SaaStr

JANUARY 23, 2025

Moving upmarket isn’t just a nice-to-have for most SaaS companies – it’s often the difference between building a sustainable $100M+ ARR business and getting stuck in the mid-market quicksand. Just look at the numbers: Enterprise customers bring 95%+ best-in-class retention vs. 85% in mid-market.

Enterprise 244

Enterprise Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 244

FastSpring

OCTOBER 16, 2024

Luckily, FastSpring isn’t just a payment service provider — we’re a merchant of record, which means you can outsource the entire cross border transaction process to us , and we’ll handle all the complexities that come with it. And typical payment service providers won’t help you with most of those concerns.

Merchant Services 158

Merchant Services Payment Services Payment Methods Outsourcing Services 158

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2024

Now, there’s payroll processing, payments online or in person, recurring billing, and so on — effectively expanding the market and TAM. Mangomint has one onboarding manager for every two sales reps, but with no contracts and a 30-day free trial, onboarding starts during the trial. There will likely be multiple Toasts for SMBs.

SaaS Payments 257

SaaS Payments Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 257

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 22, 2022

For web3 startups to thrive, their marketing teams will need to spend marketing dollars to acquire users efficiently. Existing marketing technology won’t work for web3. Web2 marketing employs the cookie as the primary identifier of a person, not a wallet. Advertisers seek to optimize their marketing funnels.

Marketing 355

Marketing Blockchain Advertising Government 355

Predictable Revenue

AUGUST 15, 2022

Learn why more and more B2B companies are choosing to outsource their sales development reps (SDRs) to grow outbound sales faster. The post Why Are B2B Companies Choosing SDR Outsourcing in 2022? appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

Outsourced Development 165

Outsourced Development B2B Development Sales 165

SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2025

5 Key Learnings from Scaling from 3 to 75 Go-To-Market Team Members in Less Than 12 Months The latest SaaStr CRO Confidential is out and Sam Blond did a great deep dive with Graham Mareno, VP of Worldwide Sales at Codeium. Their product is generating an impressive 45% of developers’ code on average. What is Codeium and Windsurf?

Sales Recruiting 240

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AI 240

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2025

The Numbers That Haven’t Moved in 20 Years Rangan dropped two statistics that should haunt every go-to-market leader: 25-35% The percentage of time sales reps spend actually in front of customers. But here’s the kicker: this isn’t a new problem. It’s been this way for decades. All time-consuming.

Scale 254

Scale AI Underperforming Technical Team Sales 254

TechEmpower SaaS

MARCH 4, 2024

TechEmpower has been instrumental in developing chatbots like these, utilizing generative AI to sift through internal documents and user manuals, enabling them to provide precise answers to customer service questions. It also facilitates rapid prototyping, allowing for quicker iterations and thus shorter development cycles.

Generative AI 443

Generative AI AI CTO Hire Sales Recruiting 443

SaaStr

MARCH 2, 2022

Teams finally have a better way to instrument their marketing stacks and understand customer interaction. Here are some things to consider: Listen to your customers and pay attention to the market signals. . Market demands may force you to shift from your original idea. Do not try to create a category because it’s trendy.

Outsourcing Services 246

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development Marketing 246

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

A great product, while necessary, isn’t sufficient to build a market leader and eventually a public company. Companies that win a market are just as good at Go-to-Market as they are at building great products. But to develop a GTM strategy, you must have Product Market Fit. Without it, you don’t have a business.

Scale 274

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Outsourced Development 274

SaaStr

APRIL 6, 2025

4 Unexpected Learnings from Databricks’ Sales Growth Machine Calendar scraping reveals top performers spend disproportionate time on new prospects – Databricks uses calendar data to track how their best AEs allocate time, discovering that overachievers focus on prospect development over existing accounts.

Scale 200

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Outsourced Development 200

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 20, 2023

I think of marketing teams as hedge funds. Marketing teams develop a portfolio of different strategies to acquire leads. Some days, content marketing works. Big Data, DevOps, microservices, AI, data contracts. A post challenging like this one hits HackerNews or a journalist covers the company. What are LLMs?

Marketing 230

Marketing Outsourced Development Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 230

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Developers act, think, and behave differently than your average customer. So selling, marketing and supporting them should be different too. As an API-first company, WorkOS focuses on selling primarily to developers. Doing Business with Developers. Anyone who says the developer market is not strong is behind the times.

