FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

If you own a SaaS or other digital product business such as a Slack plugin, Chrome extension, online publishing business, mobile app, or even a blog and youre looking to exit, you may have a lot of questions about how best to go about it. So I’ve worked in SaaS businesses that were fast growth. And I’ve done that.

Scale 119

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 119

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

Let’s review everything your customer success team has to do in the absence of any customer success tools. Best customer success software for startups and small companies. Ensure that your data is clean and easily accessible, as poor data quality undermines the value of even the best customer success tool.

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Customer Success Enterprise Software Review Startup 105

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 9, 2025

So read on, and hopefully, your SaaS sales journey will be less about trial and error and more about steady progress toward success. Self-service sales model This is when customers explore and experience your product independently without needing hands-on help from your sales team. Heres a breakdown of each: 1.

Scale 52

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Sales Recruiting 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Basically all of the SaaS CEOs/founders I know of have made at least one terrible VP+ level hire. Sometimes it’s VP Sales (OK, often, this is the most common mishire — another post here on what a really great VPS can do for you, and how a poor one can wreck your company, coming). Sometimes it’s VP Marketing.

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Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 333

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

Others are very hands-on advisors, spending many hours per month at startups other than the one they work at. If a VP of Sales has a $500k+ OTE and a big team to manage, does it even make senses to sell courses on the side? Once you had something, once you had scale, then go help one other startup. That was the rough rule.

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Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 316

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

In the early days, it was about setting expectations that startups are hard and you must work hard to succeed. We are a tech startup, and in order to be successful, we expect you to put in a lot of hard work. The underperformers who aren’t putting in the effort get a conversation, and if things don’t change, it’s not a good fit.

Sales Hiring 275

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 275

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

While it can be frightening to think differently, doing so has helped him make Veeva the biggest vertical SaaS success story of all time. If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! I was a software developer, a product person. Most startups do fail. Get tickets here. TRANSCRIPT .

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Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 337

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 23, 2023

I’m watching public company earnings to identify early weaknesses in the software market. Microsoft’s Ability to Cross-Sell its Suite is Driving Dominance in Many Categories GitHub is now home to 100 million developers. About 70% of commercial Office subscribers use Teams. Yesterday, Microsoft announced earnings.

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Azure Underperforming Technical Team Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 256

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

Duo Security is an Ann Arbor, Michigan based cyber-security startup. sales team. As everyone left to work for an investment bank in California or New York that summer of ’99, I went to work at a startup in Ann Arbor. Now, we did really cool stuff at this startup. Want to see more content like this? Secret one.

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Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 290

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

While many startups aspire toward unicorn status, only a few achieve it. To achieve this level of success, startups need a combination of strong financial performance, innovative products or services, and a favorable market environment. Lesson 1: Everything is about your team. Lesson 6: Pivoting isn’t a bad thing.

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Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 246

Sales Hacker

MAY 9, 2025

In 2023, we saw a surge of SaaS brands adding anything AI-powered or AI-driven into their website headlines. A quick use of Wayback Machine for the top 100 SaaS brands will show you just how pervasive it was. Many venture capital firms shifted their investments almost entirely into AI startups.

AI Search 85

AI Search AI Scale SaaS 85

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

What’s the secret to SaaS success at YCombinator? Sam : We’re going to talk today about a lot of topics, but the general theme is, what’s the difference between good and great SaaS companies? The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Getting the team right is so key here.

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VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 286

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

So let’s take a look back to a deep dive with the CEOs on what they learned building their first senior teams: ———-. As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. What makes you feel that you need to level up your management, set up your first management team?

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Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 258

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 13, 2019

When we announced a few weeks ago that we would be bringing our leading SaaS conference to Asia, and running it in Hong Kong, many locals thanked us for choosing the city. was created by a team with 25+ years of experience in location-based tech, spanning various services and real-time asset tracking systems. Founders : Max Armbruster.

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SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Merchant Services Payment Methods 225

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 20, 2018

In the early stages of most SaaS startups’ lives, the CEO or founder often acts as the initial head of sales. In this post, I outline how SaaS founders should modify their approach and implement a simple sales methodology to increase their odds of success. Iterate the product based on feedback.

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Startup Sales SaaS Systems Review 178

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

Both are two of the most impressive and inspiring public SaaS CEOs — but their products and companies couldn’t be more different. One was to get a sense of what the bar was to pull off a successful SaaS IPO these days (answer = oh man, very high). Do you have two sales teams? It’s not just building the 1.0,

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Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Revenue Acquisition 356

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2023

Founders are responsible for ensuring a startup always has enough money, setting the vision for the company, and driving things forward. Lesson #1: If You Aren’t Making Mistakes, You Aren’t In A Startup If you do things that always work and maintain the status quo, you’re likely at a major company like Microsoft. And it was true.

Sales Recruiting 286

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 286

The Angel VC

MAY 17, 2017

In our weekly investment team call earlier this week we decided to pass on two early-stage SaaS startups that were both on track to grow from zero to $100k in MRR in their first 12 months of going live. The other part is that even as recently as 6-24 months ago, we’d consider a SaaS startup with this growth pattern exceptional.

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Business Model Venture Capital SaaS Underperforming Technical Team 180

Sales Hacker

JUNE 17, 2025

He’s now an investor, advisor, and board member to iconic B2B SaaS companies, and one of the most respected voices in GTM for vertical SaaS. But behind every product launch and revenue milestone is a team – and building that team is one of the hardest and important parts of the journey.

