SaaStr

JANUARY 8, 2025

So the overall “project management” space has seen widely disparate impacts from the SaaS partial downturn of 2022-2024. Asana, strong in B2B2B and selling to tech, was perhaps hit hardest, with growth slowing to 10%. Monday.com by contrast, selling mainly outside of tech, saw growth remain strong at 34%. It’s been a tale of two worlds.

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Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

Most startups play defense when discussing pricing with customers. They dance between asking for too little, leaving money on the table, and asking for too much, only to lose the customer’s interest. The very best companies lead their customers in that dance. They use pricing as an offensive tool to reinforce their product’s value and underscore the company’s core marketing message.

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SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 283

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 17, 2025

Q1 ‘25 earnings season for cloud businesses is now behind us. The 60 companies that I’ll discuss here (which is not an exhaustive list, but is still comprehensive) all reported quarterly earnings sometime between April 23rd – June 11th. In this post, I’ll take a data-driven approach in evaluating the overall group’s performance, and highlight individual standouts along the way.

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Cloud Software Benchmarks Retention 277

The Daily Egg

MAY 19, 2025

Everyone complains about popups. But if you are trying to grow your business, who cares? Opt in popups work. The right offer, shown at the. The post How To Build a Convincing Opt In Popup That Gets Signups appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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Business 250

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When test coverage falls behind release velocity, quality suffers, and your team feels the consequences. This guide outlines when it makes sense to outsource quality assurance (QA), the risks to watch for, and how to scale testing without increasing headcount or slowing down engineering. You will learn how leading teams are leveraging external QA partners to expand coverage, enhance defect detection, and remain aligned with CI/CD timelines.

Scale

Stax

JUNE 18, 2025

Software tailored to your industry? That’s the main premise of vertical SaaS. Unlike horizontal SaaS solutions that serve a broad range of businesses, vertical SaaS solutions are designed with deep knowledge of specific markets—making them more intuitive, efficient, and impactful. This article explores what vertical SaaS is, its advantages, challenges, and how companies can win in this focused, fast-growing space.

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Merchant Services SaaS Payments Payment Services Payments 167

USIO

FEBRUARY 19, 2025

Becoming your own Payment Facilitator (PayFac) sounds greatuntil you realize its a regulatory nightmare , a financial black hole , and takes longer than your last DIY home improvement project (which, lets be honest, is still unfinished). Fortunately, PayFac-as-a-Service (PFaaS) exists to save you from the $1M+ upfront cost, 12+ months of setup time, and the headaches that come with managing payments, compliance, and risk.

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PayFac as a Service Merchant Services Payfac Payments 179

SaaStr

JANUARY 3, 2025

The success rate for executive hires at high-growth SaaS companies can be surprisingly low – you’re often lucky if 50-60% of your management team works out long-term. In a recent conversation between HubSpot Chairman and co-founder Brian Halligan and SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin, they shared their advice on what actually works when hiring VPs and building your SaaS executive team.

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Sales Hiring Scale Systems Review Interviewing 284

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2025

When SaaStr Fund made the first investment in RevenueCat back in 2018, nobody could have predicted that this “simple API for managing in-app subscriptions” would become the infrastructure powering 33% of all mobile subscription apps and reach a $500M valuation in 2025. And more importantly, revenue and user growth that is accelerating at scale.

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Payments Payment Solutions Underperforming Technical Team Payment Methods 265

SaaStr

JUNE 11, 2025

Dear SaaStr: How Does a Founder Mindset Change As You Go From Startup to Scaleup? The big changes I see: Moving (Over Time) From Hustler to Strategist. Though Stay a Hustler, Too 😉 In the early days, you’re in the trenches—selling, building, and doing whatever it takes to survive. But as you scale, you have to step back and focus on strategy. You move from being the doer to the leader, managing teams and making high-level decisions.

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Startup Interviewing Scaling Metrics 263

Speaker: Tamara Fingerlin, Developer Advocate

Apache Airflow® 3.0, the most anticipated Airflow release yet, officially launched this April. As the de facto standard for data orchestration, Airflow is trusted by over 77,000 organizations to power everything from advanced analytics to production AI and MLOps. With the 3.0 release, the top-requested features from the community were delivered, including a revamped UI for easier navigation, stronger security, and greater flexibility to run tasks anywhere at any time.

