SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2020

317: Rachel Hepworth is VP of Marketing @ Pilot, the startup that offers the best bookkeeping, tax and CFO services for growing businesses. Before Slack, Rachel spent 4 years at LinkedIn where she led the product marketing team for content experiences. But basically about 15 years ago, I was out of school.

SMB 180

SMB Scale Startup Marketplace as a Service 180

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

Source 16 Startup Metrics by Jeff Jordan, Anu Hariharan, Frank Chen, and Preethi Kasireddy, a16z We have the privilege of meeting with thousands of entrepreneurs every year, and in the course of those discussions are presented with all kinds of numbers, measures, and metrics that illustrate the promise and health of a particular company.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SaaS 52

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 18, 2019

They didn’t know it at the time, but they had also created an entire business category: an on demand, short-term rental marketplace, which has shot the value of their business north of $38 billion. This is episode six of Scale , a brand new podcast series on moving from startup to scale up. Focus on people, not just product.

Scale 112

Scale Sales Recruiting Marketplace as a Service Sales Hiring 112

Point Nine Land

APRIL 21, 2021

5 Lessons learned from growing a PM team in a hyper-growth startup Starting to feel the pain of not having product managers? Since then, I have been leading Uberall product team, which we’ve scaled from 3 people to 12 people over the past 5 years. In SaaS vs. marketplaces? Intro Hi, my name is Victor. How is it working?

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring Startup Scale Software Review 52

FastSpring

MARCH 27, 2023

It really took a few pivots, and even name changes to get just the go to market efforts and product market fit right. And I just started a consulting business, it was a service business. on just how to bucket the messaging from our product marketing perspective. Before seeing good success in the company.

Payment Solutions 95

Payment Solutions Payment Services SaaS Payments VP of Engineering 95

Chart Mogul

JUNE 23, 2022

SaaS startup growth has taken a hit as well as we noted. In the SaaS world, that means the consumer-facing apps & marketplace SaaS have a tougher time ahead. Yes, SaaS Startup Growth Is Slowing Down by Sid Jain, ChartMogul Operating During a Downturn by David Sacks, Craft Ventures What Is a Recession & Are We in One Now?

SaaS 52

SaaS DevOps as a Service Marketplace as a Service Forecasting 52

Casey Accidental

OCTOBER 27, 2020

In part two of our Sequencing Business Models series , we talked about the different types of marketplaces and what needs to be built to be effective in each of them. This builds on the first essay in the series of how there has been an increase in interest of SAAS-like models interested in becoming marketplaces over time.

Payments 56

Payments Business Model Payment Solutions SaaS Payments 56

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 13, 2018

It’s easy to connect the dots between mission and product when you consider the social media behemoth’s more than 2 billion worldwide users. 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.

Scale 151

Scale Marketplace as a Service Mobile Sales Hiring 151

FastSpring

APRIL 13, 2023

We just didn’t build a product; we built a platform out of the gate,” Justin said. When launching a startup or adding a new product, common advice is to start with a minimum viable product (MVP). It starts with self service. Startups are all about breakages. We hit it pretty hard.

Payment Methods 124

Payment Methods Marketing Payments SaaS Payments 124

OpenView Labs

JUNE 16, 2020

Related: The Recession Planning Framework for SaaS Startups. Experimenting with product/market fit. Experiment with product/market fit. As the marketplace shifts, new constraints are giving rise to new opportunities. The best companies are refining their product to meet customers where they are today.

Sales Hiring 54

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Underperforming Technical Team 54

A Smart Bear

FEBRUARY 26, 2019

Startup strategy is like Kung Fu. All startups are screwed up. HT Mike Maples Jr ) Corollary: A startup has to be so excellent at one or two key things, that they can screw up everything else up and not die. Sometimes that’s airtight product/market it. Selling to the mid-market is hard. This is my style.

Underperforming Technical Team 64

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 64

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2019

Befofe that Manny was a Senior Product Manager @ Amazon where he engineered the compensation system for Amazon Associates and Web-Services which accounts for 15% of Amazon’s traffic. 293: Congratulations you’ve built a product that’s proven itself in the marketplace! Loving our podcast content?

