SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

1 Fake product-market fit. You’re company building before product building. So why do founders believe they have market fit, even if they don’t? Raising a series of pre-product market fit. There is a common misconception that product-market fit means you’ve conceptually built what buyers want.

Underperforming Technical Team 167

Underperforming Technical Team Startup Engineering Retention 167

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

So let’s take a look back to a deep dive with the CEOs on what they learned building their first senior teams: ———-. As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. What makes you feel that you need to level up your management, set up your first management team?

Sales Hiring 252

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 252

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2024

They grew like crazy when they found product-market-fit and raised a big Series A and B. Most often, you get a call from a function called corporate development. It’s not a bad relationship to have, but understand that they’re deal executors, not deal creators. There’s some foundational shift or big macro market change.

Underperforming Technical Team 159

Underperforming Technical Team Data Development Team Review Technical Review 159

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

What should you look for in an Enterprise rep vs. a Mid-Market rep? How should you handle presenting challenges to your C-suite team when you’ve just joined the company? Solving High Volume, Low Conversion at Lattice Dini Mehta joined Lattice at $3M in revenue when it had just 10 people in seat for Go-To-Market and 7 salespeople.

Scale 216

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 216

Casey Accidental

FEBRUARY 26, 2024

In my recent essay about second products , I talked about how the goal of building a second product is not the traditional concept of product/market fit we’ve all been raised on regarding startups. In some ways, our goal with a second product is easier, and in some ways, much harder.

Underperforming Technical Team 63

Underperforming Technical Team Scale GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Startup 63

Totango

MAY 15, 2024

From the urgent need for organizations to operate like startups to the surprising disparity in AI adoption between CS and support teams, these experts didn’t hold back. 1: For CS to jump ahead with AI, teams will need to operate like a startup Startups are known for their agility, adaptability, and willingness to experiment.

Customer Success 104

Customer Success AI Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review 104

User Pilot

SEPTEMBER 25, 2023

Concept testing takes place before the development phase to assess how well the idea could satisfy user needs , while usability testing focuses on how easy the product is to use and navigate and happens during the development stage. Concept testing should be an integral part of product development for a number of reasons.

Underperforming Technical Team 80

Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Data Analysis AI 80

User Pilot

MAY 1, 2024

He also hosts a job board for product professionals and has created a GPT-4 chatbot, Lennybot, that is programmed to answer questions from Lenny’s newsletter and podcast. Before starting his own venture, Lenny worked in the product and engineering teams of companies like Airbnb and Neustar.

Underperforming Technical Team 74

Underperforming Technical Team New CTO Interviewing CTO 74

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 19, 2021

And for your support team, using the right conversational support tool and framework allows them to maximize their resources, so they can focus on solving complex queries and building long-term customer relationships. But conversational support doesn’t just benefit your support team. Teams that benefit: Sales, marketing.

Underperforming Technical Team 129

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 129

Point Nine Land

OCTOBER 23, 2023

We recently hosted the Point Nine Founders Summit, featuring several panels and presentations from founders, CFOs, COOs, and sales execs on building early sales teams and hiring your first successful sales leaders. It helps keep the product team focused on customer feedback and providing value in exchange for revenue.

Sales Hiring 125

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors Technical Cofounder 125

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

The fastest growing software companies in recent years all have something in common – they started with little to no sales team. They relied on a great product, with a passionate userbase that helped kickstart an organic growth engine which sold the product for them. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

User Pilot

JANUARY 16, 2024

Not performing user research on your target audience User research forms the foundation for building effective products. Going ahead to develop products or features based on assumption doesn’t always end well—you’re likely to build something that doesn’t solve real user problems. Wasting time and money.

Underperforming Technical Team 80

Underperforming Technical Team User Experience Onboarding Mobile 80

SaaStr

APRIL 14, 2023

Mistake #1: Viewing Investors Only As Capital As founders build a team, they focus on obtaining complementary skill sets. When building a product, organizations are solving a specific need. Of course, building great teams and finding product market fit is critical, but don’t forget about product investor fit.

