SaaStr

JULY 14, 2022

What started as a simple WordPress blog in 2012 has now become the world’s largest community of SaaS executives, founders, and entrepreneurs. And SaaStr Europa brings 2,500+ SaaS execs, founders, and VCs together to Europe every summer. We were the first major SaaS event back in the SF Bay Area. SaaStr is turning 10!

Scale 312

Scale Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO 312

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2024

Some are decades-old problems, while others have emerged from this new world we’re in. GTM Mistake #1: A VP of Sales That Can’t Sell or Demo the Product Mistake number one has always been an issue, and it’s the number one reason startups struggle in today’s world. They hire a VP of Sales who doesn’t want to sell or learn the product.

CTO Hire 211

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO Venture Capital 211

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

As a founder, you’ll just run out of time to properly manage key customers and partners yourself. Hire that person, and make sure they are someone the top customers can really trust and count on. “That it was much easier to do more in order to keep that customer than to get a new “top” customer.

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CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 328

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

Just like filing your income tax returns or hanging that state-mandated safety poster up in your break room, sales tax is a back-office pain point, not a profit center. . That makes sales tax compliance easy to ignore… until it becomes a problem. . Why is sales tax such a pain for SaaS companies? There are a few reasons.

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Merchant Services Technical Review Scale Sales Hiring 199

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. Which role should you hire for first? For starters, your first hire should be someone who can complement your skills, someone who is strong in areas where you’re weak, but it goes much deeper than that. And for good reason.

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Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 264

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 18, 2025

Before that, he was the first non-founder seller at three startups, turning early traction into a repeatable sales motion. Discussed in this Episode: When to hire your first account executives Key traits to look for in early sales hires Structuring compensation for first sales reps Should you ‘hire the buyer’ to be your sales rep?

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Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale VP of Engineering 89

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Since 2010 we’ve seen more startups, funds, and capital than ever before, but with this drastic increase, investors are seeing unexpected new trends reshaping the future of the industry. The panel that we are in is called Is Seed the New Series A, and this is a question that I’ve been asking informally yesterday and today.

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New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 173

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 18, 2012

Continuing my little series using the "minimum viable" approach , here is my 2nd DO for SaaS startups: Build the right team I've written about the topic before, so if you've read this post from early this year most of what I'm going to write now won't be new for you and you may want to skip this article. What comes next?

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Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup Outsourced Development 121

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. We have someone that probably 98 percent of you know virtually or socially in some sense, Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!

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Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 296

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. Pete was a Google Associate Product Manager for AdSense and launched Google App Engine. First, hire a management coach to work with you as the company grows. These were some of the things I learned from Pete.

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CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 113

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

Last night I read this question on Quora : In general terms, what is the ideal size and make-up of a team for a pre-revenue SaaS startup? I do have a slight preference with respect to the team size as well, but it's light because I've seen and worked with very successful SaaS startups with different team sizes.

CTO Hire 106

CTO Hire Startup Sales Hiring New CTO 106

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Confused about trying to understand SaaS roles? SaaS companies have many moving parts, and it can be difficult to determine who does what. TL;DR SaaS, or “Software as a Service,” is a business model that delivers centrally hosted software to subscribers over the internet. What is a SaaS business model?

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Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

Last year, the message was that it’s harder, so what is the theme for many SaaS companies this year? SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin shares his take on the current SaaS landscape midway through 2024 and what might be coming next in 2025 at the opener to this year’s SaaStr Europa. Just build. UiPath saw a huge drop of 30%.

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CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 147

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

They have service and all this, but the second cloud for them was sales. And it really makes no sense because I’ve asked so many of the best SaaS CEOs that are public how to go multi-product. They wanted to sell the Amplitude product, I forget, to sales or somebody else, and that was their mistake.

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Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 243

Outseta

APRIL 11, 2019

Why most SaaS companies are blind to some of the best talent on the market By Geoff Roberts 9 min read I believe that most SaaS companies are missing out of a major opportunity when hiring—the opportunity to hire more part-time help, where the employee acts as a fully integrated (albeit part-time) member of the team on an ongoing basis.

CTO Hire 52

CTO Hire Sales Hiring B2B New CTO 52

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

As a global technology provider powering thousands of SaaS companies, Google is at the forefront of driving exciting and innovative technologies to market. You’ll also learn how leading SaaS companies are able to scale and thrive in this complex, dynamic environment. Who’s here on a CEO or more on a business hat SaaS?

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Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 173

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

For Slack, that was clearly the engineering and dev communities, who love new tools. They love new ways of working and were happy to bring Slack into their functional teams and say, “Let’s experiment with this new way of working.” And it was very successful. Product can do a huge amount there.

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Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 216

SaaStr

JANUARY 14, 2020

What sets apart some of the most successful, high-growth companies we see today—Slack, Dropbox, Atlassian—has been their ability to tap into and master a new GTM strategy: B2C2B. We saw inside the company this tension between our classroom business and this new B2C digital business, and we knew we had to make a decision.

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B2B B2C Scale New CTO 158

SaaStock

MARCH 29, 2019

Which is why you should sign up for the 2 for 1 Insider Sale and get two people for the price of one. Don’t overextend your resources when testing new SaaS growth ideas. Here is what he writes: Kieran Flanagan , VP of marketing at HubSpot, shared some interesting insights on approaching new ideas for scaling up your business.