AI 82

AI Technical Advisors Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 82

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

Different Pathways to CRO For Jane Kim, former CRO of CircleCl,, she used to work in finance before transitioning to SaaS. After switching to SaaS, she started as an SMB sales leader with no prior management or SMB sales experience. The decision to leave a fairly scaled role leading 200+ AEs at LinkedIn to join a smaller-stage startup.

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Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 293

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.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Startup Software Review Enterprise 145

User Pilot

DECEMBER 31, 2024

While your product managers use our analytics reports to track product usage, your engineering teams can use our session replays to uncover bugs, and your customer support team may use our in-app help center feature to offer self-service and reduce support tickets. Userpilot is perfect for non-technical teams.

Technical Review 105

Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Software Review Onboarding 105

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

So how feasible do you think that works for a typical B2B SaaS business that probably our user-base is not too knowledgeable about [inaudible] on the internet for something specific in their day-to-day use case? And you can build that in a way with the startup that you can’t in a bigger company. This always works. So, thanks man.

Scale 286

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 286

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2023

At nine figures in revenue and 550 people, the CEO of Lattice, Jack Altman, has seen every stage of building a startup. Most of the time, a missing teams view or the ability to integrate with one more system isn’t the answer. They may hit you up with great startups to buy, important summits, and other valuable opportunities.

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Underperforming Technical Team Startup Investment Communication 49

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

The fastest growing software companies in recent years all have something in common – they started with little to no sales team. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team. Yes, Dropbox started off with no traditional sales team. It’s become apparent that for hypergrowth SaaS startups today, there are two distinct phases.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

In today’s dynamic SaaS landscape of hyperfuncational SaaS, the journey of building a product that customers adore, while simultaneously scaling revenue to nearly $1B, is still quite a feat. They initially tried to sell to other startups on the basis that Klaviyo could help you with your customer marketing.

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Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 300

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2021

Pomel focused his session on: Making your SaaS startup customer-centric: Hw event marketing has helped him integrate his engineering and sales teams. How many of you guys’ product rely on the highly functioning engineering team? We hired everybody on our teams. We can look back at how Datadog scaled.

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Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 311

Incredo

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Precisely – about SaaS affiliate programs… SaaS partner programs entice both software providers and affiliate partners for various reasons: 1) SaaS products are usually low-cost. So SaaS affiliate marketing partners have a huge audience to convince and convert. 5) Everyone minds his own business.

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SaaS Payments Payment Methods Merchant Services Sales Recruiting 139

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Check out this 2018 Europa session with Guillaume Princen, Head of France and Southern Europe @ Stripe, where he talks about the metrics you need to be focused on in your startup. So the first question is what made SaaS so successful. Customers love SaaS products and tools because it simply works. They love SaaS products.

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SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Gorgias is the leading contact center for e-commerce and it’s been a fun one to track at SaaS, from 1,000 to 3,000 to now 7,000 customers. Four years ago, after launching and failing my first startup I realized I had a lot to learn. Together, we developed sales pitches, built out a robust sales process in just a couple of weeks.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 278

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

This is the recipe for a mediocre sales team. Like a sports franchise, a top team should be both collaborative and competitive. It’s a timely conversation for us, coming hot on the heels of the release of our book Intercom on Sales last month and Steli’s own book The 2020 Startup Sales Playbook this week. to Close.com.

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Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 184

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2023

You could do vanilla 101 SaaS practices and succeed. Getting off the ground is one thing — an easy pitch of being an HR tech startup focused on improving hiring. In a year like this, SMB is doing worse, with a lot more churn and startups going out of business. Daniel’s team is an anti-gravity device.

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Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 274

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2024

These nine sales concepts, when done correctly, will greatly improve your sales and sales teams. #1: Most people think you need to hire more salespeople in a demand-poor environment. Demand-poor environments lead to problems like: Sales reps clinging on to opportunities for too long. That’s the wrong answer.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 284

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2020

Sam Blond, CSO at Brex explains why recruiting, networking and employee happiness is the key to this playbook on recruiting your sales team. I’m doing The Playbook To Recruiting Your Sales Team. Once again, amazing job to the SaaStr team. I’m really honored to share this stage with some really bad ass speakers.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 187

Incredo

OCTOBER 17, 2019

Asking “what’s the typical commission for SaaS salesperson?” is like asking “how expensive should I price my SaaS product?” what factors to consider before defining your SaaS sales commission percentage. We will share 8 ideas on how to increase your sales team’s productivity and help them close more deals. See below!

SaaS Payments 150

SaaS Payments Compensation Payment Services Sales Recruiting 150

Kellblog

AUGUST 31, 2022

Two important notes: There is an optional fourth part, sales development , i.e., managing the team of sales development reps (SDRs) who convert MQLs into stage-1 oppties. Whether this team should report into sales or marketing is a separate debate. The lines between these parts are not black and white.

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Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Marketing Startup 145

Incredo

OCTOBER 17, 2019

Asking “what’s the typical commission for SaaS salesperson?” is like asking “how expensive should I price my SaaS product?” what factors to consider before defining your SaaS sales commission percentage 4. and finally figure out how much that SaaS sales salary should be. In the end, a bonus section is waiting for you!

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SaaS Payments Compensation Payment Services Sales Recruiting 144