SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2023

Scaling a tech startup doesn’t come easy, and when you’ve tried all the conventional SaaS advice, it might be tempting to give up. It has now secured over $67M in funding and offers a robust platform for mid-market and SMB segments. But before the years of rapid scaling, it took the company a little while to hit its stride.

Scale 190

Scale Scaling SMB Marketing 190

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2024

So there are times in startup life when it seems like a wave is just overpowering you, that there is only so much you can do. But startups aren’t always as agile as social media paints them to be. Almost every founder regrets using capital to keep a high-burn rate engine going that isn’t scaling rapidly. #2.

Trends 272

Trends Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital 272

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Eran Zimman, monday.com’s co-founder and co-CEO, shares his secrets to scaling and growth in an unpredictable market. Serve customers a CRM or project management first, and as they scale and use it more, they’re exposed to more features. You don’t want to overwhelm SMB customers, and Monday made this a focus from day one.

Scale 159

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Banking 159

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2023

At SaaStr APAC 2023, Scott Pugh, VP of Sales at Figma, shared how to scale these two sales teams while building culture. Pugh’s strategy is simple, albeit not always easy: Recruitment — how to hire the best talent to scale your sales organization. Diversity is really important when scaling. Focus on the hiring profile.

Scale 208

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scaling 208

SaaStr

MARCH 10, 2024

Even SMB leaders like Monday are there. In fact, almost every SaaS leader at scale is hitting $300,000 in Revenue Per Employee at the pre-IPO phase. Not just unicorns and startups, but almost every public SaaS company had negative operating margins. SaaS startups that IPO’d funded it with IPO proceeds.

SMB 227

SMB Cloud Startup Scaling 227

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

She was hired because they saw a bit of softening in new business growth, and she came to help diagnose what was going on and help scale the business. As a startup, it’s tempting to try and do everything. It’s better to find the best ICP to get to $5M-$10M and scale from there. In the early days, you have to.

Scale 213

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 213

SaaStr

MARCH 6, 2024

Seat Contractions Have Brought NRR Down From 120% to 111% While 111% NRR is still quite an engine at this scale, the drop in NRR from seat contractions explains a good chunk of the headwinds Okta has seen. #2. While many tech SMBs are struggling, finding the gems in the SMB base that can grow into large accounts is still critical.

Fractional VPE 203

Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Scale SMB 203

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2023

So you’ve nailed your pitch for startups and are looking to hook your first mid-market customer. Case shares the playbook for the “messy middle” to prevent the very predictable problems you run into in the middle ground of the mid-market, that space between SMB and enterprise. What do you do? These people have money and a budget.

Scale 176

Scale Enterprise Scaling SMB 176

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

Founder and CEO Girish Mathrubootham shares five big bets that paid off as he scaled this multi-product company. Most startup founders are either pirates or romantics , and Mathrubootham was foolish enough to believe they could start in that small suburb while building a global software company. Cast your net wide. Why did he do this?

Sales Hiring 221

Sales Hiring Scale SMB AI 221

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2023

See, e.g. Shopify, whose blended gross margins with payments even at its scale are still less than 50%. Yet, I see most “Hybrid SaaS” startups ignore this and spend as if they had 80% margins. SMB SaaS often has much lower than 100% NRR, especially to start. Often in the 40%-50% range, instead of 75%-80%. They don’t.

SaaS Payments 192

SaaS Payments Metrics Payments SMB 192

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 13, 2016

When an SMB SaaS startup is young with quickly growing revenues, more of the same works. A $1M ARR SaaS startup with an average selling price of $750 per year needs to add 1,333 each year on average to double. For some SMB SaaS companies, generating this kind of lead volume even at scale isn’t a challenge.

SMB 100

SMB Scale Startup Marketing 100

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2023

10+ Actionable Things You Can Do To Scale Faster In The Early Days The Chat GPT Growth Story: How AI is Changing the Way We Work The Challenge with SMB SaaS: High Growth Can Only Mask High Churn For Just So Long (Updated) Dear SaaStr: My Top Sales Rep Made $600,000 a Year — And Just Quit!