Underperforming Technical Team 210

Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Development Part-Time VPE 210

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

25x’d Revenue and Crossed $100M ARR Apollo.io, an all-in-one go-to-market platform, underwent a significant transformation in its business model that led to remarkable growth. CEO Tim Zheng came to SaaStr Annual to share the deep dive on the journey from SLG to PLG here: Initial Challenges and Market Position In 2019, Apollo.io

Scale 161

Scale Scaling Outsourced Development Sales 161

Clouded Judgement

AUGUST 16, 2024

Some critics argue that it's deflationary—that by making it possible to do more with less, GenAI will shrink markets, particularly in software. And that shift will dramatically expand the size of software markets (and the equity value created). As software grows as a percentage, I think we see headcount / outsourcing shrinking.

Outsourcing Services 276

Outsourcing Services Cloud Software Outsourced Development 276

SaaStr

APRIL 15, 2025

With 17 years of venture capital experience, Ethan began his career in consumer investing before pivoting to B2B, where he developed particular expertise in developer platforms and B2B software. Current State of Early-Stage Venture Market The early-stage venture landscape has experienced significant shifts since the peaks of 2021.

Technical Review 157

Technical Review Venture Capital Outsourced Development AI 157

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2021

It was founded way back in 2005 as an outsourcing company, then developed Windows software to automate scripts and more, and turned this into a powerhouse for automating complex functions integrating Cloud and on-prem. 2005: Started as a tech outsourcing company. 1,409 employees in sales and marketing, out of 2,863 total.

Outsourcing Services 362

Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Payment Features Cloud 362

SaaStr

APRIL 21, 2023

Now, he has five more marketing strategies that are sure to generate more leads if done right. If you aren’t spending money on marketing, it’s time to step it up. Most SaaS companies don’t spend enough on marketing, and that’s a mistake best avoided. You’ll likely get an email back and a double-digit connect rate.

Outsourcing Services 259

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development Marketing 259

SaaStr

JUNE 5, 2025

The New Rules of AI Investing: Why Speed Beats Strategy and Labor Budget Is the New Software Budget The pace of AI advancement has fundamentally broken our traditional frameworks for thinking about technology adoption, market timing, and competitive moats. “Markets used to tap into just software budget.

Software Review 248

Software Review Technical Review AI Development Team Review 248

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2024

To get the most efficiencies out of their marketing team and resources, Gorgias puts a big emphasis on using only high-quality data that they audit regularly. When they outbounded a prospect with an intent or predictive signal, the dollars per contract average were 3-4x higher than those with no signal. From there, strategy comes in.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Hiring Strategy Marketing 273

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2025

ARR (already doubling the old “best in class” annual benchmark) Median : $700K ARR Bottom quartile : $500K ARR The top performers are starting to pull away significantly, suggesting they’ve cracked something fundamental about product-market fit that others haven’t. By month 6: Top quartile : $2.0M

AI 130

AI Enterprise Startup Benchmarks 130

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2024

Dave Gerhardt was VP Marketing at Drift, acquired for $1B, and then Privy, acquired for $100m, and now runs a great CMO/VPM community called Exit Five. Lemkin expresses concern about the changing work ethic and loyalty of sales and marketing professionals, observing a trend of multiple job-holding and lack of commitment.

Sales Hiring 293

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Technical Review Scale 293

Tom Tunguz

MAY 15, 2022

The y-axis is sales efficiency: a proxy for product-market fit (PMF). The company likely needs 1-2 quarters to develop a product and then 2 quarters to book business. Time to Strategize : with a long runway but lacking product-market fit, the startup possesses the resources to scale. Markets reverse in a moment.

Startup 355

Startup Outsourced Development Scale Banking 355

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2020

When they launched, their vision of eliminating email through task management made big waves in the market. Today, the company is a massively successful SaaS business and another example of the flywheel business model that creates demand at the individual user and leverages that interest to sell department and company-wide contracts.

Payment Solutions 363

Payment Solutions Payments Outsourced Development Payment Services 363

SaaStr

DECEMBER 16, 2022

Rippling entered a mature, highly competitive market, found a need gap, and worked to address it. Outbound marketing to investors and potential users is an essential growth driver, especially in the early stages of business growth. Scaling your go-to-market efforts. Leveraging other initiatives and channels beyond outbound.

