SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2023

Since 2008, investor preference has largely been growth-oriented due to the artificially low cost of capital and stimulus. The right strategy to win means reassessing fundamental issues like the product-market fit and centering on the best ICP. Shifting focus in a new era. Strategy to win.

Consulting 49

Consulting Underperforming Technical Team Management Marketing 49

SaaStr

MAY 22, 2019

Leaders who do so will lose their product market fit. She started off as an associate product manager with Netscape, then joined the Boston Consulting Group as a project leader. From 200-2008 she held leadership positions at Allegis Corporation and Intuit before ultimately joining Intercom in 2017.

Scale 170

Scale Leadership Consulting Software Development 170

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

Klaviyo was bootstrapped, so there wasn’t much time to find product market fit. When Klaviyo started during the post-2007-2008 recession hangover, it was a great time to build. They wanted to create a place where you could store everything about your customers and use the data any way you choose.

Revenue 312

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 312

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 16, 2023

One of the toughest challenges for founders — and especially technical founders who are used to focusing so much on product features over sales — is striking “product-market fit”. What does this mean for product design and product management? This was 2008, right? the night before it was to IPO).

Product Marketing 78

Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 78

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

When I was starting as a first time entrepreneur in 2008, I got rejected by a lot of VCs. Do you have to still find the right product market fit, you have to build a good product, you have to service the customers, you have to compete in the market. And it doesn’t mean that you have to sell a big product.

Sales Recruiting 264

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 264

User Pilot

SEPTEMBER 9, 2024

Additionally, as users engage and provide feedback, the company can identify common challenges and improvement opportunities, allowing the product to evolve in line with real user needs. Join other product marketing geeks.

Strategy 111

Strategy Marketing Social Media Software Review 111

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 7, 2018

In particular, post-2008 when a SaaS solution with its OPEX offering stood out from the conventional CAPEX solutions. In 2015 Randy had kept pace with the growth in the market. Competitors were increasing their market share and Randy was falling behind. FIND PRODUCT MARKET FIT. Originally this worked well.

Scale 101

Scale Growth Hacking Scaling Sales Hiring 101

SaaStr

JULY 11, 2019

What you need to know about this story is that I founded the company back in 2008. The challenge with that is you found a company, you start building a company, you raise money for a company, you hire a team to build the product for a certain type of company, and then the whole consumer changes and you have to adjust.

Scale 157

Scale Marketplace as a Service Sales Recruiting Scaling 157

Baremetrics

MARCH 16, 2021

While blockchain technology was spearheaded by Bitcoin starting from 2008, using the technology for other applications became popularized around 2017. As a growing startup, QuikNode is focused on optimizing product market fit and iterating for more traction. Table of Contents. Gain valuable feedback.

Blockchain 90

Blockchain Payment Solutions Artificial Intelligence Payment Services 90

Casey Accidental

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

After product/market fit, most companies’ obsession is not thinking about how to create their next amazing product. Specifically, how do I get this product I know is valuable in the hands of everyone it can be valuable to. As I have discussed in previous essays , product/market fit can be hard to interpret at the time.

Payments 63

Payments Scale Payment Methods Underperforming Technical Team 63

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

MARCH 23, 2020

S Curves At HubSpot we often discussed S Curves - the idea behind them is that all products, markets and business models follow a predictable cycle of growth, maturity and decline (the pattern often looks like an “S”). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness brought the theory worldwide attention back in 2008.

Underperforming Technical Team 213

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service 213

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

At the beginning, my vice presidents were engineering, and product, and a designer. Making sure we have product market fit was effectively number one. Build the product. Get it into the market. As the evolution of the company, as we started moving up market, started selling to enterprises, it was, “OK.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 264

Brian Balfour

JULY 5, 2017

In the introduction to this series I made the point that Product Market Fit isn't the only thing that matters. It is actually only one of four fits needed to grow a product to $100M+ in a venture-backed time frame. Why we should be thinking about it as Market Product Fit. I’ve been in both situations.