ChatGPT 223

ChatGPT Scale SMB AI 223

SaaStr

JULY 31, 2022

The Challenge with SMB SaaS: High Growth Can Only Mask High Churn For Just So Long. SMB SaaS has a lot going for it, but one big existential challenge — inherent churn. SaaStr 574: 5 Scale-Up Mistakes for Startups with Dave Kellogg. A great panel on just where marketing at scale in SaaS is today.

New CTO 230

New CTO CTO SMB Venture Capital 230

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2023

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. But in other years, SMBs are jumping in the boat, so you get amazing growth long-term with a multi-segment strategy.

Sales Hiring 198

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 198

SaaStr

AUGUST 6, 2022

Is Every SaaS Startup Worth Half of What It Was Last Year? Every Venture Backed Startup is Now Competing for Reserves. The Challenge with SMB SaaS: High Growth Can Only Mask High Churn For Just So Long. SaaStr 577: Scaling Faster, An AMA with SaaStr Founder & CEO Jason Lemkin. Top Podcasts This Week: 1.

SMB 203

SMB Startup Scaling Churn 203

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2023

Most startup founders create companies to grow them. They had SMB positioning with an unfavorable LTV to CAC ratio. The post How To Scale Your Go-to-Market Strategy at Every Stage with Cipio Partners Managing Partner Rolan Dennert (Video) appeared first on SaaStr. This is true in life and business. One thing is for certain.

Scale 219

Scale Strategy Scaling Outbound Sales Team 219

SaaStr

DECEMBER 31, 2022

. “How To Innovate Faster with Community: Insights From GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij” A great session from GitLab’s CEO and founder on how to really use community to build and scale. #2. 3 How to Scale Outbound Sales with the CROs of Outreach, Malwarebytes, HubSpot, Seismic. appeared first on SaaStr.

Scale 191

Scale SMB Innovation B2B 191

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2024

Efficient, steady, profitable growth at scale. Enterprise Doing Better than SMB A common trend across many selling into tech. Startups are struggling. Even with a few bumps, Atlassian is still trading at a $55 Billion market cap, so over 12x ARR. That’s twice the average of 6x ARR for public SaaS companies.

SMB 214

SMB Enterprise Scaling Trends 214

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 31, 2022

We are delighted to share that we are officially launching our new program for fast-growing, venture-backed startups. Over 5,000 startups from top incubators around the world use Intercom. It is an essential element of the startup stack as founders optimize their customer engagement”.

Startup 118

Startup Venture Capital Scale SMB 118

SaaStr

OCTOBER 21, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What is the average percentage of annual vs. monthly plan sold for a BtoB SaaS startup targeting the SMB market? Folks at scale can force their customers down an annual path even if they don’t want to. 90% of Smartsheet’s SMB customers pay annually. 20%+- will pay annually to save money.

Data 203

Data SMB Payment Features Churn 203

SaaStr

JANUARY 3, 2024

Shrav added that if you want to close bigger deals, not just Enterprise, but mid-market and SMB as well, that the moment you’re ready to Go-To-Market, you need to become compliant. However, Shrav explained when that automation won’t necessarily scale anymore. We usually see this happen around 50 to 100 employees.

AI 145

AI SMB Sales Hiring compliance 145

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2023

It’s very detailed and oriented more toward growth-stage scale-ups — but it’s excellent. I didn’t so much learn from it as confirm — confirm things I’ve seen, known, and put into practice, and seen it confirmed across many SaaS startups. Note again this skews toward late-stage startups and scale-ups.

Scale 253

Scale Compensation Sales SMB 253

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

And as startups scale, many try to automate away support and success for the smaller accounts. If your SMB product requires or has a salesperson involved in closing, that’s a clear sign you also want a human being involved in making sure that customer is a success post-sale, too. The post Do SMBs Need Customer Success?

Customer Success 310

Customer Success Scale SMB Sales 310

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about how to scale faster. Michiel Rauws (@michielrauws2): So, my question is, we’ve been scaling our SaaS business. We can scale accounts, when we get them, very well. Then later as we scale, we converge and we all do the same stuff.

Scale 199

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 199

SaaStr

OCTOBER 2, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Why Your Cost of Sales Generally Doubles As You Scale. The Challenge with SMB SaaS: High Growth Can Only Mask High Churn For Just So Long (Updated). 5 Critical & Company-Altering Learnings from B2B Startups | Y Combinator MD Anu Hariharan.