Outsourcing Services 282

Outsourcing Services Scale Sales Hiring Outsourced Development 282

SaaStr

OCTOBER 21, 2021

First to Market? But even if you are late to market, that can still work if you ride changes in the market. Markets don’t stay static. Dominating the market. Marketo, Eloqua, Hubspot, ExactTarget, Pardot, Silverpop, and so many others had great exits in marketing automation. Product-market fit.

Outsourcing Services 313

Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Startup Product Marketing 313

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

I’m referring to the full spectrum of business execution, from product management to design to engineering to marketing to sales to support and all the other functions needed to scale a business. are making it easier and faster for software developers to develop complex software applications atop this infrastructure.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

MAY 9, 2025

The marketing site looked like a flashback to 2018. To fully rebuild trust, they need to: Maintain this new momentum with regular meaningful updates Improve their core platform stability issues Revamp their customer support processes Demonstrate they’ve truly changed their approach to product development But we’re back.

Social Media 173

Social Media Outsourced Development Interviewing Retention 173

SaaStr

APRIL 18, 2023

First to Market? Product-market fit. You have to find a product the market wants to buy. You can outsource development. You have to be able to build, ship, market, and sell your product. They are just all-in, 100% committed, and work harder, sell harder, and importantly, hire better than the rest.

Outsourcing Services 283

Outsourcing Services Startup Outsourced Development Technology 283

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2024

1: Don’t Outsource Recruiting Founders and sales leaders often ask Sam, “Which external recruiting firm do you recommend for sourcing and hiring sales leaders, AEs, or whatever the hire-of-the-day is?” Founders think outsourcing recruiting will: Save them time Find them the best candidates Sam believes both of those things are wrong.

Sales Recruiting 290

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 290

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

This function can be outsourced in the early days of a startup, but it is usually brought in-house after Series B. The team is typically highly cross-functional, working together with sales, product, engineering, and marketing, and the goal is to help the other teams make better decisions through data and financial modeling.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

But I almost never see mediocre outsource SEO really work for B2B. Ash Bhoopathy (@ashbhoopathy): What the key things are to have to absolutely make sure you have in-house versus nowadays it seems like there’s a whole bunch that you can actually outsource? Experiments are great to outsource, but you cannot outsource your core.

Scale 293

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 293

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

Tips: to manage OKRs, and KPIs with ease with Kashinath Kadaba Shrish, Cofounder & CTO at Fitbots Leveraging new age AI technologies(GPT and NLP) to increase Organic Traffic using Scalenut with Saurabh Wadhawan, CoFounder at Scalenut What are the best marketing channels for SaaS B2B businesses?

VP of Engineering 293

VP of Engineering Technical Cofounder Outsourcing Services CTO Coach 293

Tom Tunguz

JULY 8, 2021

Asset acquirers - these include brokerages, custodial and non-custodial wallets, banks, asset managers, hedge funds, market makers, and lenders. Many in this group attract investors/users with high interest rates for deposits, which are funded by lending assets to other market participants. Smart contracts are open-source.

Outsourced Development 267

Outsourced Development Marketplace as a Service Banking Construction 267

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 1, 2021

A company with this architecture will map out the customer journey sufficiently well to develop proxy metrics , leading indicators of customer behavior. A data scientist might develop a churn prediction algorithm. Data like customer contracts, contact history, event attendance, product usage. Should a sales person call them?

Data 363

Data Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning SaaS 363

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 19, 2021

implies a 17 month payback period with a contract size of $55k, but the S-1 suggests the enterprise part of the business has been an important focal point. The significant delta in the figures suggest customers pre-pay their contracts often. The sales efficiency of 0.67

Metrics 315

Metrics Outsourced Development Scale Cloud 315

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2020

But New Relic has continued to scale, crossing $650,000,000 in ARR (or so) and a $4B market cap. New Relic has aggressively re-entered the long tail segment of the market with up to 100G/month of usage for free, which has led to 10x the sign-ups of before, when the cost was $2k. It can be a bit scary to move from fixed contracts.

Scale 341

Scale Outsourced Development SMB Cloud 341