Kellblog

JULY 17, 2022

In general, I think branding is a potential marketing rathole for startups, particularly early-stage ones. Some startups put the cart in front of the horse. Create a product. Get product-market fit (PMF), i.e., determine some problem you solve for some person with some product. Go sell some software.

Branding 131

Branding Startup Software Sales Recruiting 131

Kellblog

JULY 24, 2021

I sometimes get asked about how to structure an enterprise software marketing organization and the relative roles of product marketing vs. competitive analysis. My first job in marketing, which served as my bridge from a technical to a sales-and-marketing career, was as a competitive analyst.

Product Marketing 138

Product Marketing Marketing Sales Hiring Payment Services 138

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2022

When You Fall Out of Product-Market Fit. The Simple Reason Startups That Just Raised $100s of Millions Are Doing Layoffs. SaaStr 604: SaaStr CRO Confidential Presents How to Fundraise in Late 2022 with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin. 5 Interesting Learnings from Duolingo at $360,000,000 in ARR.

Sales Recruiting 230

Sales Recruiting AWS Compensation Enterprise 230

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 20, 2023

Why is having a firm grasp of the present the best thing an early-stage investor can have? Why does Mike Maples believe no company with true product-market-fit has ever failed? Why does Eric Paley believe “go faster” is the worst startup advice? Can seed funds play in a world of $25M valuations?

Venture Capital 242

Venture Capital Investment Pricing Startup 242

Clouded Judgement

JANUARY 12, 2024

Setting the stage for our convo was the increase in startups either shutting down or being acquired / acquihired recently. Many companies raised rounds in 2021 who thought they had product market fit. Or who thought their market was 10x bigger than it actually was. The environment got tougher for EVERYONE.

Cloud 284

Cloud Venture Capital Acquisition Revenue 284

Kellblog

JULY 8, 2020

I was talking with my old friend, Mark Tice , the other day and he referred to a startup mistake as, “on his top ten list.” ” Mark’s been a startup CEO twice, selling two companies in strategic acquisitions, and he’s run worldwide sales and channels a few times. Ignoring churn greater than 15%.

Sales Hiring 140

Sales Hiring Startup Software Review Enterprise 140

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2023

In Part 2 of Ask Me Anything, Lemkin will answer these questions: How do you balance being authentic as a new startup and getting customers to buy into your vision vs. appearing well put together with everything going on? Some sales folks might disagree, but Lemkin believes startups should be about 85-90% transparent.

Sales Hiring 239

Sales Hiring SaaS Banking Enterprise 239

SaaSHolic

MARCH 20, 2023

Mas se você vai buscar por investimento para sua startup seed ou early stage, então você precisa do investidor smart money. Ele pode estar presente em qualquer nível de investimento (anjo, seed, aceleradora, Series A,B, etc) e traz para a mesa mais que uma parte do investimento. O que é Smart Money?

Startup 52

Startup SaaS Product Marketing Revenue 52

User Pilot

AUGUST 14, 2024

Userpilot Product Drive 2024. Product Drive Categories This year’s Summit Drive features talks in four categories : product management and leadership, product growth, product marketing, and AI & product management. Userpilot Product Drive 2024 talk categories. Why does it matter?

Scale 85

Scale Artificial Intelligence Technical Review AI 85

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 don’t want to hire a product marketer, a corporate marketer, or a strategist.

CTO Hire 190

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO Venture Capital 190

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2023

Kristina Shen, General Partner at a16z, shares some insights into the present and future of generative AI at this week’s Workshop Wednesday, held every Wednesday at 10 a.m. Will it be existing companies embedding AI smartly or new startups who can meaningfully adopt AI faster? So, we’re back to the debate. Only time will tell.

AI 260

AI Generative AI Venture Capital SaaS 260

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 14, 2022

In a special presentation, Secureframe COO Seema Kumar shares common leadership challenges in today’s modern workforce, best practices, and tips for talent retention. Startup Leadership Challenges. But the modern workplace presents a few key leadership challenges that must be overcome to boost employee retention.

Retention 130

Retention Leadership Compensation Communication 130

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

We were coming off an environment where startup funding was as fruitful as ever. You could even present it to the sales team as options one and two: We can continue hiring more salespeople and keep quotas the same. Whether you present the option to the team or not is up to you. In a startup today, everyone’s important.