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Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Social Media 103

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 11, 2019

Pricing is an incredibly important part of any SaaS product’s go-to-market strategy. At Hired, we started out with a transactional model that was—at the time—a super disruptive approach and one of our key differentiators. I’ve had roles in almost every function from sales to product to customer success. Customers called us.

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Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Technical Review 45

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

As a SaaS business, Intercom is a data processor: our customers entrust us with their data, which we store and process on their behalf. Continuous risk management. Hiring and cultivating incredible talent on our Information Security team. Shipping quickly and securely. Evolving security landscape.

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Data CTO Hire Technical Review Scale 118

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2020

If you missed episode 130, check it out here: Turning Junior-level Talent into Top Sales Professionals with Eddie Baez. Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Sales enablement is easy. REGIE uses artificial intelligence to create entire outbound inbound, and even follow-up sales campaigns faster. We’re on iTunes.

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Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 110

OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

A Couple SaaS Generations Ago… Traditional software companies managed sales, product development, finance and HR in siloed organizations by function. Cross functional management was attempted but often not effective. In the early SaaS days, management structure was essentially the same.

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Part-Time CTO CTO CTO Hire Management 69

ProfitWell

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

RevOps is a centralized function that helps recognize and align revenue from sales, marketing, and customer success. RevOps isn’t new—some form of revenue operations has been around for a very long time, it simply lacked a title. RevOps is one of the fastest growing job titles in the SaaS world. Michael Klett. Back to RevOps.

CTO Hire 98

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 98

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Major challenges facing a new CEO [19:40]. Sales enablement is easy: all you have to do is create perfectly targeted content, stay informed on email best practices, drive more engagement quarter over quarter, spend less money, and do all of this with less time. We’re on iTunes.

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Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach Scaling 117

User Pilot

MARCH 7, 2024

So I talked to several female leaders in SaaS – about their experience with breaking into leadership positions in tech startups – what challenges they’ve faced, and how they managed to overcome them. It was an iPad interactive brochure and sales tool for sales centres. Sima Banijamali – Sr.

Technical Review 105

Technical Review CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire 105

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 5, 2022

In today’s data-driven SaaS scene, these can affect hundreds of millions of users and cause damage in the billions of dollars, and as compliance frameworks become requirements to do business, businesses are turning to third-party services that can help expedite and facilitate the process. Liam: The whole area is a new space.

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Scale Software Review compliance Technical Review 212

Upscope

JANUARY 5, 2020

10 companies show you their positioning strategy How Superhuman achieved positioning by creating an engine Upscope's SaaS positioning lesson? It’s the underpinning of your go-to-market strategy and impacts everything from marketing to sales, to customer success and the product itself. through the marketing mix. "

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Strategy Marketing Sales Hiring Engineering 128

Point Nine Land

APRIL 9, 2021

Over the last few years, we’ve published a number of SaaS funding napkins as well as marketplace napkins. So if you’re a US-based startup, you might be able to shoot slightly higher ;) Unlike SaaS companies which have been around for years, B2B marketplaces are a relatively new category and not many investors have invested in them yet.

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Marketplace as a Service Payments B2B SaaS Payments 59

Outseta

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

There’s typically direct responsibility for revenue performance, although the marketer’s impact on a business’ bottom line is less cut-and-dry than their counterparts in sales. The process of building trust in a consulting capacity really focuses on the sales process. What will be delivered, and over what timeline?

Sales Hiring 50

Sales Hiring CTO Coach CTO Hire Underperforming Technical Team 50

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

That’s what David Apple—customer success and sales guru at Notion— is asking. Along with: What’s the ROI of your customer success manager? The question is not whether a CSM is a valuable asset to a SaaS business, but rather, how valuable are they? How many CSMs should you hire? What’s the return on investment of your mom?

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Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

Chart Mogul

JULY 1, 2020

Simply put, you conduct customer discovery interviews before launching a new product, or whenever you want to discover potential customers. After missing the mark on product/market fit for their first startup, the founders decided to find a new business idea and validate it with potential customers. Click To Tweet.

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Interviewing B2B Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 76

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. More and more people are hiring leaders, not for past experience, but for capability and capacity. We hire a third-party firm.

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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. Today, a lot of the PLG SaaS tools require sales motion upfront because nobody understands those tools. Those types of tools actually require work in the initial days of the sales motion. That’s the success.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

ProfitWell

OCTOBER 1, 2019

When HubSpot first launched its culture code, Dharmesh Shah, CTO and Founder of HubSpot, felt it was important to share it with candidates. However, making the culture code public prompted a very important journey for HubSpot that helped employees become more accountable. Mistake 6) Mismanaging your people managers.

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Company Culture Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 40

Chart Mogul

JULY 1, 2020

Simply put, you conduct customer discovery interviews before launching a new product, or whenever you want to discover potential customers. After missing the mark on product/market fit for their first startup, the founders decided to find a new business idea and validate it with potential customers. Tweet this quote.

Interviewing 52

Interviewing B2B Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 52

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2020

Brendon introduces his playbook to hiring the first VP of Sales from his experiences as VP of Sales at LinkedIn, EchoSign, Talkdesk and more. Learn the dos and don’ts to make the correct hire the first time and not rush into hiring the wrong VP of Sales, which can cost the company months or even years.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire Scale 223