market fit is in the making.”. You could nearly move the columns of the napkin over a step.

Finance 289

Finance Product Marketing SaaS Investment 289

SaaStr

MAY 22, 2021

There’s now a whole group of companies I’ve invested in, and/or been an advisor/board member or other close relationship with … that are hitting or have recently crossed 4 Years Old. So they often took longer to get to product-market fit. One is simply that the SaaS markets are so much bigger today.

SaaS 171

SaaS Investment Product Marketing Revenue 171

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

Dev Ittycheria: And in some ways even though I’ve been a VC, and an operator, in some ways as an operator, I’m just now investing my time, not my money. So when I looked at opportunities to pursue, whether to go back into an operational role, a lot of it was around how big is the market opportunity? So that’s easy.

Sales Recruiting 242

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 242

SaaStr

DECEMBER 23, 2022

When you know something is working, you invest in scaling it. “It Samsara has also learned powerful lessons from expanding its product into novel markets. Samsara found a repeatable motion that allowed them to invest in a local team familiar with the challenges. You can’t assume that your product works everywhere.

Scale 164

Scale Engineering Marketing Scaling 164

SaaStr

AUGUST 30, 2022

On the investing side of life, the toughest meeting of all for me at least is probably the Right Co-Founder, Wrong CEO start-up. Great product, driven team, good early product-market fit, great vision. Check, check, check and check. But clearly — the Other Co-Founder should be CEO.

Sales Recruiting 223

Sales Recruiting Technical Cofounder Scale Investment 223

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

David Sacks: SaaS Background and Investments. 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. David Sacks has invested in over 20 unicorn companies, including Airbnb, Bird, ClickUp, Facebook, Slack, and Uber. Head of Marketing.

CTO Hire 237

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO 237

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2024

They grew like crazy when they found product-market-fit and raised a big Series A and B. The Journey of Selling Your Startup Harry was the co-founder and CEO of Periscope Data, which raised a seed round before finding customers, yet didn’t run out of money before becoming an overnight success 3-4 years later.

Underperforming Technical Team 164

Underperforming Technical Team Data Development Team Review Technical Review 164

SaaSHolic

MAY 5, 2023

The speakers believe that the next 10 years will be better for the region, with opportunities for investment in various industries using technology to solve problems. Latin America has interesting characteristics that make it a viable place for investment, including a high level of internet penetration and social engagement.

Technical Review 90

Technical Review VP of Engineering Development Team Review Software Review 90

SaaStr

MAY 6, 2021

Just note, you’ll need a strong balance sheet and stable investments — it takes money to make money. She decided to take some time off to regroup and thought about what exactly she wanted: a company that’s reached product-market fit but needs to grow, a disruptive technology, and a founder-CEO that would be like a partner.

Sales Hiring 228

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Revenue 228

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

MARCH 23, 2020

Customer > Team > Individual During my time at HubSpot, the leadership team shared this mental model to help with decision-making. To overcome this challenge, the best companies continually innovate and create new products to offset the maturation and decline of existing ones. Source: Amazon 15. This is always wrong.

Underperforming Technical Team 213

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service 213

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 20, 2021

Here are three ways to know if it’s time to invest in customer support operations (if you’re looking to scale, it probably is), and a few simple things your organization can do to get started. Rather than needing to invest in new tools, think about how you can strategically leverage the tech stack you’re already using. Sound good?

Scale 156

Scale Customer Support Scaling Headcount 156

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2021

As you approach $10m ARR, Initial Scale, money per se shouldn’t be an issue, other than the rate at which you can and should invest it. But assuming you are growing > 6-10% a month (which you should be at this point, if you have product-market fit) … you will get there. Every hire is just too expensive.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Scale Banking Engineering 300

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2022

Sometimes you find that the customer is fond of your product while investors don’t want to invest because they don’t believe in it. That means that you have to find an investor who truly understands your business model and your challenges, supports you, and has invested in other companies in the same industry. .

Scale 186

Scale Marketing Scaling Communication 186

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 4, 2022

If leadership wants to make more informed decisions, give the CS team a say in every matter that affects the customer. If you’re asking me to do more with less,” says You Mon, “then this is what the NRR and GRR are going to go to and the resulting return on lack of investment.”.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Scale SaaS Finance 98

Valuize Consulting

MARCH 2, 2022

But, if you’re enterprise-sized or mid-market and growing rapidly, I strongly recommend having at least one seasoned practitioner on your Operations side, if not an entire team, dedicated to finding efficiencies and processes that drive scalability and revenue growth.”. Tip 2: Manage Expectations & Set Priorities With Senior Leadership.

Scale 52

Scale Leadership Customer Success Retention 52

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 14, 2023

7 engineers, if you include me, one designer and one kinda product slash everything else, who’s my co founder. We actually raised 6 million upfront, so we had a lot more money, but I think pre-product market fit, it’s better to be sub 10 people. Immad: We kept it pretty small.

Sales Hiring 94

Sales Hiring Banking Scale Pricing 94