SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2022

Q; Dear SaaStr: I Just Received a $1M investment for My 3-year old Industrial SaaS Product to Scale. 1m isn’t enough to scale anything, at least not in the U.S., If you are very careful, 1m will let you invest in your first sales team. You can keep investing in whatever small paid channels already work.

Scale 192

Scale Sales Hiring Investment Scaling 192

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2023

At SaaStr we’ve huge champions about investing early in CS. is a number to back into, at scale. It’s a reminder CSM staffing overall is actually fairly thin at scale. Especially in this new age of efficient growth. But again, there’s only so much money. So what’s the current, actual spend for CS?

Customer Success 188

Customer Success Scaling Management Churn 188

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

She was hired because they saw a bit of softening in new business growth, and she came to help diagnose what was going on and help scale the business. While it may seem smart when you have five or fewer salespeople to sell anything and everything between $3k and $100k, that won’t scale. Attune sellers for one or the other.

Scale 230

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 230

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

General Partner Doug Pepper and General Partner and Head of Analytics at ICONIQ Growth, Christine Edmonds, share the art and science of scaling GTM at this year’s SaaStr Annual. Early Growth Stage — $20M to $50M ARR This is the first time companies are really starting to build their GTM organizations for scale. What does that mean?

Scale 236

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Outsourced Development 236

Andreessen Horowitz

MARCH 26, 2024

Tyler (who was the fastest promotion to engineering director at his previous firm) scaled the systems data pipelines so that training and inference could work at scalable economics for the average business. Diego designed and built an elegant product to make these applications practical and usable for non-technical teams.

Investment 123

Investment Healthcare AI Business Model 123

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 26, 2022

A former venture capitalist, Mark Leonard started Constellation in 1995 with $15m of outside investment & a goal of buying vertical software companies with a moat & good unit economics. But at scale, software holding companies can grow at similar rates & trade at similar multiples to their venture-backed peers. BU Size. #

Software Review 232

Software Review Investment Software Acquisition 232

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 22, 2020

Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO @ Stack Overflow recently shared with our community the four key pillars he feels are necessary to propel a company to scale upward. Is your product sound, and does it solve a big problem for customers, enough for you to scale? All of this will help create value and return on investment capital.

Scale 311

Scale Scaling Technical Review Systems Review 311

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 29, 2023

Many of you are familiar with this visual, most likely created by an investment firm. You have to keep investing in the new product while getting back to the current product. Keep leaning into the investment, and don’t let off the gas. Or, this is a company bet, and you’re willing to invest 70% for a year.

Scale 234

Scale Scaling Startup Sales Hiring 234

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

Dear SaaStr: What Are Some Signs That Your SaaS Marketing Programs Won’t Scale Well? You need to invest there, too. So my rule from all of this is basically, invest in any marketing program that even returns $1 for $1 spent. The post Dear SaaStr: What Are Some Signs That Your SaaS Marketing Programs Won’t Scale Well?

Scale 223

Scale Scaling Marketing SaaS 223

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

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 240

Acquisition Investment Headcount Banking 240

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 20, 2020

Today, we’re answering the question: how do teams grow as a startup scales? 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. But in sales, a CRO is often hired at the $20-50M ARR range.

Scale 337

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Software Review 337

SaaStr

DECEMBER 5, 2023

Despite what we’ve seen post-2020/2021, there has been a surge in AI investments, with AI companies at the infrastructure layer hitting a hundred times valuations at early funding stages. Regularly ask two crucial questions at the end of board meetings: “Scale 1-10: How am I performing?”

Investment 148

Investment Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 148

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2021

And here, they just couldn’t safely invest. ” Which is, once you are post-Initial Scale, past $3m-$4m in ARR or so, even if you have 80%+ gross margins and a very efficient sales and marketing engine … once your cash dips below 50% of your ARR … you’ll have stress, and importantly — underinvest.

Scale 338

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Construction 338

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 22, 2020

This year, we launched Scale , a new content strand focusing on how industry leaders are propelling their companies forward by keeping their customers front and center. . When we created Scale, we had no idea what the year would hold in store; we simply knew that investing in long-term customer relationships was the key to success.

Scale 220

Scale Scaling Customer Support Interviewing 220

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 206

Acquisition Investment Headcount Banking 206

SaaStr

AUGUST 5, 2022

Dear SaaStr: Should I Tell VCs How Much I Want Them to Invest? 10m tells me you are really ready to scale. 10m tells me you are really ready to scale. Don’t ask an investor for more money than they will invest, if you’d take less. The post Dear SaaStr: Should I Tell VCs How Much I Want Them to Invest? 2m another.

Investment 220

Investment Scale Scaling Sales 220

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2023

Scaling a tech startup doesn’t come easy, and when you’ve tried all the conventional SaaS advice, it might be tempting to give up. But before the years of rapid scaling, it took the company a little while to hit its stride. What Did WorkRamp Do Differently to Scale? But sometimes, the road less traveled is the path to success.

Scale 204

Scale Scaling SMB Marketing 204

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 19, 2021

It’s a familiar problem for all companies that scale fast – how do you keep your core technologies manageable for the increasing number of teams that depend on them? Instead, it would be an internal core technologies team that would take long-term views on how we build and scale Intercom. Scaling to Rails.

Scale 216

Scale Technical Review Technology Scaling 216

SaaStr

JULY 4, 2021

This was my first venture investment. One of the earliest posts I did on SaaStr was back in 2013 when I made my first venture investment, co-leading the seed round in Pipedrive. I also made a lot of mistakes on this investment I’ll share in another post. Lemkin invest in Pipedrive? So I said — invest in that one .