Retention 76

Retention Product Marketing B2C Startup 76

User Pilot

JULY 28, 2023

A form of minimum viable product MVP designed to attract customers up front and raise money to actually build the product prior to launch. If you want to generate a buzz and market your idea, use a crowdfunding-style MVP. Identify product market fit and understand what will build loyalty, use a minimum lovable product.

Marketplace as a Service 96

Marketplace as a Service Social Media Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 96

Mucker Capital

MAY 6, 2020

That pressure can lead to missteps, which most startups can ill-afford when they still haven’t found product-market fit or a scalable, repeatable go-to-market strategy. Indeed, after raising large rounds of financing, founders frequently feel pressure to spend aggressively to drive growth.

Startup 52

Startup Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring 52

User Pilot

MAY 19, 2021

Hubspot, one of the leading content marketing platforms, pioneered webinars all the way back in 2008. In only 4 years the number of customers that used their product went from 317 to 10,000. Hubspot built its early success off interactive, unforgettable, and useful webinars.

B2B 119

B2B Marketing SaaS Social Media 119

ProfitWell

AUGUST 19, 2019

They’re an established leader in the market and one of the first movers in the space, but the tradeoffs they’ve made to get there have put the company in dire straits. The biggest problem Evernote has is product-market fit. Subscribe and Listen. How freemium acquisition can go wrong over time.

Acquisition 76

Acquisition Scale Social Media Branding 76

SaaSHolic

MARCH 20, 2023

A Activision e a Blizzard cresceram na década de 90 se especializando nesse público (até se fundirem em 2008) e gigantes como Microsoft, Sony e Nintendo desenvolveram hardware e software para o público. Nascia em 2007 outra empresa de tecnologia — chamada Zynga — que buscava agradar um público um pouco mais específico: os gamers.

SaaS 52

SaaS Software Review Mobile Startup 52

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 14, 2025

Procore quickly found early product-market fit by being narrowly focused and doubling down on its customer profile of custom home builders serving high-net-worth individuals. Then came the 2008 financial crisis. There was complexity around each home project as most of these homes were built like commercial buildings.

Scale 290

Scale Construction SaaS AI 290

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2019

How does a startup that launched during the financial crisis in 2008 become a unicorn company in 2019? Product-market fit has been really important. So we started in 2008 June, 2008 I think and in three days we would celebrate our 11th birthday. That’s when we found product market fit.

Sales Hiring 195

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Government 195

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2024

Pouring money into go-to-market will not solve for product market fit. I find that often, in SaaS, it’s easy to get excited after a few customer acquisitions, and teams will too quickly pivot into investing capital into demand gen, sales, and marketing. . #4. What’s the #1 bit of advice you’d give to SaaS founders today?

Innovation 290

Innovation Wireless Acquisition Technology 290

SmartKarrot

MAY 11, 2021

Izosimov in 2008 for an article in Harvard Business Review, hypergrowth means ‘the steep part of the S-curve that young industries experience that sets them from losers.’. In the product-market fit , hypergrowth occurs at Stage 4. Hypergrowth is essentially driven by market demand. First coined by Alexander V.

Systems Review 10

Systems Review Technical Review Customer Lifetime Value Innovation 10

SaaStr

JULY 22, 2020

We got started in 2008 when we first spotted this sort of new place in investing, which we called seed. At the time, there may be four or five other firms doing this same strategy of investing somewhere between $500,000 and $2 million into companies that were just getting started we would call it pre product market fit.

Venture Capital 285

Venture Capital Travel Investment Marketplace as a Service 285

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 7, 2019

You joined YouTube back in 2008, and you helped guide the company through hypergrowth after its acquisition by Google. During that time, what were some of the biggest lessons that you learned scaling the product organization? When I got to YouTube in 2008, we had amazing growth in lots of different ways. This was 2008.

Software Review 171

Software Review Mobile Systems Review Technical Review 171

SaaStr

JUNE 15, 2021

Jason : You launched, it’s a hack in the beginning with 18 months, you’ve got another product line? Jeff : Basically, we launched voice in 2008, very end of 2008. It’s from Twilio to you, our customer, is that we stand by this as an operationally excellent product. Is that the history?

