SaaStr

JULY 14, 2022

With Aaron Levie, Stewart Butterfield, David Sacks (fresh off Yammer’s acquisition for $1b+, which seemed so high at the time), Leyla Seka from Salesforce, David Ulevitch from OpenDNS (who sold to Cisco just a few months later for $800m, which again seemed enormous at the time), and the list went on. It was awesome.

Scale 276

Scale Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO 276

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Since 2010 we’ve seen more startups, funds, and capital than ever before, but with this drastic increase, investors are seeing unexpected new trends reshaping the future of the industry. The panel that we are in is called Is Seed the New Series A, and this is a question that I’ve been asking informally yesterday and today.

New CTO 151

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 151

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

5/ Moving from CTO-led -> VPE-led dev team. Most of us hire a VP of Engineering to take over from our CTO because we see the CTO is getting burnt out, or has trouble building a dev team > 8-9 folks, or gets disinterested in solving technical debt, bugs, etc. That’s when you want to lean in. More here.

Part-Time VPE 261

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 261

User Pilot

MAY 1, 2024

. “Localmind” experienced steady growth until Airbnb made an acquisition offer in 2012, which Lenny accepted. Following the acquisition, he transitioned from engineering to the product team , marking a pivotal moment in his career. This requires rapid cycles of building, shipping, gathering feedback , and iterating.

Underperforming Technical Team 75

Underperforming Technical Team New CTO Interviewing CTO 75

Panintelligence

JUNE 7, 2024

In this blog, we asked Panintelligence CEO Zandra Moore and CTO Ken Miller what they think are some of the most frequent mistakes in SaaS development and offer actionable insights to help you steer clear of them. We often see companies too focused on customer acquisition, and not enough on retaining customers.

CTO Hire 98

CTO Hire SaaS Business Underperforming Technical Team 98

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

We’ll also hear Andrew Chen, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, talking about the changing landscape of customer acquisition. For Slack, that was clearly the engineering and dev communities, who love new tools. And it was very successful. We have a lot of people going to slack.com, and it’s very simple to start a team.

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Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Customer Onboarding Specialist: Responsible for helping new customers get up and running with the company’s products. Time to Market for New Products : Also known as velocity, this metric measures the CTO’s effectiveness and speed in rolling new products /features. Come up with product and new feature ideas.

Sales Hiring 90

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 90

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Well, in the past several years, there’s been a tremendous number of companies that have built specifically for developers and use this as a way to get into these new markets, to displace incumbents and disrupt the competition. You have the opportunity to upsell new features and capabilities to them. The contract size grows.

Outsourced Development 174

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 174

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

What’s their new CAC Payback Time? New Gross Margins? You’ll need Cost of Revenue to calculate your Gross Margin, which in turn you need to calculate Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Payback Time and to understand your company’s unit economics in general. Let’s start with Payroll – Support.

Startup 90

Startup Merchant Services DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

FastSpring

DECEMBER 22, 2020

With this new investment, we are already increasing our pace of innovation and have a very exciting roadmap of things to come over the next 12 months. As the worlds of sales rep driven commerce and ecommerce converge, the acquisition of SalesRight will help us create a leading solution to enable this trend. We acquired SalesRight.

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Payment Methods Payment Services Payment Solutions Payments 90

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shared with us how they got there — and the top mistakes they made — just 3 quarters after their IPO. We have someone that probably 98 percent of you know virtually or socially in some sense, Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!

Part-Time VPE 216

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 216

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2019

I used to be a CTO and operator, co-founder of a SaaS start up. And something of insight so we are New York based, global venture and equity investor. So acquisitions could be for a number of reasons. So you might say that you are so focused on core growth, how would you ever manage an acquisition and then integrating that?

Outsourcing Services 109

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Technical Review 109

ProfitWell

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

RevOps isn’t new—some form of revenue operations has been around for a very long time, it simply lacked a title. When Co-founder and CTO of Chargify , Michael Klett isn’t brewing his own beer, he’s crafting billing experiences. Said hops came from a new cultivar out of the Pacific Northwest called Cascade. Key takeaways.