Development Team Review 211

Development Team Review Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team SMB 211

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

MARCH 23, 2020

Companies which don’t use mental models risk unleashing mayhem with poor choices or becoming bloated and bureaucratic by reducing the volume and speed at which decisions are made - both scenarios are undesirable and will impact growth. OKRs are a useful mental model - they make it crystal clear what people and teams should be striving for.

Underperforming Technical Team 213

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service 213

User Pilot

JANUARY 29, 2023

Without validating features, it’s easy to create products that aren’t aligned with their vision or are difficult to differentiate. Developing features without validation results in bloated products and unnecessarily drives the cost of development up. Product teams should invest in validation when developing the MVP.

Management 86

Management Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Scale 86

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Even as a three person team, we went through an exercise to figure out what do we stand for, as a team? Sam : This is not my insight, but someone else says… I really do believe it, that the team you build is the company you build.

VP of Engineering 250

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 250

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

A mentor of mine suggested that I reframe my search to seek out companies that I would invest in, instead of the other way around. He told me, you can invest time, talent, or treasure. Unfortunately for me, I had little experience, not much talent, and lacked the treasure/money to invest. It seemed like the best investment! .

Scale 251

Scale Sales Hiring Sales SMB 251

User Pilot

JUNE 20, 2023

TL;DR Product idea validation is a process during which product teams test and tweak the product concept to ensure it satisfies a real market need. Apart from testing the demand for the product, idea validation helps teams assess if they have the necessary expertise and resources to build the product.

Underperforming Technical Team 77

Underperforming Technical Team Social Media Scale Interviewing 77

User Pilot

JANUARY 17, 2024

The most common challenges that hinder SaaS growth are lack of product-market fit , ineffective sales and marketing strategies , customer churn, and long product development cycles. Provide the necessary training for your sales teams. Optimizing your marketing strategy to cut costs.

Scale 86

Scale Scaling SaaS Underperforming Technical Team 86

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

They are hiring leaders, building teams, and attracting advisors in the US while devouring the SV SaaS playbook. AI is likely the next platform, dev tools are strategic given the scarcity of developers, cybersecurity is front and center for enterprises, and the data stack is still going strong. Proximity to customers helps too.

Scale 203

Scale Sales Hiring Cybersecurity Underperforming Technical Team 203

User Pilot

MARCH 9, 2023

The key causes of customer churn are poor customer support , buggy product, wrong product-market fit, bad user experience, poor onboarding process, high pricing, and long time-to-value. If your product doesn’t help them reach their end goals, they’ll stop investing their time and money in it.

Underperforming Technical Team 90

Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 90

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

I mean, and I may at the risk of stating at times of blinding lava, they’re very … They’re really care a lot about what is the market opportunity you’re going after, right? You can have the great product and a great team, but the market of small or very niche. So that’s easy.

Sales Recruiting 241

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 241

SaaStr

JULY 8, 2020

What Nobody Tells You About Seed Investing with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and Cowboy Ventures Founder and Partner Aileen Lee. I think it gives us a perspective that maybe we don’t get in some other places, in addition to many great investments over the years. Personally, our team has been holding back a little bit.

Investment 155

Investment Technical Review Part-Time VPE Development Team Review 155

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason Lemkin: Yeah, I think if you ask how applicable is SEO, programmable is maybe a different question, but I tell you every single SaaS company I have invested in or worked with that has made a commitment to building at least one high quality piece of content per week has seen significant ROI from SEO over a period of months or a year.

Scale 227

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 227

SaaStr

JUNE 15, 2021

Twilio is a cloud communications platform that allows software developers to embed communications into the apps that they’re building. He said, “I feel so bad. Jeff : I felt really bad, because you plan way ahead. For real, why is the developer market bigger today? ” I’ve never heard that.

