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. It has now secured over $67M in funding and offers a robust platform for mid-market and SMB segments. And they mostly did this by ignoring four pieces of traditional startup advice.

Scale 204

Scale Scaling SMB Marketing 204

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 31, 2022

We are delighted to share that we are officially launching our new program for fast-growing, venture-backed startups. Over 5,000 startups from top incubators around the world use Intercom. It is an essential element of the startup stack as founders optimize their customer engagement”.

Startup 118

Startup Venture Capital Scale SMB 118

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

And as startups scale, many try to automate away support and success for the smaller accounts. If your SMB product requires or has a salesperson involved in closing, that’s a clear sign you also want a human being involved in making sure that customer is a success post-sale, too. Invest here to drive NRR up.

Customer Success 324

Customer Success Scale SMB Sales 324

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

After switching to SaaS, she started as an SMB sales leader with no prior management or SMB sales experience. The decision to leave a fairly scaled role leading 200+ AEs at LinkedIn to join a smaller-stage startup. During her time in finance, she did multi-million dollar deals with 12 to 18-month deal cycles.

Scale 239

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 239

SaaStr

OCTOBER 27, 2023

Jason re-takes the stage in Part 2 of the series to answer questions about the right time is to invest in a new product line, building vertical vs. horizontal, multiples in 2024, and much more. Building and scaling a startup isn’t for the faint of heart and often comes with many ups and downs that SaaS veterans have experience in.

Sales Hiring 243

Sales Hiring Scale Venture Capital Startup 243

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 15, 2022

It does less in SMB. Vista’s investments are older, established SaaS companies with brands. So it’s less representative of raw startups, but more representative of overall enterprise and mid-market spend. in ARR, so it’s second only to Salesforce in SaaS. And they spans dozens of leading vendors in SaaS.

Cybersecurity 308

Cybersecurity SMB Interviewing Enterprise 308

SaaStr

DECEMBER 26, 2020

Even once you hit just $2m-$3m ARR — fairly early — the trade-offs start to become clear for startups with customers both Smaller and Larger: Small customers consume just as many sales, success, and marketing resources. This makes the SMB leads worth a lot more than just their direct lifetime value. Probably more.

SMB 349

SMB Sales Hiring Marketing Enterprise 349

Casey Accidental

MARCH 29, 2022

A common issue leaders in product management, design, or engineering face is justifying investment in the “non-sexy” stuff. I’ll walk through some frameworks and examples from my career on how to drive excitement and investment in these critical areas that may not be properly valued or staffed currently in your organization.

Investment 139

Investment Underperforming Technical Team User Experience Scale 139

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 8, 2015

See also: Innovator’s Solution for SaaS Startups. There’s a familiar path now to SaaS companies that start in the SMB (small-to-medium business) part of the market. In short, new startups leverage a distribution advantage to acquire SMB customers at scale. SMB 3-7% 31%-58%. Annual Investment, $M 0.75

Innovation 155

Innovation Startup Scale SMB 155

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 7, 2023

And a few other limiters: Most enterprise reps really struggle to sell SMB tools, and vice-versa. Whatever you do, make sure if someone comes from even a slightly easier sales environment, that they really can do it at your startup. The prospects come in mostly knowing you, and what they want. But usually, they don’t.

Sales Hiring 168

Sales Hiring Sales SaaS SMB 168

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 2, 2016

Channel distribution represents one of the biggest and most important changes in customers acquisition for SMB SaaS startups in quite a while. One of the most interesting examples is Microsoft’s Office 365 SMB business. It’s the most successful SMB SaaS acquisition channel ever built. by Thomas Hansen.

Outsourcing Services 108

Outsourcing Services SMB Acquisition Scale 108

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. billion in 2012.

CTO Hire 246

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO 246

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Their CEO will join us at SaaSr Scale 2021 on December 15 to talk about using data to get to 10,000 SMB customers! I asked Aasif Osmany to share his learnings as a top-performing SMB VP of Sales, below. Four years ago, after launching and failing my first startup I realized I had a lot to learn. 7 Tips to get 7,000 Customers.

