Intercom, Inc.

MAY 19, 2021

It’s a familiar problem for all companies that scale fast – how do you keep your core technologies manageable for the increasing number of teams that depend on them? How our core technologies were being used was also diverging, leading to needlessly increased complexity in our systems. Our first challenge – Elasticsearch.

Scale 216

Scale Technical Review Technology Scaling 216

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

At Glasswing Ventures, they tell their AI-native companies not to lead with AI because it’s such a superficial indication of interest. When you take the data, you may have a business goal of making more sales or delighting the customer. What should founders know about the modern AI stack that Enterprises can scale on?

AI Search 293

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 293

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2023

Alison brings the perspective of all sides of a startup, from investing to SaaS to Cloud. For Google Workspace, they invested in expanding and building Google Meet and the rest of the workspace during 2020. What they’re seeing with GenAI and Google Cloud is an opportunity to grab share from AWS.

Cloud 313

Cloud Scale AWS AI 313

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

The Challenges and Pitfalls of a Partner Ecosystem Drata attributes much of its success to its partner ecosystem, which is an interesting case study for most, so how do they break up marketing, sales, and resource allocation vs. a more direct-sales modeled business? AWS can’t support 20 partners equally. It won’t work.

AWS 285

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 285

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Call me when it scales.” The point is that getting to $1-2 million in ARR probably has less predictive value concerning a company’s ability to get to true scale than most people think – or at least thought some years ago. Being a seed investor I’m trying to find SaaS companies that can scale before they have scaled.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

Why did sales-driven Qualtrics get to $100m+ in ARR without ever raising a nickel, and generating more than $20m a year in free cash flow ? Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? Sales, done right, should be accretive (although expect sales efficiency to ultimately decline post-Initial Scale).

Scale 299

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 299

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

CloudKeeper from TO THE NEW, is a cloud spend optimization solution that guarantees to cut down your AWS bills by 5-15%. With CloudKeeper, we have helped 200+ of our customers optimize their AWS spend with a guaranteed reduction in their AWS bills. No lock-ins. Savings from Day 1. RI pricing for On-demand usage.

Cloud spend optimization 263

Cloud spend optimization AWS Scale compliance 263

SaaStr

AUGUST 3, 2024

Overall Cloud spending has bounced back off lows for sure: AWS at a $105B run rate growing 19% Quarterly YoY growth trends below. VCs are minting AI unicorns at a strong clip, and investing in AI at as fast a clip as they can. Sapphire Ventures, a leading growth-stage VC fund, has some good data. # Not overall. 200m for Clio. #

AWS 238

AWS Scale Social Media AI 238

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2024

It could be a 6-month, 12-month, or multi-year venture, so you want the cash to invest in an upmarket strategy properly. One way is by talking to your customers and prospects. Either way, ensure the demand gen team sits down with sales and decides which accounts to go after. You’ll also need to look at your sales process.

Sales Hiring 305

Sales Hiring Scale SMB compliance 305

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

Or of my investments, ones like Algolia and Salesloft, that yes, in theory, were playing in larger markets, but in practice, their entry points were quite narrow. How can that scale over time? How many sales reps, how much marketing spend, how many engineers will you really need? Worth investing 7+ years of your life in.

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital AWS 284

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

An open discussion with Sam Blond, CSO at Brex, and Kristen Habacht, VPS at Atlassian, about adjusting their sales process during Covid-19. Kristen Habacht runs EDR sales at Atlassian, which I got a check today, $40 billion-$50 billion company. Four, people in the sale? Kristen Habacht: Well, there’s none in sales.

Merchant Services 265

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 265

SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2024

Some things to think about as you craft your offer are: Does it align with your sales motion? You don’t want conflict with the sales team. This is where they started, but startups weren’t adopting the product as much with a discount, and there was a lot of conflict with the sales team. A free term. Do they have a CRO in place?