Scale 306

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Engineering Wireless 306

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

If you can create a scenario where others are building on top of your product – and therefore evolving it in ways you may not have the resources to do yourself – your offering suddenly becomes even more valuable to your customers. Here, Ceci unpacks her thinking for Intercom’s Group Product Marketing Manager, Jasmine Jaume.

Underperforming Technical Team 170

Underperforming Technical Team Marketplace as a Service Outsourced Development Development 170

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2023

Stewart : If we had started in 2008, your question before, we would not have taken off like this, for a number of other reasons. David : Which is great, because Parker did a great job, but at some point with a 600 employee company, at some point you might decide you want a product management team. It was just harder.

Scale 363

Scale Sales Hiring PayPal Development Team Review 363

Hitenism

APRIL 24, 2017

By the time I had started KISSmetrics in 2008, I was constantly making friends with people like Eric Ries, Sean Ellis, and Ed Baker just to learn everything they knew about getting predictable growth. To learn this discipline in the past, you would have had to personally network your way to the top growth practitioners in Silicon Valley.

Growth Hacking 177

Growth Hacking Artificial Intelligence Technical Review Systems Review 177

SaaStr

AUGUST 6, 2019

We looked at the world in 2008, 2009, and we said, “How come it’s almost impossible to connect two companies to do business, especially if they have complex business processes, but we can all connect as consumers on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, every single day we want to do business? Your product has value for them.

Payment Solutions 182

Payment Solutions Payments Outsourcing Services SaaS Payments 182

Casey Accidental

DECEMBER 5, 2023

I’d argue the only companies that have found product/market fit in crypto are companies that either enable or catch grifters. A more pithy way of saying this is the crypto space has created more criminal convictions than companies with product/market fit. So, as an operator, this feels like 1997 or 2008.

AI Search 66

AI Search AI ChatGPT Scale 66

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2019

As for Tom, he joined Redpoint in 2008 and has since led investments in Kustomer, Looker, Expensify, and Gremlin all prior guests on the show, I hasten to add. What time frame from SAL to closed lead suggests product market fit? How does this differ when comparing SMB to enterprise?

Scale 171

Scale SMB Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 171

SaaStr

JANUARY 3, 2020

As for Tom, he joined Redpoint in 2008 and has since led investments in Kustomer, Looker, Expensify and Gremlin all prior guests on the show I hasten to add. What time frame from SAL to closed lead suggests product market fit? How does this differ when comparing SMB to enterprise?

SMB 32

SMB Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 32

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2020

Early stage, there’s going to be demand risk and product market fit risk, but later the risk is about the ability to scale. Is it in that pre product market fit phase? What types of product marketing pieces do we need to generate and create? Harry Stebbings: Totally. I see that.

Scale 221

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Investment Sales Hiring 221

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 9, 2024

In 2008, I started a business called RJMetrics, which was basically the first SaaS analytics platform. There weren’t really SaaS products or APIs at that point. Then by 2011 or 2012, some of the tech components of the Great Recession had started wearing off and the market started waking up. The first two were much nerdier.

Scale 118

Scale Technical Review Sales Hiring AI 118

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2020

I went into product marketing for the commercial arm of Xerox Park, which is a big computer research company here. And we started CloudFlare during the economic downturn right after the financial crisis in 2008. ” Because again, it was 2008. Then, I went into sales school, Xerox sales school.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Review Outsourcing Services 264

SaaStr

APRIL 3, 2020

Basically I was recruiting engineers for Bay area based startups and the problem with it was that the year was 2008, and it was a really tough time for hiring, but an even worse time for recruiters. How do you approach that,, because you can’t literally market to everyone from financial services to shipping brokers.

Sales Recruiting 232

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Branding 232

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

Billion story from its launch in 2008 to its 2018 acquisition by Recruit Holdings. In terms of the product market fit falling apart. How does your customer success and customer support functions change with the move to enterprise? Billion acquisition is just one milestone in the early innings of the company’s story.

Scale 164

Scale Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Payment Services 164