SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. Q: Should Product Marketing Work for Product or Marketing? It’s up to you.

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 284

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2023

Marketing, design, and product teams work to optimize one end of the funnel at the cost of the other. If you have product market fit, don’t wait to implement outbound. Regardless, be furious about outbound and bring an entrepreneurial mindset to your marketing. The next hiring focus should be growth marketing.

Scale 244

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scaling 244

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

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. Obviously, I can’t imagine a chief executive not having loss of sleep over building a management team. Mallun : Sure.

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 261

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

The goal is to help each other learn something new, find mentorships, create partnerships, and exchange strategies. 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.

VP of Engineering 293

VP of Engineering Technical Cofounder Outsourcing Services CTO Coach 293

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

You have to see: A couple of good hires brought in Improvement on some metrics A big deal or two hanging out there, brought in and closed Things taken off your plate. More time may make them better if they’re already progressing, even if it’s just 10-15% in the first sales cycle. Hiring someone too junior. That often compounds.

Part-Time VPE 242

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire 242

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2024

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. You also don’t want to hire a VP of Sales who won’t carry a bag.

CTO Hire 209

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO Venture Capital 209

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 18, 2025

Previously, he was an operating partner at Fractal Software, helping launch vertical software companies and find product-market fit. If you missed GTM 134, check it out here: Build your AI Outbound Machine with ChatGPT | Jordan Crawford Highlights: 05:03 When to hire your first sales reps.

Sales Hiring 93

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale VP of Engineering 93

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 24, 2021

A thanks to [Marsh 00:00:34] for stepping in at the beginning of the month, and a great session with our own Jason Warner and Adrian, the CTO of Zendesk. Lionetti, the CMO at Confluent, and most recently, the CTO from Zendesk, Adrian. Anything that you can find that cascades through the organization is critical.

CTO Coach 164

CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 164

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Here are five quick takeaways: Balancing human-computer interaction has been the difference between technologies that break out and are very successful and technologies that are considered to be ahead of their time or just not the right product-market fit. That was actually a pretty tall order at the time.

Artificial Intelligence 169

Artificial Intelligence Scale CTO Hire Technology 169

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. And you should do it right then.

CTO Coach 113

CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 113

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

In this article, we’ve outlined the major roles that move the needle in terms of product growth alongside their KPIs and current salary ranges. Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. Before the hiring process, take some time to decide on your current needs and hire as your company grows.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

You can watch the full session , and if you missed the podcast with the first half of the interview, you’ll find that here. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin. We might’ve touched on this one too on the hiring and the people.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 246

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

To build the initial team, to build the product, to build the initial go to market, to build the first customers and to build the ARR, the starting. Pietro : This journey used to end at the legendary, mythical product/market fit. Pietro Bezza | Managing Partner @ Connect Ventures. ” That’s not proven. .”

New CTO 173

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 173

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

So you were the first sales hire. Talk to me about the sales hires that you made back in the early days and talk to me about how it changed through the different stages. So my first sales hire was beginning of 2015. The very first few sales hire are I would say not your typical reps. Laura Bilazarian : Awesome.

Scale 146

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 146

OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

To combat this and be more agile, SaaS management is morphing and restructuring functional management and multiplying the number of new C-Suite titles like Chief Customer Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, and Chief Product Officer, not to mention Chief Performance Officer and Chief Security Officer.

Part-Time CTO 69

Part-Time CTO CTO CTO Hire Management 69

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

Mallun Yen : So, you were an engineer by training and then you became an engineering leader, as the CTO of Webex, and then you became a CEO. You’ve got to learn about sales, about marketing and, otherwise, you need to hire a lot of other people around you to help. Mallun Yen : So, when did you hire employee 34?

Sales Hiring 141

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 141

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

Joel had what he calls “an honest conversation” with Buffer’s CTO Dan. One interesting thing that Joel shared with us, was that he realized implementing these software tools would require a large investment, but he consciously made that decision: I would gladly spend $100,000 on a tool if that would allow me to avoid hiring.

Payment Solutions 113

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Social Media 113

Upscope

JANUARY 5, 2020

Superhuman achieved product market fit and positioning by creating an engine Superhuman ran a brilliant detailed step by step process that helped achieve real product market fit and provide their precise positioning in the crowded email client market. Two key things greatly helped find their positioning.

Strategy 128

Strategy Marketing Sales Hiring Engineering 128

Chart Mogul

JULY 1, 2020

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. The problem was, it was very hard to find people to talk to about your prototype and conduct your research. As people or members of the same team, we’re biased.

Interviewing 76

Interviewing B2B Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 76

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

Seema: Would love to talk about finding those initial customers who you tested with. So we didn’t have product market fit for that. How did you think about, who do I want to target for that product given where we are now. I knew that we had something here when we were in the Postmates office in San Francisco.

Merchant Services 81

Merchant Services Payment Methods Payments Payment Solutions 81

OpenView Labs

JULY 2, 2020

Find out here. The fundamentals of your business model and pricing structure are important to understand, and that knowledge is exactly what you’ll find in this article written by Yay?nlanma I studied 87 public and private SaaS companies in the U.S. and found four key learnings that companies can apply to their own pricing strategy.