Scale 260

Scale Sales Hiring Sales SMB 260

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2023

You don’t want to overwhelm SMB customers, and Monday made this a focus from day one. 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. Since starting the company in 2014, there wasn’t a lot of money you could raise in a startup.

Scale 161

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Banking 161

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2023

Most startup founders create companies to grow them. A Strategic Move Upmarket Another company CIPIO Partners invested in needed to make a strategic move. They had SMB positioning with an unfavorable LTV to CAC ratio. While all organizations are different, one core truth remains — Everything changes.

Scale 231

Scale Scaling Strategy Outbound Sales Team 231

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 25, 2019

Enterprise sales is hard, which is why most businesses start as an SMB org and grow into an enterprise org. So let’s look at how to drive sales in a high-growth situation, so the transition from SMB to enterprise is smoother (and faster). 2 rules for transitioning from SMB to enterprise. Invest in a community.

SMB 73

SMB Enterprise Strategy Compensation 73

SaaStr

AUGUST 30, 2023

G2 is a unicorn startup that’s stayed in the game for over a decade. Many investment banker pitches say that everyone is number one at something. You might not be DocuSign, but for SMBs in France in retail, you are number one. You can filter your search by industry, whether you’re SMB, mid-market, or Enterprise, etc.

AI Search 200

AI Search AI ChatGPT Scale 200

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

As a startup, it’s tempting to try and do everything. 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. Lattice had limited resources and a small team, which meant they needed to focus in.

Scale 228

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 228

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 12, 2014

I wondered whether startups serving enterprises might be more or less valuable than those serving small-to-medium businesses (SMBs). In particular, do SaaS startups serving SMBs spend more or less than their counterparts in the mid-market and enterprise? And which type of SaaS startup grows the fastest?

Startup 100

Startup SMB Sales Hiring Acquisition 100

SaaStr

MARCH 10, 2022

Investing in a Product-Led Model to Drive Exponential Sustainable Growth. We just did a deep dive on how DigitalOcean is growing an impressive 37% at $500,000,000 in ARR , and staying very SMB with 600,000+ customers. Specifically, Anu will discuss : Enacting Transformational Change by Building a Movement. Building a Community.

Scale 205

Scale SMB Scaling Development 205

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 25, 2019

In the SMB the distribution is more uniform. Price points in the SMB can vary widely, as can the success effort. This is a pleasant surprise for startups because it means the CSM investment per dollar of ARR goes further. There is an upper limit to the number of relationships a CSM can manage.

Management 207

Management SMB Enterprise Retention 207

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

They had been building toward an SMB audience, so hiring 50 people in sales against a product that wasn’t ready for a specific audience would’ve been a mistake. In a startup, you might have a strong hypothesis, but it might not work out. Next, think about product maturity. Experimental vs. Scale.

Scale 260

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 260

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2020

CEO Lew Cirne, after regretting selling his first startup in the space to CA for $375m, tries again with New Relic. Those of us who’ve been around a while think of New Relic as a freemium and almost SMB tool, but today 77% of their revenue comes from accounts greater than $100k. New Relic is one of my favorite Cloud stories.

Scale 301

Scale Outsourced Development SMB Cloud 301

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 17, 2023

Prior to starting Blueprint in 2020, he worked for over fifteen years in various sales and sales management roles, building teams across presales, partnerships, SMB, Mid-Market, & Enterprise Sales. Chuck lives in the Bay Area with his wife and has two daughters, a junior at UCLA and a freshman at UC Santa Barbara.

Sales Hiring 103

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing SMB 103

SaaStr

APRIL 14, 2023

Many startups crash and burn when they hit the Series A crunch — that do-or-die time where many seem to lose their footing even if they’ve been successful up to that point. Enterprise will likely have a different problem set vs. an SMB. Create a full breakout plan first, then look back and figure out who will invest.

