Totango

OCTOBER 14, 2024

A dated focus For years, getting to “product-market fit” was the holy grail. Hit that, and you aren’t even really selling , you’re simply fielding contracts. When the company is focused on customer ROI, Marketing can develop campaigns around that ROI, and sales can qualify prospects based on their need for that return.

Scale

FastSpring

JULY 29, 2025

What Signs to Watch For, and Why ARR + NRR Matters ARR measures your company’s ability to acquire new customers effectively, while NRR provides deeper insight into how well your products continue to deliver value over time. A rising NRR signals genuine product-market fit and customers are expanding services without being pushed.

Merchant Services

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

Google’s like, hey, where’s your offer from whatever recruiter, like maybe a contract recruiter. Like, I don’t know if they’re a developer and they’re, you know, coding in a specific language, you know, developer groups and meetups and things like this. this part of your strategy?

SMB

Valuize Consulting

NOVEMBER 25, 2024

Collaborating with Finance to Develop Models Capturing Short-Term Costs and Long-Term Benefits Payback Period (PP): The Payback Period measures how long it takes for an investment to generate cash flows sufficient to recover its initial cost. This justifies a lower Customer Success Manager (CSM)-to-account ratio for these clients.

Payment Services

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2025

A company finds product-market fit, revenue takes off, and then… the wheels start to wobble. The Traditional SaaS Scaling Trap Most B2B leaders fall into what I call the “efficiency death spiral”: Year 1-2: Product-market fit achieved, early customers acquired cheaply through founder networks and word-of-mouth.

Scale

Sales Hacker

JUNE 6, 2025

Every time we automate a task – prospecting, drafting, follow-up, analysis – we also outsource the skill-building that task enables. Here are several ways we heard from leaders that they’re actively doing to reinforce certain skill development: Manual before automation. CSMs have summaries of every customer call.

AI Search

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2025

Top 5 Takeaways Consumption Revenue Recognition Changes Everything : Unlike traditional SaaS, Snowflake can’t recognize revenue ratably—they only book revenue when customers actually consume credits, even with multi-year contracts. At SaaStr, we’ve seen everything from scaling revenue to product-market fit.

AI

Sales Hacker

JUNE 17, 2025

There are real estate developers. They do their own general contracting. And it gets to market faster and we develop it and we build against it. So you can test a lean AI strategy in something like marketing, but you still need humans. So in construction, there are these owner operators, right? That’s it.

AI

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 3, 2025

At GitHub, primary GTM plays serve as the foundation for not just Revenue, but also Product, Marketing, Finance, and other teams – all internal and cross-functional partners. An annual plan is a living document An annual plan is a hypothesis, not a rigid contract. External partners are just as critical. .

Sales Hiring

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 7, 2025

Fred Viet: The mental model we had, and we are doing expansion as well in other markets currently, is, Always trying to have some early signal. I like what you say about making sure the market is pulling you. and I would say making sure the market is pulling us instead of trying to force too much in this direction.

Outsourcing Services

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2025

For B2B SaaS companies : The war for AI talent isn’t just about building better products—it’s about access to a finite pool of people who understand how to make AI actually work in enterprise contexts. Today’s abundance of capital—and the speed of AI development—creates different incentives.

Artificial Intelligence

Chart Mogul

NOVEMBER 11, 2024

You’ve got to set the timeline for your penetration price, develop your messaging around it to set the right expectations with your customers, and define what happens when it’s time to implement the full price.

Pricing

SaaStr

JULY 24, 2025

” Cursor vs. Lovable: The $28B Question With Cursor approaching $1B ARR and raising at a $28B valuation, the fundamental question isn’t about product-market fit—it’s about platform risk and defensibility. But developers just shut it down when you do one little test and see it’s crazy.

Software Review

Sales Hacker

MAY 20, 2025

But all, all signs to me point to product market fit. Sophie Buonassisi: So product market fit is really that trigger for companies listening, thinking about hiring and bringing on ops. Enrichment gives you an opportunity to understand not only your customer base, but to create and fuel that product market fit.

Engineering

Sales Hacker

MARCH 21, 2025

Inbound requests for larger contracts and enterprise agreements. Prior to Mutiny, Jaleh was the Head of Marketing and Business Development at Gusto, where she grew the company from 500 to 50,000 customers over 4 years. She was the Director of Product Marketing at VMware prior to Gusto. GTMfunds Operator-led model.

Enterprise

Teamgate

JULY 16, 2025

Developer API Documentation, API, Examples, FAQ and more. Developer API Documentation, API, Examples, FAQ and more. " Travis McClure, Chief Operating Officer at ez Home Search Your pipeline should reflect how clients progress in real life, with stages like New Lead, Contacting, Engaging, Qualified, Under Contract, and Closing.

Scale

User Pilot

FEBRUARY 24, 2025

Last 3 professional positions Senior Product Manager Vivun (20222024): Transformed a suite of disparate products into a unified platform, enabling a 25% increase in multi-product contracts. Product Manager Salesforce (20172019): Led a redesign of the headcount tracking software, reducing auditing time by 70%.

Technical Advisors

Tom Tunguz

MAY 15, 2022

The y-axis is sales efficiency: a proxy for product-market fit (PMF). The company likely needs 1-2 quarters to develop a product and then 2 quarters to book business. Time to Strategize : with a long runway but lacking product-market fit, the startup possesses the resources to scale.