CTO Hire 98

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 98

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 5, 2021

In conversation with Blake Bartlett , she walked us through how B2C and B2B growth strategies compare across each phase of the customer journey from acquisition to retention and expansion. At Acorns, my team included user acquisition, CRM marketing, and growth product.” Acquisition. Defining Growth . Hila explains. Activation.

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B2C B2B New CTO Acquisition 65

OPEXEngine

JANUARY 4, 2022

It’s the kind of notoriety that is leading to a wave of consumption pricing for new software companies and causing established companies to consider whether they too should switch to a usage-based model. “Subscription-based pricing is dead: Smart SaaS companies are shifting to usage-based models” headlined a recent TechCrunch article.

Pricing 52

Pricing New CTO CTO Metrics 52

OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

To combat this and be more agile, SaaS management is morphing and restructuring functional management and multiplying the number of new C-Suite titles like Chief Customer Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, and Chief Product Officer, not to mention Chief Performance Officer and Chief Security Officer. Chief Product Officer.

Part-Time CTO 69

Part-Time CTO CTO CTO Hire Management 69

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

If you're generating something that's brand new, like a brand new category, nobody understands about it. In my past roles at ACORN, GitLab, whenever I started as a head of growth, one of the data points I will look into is what's the percentage of new users coming back the second day or coming back second month?

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

ProfitWell

FEBRUARY 14, 2020

For example, if you subscribe to the New York Times , you pay a flat price per month or year. Spotify, on the other hand, added discounted tiers for Spotify Premium in a bid to increase acquisition and retention. What is flat rate pricing? Who is using a flat rate pricing strategy? The reason for this success? And lots of them.

Pricing 59

Pricing Technical Cofounder Scale New CTO 59

Point Nine Land

SEPTEMBER 7, 2021

There are several reasons for this line of thought: The US is by far the largest market, it’s relatively homogenous (compared with Europe), and it’s where you’ll find most early adopters of new technology. It led to a 3x increase of MRR within a few months and created the foundation for a scalable, profitable customer acquisition engine.

Venture Capital 52

Venture Capital New CTO Scale CTO 52

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

Additionally, “leapfrog” candidates—those who come from a level below the C-suite, such as senior vice presidents—now make up roughly 5% of new chief execs. We also measure NPS, and we benchmark that across all acquisitions. Q: Based on your acquisition experience, are for-sale businesses focusing on the customer and NPS?

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

SaaStr

MAY 8, 2019

Every week we’ll be rolling out new winners until we get to the very pinnacle of our list. Dug Song founded Duo Security in 2019 and grew the company as CEO until it’s acquisition in October of 2018. Using magic (standard deviation) we came up with the best of the best of our sessions as voted by you, our SaaStr community.

CTO Coach 29

CTO Coach New CTO CTO Web Developers 29

Point Nine Land

APRIL 9, 2021

So if you’re a US-based startup, you might be able to shoot slightly higher ;) Unlike SaaS companies which have been around for years, B2B marketplaces are a relatively new category and not many investors have invested in them yet. Economics and Acquisition ?? Economics and Acquisition ?? Market Characteristics ??

Marketplace as a Service 59

Marketplace as a Service Payments B2B SaaS Payments 59

Outseta

APRIL 11, 2019

Think of the best CTO-level software developers that you know—do you think your product would progress faster if they were building it 2-3 days per week, or if you hired an average developer in a full-time capacity? . ” For example, maybe your company sells its products primarily online using a low-touch customer acquisition model.

CTO Hire 52

CTO Hire Sales Hiring B2B New CTO 52

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

This acquisition reinforces Sprinklr’s mission to define and lead the customer experience management industry with the world’s first Unified Front Office. This helps brands manage customer-facing functions in their entirety, from marketing and advertising to research, care, and social engagement. Congrats on the collaboration, friends.

Scale 43

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

ProfitWell

JANUARY 2, 2020

Not only does your sales team need to bring new customers through the door, but they also need to ensure that what they’re selling matches up exactly with those customers’ expectations. Traditional sales teams live mainly on the acquisition stage in the cycle. That’s what makes subscription sales so difficult. Marketing efforts.

