Tom Tunguz

JUNE 23, 2018

In 2011, the median startup raised a $0.5M Or startups might commercialize hardware, another category where time-to-market is slower than classic SaaS. Last, startups can benefit from a longer period to experiment, and find true product market fit. In other words, investors are concentrating capital in fewer startups.

Machine Learning 189

Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Startup Investment 189

SaaStr

MAY 22, 2019

from 2007-2011 which eventually became Twitch. Leaders who do so will lose their product market fit. Jay Simons rose up the ranks from Area Sales Manager with Plumtree software to VP of Product Marketing and Strategy. From there he went on to BEA Systems as VP of Marketing.

Scale 169

Scale Leadership Consulting Software Development 169

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 20, 2018

We had to look at the problems our new customers needed to solve with fresh eyes and build a healthy partnership with Product to turn these roadblocks in the sales cycle into solutions that customers would love. Trial and error: adding sales input to the product roadmap. Here’s how we did it with a few lessons we learned along the way.

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Scale Sales Software Review Strategy 199

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 16, 2020

Here are five quick takeaways: In 2011, Forbes Magazine called RealtimeBoard (Miro’s previous iteration) “a virtual whiteboard on steroids” We chatted to Andrey about this description to see if the shoe still fits today. Andrey: So to clarify a little bit, we think that product development teams should sit together.

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Consulting Marketplace as a Service Scale Development 249

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

Since 2011, over 500,000 projects have been built with PlanGrid. We do product analytics to help companies build better products. We ended up so totally nailing product market fit because we were laser focused on the customer. Spencer : You have to hire someone who is an expert at it in product marketing.

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SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

I still remember the very first time I met Dev back in 2011 and I was this engineer turn first-time founder, CEO running the business. 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. None of that changes.

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Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 261

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 17, 2018

Des: Some background here: Intercom started in 2011 as a single product. Making the leap of, “I’m going to hire Intercom and get my promotion…”, you can wish there were a direct connection, but there’s not. It’s the results Intercom gets you that will get you promoted.

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Sales Hiring Interviewing Scale Underperforming Technical Team 202

Brian Balfour

JULY 12, 2017

This is part 3 in a series about the growth frameworks companies need to grow to $100M+ Part One: Introduction & Why Product Market Fit Isn't Enough. The Road to a $100M Company Doesn’t Start with Product. Which brings us to part three: Product Channel Fit. The channel does not mold to the product.

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Strategy Growth Hacking Mobile Product Marketing 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

Chart Mogul

FEBRUARY 11, 2021

We see it in the comparison between Intercom ( $150m in ARR ) and Drift ( valued at $360m at their latest funding round): Intercom (founded in 2011) was one of the first companies to offer live on-site chat going after a broad audience of companies and teams. Both approaches can support the creation of a successful SaaS business.

SaaS 86

SaaS Blockchain AI Search Outsourced Development 86

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 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 261

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 1, 2020

Because in the early stages of product-market fit, you’re still shipping stuff and you’re looking to hit this sort of, what I call a vein of value in your customers. I was having a great time there, back in 2011. You’re looking for something like, “S**t that’s really powerful, do more of that.”

VP of Engineering 165

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Engineering 165

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 1, 2020

Because in the early stages of product-market fit, you’re still shipping stuff and you’re looking to hit this sort of, what I call a vein of value in your customers. I was having a great time there, back in 2011. You’re looking for something like, “S**t that’s really powerful, do more of that.”

VP of Engineering 165

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Engineering 165

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

Cause I remember when we signed the program manager agreement with Discover, this was early 2011, and then we closed our Series A on June 2nd of 2011. So we didn’t have product market fit for that. How did you think about, who do I want to target for that product given where we are now. So we didn’t.

Merchant Services 81

Merchant Services Payment Methods Payments Payment Solutions 81

OpenView Labs

JULY 2, 2020

Yet another great piece by Price Intelligently on the need to update your SaaS pricing model – because all SaaS product markets are constantly evolving. In 2011, Netflix unveiled a change in pricing that put them in trouble. Check out this article to see why this type of pricing model may take away a startup’s pricing power.

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Pricing SaaS Payments Payments SaaS 135

User Pilot

SEPTEMBER 4, 2023

By 2011, it achieved revenues of $850 million with only 20 shows. Cirque du Soleil is one of the most legendary examples of a market-creating strategy done right. .” It maximized differentiated value while eliminating unnecessary elements that added cost but not value. The results were remarkable.

Strategy 90

Strategy Technical Review Business Innovation 90

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

Eric Yuan : Yes, when I started the company in 2011, I was already 41 years old, but I still feel that I was very young. And, that was a product manager? Eric Yuan : Product marketing manager. Eric Yuan: Yeah, we tried to let him evaluate our product, you know? And we hired a product marketing person.

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Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 141

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2019

I co-founded Talkdesk in 2011. Then, of course, you need product marketing because these teams need sales collateral that’s up to date that helps them sell the product. So I mean you realize that in order to have to sell the product that SaaS you need an army to support the entire operation.

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Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Company Culture 120

Chart Mogul

FEBRUARY 11, 2021

We see it in the comparison between Intercom ( $150m in ARR ) and Drift ( valued at $360m at their latest funding round): Intercom (founded in 2011) was one of the first companies to offer live on-site chat going after a broad audience of companies and teams. Both approaches can support the creation of a successful SaaS business.

SaaS 52

SaaS Blockchain AI Search Outsourced Development 52

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 29, 2022

And I’d like to talk you through some of the trends we’ve observed since 2011 and some of the beliefs that underpin what we build in Intercom. We built the first Business Messenger in 2011 because we saw so many new requirements emerge. We’re seeing a shift towards designing for end user productivity.