Pricing 138

Pricing SaaS Payments Payments SaaS 138

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

We needed to stay relevant along the customer’s journey and we needed to find our own cloud provider that was going to allow for us to scale quickly, to have the security that we knew customers were demanding when they were searching for cloud platforms. And what challenge that presented to us was how do we do that quickly.

Cloud 173

Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 173

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

Plus, the Product Marketing Alliance drops the Product Marketing Salary Survey. What about the ROI of spending time with your family, friends, or kids? How many CSMs should you hire? Product marketers: move west. The Product Marketing Alliance dropped the Product Marketing Salary Survey.

Scale 43

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

OPEXEngine

NOVEMBER 11, 2020

In HubSpot’s case, we eventually hired a world-class data science team, but our scoring only improved by a few points,” notes Redbord. You’ll need someone familiar with your data—perhaps a CTO or someone responsible for business operations. Especially in the early days, keeping your scoring system simple and lean will help you: 1.

Startup 91

Startup Scale Systems Review Technical Review 91

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

Joel had what he calls “an honest conversation” with Buffer’s CTO Dan. One interesting thing that Joel shared with us, was that he realized implementing these software tools would require a large investment, but he consciously made that decision: I would gladly spend $100,000 on a tool if that would allow me to avoid hiring.

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Payment Features Outsourcing Services Payments 52

Chart Mogul

JULY 1, 2020

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. The problem was, it was very hard to find people to talk to about your prototype and conduct your research. As people or members of the same team, we’re biased.

Interviewing 52

Interviewing B2B Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 52

User Pilot

MARCH 30, 2025

However, if youre below 20%, its time to reassess your approach. Here are a few problems that could hinder your app user retention: No product-market fit: If your app doesnt solve a pressing problem for users, they wont stick around. Jose Gomez, CTO & Co-Founder at Evinex. Key elements of an app with good ASO.

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Retention Payment Methods Strategy 52

SmartKarrot

MARCH 4, 2021

To handle this evolving requirement, it is important to build a competent profile to initiate progress in product development. This is where companies need another C-level executive to facilitate business growth via products. What makes a chief product officer (CPO) different from a CTO or a VP in the product department.

Part-Time CTO 16

Part-Time CTO VP of Engineering CTO CTO Hire 16

ProfitWell

JANUARY 2, 2020

The sales strategy required to win over a small business owner will be drastically different from the strategy required to convince an experienced CTO of your subscription’s value. When you’re just starting out, this information can be difficult to find. Understand what drives success when selling subscriptions.

B2C 52

B2C Subscription Payment Features Payments 52

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

If you're really starting from scratch, do the product. Do a bunch of change and even pivot to get to product market fit in that stage. You want to have some users, some customers to help you validate whether your product is solving their problem. moment may be outside the product. Growth is not really secondary.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

SaaStr

DECEMBER 16, 2023

We’ve discussed most before individually, but let me throw ’em together: It may well take 24 months to get to true product-market fit and Initial Traction. You really need a great CTO, not just a good business team. A mediocre tech team, a part-time CTO, or even just a decent CTO just doesn’t get you there.

Part-Time VPE 295

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Sales Recruiting VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) 295

SaaStr

JULY 23, 2021

Brian Peterson, CTO @ Dialpad. Tolithia Kornweibel, Chief Revenue Officer @Gusto. Nicole Culver, Director of Product Marketing, SaaS @Bandwidth. Dave Walters, CTO, Hired. Christa Diaz, Senior Director, Customer Success, Hired. Amy Pisano, CRO, Hired. Zach Kitschke, CMO, Canva.

VP of Engineering 284

VP of Engineering New CTO CTO Hire Sales Hiring 284

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2025

Co-founders Dharmesh Shah (CTO) and Brian Halligan (Chairperson) shared at SaaStr Annual the unfiltered truth on building an SMB powerhouse, pivoting to product-led growth, and why the “M” segment is SaaS gold. The company had to retrench and restart their global efforts multiple times.

Scale 189

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Scaling 189

SmartKarrot

OCTOBER 29, 2021

Let’s try to find that out in this write-up. Here is a list of people who I believe are predominantly found in the C-Suite role: Chief Executive Officer Chief Customer Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief Operating Officer Chief Technology Officer.

Customer Success 10

Customer Success Part-Time CTO CTO Scale 10

SmartKarrot

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

Chris Orlob is the senior director of product marketing at Gong.io, an AI (Artificial Intelligence) platform to provide sales analytics. He is a SaaS sales & marketing enthusiast who shares his insights on the same on social media. One of the top SaaS influencers is Dharmesh Shah , co-founder, and CTO of HubSpot.

VP of Engineering 10

VP of Engineering Scale SaaS Venture Capital 10

OPEXEngine

JUNE 16, 2020

Hired CEOs: It’s the Board’s Company vs. It’s My Company to Run. You become a hired CEO primarily through one path — climbing the corporate ladder at a large tech company [5a], reaching the GM or CXO level, and then deciding to branch out. Dave started his career in technical and product marketing positions at Ingres and Versant.

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Venture Capital Technical Advisors 59

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr. We find that on the one hand we want our product to be so simple and easy to use and deliver a really quick time to value. The hardest element of being CRO @ New Relic?

Scale 210

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 210