B2C 52

B2C Payment Features Subscription Payments 52

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

Jason Lemkin: 50 reps in a new city that you’ve never met, and hired in 60 days when you’re in the low millions ARR. When we made the acquisition, I remember being in a meeting with our senior executives. About four months after we made the acquisition, we announced to the team we were changing the name.

Sales Hiring 237

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 237

OpenView Labs

JULY 2, 2020

New for 2020: SaaS Pricing and COVID-19. In this brand-new report, we finally answer the question “Freemium or free trial?” Pricing Low-Touch SaaS: How to Approach Pricing and Packaging a New SaaS App, by Example. SaaS pricing is one of the most important (but difficult) decisions a new business makes.

Pricing 135

Pricing SaaS Payments Payments SaaS 135

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2020

And by the time the song comes out, you’re not even going to really appreciate it because you’ve written 20 new songs, and those are the ones that you can’t wait to hear. And I always just also love to hear about companies that are started outside of New York City and San Francisco. So it’s a great story.

Marketplace as a Service 98

Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 98

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 9, 2020

And I’m a writer of a newsletter called Tech Bound, in which I hone in on marketing strategies and customer acquisition. The customer or user acquisition strategy is product-led and follows this concept of land and expand. I first got started in SEO, I think at around 16 years old. I’ve always been a pretty curious kid.

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Technical Review Scale Underperforming Technical Team Software Review 199

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

Major challenges facing a new CEO [19:40]. We went through an acquisition and we got bought. I got into the game there, obviously went through the acquisition, that’s how we came up with the idea for the company. It really lended itself to being this new category, this post signature type of contract product.

Scale 112

Scale CTO Hire Scaling CTO Coach 112

OPEXEngine

JUNE 16, 2020

The 90-Day Rule , which argues that new managers need to be decisive about who stays on the teams they inherit. Most of the time, in my experience, VCs run in advice/support mode, but if a company starts to have continual performance problems, is considering a new financing, or evaluating potential exit opportunities (e.g.,

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Venture Capital Technical Advisors 59

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2019

The catch was he had just moved his family four kids to New York city. We had no New York city presence. I had my CTO and everyone would be like, “You can’t do this. So, we decided to be flexible and through that we actually opened a New York office. Real connection, but there was a catch. This was a problem.

CTO Hire 160

CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 160

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 24, 2021

Great to see a lot of repeat attendees and some new ones. A thanks to [Marsh 00:00:34] for stepping in at the beginning of the month, and a great session with our own Jason Warner and Adrian, the CTO of Zendesk. Lionetti, the CMO at Confluent, and most recently, the CTO from Zendesk, Adrian. I’m Travis Bryant.

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CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 124

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2020

So I worked for Jason Lemkin for about six years, half of which was EchoSign and the other half of which was Adobe post acquisition. QUESTION 6: My company is a very technical product and somebody serious software and it’s a new category you were creating like scratch. New category. So he’s the CTO?

Sales Hiring 154

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire Scale 154

Outseta

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

Just as a CTO may have to explain the importance of technical projects to a CEO, the CMO needs to educate the CEO on the various ways marketing can drive their business. Beyond that, with new data privacy laws attribution is actually becoming more difficult and less possible than it was 5 or 10 years ago. Look for a new team.

Sales Hiring 50

Sales Hiring CTO Coach CTO Hire Underperforming Technical Team 50

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2024

He says that there are three main reasons for this: The cost of customer acquisition has gone up. Investors should immediately engage with the CTO to assess their technical capabilities and potential, as great CTOs can demonstrate their exceptional skills quickly. The competition is more intense. Customers are more demanding.

CTO Hire 208

CTO Hire Development Team Review Software Review Technical Review 208

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

And also, we always prioritize the features requested by our existing customers over the new prospects. Mallun Yen : So, you were an engineer by training and then you became an engineering leader, as the CTO of Webex, and then you became a CEO. You know, earlier today we talked about creating a new category. Welcome Eric.

Sales Hiring 136

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 136