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 261

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 6, 2016

In Startups are Risk Bundles , Leo Polovets outlines the risks startups face as they grow. On the last slide of his presentation, he listed the four key existence risks facing the business today. Hiring risk: Building the team in a mercenary job market. The business isn’t focused on the most critical issues.

Startup 100

Startup Scaling Customer Success Investment 100

Point Nine Land

OCTOBER 23, 2023

We recently hosted the Point Nine Founders Summit, featuring several panels and presentations from founders, CFOs, COOs, and sales execs on building early sales teams and hiring your first successful sales leaders. At Point Nine, we aspire to continuously share what we learn with our community and the extended startup ecosystem.

Sales Hiring 124

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors Technical Cofounder 124

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 3, 2015

After a startup attains product market fit and begins to exceed the first breaking point of the startup management structure around 10 employees, it’s time to codify the company’s values. At two separate SaaS Office Hours recently, we heard similar stories from Maia at Greenhouse and Pete at Optimizely.

Startup 109

Startup Scale Interviewing Scaling 109

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 23, 2022

The unpredictable market has given rise to new trends and a new type of elite company, which Bessemer Venture Partners have dubbed the Centaur. Soon, however, cloud will grow beyond the enterprise software market, penetrating the broader tech market and the world’s GDP. Cloud Goes to Market. Introducing the Centaur.

Cloud 241

Cloud Benchmarks Trends Business Model 241

The Angel VC

JUNE 28, 2017

I’ve been fascinated by the concept of Product/Market Fit for quite some time. The reason why it’s such an interesting and important concept is that getting to Product/Market Fit (PMF) marks a critical juncture in a company’s lifecycle. What is Product/Market Fit? How can Product/Market Fit be measured?

Sales Hiring 237

Sales Hiring Scale Product Marketing Startup 237

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 29, 2019

Editor’s Note: This article is Part One of a four-part series that covers the most crucial product marketing activities. . I recently presented at Venture Lane , a curated startup hub for early-stage startups, to share more about Product Marketing and how it relates to an early-stage startup.

Product Marketing 40

Product Marketing Development Marketing Scale 40

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 4, 2022

This should be qualitative (no slides)and present a big-picture narrative on how things are going. . These deep-dive topics can be functional in nature, such as delving into the product roadmap or the sales hiring plan. One hour, every other month for seed companies or companies that are pre-product market fit.

Sales Hiring 249

Sales Hiring Scale Leadership Startup 249

User Pilot

AUGUST 12, 2024

In this article, we’ll cover the basics of product positioning and messaging and a brief overview of improving your homepage. TL;DR Anthony Pierri is the co-founder of FletchPMM, a product marketing consultancy that specializes in improving B2B startup homepages. Anthony Pierri ’s headshot. What is positioning?

B2B 90

B2B Software Review Communication Startup 90

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

As part of our last three annual finance and operating benchmarks surveys, we’ve asked nearly 2,000 startup founders and leaders of B2B SaaS businesses this simple question: “What’s keeping you up at night?”. It’s simply about which areas startup founders feel like they may be coming up short, not doing enough, or missing the mark.

Sales Hiring 82

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Startup 82

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

Yet in Mark’s experience working with and mentoring startups, he’s found that many entrepreneurs go with intuition over information. Those risks can be fatal: Mark has found a 75% failure rate for both Series A and Series C startups (as he presented during his 2019 SaaStr talk.). I think that’s message-market fit.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

Chart Mogul

OCTOBER 3, 2019

The design of your product? . Marketing? . After your product/market fit, your business model is the most important consideration if you’re to save your business from the startup graveyard. Intercom’s model presents a useful way to think about this: Source: Intercom. Your technical infrastructure?

Acquisition 91

Acquisition Underperforming Technical Team Startup Customer Lifetime Value 91

Sales Hacker

MARCH 12, 2024

He has also previously served as the Board Chair of Philly Startup Leaders and Board Member of Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies (PACT). Discussed in this Episode: Ecosystem-led growth is about leveraging partnerships to make your go-to-market teams more successful.

