SaaStr

MAY 10, 2023

Combining Strong Growth With A New Level of Efficiency. 23% Customer Count Growth Leads to 30% Revenue Growth, but NRR dips to 104% HubSpot is still very much SMB, especially the “M” of SMB. But maintaining 100%+ NRR allows them to grow meaningful faster in revenue than in customer count, even from SMBs.

Scale 322

Scale SMB Headcount New CTO 322

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2023

Mike Wiacek, CEO at Stairwell, Mo Jebrini, CTO at Mashvisor, and Michael Ermolenko, CTO at Inworld.ai, discuss with Helene Ambiana, Global SMB and Startups Marketing Director at Google Cloud, how they overcame the hurdles of scaling and reached their goals. . Build an irreplaceable team . As a team grows, so do the expectations.

Scale 259

Scale CTO Hire Cloud Scaling 259

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

Another top mistake SMB folks make trying to sell enterprise. “That it was much easier to do more in order to keep that customer than to get a new “top” customer. ” — Echeyde Cubillo, Co-founder and CTO, Acme Ticketing. Your key champion might buy just 1 or 2 new products a year.

CTO Hire 325

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 325

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

5/ Moving from CTO-led -> VPE-led dev team. Most of us hire a VP of Engineering to take over from our CTO because we see the CTO is getting burnt out, or has trouble building a dev team > 8-9 folks, or gets disinterested in solving technical debt, bugs, etc. Field vs. mid-market vs SMB early. More here.

Part-Time VPE 293

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 293

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 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. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!

Part-Time VPE 290

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 290

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. It makes sense that that would be the role that comes in as the CTO. Craig : Yeah. That’s it.” What is good?

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 261

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

Growth is still good for them, but they had no net new customers last quarter. HubSpots NRR has fallen to 100%, so to grow 23%, they must add 23% net new customers. Are brand-new companies that seem epic with no revenue really worth $1.5B Maybe if you have the ex-CTO of Github, but that’s still a super speculative bet.

CTO Hire 144

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 144

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

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. The peak of your day starts around 3:00PM because that’s when New York wakes up. Gaetan Gache t: The fact that you’re new is actually becomes a negative. In that case, it was Gap.

Scale 146

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 146

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. And then you keep resources on them because for the next three to six months, you’re taking feedback from customers and feeding it back into that new functionality or that new product.

Sales Hiring 247

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 247

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 63

Payment Methods Scale CTO Coach SMB 63

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? I do that a lot.

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 292

CTO Hire Development Team Review Software Review Technical Review 292

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 268

Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 268

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 210

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 210

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

How does this change when selling to SMBs vs enterprise? * Are marketing becoming the new sales team with their content being used more and more in the sales funnel? Bret was formerly the CTO at Facebook. What measurements should be used to determine their success? How should the success of marketing be measured?

Scale 242

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 242

SaaStr

MAY 2, 2019

And my retort was, for the first year, basically, well they’re the team that’s got my here so I’m going to stick with it, which I did for a year and then we kind of started turning around a little bit and saying, look, yeah, but are we growing as fast as we could be given the new reality of the ground? Vlad: So what’s the new reality?

Scale 201

Scale Business Sales Hiring CTO Hire 201

OnStartups

JULY 7, 2021

Is your title CTO? Dharmesh: Yes, CTO. And then I met Brian in grad school and we both have this kind of shared passion for SMB. And whether they start a new company or not, they sort of live as a user at the edge. How many new people signed up for our service or product in the last 90 days? 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. And then I met Brian in grad school and we both have this kind of shared passion for SMB. And whether they start a new company or not, they sort of live as a user at the edge. How many new people signed up for our service or product in the last 90 days? So this is Dharmesh.

Payment Methods 40

Payment Methods Technical Review Software Review Payment Solutions 40

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 153

VP of Engineering CTO Hire Technical Review Sales Hiring 153

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 253

Scale New CTO CTO Scaling 253

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 16, 2025

That’s why we’re thrilled to back Hammerspace and lead their $100m Series B, the company building a new kind of data platform - a parallel global file system with automated data orchestration for the AI and hybrid cloud era. Their CTO, Trond Myklebust is equally impressive. Hammerspace breaks this lock-in.

Technical Advisors 130

Technical Advisors Scale New CTO Cloud 130

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 10, 2024

35:30) Optimal team structures for SMB sales organizations. (52:25) And that made it a lot easier for me to build the SMB sales motion that we ended up being the core sales motion that we built at Levelset. It’s in New York. The other thing is, I live in New Orleans. I remember there was this podcast.

Scale 114

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling CTO Coach 114