Scale 118

Scale Banking Technical Review Software Review 118

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. By 2016, Procore was a multi-product, multi-stakeholder platform expanding into enterprise and mixed-use construction firms.

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Scale Construction SaaS AI 284

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

Source From $10M to $100M+ ARR: Five CFO Learnings by Mark Khavkin, Pantheon I joined Pantheon, the leading SaaS website operations (WebOps) platform, in early 2017 as the company demonstrated its product-market fit (PMF). Comparing the 2018 public offering of Spotify to Pandora’s original IPO in 2011 is a major example.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SaaS 52

ProfitWell

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

Put together a ‘pricing committee” comprised of members from sales, finance, product, marketing, and a coordinator who’s the driver of your research and strategy. First, let’s take a look at Help Scout , a help desk software launched in 2011. Define organizational goals and objectives. Review current pricing strategies.

Pricing 45

Pricing Payments Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Payments 45

User Pilot

SEPTEMBER 4, 2023

By 2011, it achieved revenues of $850 million with only 20 shows. Cirque du Soleil is one of the most legendary examples of a market-creating strategy done right. ." It maximized differentiated value while eliminating unnecessary elements that added cost but not value. The results were remarkable.

Strategy 52

Strategy Technical Review Business Innovation 52

SmartKarrot

MARCH 25, 2021

In 2011, employees tested how the commercial licensing worked on all Youtube videos before it became public. If your solution has a product-market fit , employees can use it to understand their product better. This will make product teams aware of any issues they face. Oracle runs Oracle through Oracle Linux.

SaaS 10

SaaS Scale User Experience Advertising 10

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 28, 2025

And then before that, he served as the CMO of Just a small company you may have heard of, uh, called Salesforce, uh, where he was responsible for driving really the whole global corporate and product marketing functions and led the team during a time period where Salesforce was really going through hyper growth. Product marketer.

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Sales Hiring AI Scale Cloud 103

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 1, 2018

In the very early days of Intercom the marketing hat fell on my head, but I’d be doing marketing a disservice (and 2011 Des a disservice) if I said that’s what I thought I was doing. I didn’t have a perfectly mapped out startup marketing strategy. Pitching your product.

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Startup Strategy Marketing Social Media 201

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 19, 2019

And as the Group Product Marketing Manager for Platform here at Intercom, I’ve loved seeing all the creative apps our partners have built. And that just gives you more product-market fit and helps you grow faster. Again, as I mentioned, this was my job back in 2011, 2012, 2013. They were much more rigorous.

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Marketing Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring 217

SaaStr

OCTOBER 22, 2020

As for Ryan, he has spent an incredible 9 years at Okta in numerous different roles starting with running the product marketing team before moving to run the marketing team, leading to his promotion to CMO close to 5 years ago now. How does Ryan ensure cross-function working seamlessly from the very beginning with marketing? *

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Sales Hiring Scale Interviewing Technical Review 219

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2020

Both of us and our third co-founder, Jason Purcell, were at a company called Endeca, which was a search engine for e-commerce, exited to Oracle for over a billion dollars in 2011. Rob Gonzalez: Right now, I’m looking for a head of product marketing, so if you know anyone, let me know. I think at least you are not alone.

SaaS Payments 293

SaaS Payments Scale Payment Services Payment Solutions 293

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 9, 2024

Then by 2011 or 2012, some of the tech components of the Great Recession had started wearing off and the market started waking up. We found that we had this just incredible product market fit. From late 2011 until maybe 2015, RJMetrics was… the leads were flying in and falling off of our desk more days than not.

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Scale Technical Review Sales Hiring AI 118

Sales Hacker

APRIL 20, 2021

Lloyed Lobo : So we started the company many moons ago in late 2011, early 2012. I like to get it from, to a point where it’s product market fit and then hand it off to somebody to steer. Our mission is to democratize access to these tax credits, to help people get more money faster for less time and risk.

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Scale Scaling Startup AI Search 104

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 4, 2019

In 2011, he had a board-level disagreement with his shareholders … so he bought them out, to radically focus on his customers. Zvi raised a lot of money many years ago — the last time he raised money was 2011. Sam Jacobs: And your last funding round was 2011? Zvi is a serial entrepreneur. He’s now experiencing 50% growth.

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Scale CTO Coach Cloud New CTO 52

Brian Balfour

AUGUST 3, 2017

The difference between these two are not the common mantras of build a great product, product market fit is the only thing that matters, or growth hacking. Mailchimp is now just moving up to the mid-market with their automation features, and it has been 10+ years. One of the reasons were they hit product channel fit.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2020

I joined the company in 2011 when they had around 50 people as the third salesperson and shortly thereafter, within that first six months, raised almost a quarter billion dollars and the company started just growing exponentially.

Sales Hiring 271

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 271

SaaStr

APRIL 25, 2019

So then you started your third UCaaS company, which is your current company now, DialPad, back in 2011. We had probably a handful of customers we’re still going through, like product market fit, but super early on. And as I said, it’s just been fantastic to see the opportunity in the market and so forth.

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Acquisition Technical Review Systems Review AI 157

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 29, 2020

The state of tooling in 2010 or 2011 was that there was no Stripe, there was no subscription management and the idea of a SaaS economy was just nonsense. So we quickly had to build the product out and get actual users up and running. We incorporated in San Francisco on August 15th, 2011, I think.

Payment Solutions 209

Payment Solutions Payment Methods Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 209