Cloud 105

Cloud Trends Startup Pricing 105

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2019

Alex Western, Managing Director at Think3, talks about the problem he has seen consistently across SaaS startups that have VC funding – overgrowth. He was posting 80 percent customer retention but he had a million and a half dollars of incremental cash burn from all of the sales and marketing investments. backed startups.

Startup 105

Startup Venture Capital Banking Scale 105

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

You can find the full slide deck from David’s presentation on Slideshare. David’s first foray into SaaS was in 1999 when he joined a startup that would become PayPal, starting as the product leader and later as the COO. Positions Needed: Enterprise AEs, Mid-Market & SMB AEs, SDRs, Sales Ops, Sales Engineer.

CTO Hire 252

CTO Hire Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO 252

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 13, 2023

But the past few years presented challenges that caught even the most-seasoned CEOs off guard. These—along with more practical topics, such as GTM strategy and product-market fit—were among the issues discussed at our recent Connect/Enterprise event, which brought together top executives from across the a16z network.

Enterprise 107

Enterprise Travel Sales Hiring Generative AI 107

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 16, 2018

Last week, I shared a presentation with an executive team at a large public SaaS company on everything I’ve learned about pricing. Here’s a summary of the frameworks and theory that I’ve aggregated over a decade of investing in startups. All of these disciplines fall under product marketing.

Pricing 230

Pricing Market Research Interviewing Product Marketing 230

Kellblog

MAY 18, 2023

A funny thing can happen with startups. Sometimes, the reasons customers love the product end up not being the same reasons that the founder wants them to love the product. But it’s not a substitute for the actual reasons why customers buy and love the product. This may sound bad or scary, but it’s not.

Interviewing 121

Interviewing Data Product Marketing Sales 121

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

What should you look for in an Enterprise rep vs. a Mid-Market rep? How should you handle presenting challenges to your C-suite team when you’ve just joined the company? Solving High Volume, Low Conversion at Lattice Dini Mehta joined Lattice at $3M in revenue when it had just 10 people in seat for Go-To-Market and 7 salespeople.

Scale 237

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 237

User Pilot

AUGUST 17, 2024

TL;DR Dan Olsen is a well-known product coach, speaker, and the author of the Lean Product Playbook, in which he introduces his Lean Product Methodology. Dan is one of the speakers at this year’s Product Drive conference organized by Userpilot. He’s also the founder of the Lean Product Meetup community.

Metrics 81

Metrics Acquisition Retention Onboarding 81

User Pilot

JUNE 18, 2024

Here is a compilation of the best resources for product analysis: Books : Gain foundational knowledge with “Product Analytics” and “Lean Analytics” to learn how to extract customer insights and leverage data for business growth. Explore broader data analysis topics with Product Alliance, DataCamp, and Tableau.

Scale 52

Scale Data Analysis Underperforming Technical Team Market Research 52

User Pilot

OCTOBER 15, 2023

A growth marketer is a professional who leverages experimentation and optimization techniques to increase customer lifetime value, drive retention, and fuel business expansion (referral programs, upsells, etc.). In contrast, traditional marketing managers primarily concentrate on classic marketing campaigns for customer acquisition.

Growth Marketing 92

Growth Marketing Marketing Customer Lifetime Value Scale 92

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 21, 2017

In 2012 ChiefMartec landscape counted 350 vendors selling to sales and marketing. This sea of SaaS startups have reshaped the market. Incumbent client/server technologies have lost their market dominance to new incumbents. Trades market size for better product market fit. Today, that figure is 5000.

Venture Capital 183

Venture Capital SaaS Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 183

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 17, 2018

The five most popular posts of 2018 were: The Strategic Shift in Revenue for SaaS Startups as They Scale - or popular by any other post by a factor of 10, this post discusses the importance of focusing on renewals as a business reaches $10M, $20M and beyond in ARR. Dropbox S-1 - There were many questions surrounding the Dropbox IPO.

Acquisition 121

Acquisition Interviewing Cloud Pricing 121

Chart Mogul

OCTOBER 3, 2019

The design of your product? After your product/market fit, your business model is the most important consideration if you’re to save your business from the startup graveyard. After your product/market fit, your business model is the most important consideration if you’re to save your business from the startup graveyard.

Acquisition 52

Acquisition Startup Underperforming Technical Team Customer Lifetime Value 52