Development Team Review 222

Development Team Review Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team SMB 222

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

My hope is that this analysis can provide startup entrepreneurs with a framework for how to manage their businesses around SaaS metrics (e.g., For businesses selling predominantly to SMB customers, these benchmarks are all slightly lower given the higher-churn nature of SMBs. net retention and CAC payback).

Cloud 169

Cloud Software Azure AWS 169

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

Indeed this was also my #1 mistake and the #1 I see from so many startups learning to go upmarket. Another top mistake SMB folks make trying to sell enterprise. . This sounds so basic, but again it often isn’t, especially if you are using less experienced and/or SMB trained sales reps to sell into the enterprise.

CTO Hire 277

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 277

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2023

Jason Lemkin, Founder of SaaStr, and co-founders and CEOs, Eran Zinman and Roy Mann of the wildly successful monday.com chat with Startup For Startup about ARR, NRR, CAC, and what it takes to beat the odds in a tougher environment. Then the Boom happened, and everyone could justify insane investments, and it warped everything.

Metrics 195

Metrics SaaS Sales Hiring Finance 195

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 21, 2017

Over that 20 year period, annual SaaS investment has increased 20x, peaking in 2014 at $7B. This sea of SaaS startups have reshaped the market. Segmentation - focus on SMB, Mid-Market, or Enterprise, to play where competition isn’t present. Salesforce was founded in 1999. Today, that figure is 5000.

SaaS 180

SaaS Venture Capital Finance Machine Learning 180

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 10, 2012

Performance marketing is a skill every startup should hone as a core competency as quickly as possible. Performance marketing creates a process where $1 invested in the business creates greater than $1 in output - a growth machine. Building a growth engine. The more data, the better the expected value prediction. ac |t|).

Startup 100

Startup Marketing Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 100

ChurnZero

JUNE 2, 2021

A [Rob]: That’s more of a question for the earlier stage investing in the public market. A private equity investor once said that he only invests in companies where that’s 40 or higher. Is the bar across the same for a SMB-focused company versus an enterprise-focused company? I will say this much. Growth is king.

Benchmarks 98

Benchmarks B2B SMB SaaS 98

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 9, 2023

The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not constitute an offer to sell, or a recommendation to purchase, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any security, nor a recommendation for any investment product or service.

Trends 130

Trends Cloud Azure AWS 130

Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 21, 2023

My hope is that this analysis can provide startup entrepreneurs with a framework for how to manage their businesses around SaaS metrics (e.g., For businesses selling predominantly to SMB customers, these benchmarks are all slightly lower given the higher-churn nature of SMBs. net retention and CAC payback).

Cloud 177

Cloud Software Benchmarks Retention 177

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 26, 2020

Our Chairman and Co-founder, Eoghan McCabe , sat down for a chat with Harry Stebbings on the Twenty Minute VC podcast to discuss his startup journey and the lessons he learned while building Intercom. We built a hundred million dollar business with SMB. Can’t do it. You can’t reach these people. They won’t pay enough.

Leadership 211

Leadership Scale SMB Innovation 211

SaaStock

JANUARY 25, 2019

from 500 Startups, Redpoint eventures, and others. Omie main goal is to bridge the efficiency gap in Brazilian SMB, helping customers to be more prosperous. Omie is the only SaaS company figuring among 100 fastest growing SMB in Brazil, according to Deloitte Consulting, ranking #3. CEO : Tiago Dalvi. Founded : 2015.

SaaS Payments 257

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Methods Payments 257

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

So for the audience, cloud giants are turbocharging startup sales, and the predominant reason for this is because they’re fundamentally changing IT budgets at the customers that we’re all selling to. How do you understand really if cloud marketplaces are right for your startup? Jabari Norton. Rico Mallozzi. Crowdstrike.

Scale 201

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 201

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 13, 2018

But as the college-dorm-room startup matures, there’s a fascinating twist to be found in the way it applies its new mission to Workplace, a B2B startup within the (former) startup. You really have to think of Workplace as a SaaS startup within Facebook. When Workplace became a real thing at Facebook, I was in London.

Scale 151

Scale Marketplace as a Service Mobile Sales Hiring 151