Scale 142

Scale Sales Hiring Construction Education 142

Sales Hacker

APRIL 16, 2018

3) A career in sales and marketing [3:30]. 6) Flipping the framework from startup to scale-up [8:45]. 9) Sales and marketing alignment [21:35]. At GLG, Jess launched and built three new businesses, professional services, life science, and corporate markets that resulted in over $100 million in incremental revenue.

VP of Engineering 67

VP of Engineering Revenue Scale Sales Recruiting 67

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2019

On one half of it you have product market fit and on the other half you have partners and ideally developers integrating in order to reach your users. The platform flywheel, the basics of it are you have a product that suddenly has market fit, you have customers who are joining that product. Vicki Lin: Yeah.

Payments 120

Payments Scale Scaling Revenue 120

Chargify

AUGUST 17, 2017

Note: For the purposes of this specific post, the tactics presented are targeted to established SaaS companies that have already verified product/market fit and experienced initial traction. If your SaaS startup isn’t there yet, you should read Finding Product/Market Fit: When To Stand Firm & When To Pivot first.

Scale 53

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Artificial Intelligence 53

SaaStr

JUNE 10, 2020

But one thing I know through pattern recognition, there’s a lot of similarities across startups and companies as they go through the different stages. Second, product market fit. And really our approach to our customers and the market had to pivot immediately. It’s a competitive marketplace.

Travel 176

Travel Marketing Scale Outsourcing Services 176

Unbounce

SEPTEMBER 16, 2021

Across social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Youtube, standard placements for display ads are: Stories Timelines Video feeds Right column (Facebook) Marketplace (Instagram) Explore section Messenger inbox and sponsored messages. Brand awareness can be like a social currency for startups.

Payment Methods 145

Payment Methods Payment Solutions Payments AI Search 145

SaaStr

JUNE 10, 2021

Marten Mickos: We heard here that the cloud business has a combined market cap already of over a trillion dollars. So the whole world of software as a service and cloud has just exploded and will continue to grow enormously. And if we look at the specifics of the word SaaS, software as a service.

Outsourcing Services 140

Outsourcing Services Marketplace as a Service Outsourced Development Scale 140

SmartKarrot

JUNE 25, 2021

No business can survive in the long run without a loyal customer base for its services or products. SaaS leaders need to believe and keep the product in mind to guide customers properly. This book is the basis for the Lean Startup Movement. The models in the book are useful for both SaaS companies and startups.

Development 10

Development SaaS Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service 10

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 16, 2019

The classic example sees a company move from niche startup to mainstream scale-up, but it can also see companies hone their product-market fit by focusing on a more specialized, and yet more lucrative, user base. If your application is a self-service one, focus on content and inbound marketing as your primary source of leads.

Business Model 195

Business Model Scale Pricing Payment Methods 195

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

With any hot topic in the startup world, it’s helpful to start by establishing terms. In this case, Ceci Stallsmith likes Bill Gates’s – a platform occurs when the value of the stuff built on top of your product surpasses the value of your product by itself. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the episode.

Underperforming Technical Team 170

Underperforming Technical Team Marketplace as a Service Outsourced Development Development 170

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2021

Sara Hicks, VP of Product, Commerce @ Mailchimp. Devon Rutherford, Managed Services Program Manager & Pre-Sales Manager @ Leaseweb. Mariela Towers, Head of Marketing @ BEE. Matteo De Renzi, Global Marketplace MD @ GT Gettaxi (Gett). Michael Seibel, YC Partner and CEO of YC’s Startup Accelerator @ Y Combinator.

VP of Engineering 265

VP of Engineering Technical Cofounder CTO Coach CTO Hire 265

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2020

How should startups decide which customer segment to focus on? * How should startups think about implementing partnerships? There was a small startup scene. Rob Gonzalez: And so, a lot of people that were doing computer science in Williamstown were thinking about startups back even in the late nineties.

SaaS Payments 261

SaaS Payments Scale Payment Services Payment Solutions 261

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2021

Michael Seibel, YC Partner and CEO of YC’s Startup Accelerator @ Y Combinator. Katrina Wong, VP Marketing and Demand Generation @ Segment. Asawari Samant, Head of Marketing @ Anyscale. Nicole Culver, Director of Product Marketing, SaaS @ Bandwidth. Jen Taylor, SVP, Chief Product Officer @ Cloudflare.