Startup 267

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team AWS 267

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

It’s worth pointing out that Azure is a bit above the long term trendline, while AWS is still below (but accelerating up). As a public company with significant scale, it’s hard to grow quickly if you have to rely solely on new customers for that growth. Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S.

Cloud 318

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 30, 2022

But these days, there are so many innovative and impactful tools that can massively streamline your workflows and help to set you up for success as you scale. This is especially important for small teams, where you need to operate at a scale far beyond your headcount (without burning out your team by working around the clock).

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Startup AWS 163

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

1: How Sales and Marketing Have Shifted Since 2020 Expectations and the types of people working in SaaS have shifted over the past few years, and much more in sales, marketing, and customer success. . #1: At scale, this is a jigsaw puzzle,” he said. I can leave my horrible sales job making $240k OTE and be a solopreneur.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 307

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 9, 2021

This is why we’re seeing more and more SaaS companies—Datadog, Twilio, AWS, Snowflake, and Stripe, to name a few—find success with product led growth paired with usage-based pricing. It requires shifts in go-to-market strategy, sales compensation, financial planning, billing, and much more. Ready to scale to $100+ million ARR?

Scale 98

Scale Pricing Scaling AWS 98

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

I’m referring to the full spectrum of business execution, from product management to design to engineering to marketing to sales to support and all the other functions needed to scale a business. Basic marketing and selling at a global scale is becoming easy too. The second army are your main competitors. Mid-stage startups.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2019

In this session, Anna and Sameer will highlight SendGrid’s journey from growth stage through acquisition and why focusing on people and culture is mission critical to success as a company goes through the scaling process. We were signing up hundreds of new paying customers every month with five sales reps. Anna Khan | VP @ BVP.

Scale 159

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 159

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

If we look at that and step back, you can think of this, again, from the leading perspective of the public’s first, which is this evolution over time. We’ve all seen AWS and what they’ve done with their platform. Even at spectacular scale, they’re still growing at 30%. They had to reinvent themselves.

Sales Hiring 235

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 235

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

And then I spent a year at Salesforce working on Marc Benioff’s extended leadership team, and really had a chance to learn how important trust can be, and also really learn from Salesforce, from Mark, how do you really build a global SaaS leader at scale? And in this time of COVID, we’re also pleased we are able to give back.

Software Review 259

Software Review Scale Technical Review SaaS 259

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Customer acquisition is basically how much do you spend in terms of sales people, sales team, and in terms of marketing to acquire a new customer. The key here is knowing what your sales model is. And there are basically two sales models out there. Kind of extreme sales models out there for SaaS businesses.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Amazon on AWS : “…customers are continuing to shift their focus towards driving innovation and bringing new workloads to the cloud. The hyperscalers benefit from massive scale, distribution, trust and depth of customer relationships in ways no other software companies do. Follow along to stay up to date!

Cost optimization & reporting 167

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Azure AWS 167

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 31, 2021

When you first get started, effectively any hosting setup will do the trick: your application is small, you have relatively few customers, and perhaps (depending on your sales process) expectations around performance and reliability are a bit lower during the beta phase. Are you growing and want to scale? Over time all of that changes.

AWS 115

AWS DevOps as a Service Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review 115

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 9, 2021

Ten years ago, we built the initial Intercom infrastructure in AWS’ us-east-1 data center in North Virginia, USA. As a first step, we’re delighted to announce that we now offer European data hosting – allowing your most important data to remain entirely in Europe, stored in the AWS-eu-west-1 region. What’s next?

Data 181

Data AWS Scale Engineering 181

Clouded Judgement

AUGUST 2, 2024

Cloud Giants Report Q2 We also got the Q2 quarters from AWS / Azure / GCP this week! Our expectation, obviously again, is that we are going to significantly increase our investments in AI infrastructure next year, and we'll give further guidance as appropriate.” Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S.

