SaaStr

APRIL 1, 2023

We hired job hoppers that never stayed anywhere for more than 18 months for leadership roles. This data from Carta helps illustrate it: So we cut corners. We stopped doing reference checks. No time, didn’t want to know. We all did, just to get it done. And now we’re paying the price. The same things happened in VC and investing.

Sales Hiring 244

Sales Hiring Investment Leadership Startup 244

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 1, 2021

Claire’s operational experience is one-of-a-kind, and the conversation focused on scaling startups. Goal frameworks ensure that the priorities of the leadership team coalesce the priorities of the rest of the organization. On metrics: Early in Stripe’s history, the company tracked output metrics in dashboards.

Scale 249

Scale Scaling Payment Services Leadership 249

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 21, 2021

Behind every successful startup executive is a successful startup coach, or at least that’s the case with Alisa Cohn. Cohn’s been imparting leadership lessons at some of the world’s most well known brands and companies (Venmo, Etsy, Tory Burch, Google, and The New York Times, to name just a few).

Leadership 87

Leadership Startup Strategy Pricing 87

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

You see this time and time again in startups that are late to “top” their first set of VPs. Really, what you tend to see when you keep a stretch VP too long in their current role is flat metrics. But a VP whose metrics are flat for more than a quarter rarely if even finds a way to reaccelerate growth later.

Sales Recruiting 222

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Metrics 222

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

You Mon Tsang, CEO and co-founder of ChurnZero, Colleen O’Sullivan, VP of Integrated Customer Experience at Hubspot, and Jason Lemkin, SaaStr founder and CEO, give their take on where the customer success industry is headed and shares data from the Customer Success Leadership Study done by ChurnZero at the close of 2023.

Customer Success 221

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale AI 221

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2023

I didn’t so much learn from it as confirm — confirm things I’ve seen, known, and put into practice, and seen it confirmed across many SaaS startups. Sales Leadership Typically Has 40% or So From Variable Comp. Note again this skews toward late-stage startups and scale-ups. Everyone should have a read.

Scale 255

Scale Compensation Sales SMB 255

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 11, 2023

Ang shares her 5 P’s of Sales Leadership: Professionalism Preparation Process Performance Play More on these below. Sara So, Ang, I’m curious what drew you to Sales Leadership originally? If I had to pick a moment, it was in the early 2000s when I joined a startup specializing in enhancing online visibility for small businesses.

Scale 64

Scale Leadership Sales Hiring Sales 64

OpenView Labs

DECEMBER 15, 2021

An entrepreneur with more than twenty years of startup experience, Godard has seen his share of struggle and failure. And even when he achieved business success, he still battled the anxiety, fear, and depression that is par for the course in the startup arena. . What is Conscious Leadership? Starting with Self Awareness.

Leadership 73

Leadership Entrepreneurship Consulting Engagement 73

SaaStr

OCTOBER 14, 2022

To keep tabs on your efficiency, be mindful of these helpful metrics: Burn Multiple. This metric reveals how long it takes to earn back your sales and marketing spending, which is highly relevant when factoring into efficiency. Measuring Efficiency in SaaS. Burn Multiple = Net Burn / Net New ARR.

Startup 194

Startup SaaS Metrics Churn 194

SaaStr

OCTOBER 1, 2022

Anu Hariharan works with hundreds of startups annually as Managing Director at Y Combinator. Through experience, she explains five company-altering learnings from B2B startups that founders should consider at the earliest stages of their businesses. . B2B startups are underpricing . Your product may not be as good as you think.

Scale 195

Scale Sales Hiring B2B Startup 195

Baremetrics

JUNE 16, 2021

The startup world is built on the culture of learning. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How To Build the Future by Peter Thiel 4 4. In The Hard Thing About Hard Things , Horowitz distills years of experience building companies into actionable lessons of leadership. After all, successful businesses aren’t grown in silos.