Startup

SaaStr

OCTOBER 21, 2021

And $10B Notion took years to get to product-market fit. Product-market fit. You do have to eventually get to a minimum sellable product. You have to find a product the market wants to buy. You can outsource development. It took $26B UiPath a stunning 10 years to get to $1m ARR!

Outsourcing Services

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

with Olivier Adam, Chief Growth Officer at ReferralCandy Successful Scaling Across Markets, Lessons in Marketing & Building GTM with IvyCap’s MP with Ashish Wadhwani, Co-founder and Managing Partner. If you’re already a ticket holder for SaaStr APAC, there are two ways to participate in Braindates.

VP of Engineering

SaaStr

APRIL 18, 2023

Product-market fit. You do have to eventually get to a minimum sellable product. You have to find a product the market wants to buy. You can outsource development. You’re already ahead of 98% of the folks at WeWork and Galvanize if you are 100% committed to doing the time. A Minimum Viable Team.

Outsourcing Services

Tom Tunguz

MAY 23, 2016

Enterprise companies average contract value is greater than $100,000. Mid-market companies span $10,000-$100,000, and SMB companies generate less than $10,000 per year per customer. It is not uncommon for a SaaS company to start in the small to medium business segment and push into the mid-market.

Outsourced Development

Sales Hacker

MARCH 22, 2018

In this article, I will summarize what I’ve learned about B2B sales outsourcing. W hat is Sales Outsourcing? Sales outsourcing gives parts of your own sales process to others (individuals or agencies). Reasons to outsource include: Lack of expertise and experience in some sales functions (e.g. Lead Generation).

Outsourcing Services

SaaStr

AUGUST 2, 2021

But developing solid partnerships takes vision, grit, time and patience. Technology Alliances: The tech alliances offer important integrations, especially critical for ServiceNow’s target market of enterprise customers. This early phase is where you’re still looking for that perfect product-market fit and scaling the product to market.

Outsourcing Services

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

Go-to-Market matters because sales and marketing spend remain the biggest proportion of SaaS spend, so honing in on that spend to build an engine and drive growth is paramount. But to develop a GTM strategy, you must have Product Market Fit. The Early Stage — $0 to $20M ARR The early stage is crucial for GTM.

Scale

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

But I almost never see mediocre outsource SEO really work for B2B. As a tiny startup who might be commercializing its first product, are there any general guidelines that you can stick to that would prevent the massive companies out there from crushing the baby? Experiments are great to outsource, but you cannot outsource your core.

Scale

Tom Tunguz

MAY 1, 2023

Conversations about contracts & pricing are kicked down the road until the customer sees value & the path to capture it. AEs, experts in closing contracts, often focus on reducing sales cycle & maximizing contract value - which aligns with their incentives & compensation plan.

Scale

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 19, 2016

What is the optimal contract length with for your SaaS startup? It’s common to see SaaS startups initially price their products on a monthly basis, then add an enterprise “Call Me” plan which hides behind it an annual contract. Annual contracts bring predictability to a SaaS startup.

Outsourced Development

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2024

It required Lucid to change its product, process, and overall user and administration systems to be able to scale with the customer. It also required them to: Negotiate their first Enterprise customer contract Undergo deep security reviews Once you land your first Enterprise customer, it might be time to build that first sales team.

Scale

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

Q: Should Product Marketing Work for Product or Marketing? Product marketing is a weird art, with many over-indexing. These days, CEOs are looking for too much magic from product marketing. Maybe we expect too much, even up to $10-20M ARR, and expect magic from product marketing.

Scale

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

Says Roberge, “We’re using a sales comp plan that was invented in the 1980s, and it’s causing our customers to utilize their licenses at a lower rate, and it’s causing revenue contraction.”. It includes leadership development courses, and responsibilities of managing and hiring one or two reps to get experience. .

Sales Hiring

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 2, 2018

Annual prepay contracts - wherein customers pay for a year’s cost on day - is a free loan from customers. There’s only one requirement: you must be able to sell your product while you’re building it. Step 1 is reaching product market fit, the point at which some group of potential customers will pay.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

AI is likely the next platform, dev tools are strategic given the scarcity of developers, cybersecurity is front and center for enterprises, and the data stack is still going strong. The former CRO of a successful prosumer SaaS company shared how they gave away free annual licenses for all new users over and above the ones contracted.

Scale

Tom Tunguz

JULY 21, 2013

That’s why I think there ought to be an additional step in the Product Market Fit process , the image at the top of the page. This step begins after Customer Validation and before the scaling of the sales and marketing teams in Customer Creation. This step should be called Customer Engagement.

Product Marketing

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 21, 2022

Second, UBP reduced friction for individual developers to tinker with the APIs. AEs retired quota by closing annual contracts for a base level usage. AEs deliberately undersized the contract commitment to ensure customer happiness and create opportunities to re-engage the customer for expansion.

Startup

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

We’re on the cusp of a golden age in AI, and the lesson learned from Cloud was that Cloud sped up the pace of development by a lot. At Base10, they expect to see the speed of development and deployment accelerate so dramatically that it will make our heads spin. Microsoft is a master class in strategy for us.

Generative AI

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Between 2016 and 2023, you see the ACV (average contract value) going up and up. Over time, they realized the product value was best spent with high-complexity organizations. As a result, the contracts got bigger because they were working with bigger companies. Undercharging in the early days is a common story.

Sales Hiring