Cloud 157

Cloud Azure GCP(Google Cloud Platform) AWS 157

Clouded Judgement

OCTOBER 27, 2023

Subscribe now Cloud Giants Report Q3 ‘23 Not a great signal for software this week from the Cloud Giants (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud)…After Q2 (3 months ago), the tone from the Cloud Giants around optimizations was largely: optimizations have started to ease, and net new workloads have picked up. Staggering scale already.

Cost optimization & reporting 157

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Azure AWS 157

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 22, 2024

This is why the consumption players (Snowflake, Mongo, Confluent, Azure, AWS, etc) so more variability in the macro slowdown. This brings me to AI (everything leads to AI these days…). But this is changing - many categories are becoming commoditized leading to massive pricing pressure. Do you have ARR or ERR?

AI 190

AI Cloud Revenue Technical Advisors 190

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

It looks at the YoY dollar change in quarterly revenue from the hyperscalers (just looking at Azure / AWS because the data goes back further) going back a few years. If we break this down and look at Azure and AWS independently (graphs below), you’ll see how the AWS “swings” were a lot more volatile.

Cloud 184

Cloud Software Azure AWS 184

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 2, 2021

Automation in infrastructure can lead to pretty serious blunders. “I almost think of this as one of those videos of the universe that goes from zooming all the way to the earth as a dot in a galaxy and all the way through the human scale and the micro scale” Jamie Osler: You have really narrowed that down as well.

Engineering 178

Engineering Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Systems Review 178

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

So how can you leverage that product’s success to obtain the valuation and funding you need to scale? I’m talking about product-led growth as an investment strategy, but really my background is 10 years of operating experience in the product-led growth world. Now I’m investing in that. So, OpenView worked out for me.

Investment 113

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 113

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

This is the revenue growth for HubSpot leading up to the IPO. Hire the VP of Marketing, MBA, the VP of Sales, MBA, the VP of Customer, MBA, the VP of Engineering, MBA, and now, the odds of any semblance of survival, let alone success, are vanishingly small at this point. Which brings me to sales and marketing. It got better.

Part-Time VPE 296

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 296

Sales Hacker

JUNE 1, 2020

Publicly-traded, PLG businesses grow faster than their peers and are less reliant on expensive sales and marketing investments to fuel their growth. With PLGs massive growth, many wonder if PLG and self-service solutions will replace Sales. Sales Isn’t Going Anywhere. That includes nearly 20 publicly traded companies.

Sales Hiring 99

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 99

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

What I mean by MQLs is Marketing Qualified Leads. One thing we’ve learned in helping our founders and operators scale their businesses is that cash is one of their most precious resources. Can also be responsible for PQLs, if there is a sales motion to upsell self-serve. Driving pipeline for sales (SLG). Efficiency.

Metrics 123

Metrics Revenue Scale Marketing 123

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 19, 2022

As businesses grow and scale, they need to continue to earn and build on that trust in every way they can – but with rapidly expanding tech stacks, it’s not just their own company policies they need to monitor, it’s those of every company they partner with. We build our services with disaster recovery in mind. data deletions or exports.

compliance 138

compliance Data Software Review Scale 138

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

Even though HubSpot grew 23% at $2.5B, there was weaker demand and longer sales cycles, and they had to do pilots with CEOs and CIOs. You can see the growth on the platform side with Azure, Google, and AWS and how much it’s accelerating in AI. Or Scale AI securing $1B. Being AI doesn’t necessarily lead to riches.

CTO Hire 147

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 147

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 12, 2021

Being able to leverage both automated and human support has led to some incredible advancements, allowing companies to scale their support and deliver personalized experiences more efficiently than ever before. You’ve probably had at least one awful support experience where automation has been used to disastrous effect.

Underperforming Technical Team 222

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Payment Methods Payments 222

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

It was around that time about 12 years ago that Jeff Bezos launched AWS, and some of you may remember that, when he did this, Wall Street analysts were looking at him and saying, “Why would you take what’s already a very unprofitable business and drive it further into the red by investing in this AWS initiative?”

Cloud 113

Cloud Scale AWS Artificial Intelligence 113