Scale 97

Scale Startup Sales Hiring PayPal 97

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 9, 2022

The Cloud 100 reviews submissions from hundreds of cloud startups and private companies each year. The Cloud 100 evaluation process involves ranking companies across four factors: market leadership, estimated valuation, operating metrics, and people & culture. It’s a very competitive field.

Cloud 211

Cloud Leadership Innovation Communication 211

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2023

In startups, founders and teams often wear many hats — figuring out what to prioritize, developing and implementing all types of demand gen strategies, attending events and networking, and founder-led sales. Your Startup is in One of Four Stages As a startup, you fall into one of four stages. Through customer stories.

Enterprise 215

Enterprise B2B Scale SMB 215

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

We were coming off an environment where startup funding was as fruitful as ever. Higher than he imagined in terms of the founder quality bar and, the stage of the business, and growth and efficiency metrics. In a startup today, everyone’s important. Another performance metric could be pipeline activity with actual outputs.

Sales Hiring 242

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 242

SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2022

Lots of SaaS founders are preoccupied with employee headcount as an important growth metric, but this indicator is not always true. At a previous startup she worked for, management was constantly interviewing people from big companies to take leadership roles. They do not hire for leadership positions.

Compensation 203

Compensation Leadership Company Culture Headcount 203

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2022

There is plenty of advice for startup founders out there, which certainly can help leaders grow their companies. Your leadership team will focus on creating these systems with the goal-system-outcome framework, but it’s essential that as the company grows, the systems shift as well. Leadership Team: 18-month horizon.

Scaling 199

Scaling Leadership Startup Product Marketing 199

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 the drive and passion remained, and leadership didn’t give up. And they mostly did this by ignoring four pieces of traditional startup advice. Great Startups Create Their Own Categories.”

Scale 193

Scale Scaling SMB Marketing 193

SaaStr

AUGUST 11, 2021

Q: I have a SaaS startup. And break this up into monthly targets for MQLs, or just Plain Old Leads, or Opportunities, or whatever metric you pick. Marketing thus doesn’t breed ownership and leadership as well as sales. I feel my marketing team does not make enough efforts. Should I fire the team? Blog posts. A B- PR firm.

Sales Hiring 262

Sales Hiring Marketing Leadership Metrics 262

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2020

So, the company starts getting divided up into functional areas, or silos, product management, sales, customers support, marketing and so on, and this siloing of the org chart I think means that not everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and there’s a general feeling of disorganization or chaos in most startups.

Startup 268

Startup Software Review Scale Systems Review 268

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2022

All startups have issues and challenges, and all deals have some “hair” on them. While startups have ups and downs, if you tell the VCs you’re going to hit $250,000 in revenue this month … make 100 percent sure you hit that projection. This is surprisingly common in startups with more than two or three founders. Who is the CEO?

Finance 271

Finance Technical Review CTO Hire New CTO 271

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 16, 2021

What is a product-led startup strategy? PLG startups get the product directly to the end user (at any level or role in the company) with minimal friction, and then use the product’s value to drive growth. In our work with startups, we all too often hear things like “we don’t have the data” or “we don’t have the resources.”

Startup 96

Startup Strategy Scale Engineering 96

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 22, 2015

Before Greenhouse, Maia founded Urban Escapes, a DC-based startup she sold to LivingSocial. Maia is especially well known for her thought leadership in developing best in class recruiting metrics. Phone calls, conversion rates through the funnel and candidate satisfaction through the process feature highly in her metrics.

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting Metrics SaaS Sales Funnel 100

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2023

If you have centralized leadership here, the CRO model where demand gen flows to the CRO responsible for top and bottom line numbers, you get more out of the funnel. A North Star metric can be ridiculously hard to define, but once you do, the idea is that this is the one above all guiding metric that guides all broader goals and objectives.

Marketing 199

Marketing Finance Startup Leadership 199

Sage Intacct

JANUARY 26, 2023

In a down market, there is greater risk of customers not getting value from the product. So, how can finance teams help stay in front of customer churn?

