SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2025

But here’s the uncomfortable truth the original convergence narrative missed: these markets ARE competing. growth rate vs. Conquest Numbers Let’s separate the happy convergence talk from the harsh conquest reality: SaaS: The Steady Performer Under Siege $295 billion market in 2025 with 18.4%

AI Search 270

AI Search Artificial Intelligence AI CTO Hire 270

SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2025

This wasn’t just an improvement it fundamentally changed how brands could engage with SMS marketing. Turn Your Customers Into Your Marketing Engine The second breakthrough was making customer success the core growth engine. Because while the payment problem was solved, the marketing side of mobile commerce remained broken.

Technical Review 262

Technical Review Payment Solutions Scale Payment Services 262

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 3, 2020

The 9 Disciplines of Great SaaS Companies remains one of the most popular posts on marketing on this blog. Gabe Larsen , the VP of Growth at Kustomer, has a marketing scorecard that goes one level deeper and breaks down some of the key elements of key marketing processes. Product Marketing is the starting point for marketing.

Underperforming Technical Team 340

Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Scale Social Media 340

SaaStr

JUNE 23, 2025

✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) June 23, 2025 The $10M-$100M ARR Sprint: How Replit Became the Fastest-Growing “Vibe Coding” App (Or One Of The Fastest) A deep-dive into the AI development platform wars and why Replit’s 10x growth in 5.5 And allowing more experienced developer to ship far, far faster. 2023 : $2.4M

Software Review 201

Software Review AI Technical Review Venture Capital 201

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2025

The 40% Problem: How AI Will Finally Fix Sales Coverage and Customer Face Time A wake-up call from HubSpot’s CEO Yamini Rangan on why your sales team is failing 60% of their accountsand how AI will change everything There’s a brutal truth about B2B sales that most founders refuse to acknowledge. Think about that for a moment.

Scale 241

Scale AI Underperforming Technical Team Sales 241

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2025

Fresh data from Ramp’s AI Index suggests that the meteoric rise in business AI spending might be showing signs of deceleration, raising questions about whether we’re witnessing market maturation or beginning to hit a potential adoption ceiling: The numbers tell a nuanced story. While overall AI penetration among U.S.

AI 280

AI Payment Services Payments Scale 280

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2024

Okta’s VP of Engineering, Monica Bajaj, and Senior Director of Platform Product Marketing, Priya Ramamurthi, share Okta’s playbook to PLG, developer experience, and Enterprise ARR. How do you build a stellar developer experience and continue to scale when the user base skyrockets overnight? How do you scale PLG?

Underperforming Technical Team 282

Underperforming Technical Team Enterprise Scale Payments 282

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2025

“Even with a bad hand, if the potential reward is great enough, taking a risk can make mathematical sense.” Market Selection: Tackle Problems with High Barriers to Entry The financial services industry presents massive barriers to entry most successful banks are centenarians, with some like Ax being over 160 years old.

CTO Hire 196

CTO Hire CTO Coach Scale CTO 196

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

How To Build A High-Performing Team And Retain Top Talent. Every leader needs to have a strategic playbook to build high-performing teams and retain top talent,” says Guan Wang, Global Director of Market Intelligence for Snowflake. . Stage 3: Employee Development. People are the most valuable asset of an organization.

Underperforming Technical Team 246

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Acquisition Company Culture 246

SaaStr

AUGUST 31, 2022

Scalability is about capability, so businesses need to understand whether they have the capacity to grow and whether their infrastructure and team can accommodate growth. Once you have solidified your company’s vision and have developed a strategic plan on how you will achieve success, don’t get too comfortable. Creating a category.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Company Culture 246

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2022

From a venture capital perspective, there’s now a premium on driving efficient growth rather than growth at any cost. . “Sales and marketing alignment is a terrific place to figure out and improve efficient growth.” . From the get-go, ensure alignment between sales and marketing teams on goals and anticipated outcomes.

Scale 325

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital Marketing 325

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2025

While competitors invested in huge sales teams, Atlassian actually restricted direct customer interaction. The “Feature Request Arbitrage” Strategy Hidden gem in their marketplace origin: They turned their biggest product weakness (feature request backlog) into their greatest strength.

Sales Recruiting 201

Sales Recruiting Marketplace as a Service Underperforming Technical Team Scale 201

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

You know how everyone says you'll never look and wish you'd kept a bad VP as long as you did? Because to scale, you are going to need to add a true management team, and then a second one, and then layers of management. The fewer weak hires they continue to make. The less they slow down feature development.

Sales Hiring 268

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Underperforming Technical Team 268

SaaStr

MAY 22, 2025

Be prepared to talk about the team youve builtwho you hired, why you hired them, and how they performed. Be ready to share specific examples of how youve developed and executed sales strategies that drove revenue growth. Talk about how youve taken small teams and turned them into revenue machines.

Sales Recruiting 194

Sales Recruiting Interviewing Sales Hiring Scale 194

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2025

Untapped Market Opportunities The obsession with focus has left “undiscovered islands of product-market fit just beyond the horizon line.” Sales Organization Structure Conrad reveals his preference for dedicated sales teams for each product, despite internal disagreement. The advantages are substantial: 1.

Startup 157

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cloud 157

Incredo

MARCH 20, 2020

The Incredo team switched to a fully remote working system in September 2019. At the beginning it was a bit hard to track the progress of tasks and communicate with team members effectively. Since you started working from home, your whole team already saves around 1 hour of their day.

Underperforming Technical Team 227

Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Systems Review Software Review 227

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.

Outsourced Development 210

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 210

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 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 261

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 10, 2020

I hope this post allows people and teams to safely talk about Product Judgment. If you ever had to face a Manager, Director or Exec as they make bad product decisions and you’re struggling to persuade them otherwise, this post will help you. It takes years to build, and therefore ranges from very weak to very strong.