Cloud 242

Cloud Scale SMB B2B 242

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 16, 2013

At first glance, SMB SaaS companies, those who sell Software-as-a-Service to small to medium businesses, may seem like any other software company. Successful SMB SaaS companies have reinvented their businesses eschewing the expensive enterprise sales model in favor of end-user centric marketing, support and product development.

SMB 100

SMB Scale Startup SaaS 100

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2021

.” Nearly a decade and 500 episodes of the podcast later, we invited back our original SaaStr podcast host, Harry Stebbings of 20VC for a catch-up chat with Jason to discuss the world of venture today and how to scale a successful SaaS sales team from the bottom up. And at scale, you pay 3x-5x bookings for SMB-enterprise.

Scale 176

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 176

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2021

startups [link]. It’s also an interesting contact to Zoom , Zendesk and Slack , which recently have seen enterprise and SMB growth be about equal post-Covid. #2. This is top-tier NRR for a product with many SMB customers. 95% renewal rate, even with 10,000+ SMBs. It’s a testament to the ROI in PagerDuty.

SMB 313

SMB Enterprise Scaling Startup 313

SaaStr

MAY 8, 2024

As a SaaS veteran who built and sold a software company for nine figures, invested in startups since 2013, 10x-ing his fund, and continues to build a powerhouse community of SaaStr fans, he offers some hot takes on the communities’ burning questions. In most startups, your payback time and magic number don’t matter.

Metrics 197

Metrics Scale Sales Hiring SaaS 197

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: The Challenge with SMB SaaS: High Growth Can Only Mask High Churn For Just So Long (Updated) The 8 Signs of a Failing Sales Rep. SaaStr 639: Scaling a SaaS Sales Team While Building Culture with Figma VP of Sales Scott Pugh    4.

Scale 185

Scale SMB Sales Scaling 185

SaaStr

JANUARY 20, 2022

How to check on a competitor's growth plan: 1/ Search on LinkedIn how many sales reps they have 2/ Multiply by $500,000 ($250,000 if SMB). It still mostly works, and you can roughly tell how much revenue a “normal” startup has from its employee count. That's how much in bookings they plan to add this year.

SMB 228

SMB Scale Startup Enterprise 228

SaaStr

MARCH 28, 2024

Our thesis here is that there is a growing need for cybersecurity offerings for the SMB, the best way to deliver that offering is via managed service providers, and winning companies will take a platform approach to building products and features that are at parity to what enterprises have access to.

Venture Capital 241

Venture Capital Cybersecurity Scale Artificial Intelligence 241

TurnKey Labs

JANUARY 7, 2024

Are you looking for an efficient way to source top development talent without having to jump through all the traditional (and tedious!) hiring hoops? Are you seeking a cost-effective and flexible way to increase your software development capabilities? If the answer is yes to either – or both! –

SMB 62

SMB Startup Software Development Development 62

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2024

In your first couple of years, you might now have any customer growth, but for anyone at scale, from $4M ARR to $5B, new customer growth is anemic. Too many startups aren’t growing, or they’re growing 10-15-20%. Most venture-funded startups have no hope of growing more than 50% at $600M or more. You’re hiding in NRR. We are not.

Metrics 235

Metrics SaaS Scale Social Media 235

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 8, 2015

See also: Innovator’s Solution for SaaS Startups. There’s a familiar path now to SaaS companies that start in the SMB (small-to-medium business) part of the market. In short, new startups leverage a distribution advantage to acquire SMB customers at scale. SMB 3-7% 31%-58%. Why does this happen?

Innovation 171

Innovation Startup Scale SMB 171

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 12, 2017

A friend recently asked, “Which path is better for SaaS startups? SMB to mid-market to enterprise or straight to enterprise?” Startups that initially target small to medium businesses benefit from several key advantages. The startup can hire less sophisticated sales teams, whose salaries are smaller.

SMB 103

SMB Enterprise SaaS Payments Sales Hiring 103

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about scaling and VC funding. Jason Lemkin: So you have like a great profile irrespective of what your startup’s doing. There’s dealing with your startup that was growing 80% last year and is growing 0% this year, and has 12 months of cash.

Scale 184

Scale SaaS Payments Scaling SaaS 184