SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

We did it by focusing on second-order revenue to generate low-cost leads, and by taking in 110%+ of our MRR each month in cash. 5/ Moving from CTO-led -> VPE-led dev team. This is pretty well understood today, but was fairly new to me. Field vs. mid-market vs SMB early. Less and you under-invest. More here.

Part-Time VPE 286

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 286

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shared with us how they got there — and the top mistakes they made — just 3 quarters after their IPO. You will fail if you: 1) try to build a suite of products out of the gate, 2) focus solely on SMBs, or 3) have an MBA. This is the revenue growth for HubSpot leading up to the IPO.

Part-Time VPE 283

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 283

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

It’s too much to learn on the fly for most new VPs of Sales. So, as leaders, you have to start from scratch and hire new people who weren’t trained in horrible ways or hire people who have been around long enough to know that sales are hard and deals can take six months to close. They wanted a one-call close.

CTO Hire 242

CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 242

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

Many people are doing great, even private companies like Netskope, which are growing over 30% at $500M in revenue. Canva is growing at 40% and has a revenue of $2.3B. Klaviyo is growing 42% at $750M, coming up on a billion in revenue, and number one in the Shopify ecosystem. Samsara is growing 39% at $1.1B. What happened?

CTO Hire 141

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 141

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

Nikos : In your case, I understand your company also shifted slightly on the market, like from SMB to bigger customers. As you said, people take it hard if suddenly you say, “Hey, this is your new EVP. X amount of revenue, X amount of churn, X amount of growth in marketing, etc. Craig : Yeah. That’s it.”

Sales Hiring 258

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 258

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Gaetan Gachet : All right, so usually the way I start this session is I ask the crowd which revenue stage they’re in. So when I joined we’re pretty much pre-revenue. So up to 100-150K and SMB, we’re at 2K. For instance, my first rep from Marketo, he was the first rep at Marketo in New York. One and 10?

Scale 141

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 141

Payrix

OCTOBER 1, 2024

addresses this shift by expanding its scope to include 64 new requirements that specifically target eCommerce vulnerabilities. These new requirements cover various aspects of security, including phishing protection, multi-factor authentication, vulnerability scanning, and more. There’s 64 new requirements in total.

Payment Services 113

Payment Services Merchant Services Payments compliance 113

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

Jason Lemkin: 50 reps in a new city that you’ve never met, and hired in 60 days when you’re in the low millions ARR. Henry Schuck: And instead of doing that, I think … I had a good senior VP of revenue. Do you segment enterprise and SMB? And guess what happened to all those mistakes, they were terrible.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 246

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 21, 2020

SMB Sales & SDRs at (Smaller) Scale [18:20]. Although our firm is based in Silicon Valley, I’m based on the East Coast so I spend a lot of time working with founders in New York City, Boston, and London. We were part of the office of the CTO. SMB Sales & SDRs at (Smaller) Scale [18:20]. Sam’s Corner [41:10].

Payment Methods 60

Payment Methods Scale CTO Coach SMB 60

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

Additionally, “leapfrog” candidates—those who come from a level below the C-suite, such as senior vice presidents—now make up roughly 5% of new chief execs. We had to say: what does SMB want? I would also encourage you as a new executive to have a separate executive coach. What does the sub-100 (emerging) want?

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

If you're generating something that's brand new, like a brand new category, nobody understands about it. In my past roles at ACORN, GitLab, whenever I started as a head of growth, one of the data points I will look into is what's the percentage of new users coming back the second day or coming back second month?

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2024

Investors should immediately engage with the CTO to assess their technical capabilities and potential, as great CTOs can demonstrate their exceptional skills quickly. The Qualities of Great CTOs (00:15:54) To identify great CTOs, it may take interviewing 20 candidates.

CTO Hire 285

CTO Hire Development Team Review Software Review Technical Review 285

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

362: The Future of the Customer with Bernadette Nixon, CEO @ Algolia, Jay Snyder, Chief Customer Officer @ New Relic, and Nick Mehta, CEO @ Gainsight. Nick Mehta: On a boat in Rhode Island and then our second guest Jay Snyder, who just recently took over as Chief Customer Officer of New Relic, publicly traded SaaS company.

Payment Methods 263

Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 263

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

Erica Schultz is Chief Revenue Officer @ New Relic, the company that gives you the real time insights your software driven business needs to innovate faster. Prior to their IPO, New Relic raised over $214m in funding from some of the best in the business including Benchmark, Insight Venture Partners and Blackrock, to name a few.

Scale 206

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 206

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

Are marketing becoming the new sales team with their content being used more and more in the sales funnel? Does it have to be tied to a number related to revenue? Bret was formerly the CTO at Facebook. * How does Sam think about the relationship between sales and marketing? How should the success of marketing be measured?

Scale 240

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 240

SaaStr

MAY 2, 2019

And then the sale will commence as far as the people and this was, we were multiple millions of dollars of revenue until I took the first call. So look, again, we were, the product was out there, we were at revenue in our case. Vlad: So what’s the new reality? So we needed to kind of get the new mindset going. Vlad : No.

Scale 199

Scale Business Sales Hiring CTO Hire 199

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2025

The All-Team Roadmap Rule : Neo4j discovered that involving every team member in roadmap prioritization and ensuring everyone gets at least one priority item per release cycle increased adoption of new features by 47%. At SaaStr Annual Neo4j’s CTO Philip Rathle shared their playbook for scaling from $0 to the first $100M.

Scale 248

Scale New CTO CTO Scaling 248

OnStartups

JULY 7, 2021

Is your title CTO? Dharmesh: Yes, CTO. Because the temptation is always once you start having customers and revenues are growing, things like that, is just to kind of, what we call drag the spreadsheets. And then I met Brian in grad school and we both have this kind of shared passion for SMB. So this is Dharmesh.

Payment Methods 140

Payment Methods Technical Review Software Review Payment Solutions 140

OnStartups

JULY 7, 2021

Is your title CTO? Dharmesh: Yes, CTO. Because the temptation is always once you start having customers and revenues are growing, things like that, is just to kind of, what we call drag the spreadsheets. And then I met Brian in grad school and we both have this kind of shared passion for SMB. So this is Dharmesh.

Payment Methods 40

Payment Methods Technical Review Software Review Payment Solutions 40

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 10, 2024

Highlights: (08:58) Building the first SaaS product and transitioning to recurring revenue. (14:58) 35:30) Optimal team structures for SMB sales organizations. (52:25) Highlights: (08:58) Building the first SaaS product and transitioning to recurring revenue. (14:58) 35:30) Optimal team structures for SMB sales organizations. (52:25)

Scale 112

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling CTO Coach 112

SaaStr

JULY 19, 2019

Previously, Peter was also the CTO/CIO of CBS Interactive where he brought CBS into the cloud. At Sun, Peter was the CTO of the Liberty identity consortium that designed SAML 2. In terms of timing, how should entrepreneurs think about whether to start at SMB and move to enterprise or start enterprise and move to SMB?

VP of Engineering 150

VP of Engineering CTO Hire Technical Review Sales Hiring 150