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Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Communication B2B 291

SaaStr

AUGUST 1, 2022

The developed world revolves around e-commerce. In a crowded field, how can SaaS companies prove themselves and shift from being completely irrelevant to their markets to delivering services their market and buyer personas value? Becoming market leaders. Embed innovation into your team’s DNA. Global approach.

Underperforming Technical Team 261

Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Innovation Investment 261

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2022

Have you ever had a sudden realization that you’re spending more on sales and marketing than research and development? If so, you aren’t alone –– the median enterprise SaaS company spends twice as much on sales and marketing than R&D. So how can a CEO manage their marketing effectively? CEOs love models.

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Market Research 261

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2024

Paul Mander currently leads all of go-to-market for B2B at Optery. He previously built the pre and post sales solutions team at mParticle from zero to supporting hundreds of enterprise customers. Is there a lot of internal or customer work that needs to be done or managed by your team? How easy is it to implement your product?

Underperforming Technical Team 118

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring Scale 118

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2023

Management teams must determine how to thrive in a downturn to position their businesses for profitable growth. However, management teams that pursued growth at all costs were punished severely. The right strategy to win means reassessing fundamental issues like the product-market fit and centering on the best ICP. Go to market.

Consulting 49

Consulting Underperforming Technical Team Management Marketing 49

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 24, 2020

There’s a CEO at the top in red, VPs in orange, senior contributors in dark gray, team leads in green, and junior individual contributors in light gray. Sometimes there are directors running teams that should be headed by VPs. Is this so bad? Hiring a large team is necessary, but insufficient.

Startup 312

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling 312

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

Over the years, though, Asthana has learned a lot about what can go wrong while building a market-leading company and how to avoid those missteps before they happen. He also observed that after product-market fit had been achieved, companies would only ever have to worry about marketing and sales. Verify product-user fit.

Underperforming Technical Team 284

Underperforming Technical Team Company Culture Customer Success Product Marketing 284

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

sales team. We ended up capturing 92% of this health care market share within the state of Michigan. I did all sorts of things there from sales, to project management, to running the engineering team, hiring. This is where I got my chops in growing and scaling enterprise sales teams. Want to see more content like this?

Scale 282

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 282

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

To achieve this level of success, startups need a combination of strong financial performance, innovative products or services, and a favorable market environment. Lesson 1: Everything is about your team. Every startup needs strong team dynamics to pull through tough times. Don’t be scared to explore new markets.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 246

Kellblog

AUGUST 31, 2022

To adapt Julius Caesar’s famous opening line of the Gallic Wars : marketing as a whole is divided in three parts. Product marketing (prodmkt), responsible in a word, for the message and how well it resonates with customers in the market [1]. Whether this team should report into sales or marketing is a separate debate.

Underperforming Technical Team 145

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Marketing Startup 145

User Pilot

OCTOBER 31, 2024

A product analytics strategy is essential for any business looking to make informed decisions about product development and user experience. Plus, there are many reasons why you need a product analytics strategy: Aligns product development with user needs and business goals. Improves product-market fit through actionable insights.

Strategy 105

Strategy Underperforming Technical Team Government Customer Lifetime Value 105

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2025

Manage Team Expectations – Balance transparency with the need to keep the team focused on building the business. Different buyers value different aspects of your business – some want your technology, others your team or customer base. Take baby steps, learn as you go, and be realistic about the commitment required.

Technical Review 196

Technical Review Software Review Development Team Review Sales Hiring 196

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

Jesse Paliotto (06:15) That’s that rings so true for me personally, because my I experienced flip of first, I think coming out of like a digital marketing background and probably 10 to maybe 15 years ago where I think at that time and please correct me if I get this wrong, it felt like very much like people were selling their blogs there.

Scale 118

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 118

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

The underperformers who aren’t putting in the effort get a conversation, and if things don’t change, it’s not a good fit. If you look at the number of Sales vs. Marketing. As we recently wrote, every marketing initiative and every channel plateaus. Others are doing little work and not working out. Jameson and Sam agree.

Sales Hiring 280

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 280

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Sometimes it’s VP Sales (OK, often, this is the most common mishire — another post here on what a really great VPS can do for you, and how a poor one can wreck your company, coming). Sometimes it’s VP Marketing. The #1 reason to do a start-up is Career Development. Or VP of Eng, or whatever. Only money.

Sales Hiring 336

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 336

Sales Hacker

JUNE 17, 2025

At Procore, he led all customer-facing functions—Sales, Marketing, CS, RevOps, and BD. But behind every product launch and revenue milestone is a team – and building that team is one of the hardest and important parts of the journey. Product and Go-To-Market. And that’s people.

AI 80

AI Technical Advisors Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 80

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2024

One of the biggest mistakes I see after $1m in trying to enter new market segments, new verticals, where you have zero traction. Then, you’ll have enough folks and experience to put a small team on a new initiative / segment / market. Micromanaging Your First (and Second) Management Team. The “I Give Up” VP Hire.

Scaling 301

Scaling Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Market Segmentation 301

User Pilot

OCTOBER 19, 2024

Satisfaction in SaaS, therefore, isn’t simply about developing a nice product and launching it in the market. For instance, you can launch a CSAT survey after a customer interacts with your support team. Similarly, unhappy customers are more likely to tell others of their poor experience. Userpilot review on G2.

Business 111

Business Underperforming Technical Team Customer Lifetime Value Systems Review 111

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

Do you have two sales teams? Who gets what part of the long-term development budget? Where does marketing allocate its resources? And most importantly, multiple products can be very distracting at the management team level. A second product can’t bail out your sales team. This is a good one.

Underperforming Technical Team 356

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Revenue Acquisition 356