Scale 280

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Engineering Wireless 280

Casey Accidental

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

The Summit gathered ~40 CPOs and product leaders to chat through topics centered around product development and product-led growth. After product/market fit, most companies’ obsession is not thinking about how to create their next amazing product. Product/market fit has a positive slope.

Payments 63

Payments Scale Payment Methods Underperforming Technical Team 63

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. Sanj has plenty of experience scaling sales teams at growing businesses, and that’s precisely why, as of November of last year, he‘s overseeing EMEA sales at Intercom.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

They also manage finances and supervise one or more engineering teams. Product Manager : In charge of creating product strategy and overseeing the design process, among other things. What to do before building a team for your SaaS company You can’t just jump into hiring without some forethought, or you’ll make many mistakes.

Sales Hiring 88

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 88

The Marketing & Growth Hacking Publication

MARCH 3, 2019

If you have that, it means you’ve managed to offer the market exactly what it needs or, in other words, achieved a product/market fit (PMF). What are the steps you need to take to identify your product/market fit? Let’s begin with the basics, and, first of all, understand the product/market fit definition.

Product Marketing 40

Product Marketing Marketing Underperforming Technical Team Customer Lifetime Value 40

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 22, 2019

Before Optimizely, Travis spent 6 years at Salesforce in a number of sales roles including building the first Platform Sales team. What does Travis advise founders when it comes to uniting customer facing teams? * And even just that shift drove a lot of behavior change both with customers and internally with the teams.

Underperforming Technical Team 154

Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Payments Payment Services Technical Advisors 154

Frontegg

DECEMBER 2, 2021

In addition, we are excited to welcome our new partners – the visionary team from Insight Partners, led by Praveen Akkiraju, Daniel Aronovitz, and Jeff Horring. Fast forward to now, Frontegg is running as the core product infrastructure for dozens of hyper-growing companies. You build it and start the product-market-fit quest.

Underperforming Technical Team 93

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring DevOps as a Service Scale 93

OPEXEngine

AUGUST 31, 2021

And while the concept has been around for years, for most of that time, tech debt was primarily the concern of product and engineering teams. They’re also increasingly holding their teams accountable to manage it appropriately. Sometimes they do so intentionally because they feel pressure to get to market faster.

Technical Review 52

Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Software Review Scale 52

OPEXEngine

AUGUST 31, 2021

And while the concept has been around for years, for most of that time, tech debt was primarily the concern of product and engineering teams. They’re also increasingly holding their teams accountable to manage it appropriately. Sometimes they do so intentionally because they feel pressure to get to market faster.

Technical Review 52

Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Software Review Scale 52

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

5 Reasons I Hate the Rule of 40 by Mikael Johnsson, SaaS Nordic While not necessarily completely useless, I would strongly argue that R40 is a metric applicable to the world of PE and public markets investing and is not a good metric for assessing the quality of venture-stage companies.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SaaS 52

Neil Patel

DECEMBER 2, 2020

Access to more capital means implementing better growth tools, expanding the team, and generally making the journey to profitability much smoother. Before you continue down this path, you and your team need to sit down and establish your needs, as well as the potential risks and rewards associated with each form of startup funding.

Startup 145

Startup Underperforming Technical Team Government Investment 145

ChurnZero

APRIL 27, 2021

As ChurnZero recently secured a Series B investment bringing our total funding that has been raised to date to $35 million, we thought we’d take a look back and see the role that Customer Success plays at each respective stage of funding for SaaS companies. And we thought, who better to ask than those that chose to invest in us along the way.

Scale 98

Scale Customer Success Payments Underperforming Technical Team 98

Sales Hacker

MARCH 15, 2022

Sales development school, marketing school, and more for your entire team. Asad Zaman : We specialize in helping companies build their go-to-market teams. We went from sales to the entire go-to-market org, practices, technical sales, and executive search. Product marketing, customer success, etc.

Sales Hiring 94

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Acquisition Development 94