Data

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2025

So in any interesting bit of convergent evolution, both Monday and HubSpot have now passed 250,000 customers. Both started SMB (Monday even more so), and Both have now gone more enterprise (Monday even more) But still with the vast majority of their customers SMB. Both have also evolved from different roots (marketing for HubSpot, team management for Monday) to now have CRMs as their core.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 5, 2025

So does being a solo founder … work in SaaS? We’ve dug into this topic several times at SaaStr. Of the post ~40 SaaS IPOs, only 5 or so had solo co-founders. So let’s call that 10%-12% or so. Still, they are some good ones: Zoom, Scaler, New Relic, Elastic, etc. More on that here : At the Top SaaS Companies, Founder-CEOs Own ~15% at IPO.

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Cloud SaaS Data 329

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2025

So when Microsoft paid $26 Billion to buy LinkedIn, it seemed like they were getting a pretty good deal. Fast forward to today, it looks like a great one. LinkedIn is at $17 Billion in ARR, still growing 10%, and its whole division is wildly profitable with 50%+ operating margins! There may be better M&A deals in the history of B2B. But there cant be too many better ones.

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Acquisition B2B 317

SaaStr

JANUARY 6, 2025

So some folks are going to disagree with me on this post, but I’m close to 100% right on it, and it will save you a ton of pain and time and money. Never hire someone who describes themselves as a “Strategist” unless that’s what you really, really want. Especially today. So many folks want to be strategists, do audits of what you do, and give you ideas.

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Consulting Strategy 273

Speaker: Alex Salazar, CEO & Co-Founder @ Arcade | Nate Barbettini, Founding Engineer @ Arcade | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO @ Aggregage

There’s a lot of noise surrounding the ability of AI agents to connect to your tools, systems and data. But building an AI application into a reliable, secure workflow agent isn’t as simple as plugging in an API. As an engineering leader, it can be challenging to make sense of this evolving landscape, but agent tooling provides such high value that it’s critical we figure out how to move forward.

AI

SaaStr

JUNE 18, 2025

Dear SaaStr: Should I Hire a Sales Consultant as My First Sales Rep? No, you shouldn’t hire a sales consultant as your first sales rep. Here’s why: As the founder, you need to be the one to close the first 10–20 customers yourself. This isn’t just about getting deals done—it’s about deeply understanding your sales process, your customers, and what works (and doesn’t) in your pitch.

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Sales Hiring Consulting Scale Sales 228

SaaStr

JANUARY 8, 2025

In the latest episode of our SaaStr CRO Confidential podcast, host Sam Blond sat down with Lindsey Scrase, COO of Checkr (and former CRO), to discuss her tactics for driving growth at the background screening unicorn. Having joined Checkr from Google in 2022, Lindsay shared valuable insights about identifying and executing on major opportunities for improvement within an already mature go-to-market organization.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 3, 2025

50 cents of compute for 500 dollars of value — Sam Altman (@sama) February 3, 2025 So just how much will AI remake classic B2B software? We are still learning. On the one hand, new AI-first entrants are rocketing to $10m ARR in a year. On the other hand, the classic leaders in SaaS have rebounded from 2024 lows both in terms of growth and market caps.

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AWS AI Software Business 284

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2025

A topic I find founders get a bit or often a lot wrong is … When To Hire Your First CFO. We’ve got a guest post below from OnlyCFO on this very topic! If I had to summarize all my learnings, it’s that you can’t really hire a full-time head of finance too early, but many of us go to hire a “CFO” around $10m-$30m ARR, when we really need a VP/SVP of Finance.

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Scale Finance Headcount Leadership 313

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AI

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2025

At SaaStr Annual’s AI Summit , we gathered an all-star panel of product leaders who have built some of the most widely-used AI features in production today. The speakers included Mario Rodriguez, Chief Product Officer at GitHub at GitHub, Diego Zaks, VP of Design at Ramp, Dane Knecht, SVP of Emerging Technologies at Cloudflare, and Vincent van der Meulen, Design Engineer at Figma, and Dani Grant, CEO at Jam.dev.

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AI Search AI Strategy Scale 311

SaaStr

JANUARY 11, 2025

"Software engineers working in AI earned 48% more than the average software engineer at the company, according to a payroll spreadsheet shared with BI." [link] — Jason SaaStr 2025 is May 13-15 Lemkin (@jasonlk) January 11, 2025 So a newer issue that is discussed a lot at start-up board meetings and investor meetings is AI Engineer comp.