VP of Engineering 272

VP of Engineering Technical Cofounder CTO Coach CTO Hire 272

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 27, 2019

268: Ryan Bonnici is the CMO @ G2, the company that allows you to get the right software and services for your business with over 897,000 user reviews to help you make smarter buying decisions. Ryan Bonnici: Now if you’re a more consumer focused org then typically marketing will run all of that, right?

Sales Hiring 131

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Software Review 131

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2020

I went into product marketing for the commercial arm of Xerox Park, which is a big computer research company here. Did a lot of consulting for high tech startups, I really love the startup space. When you have a commercial product, you don’t have this two-sided marketplace, where you’re trying to balance both.

Sales Hiring 195

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Review Outsourcing Services 195

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

It’s become apparent that for hypergrowth SaaS startups today, there are two distinct phases. The second stage is treating growth as top of funnel marketing and layering on sales to open up profitable yet harder to reach segments. This is episode four of Scale , a brand new podcast series on moving from startup to scale up.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 2, 2019

Instacart is valued at nearly $8 billion and since joining, he’s helped to make the company’s services available to more than 80% of U.S. Even with Instacart’s enormous valuation, he continues to see tremendous growth potential for the service, similar to what he saw in Instagram’s early days. Thanks for signing up.

Marketplace as a Service 184

Marketplace as a Service B2C PayPal Scaling 184

Unbounce

JUNE 16, 2020

especially for SMB SaaS startups. Today, small and medium SaaS businesses are discovering the power of using partners to help sell their products. These are often built with agencies, consultants, and managed-service-providers (MSPs) in mind. Treat it like a checklist: First, have you achieved some level of product-market fit?

Outsourcing Services 131

Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting Scale SaaS 131

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Check out this 2018 Europa session with Guillaume Princen, Head of France and Southern Europe @ Stripe, where he talks about the metrics you need to be focused on in your startup. It wasn’t the case 20 or even 10 years ago, where the business models of the internet were more focused on eCommerce, marketplaces, or even advertising.

SaaS Payments 237

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 237

User Pilot

OCTOBER 22, 2023

For startups, this is often the story of why your founder was driven to start the business, or how you are differentiated from your competitors in the marketplace. This data may be used for analysis but can also be sent to your CRM or marketing automation software for segmented post-webinar follow-up.

Engagement 100

Engagement SaaS Onboarding Marketplace as a Service 100

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2019

Weiping leads the engineering team as the top software architect for Salesforce Service Einstein, the company’s customer service AI platform. One is, especially at a startup trying to compete against Bay Area offers from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Linkedin, Twitter are, is, is playing to their strengths. Vijay Gill: Oh boy.

Engineering 132

Engineering Part-Time VPE Technical Review Fractional VPE 132

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2019

Before that Manny was a Senior Product Manager @ Amazon where he engineered the compensation system for Amazon Associates and Web-Services which accounts for 15% of Amazon’s traffic. CEOs everywhere are seeking to innovate, but 81% say their teams are not equipped to meet the challenges needed to compete in today’s marketplace.

VP of Engineering 149

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Technical Review Development Team Review 149

User Pilot

JULY 28, 2023

A minimum viable product (often referred to as an MVP) is a version of a product with just enough features to be usable. A form of minimum viable product MVP designed to attract customers up front and raise money to actually build the product prior to launch. Many startups have used this model to get off the ground.

Marketplace as a Service 75

Marketplace as a Service Social Media Development Machine Learning 75

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 19, 2019

During her career, she has worked for a unicorn, a tiny startup, a venture capital and a public company. We asked him for his advice, and he was kind enough to write a guide to the three most important things to address with your executive team before committing to the Enterprise market. A startup environment is ever changing.

VP of Engineering 11

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 11

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2020

When does Karen think is the right time for startups to think about partnerships? But how did you make your way into the world of startups and how did that lead to today being a partner at B Capital? Karen Page: I started my career in sales and marketing. And had the opportunity, my first startup experience was at Prosper.

Scale 173

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Investment Sales Hiring 173

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 12, 2021

Mark has been in and around product marketing and sales for over 30 years. He’s worked at startups and at large Fortune 500 companies. So we do a lot of work where brands or retailers come and say, “Hey, we want to get some free product out into the marketplace and have some folks actually build reviews around it.”

Technical Review 59

Technical Review VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Scale 59