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Dear SaaStr: From 0 to $10m ARR, At What Point Do We Start Hiring and Whom? From 0 t o $ 10M ARR, the hiring roadmap is critical because every hire has a disproportionate impact on your trajectory. No VP of Sales yetdont even think about it. Marketing : Likely no VP of Marketing yet either — unless.
Key hires like a VP of Engineering or VP of Product might get 1%-2% each. Senior engineers or designers might get 0.5%-1%. Another way to think of this stage; the first 10 or so should probably get at least twice the equity of others for joining early, if they are mission-critical hires. Executives : 0.3%-1%
In SaaS, it is recruiting your VPs and management team : SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. Upsell and retention is an art, science and craft. You’ll need more than 5–6 core engineers to go big.
In SaaS, once you have even a few million in ARR, the #1 challenge is recruiting top-tier VPs and building a truly top-tier management team: SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. She can be your CTO forever.
You know how everyone says you'll never look and wish you'd kept a bad VP as long as you did? That when you make a mis-hire, you'll always look back and say you should have made a change 3-4 month earlier? A lot of classic SaaStr advice has been how to spot the best potential VPs. When to hire them.
Pick a few that work for you: Get That Key VPHire Done in Q1. Enough with the excuses for not having hired your real VP of Sales, or that VP of Engineering, or whatever. Hire a real recruiter. Drop other stuff to get this hire done. But anyhow — in January, find a way.
Just go find the VP you need. Go find the VP you really need. I got the VPs of Sales, Product and Marketing I needed. I got the VPs of Sales, Product and Marketing I needed. But I should have taken a pause and just found our true VP of Engineering. You can miss a quarter if need be.
Okta’s VP of Engineering, Monica Bajaj, and Senior Director of Platform Product Marketing, Priya Ramamurthi, share Okta’s playbook to PLG, developer experience, and Enterprise ARR. PLG ensures your product is doing the work for you in terms of customer advocacy, acquisition, and retention. Why are we talking about PLG?
you don't know what to do: 1/ Spend more time w/existing customers. 2/ Hire 1 great VP. Those are good times indeed. But there will be times when almost all of just not only struggle … but are just sort of out of ideas. Spend more time with existing customers. Hire 1 great VP.
Founder CEO Todd McKinnon was VP of Engineering at Salesforce and left to start Okta in the depths of the last downturn. Customer Count Up 8% Year-over-Year to 18,950 It’s hard to find net net customers after $1B ARR. You usually have to start here, but as time goes on, you need to bring in partners in most cases. #7.
As part of the run up to 2021 SaaStr Annual in the SF Bay Area Sep 27-29 , we’re taking a look back at some of our favorite classic sessions. (And You’ll find out tomorrow. Another piece of very, very good startup advice that I’ve given myself a hundred times is the “Do one thing exceptionally well.”
Building a company made up of distributed teams presents a plethora of complex challenges that can derail productivity and impact employee retention. But with it comes immense benefits and competitive advantages such as the diversification of ideas, speedier product development, and representation in important regions and time zones.
Anyone who says the developer market is not strong is behind the times. It might even be months later that a VP of Engineering or a CTO or CFO realizes that they’re built on a new platform. Net dollar retention and negative churn metrics are very favorable with developer products. The contract size grows.
Your VP Customer Success sure better have her comp plan tied to hitting the upsell, retention, or negative net churn goals. Your VP and Directors of Engineering need to build the stuff we need to hit the plan. Maybe it doesn’t change the life of some of your senior hires. At a time the world was ending.
Your VP Customer Success sure better have her comp plan tied to hitting the upsell, retention, or negative net churn goals. Your VP and Directors of Engineering need to build the stuff we need to hit the plan. Maybe it doesn’t change the life of some of your senior hires. At a time the world was ending.
In his spare time, he also hosts his own growth-focused podcast, called The Growth TL;DR. Short on time? I’m really excited to be on your podcast; it’s one of the ones I listen to all the time. I joined HubSpot at a very interesting time when we were about 300 people globally, way back in 2013.
Acquisition gets all the glory while Customer Success gets relegated the part of the unsung hero.”. Note: This two-part article was adapted from Anna’s BIG RYG session “ When Customer Success Is a Second-Class Citizen.” Net and gross retention are not a shared KPI (take note: this is the biggest indicator).
Previously a Director of Engineering at Facebook and VP of Engineering at VMware, she brings deep technical expertise to evaluating early-stage AI companies. But when you look under the hood, what you find is mostly experiments and POCs. We can do it in X time for Y cost.”
But it turns out, the hardest part isn’t the Magic and the Impossible. The hardest part is this phase: the Possible, But Painful. If your VPE, or head of marketing, or someone key quits — you’re almost dead. But if you hire one VP after another, it will just take way too long. So first, buck up.
You’d build a product, add a couple features annually, make quarterly releases, and if you hit $10M ARR with 110-120% net retention, your ticket was pretty much punched to $100m+ ARR and beyond. The challenge: finding ways to build what customers want today while managing existing obligations. But that playbook is now obsolete.
This time last year, 24 SaaS experts predicted big things for 2024. Next we’ll be hiring it. However this will take time, so until then, companies will experiment with usage based pricing, and continue the debate whether usage based or licensing is the better pricing model in the long run. What will 2025 bring?
Your VP of Engineering Now Costs $50M in Equity OpenAI’s $6.5B Top-tier engineering talent now commands equity packages that would have been unthinkable just three years ago. Ex-Stripe engineer building fintech infrastructure? The bar is narratively compelling backgrounds and market timing. Take $3 million.
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