Investment 258

Investment Scale Scaling SaaS 258

SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2021

Battery Ventures’ data says while VC investment $$$ are on fire — they aren’t going into more startups. Some guideposts to guide to at scale. #4. The post Battery Ventures: VC Investments Are Way Up. A few top takeaways: #1. Instead, more dollars are going into the break-out leaders, not more deals.

Investment 239

Investment SMB Acquisition Cloud 239

SaaStr

JANUARY 6, 2021

How do you scale a company based that can be collaborative for everyone in your org — from finance to marketing? Take the time to invest in the right metrics because down the road they will contribute to financial success through sustainable revenue growth in addition to better strategic advantage in the competitive landscape.

Scale 200

Scale Software Review Scaling Sales Hiring 200

SaaStr

DECEMBER 25, 2021

Here’s the advice they had to offer on scaling your SaaS company. Adam #18: Invest in a strong hiring and onboarding process from day one. In the early days, Zapier invested a lot into all-hands support. It’s hard to re-engineer your business at scale. Instead, understand the strong foundation and then scale from there.

Scale 288

Scale Scaling Innovation Investment 288

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2023

Harry Stebbings of 20VC was kind enough to have us back on the latest VC Roundtable with 2 of the very, very best in growth / late-stage investing — the leaders of Insight Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures. They’ve led later stage investments in the best in SaaS and Cloud. And Where is Growth Investing?

Investment 233

Investment AI Cloud Scale 233

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 15, 2022

As a result, most tooling we use for analytics today has been built around a scale-out approach where performance is sacrificed for the ability to handle enormous amounts of data. So although as … The post Investing in MotherDuck appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz. Big data’s roots are in the hyperscalers.

Investment 103

Investment Scaling Data Enterprise 103

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2022

Scale-ups are exciting. Scaling to satisfy customers’ demands depends on innovation and foresight combined with enterprise-ready technology and the right partners. On top of considerable dedication, creating a scale-up requires a functional edge—a unique and unreplicable capability compared to the players in the industry.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Marketplace as a Service Entrepreneurship 226

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2022

But maybe not while you are scaling, you can often afford to invest more if you have funding. This is pretty much where most of us end up at, at scale. However you do it, $2m ARR per Customer Success Manager — but hired in advance , not arrears — is a solid model to scale with. Well — Maybe.

Scale 248

Scale Customer Success Sales Hiring Scaling 248

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 2, 2020

And it makes sense: in order to be around to support your customers well into the future, you need a solid foundation for scale. . For Pam, it all stems from a long-held belief that investing in the customer’s success will chart a direct path to the company’s. Listen to the full episode above or get Pam’s key takeaways below.

Outsourcing Services 253

Outsourcing Services Investment Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development 253

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 17, 2022

She reveals how customer centricity, operational rigor, and data-driven strategies drove Airtable to scale and serve over 300,000 organizations, including 80% of the Fortune 100. Invest in your tech stack so that you keep growing while you scale. As marketers, we must quickly validate decisions and scale programs as needed.

Engineering 227

Engineering Scaling Marketing Acquisition 227

SaaStr

OCTOBER 5, 2022

Confluent’s President of Field Operations, Erica Schultz, explores different tactics businesses can employ to scale revenue and increase efficiency in the current macro environment. As you look to scale your business and make your processes more efficient, it’s essential to foster a shared understanding of who your target customer is.

VP of Engineering 200

VP of Engineering Scale Scaling Sales Hiring 200

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2021

3 Invest in people. Invest in long-standing employees and reward them for agility and excite them about movement. Invest “BIG” in people. The post The Secret Sauce to Scaling to $1B with Zendesk appeared first on SaaStr. Your people are the lifeblood of your organization. Specialize and focus your execution.

Scale 196

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring SMB 196

SaaStr

MAY 17, 2021

We overindex on the inside information, and how quickly we assume they could scale up … and because of that, we let their other weaknesses slide in candidates we otherwise wouldn’t hire. Sales reps don’t have to scale in a day. So a rep with a $120k OTE has to eventually close at least $480k at scale. Not Training Reps.

Scale 236

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales 236

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Eran Zimman, monday.com’s co-founder and co-CEO, shares his secrets to scaling and growth in an unpredictable market. Serve customers a CRM or project management first, and as they scale and use it more, they’re exposed to more features. They kept doing it after the economy changed, and they also scaled it. It’s cheap.

Scale 164

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Banking 164

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2021

Scaling your SaaS company isn’t just about hitting the right growth metrics –– it requires a thorough understanding of your business goals, company culture, and leadership dynamic. Roy Mann and Eran Zinman, Co-Founders and CEOs of monday.com, look back at their incredible growth and share the dos and don’ts of scaling. It’s essential.

Scale 207

Scale Scaling Leadership Company Culture 207

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2023

A Strategic Move Upmarket Another company CIPIO Partners invested in needed to make a strategic move. This company moved upmarket and satisfied the demand of larger customers by strategically investing in product features those customers needed. They had SMB positioning with an unfavorable LTV to CAC ratio. One thing is for certain.

Scale 231

Scale Strategy Scaling Outbound Sales Team 231

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 16, 2022

Or do you actually have something worth scaling?”. If you decide that global growth is the right move for your business, then think about your expansion model, the role that capital investment might play, costs, the areas where you will have a structural advantage, the regulatory climate, and your competition.

Scale 208

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Marketing 208