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Metrics Startup Finance 52

Sage Intacct

JANUARY 26, 2023

In a down market, there is greater risk of customers not getting value from the product. So, how can finance teams help stay in front of customer churn?

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Metrics Startup Finance 52

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

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2022

Growth at any cost is no longer rewarded and startups need to pay close attention to their burn rate and runway. Fortunately, one benefit of being a startup is being agile. As you scale to later stages, measurable metrics become much more important than qualitative things like your team, product, market, and competition.

Scale 223

Scale Management Metrics Startup 223

User Pilot

JUNE 25, 2023

The Lean Startup provides principles for continuous innovation and validated learning in the fast-paced and disruptive SaaS space. Outcomes Over Output emphasizes customer behavior as the key metric for business success. Product Leadership presents insights on effective product leadership and team-building.

Management 79

Management Technical Review Leadership Innovation 79

Kellblog

MAY 26, 2024

There are more exit options available for both venture- and PE-backed, as well as bootstrapped, startups. Market your leadership. To the extent we’re assuming changes to productivity metrics, what plans have we put in places to achieve them? A crop of new startups enter to seize on that opportunity. You must win.

Software Review 108

Software Review Systems Review Sales Hiring Headcount 108

User Pilot

MAY 30, 2024

Eric Ries is a name synonymous with innovation and startup success. As an entrepreneur, author, and advisor, Eric has transformed the way businesses approach building products and launching startups with his Lean Startup methodology. Eric Ries is an entrepreneur, author, advisor, and the creator of the Lean Startup methodology.

Innovation 85

Innovation Startup AI Government 85

SaaSX

AUGUST 9, 2020

Strategic planning is an area that many startup leadership teams struggle with. It can also be tweaked easily to adapt to any startup culture. You can do this with your executive leadership team (your direct reports). Review key internal metrics. First, what is strategic planning? Step 2: Discuss.

Startup 59

Startup Systems Review Leadership Communication 59

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 16, 2023

Expand each letter below for more M - Metrics When seeking to partner with a financial institution, you will need to provide quantifiable metrics—a clear P&L business case—on how your product can benefit your buyer and what ROI they can expect from purchasing the product. With compelling metrics, of course!)

Scale 100

Scale Software Sales Generative AI 100

ChurnZero

MARCH 17, 2022

As a follow-up to our well-attended webinar on “ The startup’s guide to Customer Success ” with Jennifer Chiang (the author of the book by the same name), we wanted to get more of our audience’s questions answered. The startup’s guide to CS – Q&A part 2. Do you survey customers to determine?

Customer Success 97

Customer Success Technical Review Leadership Systems Review 97

Natalia Luneva

NOVEMBER 11, 2020

Today I interview Cynthia Del’Aria and we talk about leadership in the SaaS world. How Cynthia came up with the idea of a startup incubator. She is currently on the verge of starting a new FinTech startup which will be her fifth but she has built close to 100 startups for other people over the years.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach New CTO Leadership CTO 52

Payrix

MAY 14, 2024

What metrics are used to demonstrate a software company’s strength and success? When it comes to metrics, there is a distinction between the data that a CRO is tracking day-to-day operationally and what they are talking about at the board level. And the other one is NRR and LTV. I think it was like 105.

Payments 147

Payments Payment Services Payment Solutions SaaS Payments 147

User Pilot

JULY 13, 2022

Startup product managers will learn a lot from the Review – blog from the First Round. The Reforge blog helps product managers with topics like analytics , team management and development, product leadership , or product strategy. OpenView Venture Partners’ blog offers insights into the financial side of running a startup.

Technical Review 88

Technical Review Management Leadership Systems Review 88

SaaStr

DECEMBER 23, 2022

Last month, more employees were laid off from startups on @cartainc platform than left their jobs by choice. Well, other than perhaps the most important metrics of all IMHO — hiring freezes. For every article you read about layoffs, far more startups are just freezing or way slowing down hiring. For now, at least.

Startup 195

Startup Cloud Data Metrics 195