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Engineering AI New CTO CTO 283

SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2025

SaaStr Annual 2025 ticket sales in December: 181% of 2024 SaaStr Annual 2025 ticket sales overall so far: 156% of 2024 We'll see where we end up, but … SaaS is Back!! pic.twitter.com/5vlHiRmeCz — Jason SaaStr 2025 is May 13-15 Lemkin (@jasonlk) January 2, 2025 So one of our themes (and memes) is that SaaStr is Back. It’s a new SaaS, a different SaaS, and AI-fueled SaaS, but it’s back.

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AI SaaS Data Sales 283

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2025

So there’s an uncomfortable truth that VCs don’t discuss outloud that often, but everyone has sort of accepted. Everyone resisted in 2022 and into 2023, but by 2024 they began to capitulate. That a lot of unicorns that hit $1B+ valuations in 2020-2021 … probably aren’t really unicorns anymore. How many? Over 60% haven’t raised funding since 2021 and likely never achieved the scale to do so, or have seen growth slow: Per Carta, a , : 374 of the original 616 pool ha

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Scaling Strategy 303

Speaker: Pete Uselman, Director of Partner Experience at Wind River Payments

Most integrated payments providers share a percent of the payment revenue with their software partners. But, oftentimes, that revenue share is only a fraction of the true income potential software providers can realize. If you want to maximize income opportunities from your payments program, check out Wind River Payments’ webinar-on-demand.

Payments

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2025

Rolling out our AI SDR this morning. It took a bunch of training, tooling, etc. But … 🔥Already got 15 meetings from it, 7.5% hit rate That’s more than any human SDR did in 30+ days before (More to come) — Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) June 16, 2025 The Top 3 Reasons AI Sales Tools “Don’t Work” (Spoiler: They Actually Do, If You Use The Tools Properly) I get this question at least 3x a week: “Jason, we tried AI sales tools and they just don’t wor

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

Meet Wyatt Jenkins: From Construction Sites to Chief Product Officer If you want to understand how vertical SaaS companies scale to $1B+ in revenue while staying true to their customers, there’s no better person to learn from than Wyatt Jenkins, Chief Product Officer at Procore Technologies. Wyatt’s journey is uniquely suited to leading product at a construction technology company.

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Construction Scale SaaS Travel 244

SaaStr

JUNE 6, 2025

So Jamin Ball of Altimeter has a great summary of the cumulative revenue growth of all public SaaS companies … and it’s not a great story: Aggregate net new ARR added in Q1 from the software universe isn't looking good! Down nearly 30% YoY from Q1 last year pic.twitter.com/9MLyLe3XXf — Jamin Ball (@jaminball) June 5, 2025 Bottom Line Up Front : The aggregate cloud software market just delivered its worst quarterly performance in years, with net new ARR additions plummeting

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SaaStr

JANUARY 9, 2025

Dear SaaStr: What Are Some Successful SaaS Leaders Without Sales Teams? Many that are self-serve and SMB-focused can start off without a sales team … for a while. But almost none stay without a sales team … forever. Yes, Atlassian since well past its IPO had almost no direct sales team. But it had and has a very large channel that sells its product into the enterprise, and a lot of internal resources that support the channel.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 274

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Payment Solutions

SaaStr

JANUARY 15, 2025

So Cloud and SaaS have had a bit of a rollercoaster the past 4 years, from the boom times of 2020-2021, to the tougher times overall of 2023, to the AI boom of 2024+. But one thing has done well through all of it: security. We always need it, and the threats keep coming. And Cloudflare has been one of the biggest beneficiaries. It just keeps on going: $1.7B+ ARR 28% growth (!

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Scaling Cloud AI Engineering 272

SaaStr

APRIL 28, 2025

Kiren Sekar, Chief Strategy Officer and founding team member at Samsara, came to SaaStr Annual to do one of our best deep dives even on going multi-product. Samsara was intentionally multi-product from the earliest days, and they carefully planned out scaling 5+ products to $100M+ ARR. And come see so many more great convos like this at 2025 SaaStr Annual + AI Summit on May 13-15 in SF Bay , including the CEOs and CXOs at vertical SaaS leaders ServiceTitan, Clio, MangoMint, Owner and so many mor

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Scale Transportation Scaling SMB 259

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2025

So Lightspeed Venture Partners suryed 154 top venture-backed mostly B2B start-ups for their sales metrics. The full report is here. One analysis that was great was on the top reasons sales teams lost deals. Many will sound familiar. Sales teams report 53% of deals were lost due to no action, and 39% due to prospect went silent”: Only 27% of deals were reported as lost to competition.

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B2B Metrics Sales 283