SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Datadog, ZoomInfo, Atlassian, AWS: Epic Growth — But Some Real Headwinds For The First Time. When You Fall Out of Product-Market Fit. 5 Interesting Learnings from Duolingo at $360,000,000 in ARR.

Sales Recruiting 296

Sales Recruiting AWS Compensation Enterprise 296

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2021

It can be easy for SaaS companies to lose momentum if they haven’t quite found the perfect product-market fit. They reached $10 million ARR by year three, which was exciting, but what was missing was a true sense of product-market fit. Commoditization From AWS & Google Cloud. How can you get back on track?

Sales Hiring 312

Sales Hiring Data AWS Leadership 312

SaaStr

AUGUST 2, 2021

Technology Alliances: The tech alliances offer important integrations, especially critical for ServiceNow’s target market of enterprise customers. Examples include AWS, Adobe, Microsoft, and Google Cloud. This early phase is where you’re still looking for that perfect product-market fit and scaling the product to market.

Outsourcing Services 290

Outsourcing Services Scale Scaling Outsourced Development 290

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

Roberge recommends starting with product-market fit. Your customer retention is the best quantifiable measure of product-market fit; however, retention is a lagging indicator. Therefore, you need a way to identify product-market fit as early as possible. This is where you can get strategic and creative.

Sales Hiring 260

Sales Hiring Scale Compensation Sales 260

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2023

Ari Lee Bayme, Managing Director @ Sandfox Advisors See You There!! Ari Lee Bayme, Managing Director @ Sandfox Advisors See You There!!

VP of Engineering 246

VP of Engineering AWS Engineering AI 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

If you don’t think you need a great VP of Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and Engineering — then all that all that means is you’ve never worked with a great one. But not making the hire at all is pretty awful, too. A Rockstar engineer really is 10x better than the next tier.

Sales Hiring 290

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 290

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Ed Lenta, the SVP and GM of Databricks, had the rare opportunity of scaling three hypergrowth companies — VMware, AWS, and Databricks. It’s necessary, in every new market you go into, to go in and soften the beach. This means creating conditions where product market fit and demand start to be facilitated.

Scale 262

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 262

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 7, 2025

With a background that includes leadership roles at AWS, Microsoft, and Lenovo, Fred brings a wealth of experience in building high-performing teams and driving revenue growth. Fred Viet: The mental model we had, and we are doing expansion as well in other markets currently, is, Always trying to have some early signal.

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Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development AWS 117

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 28, 2017

In fact, this data bolsters the notion that management team’s top priority is recruiting, especially after the business has reached product market fit and capitalized itself well. This is a proxy for when the business established product market fit. The answer is incredibly quickly.

Headcount 187

Headcount Scaling Software Business 187

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 30, 2022

AWS – Cloud computing. Many of the biggest and best companies in the world use AWS – and many of them were once startups using AWS, too. For startups in particular, AWS Activate provides architecture guidance and expert support to help you accelerate your growth. Apply now.

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Startup AWS 163

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Customers range from AWS skills-builder platforms with billions of users to Zoom using it for customers and employees. When considering product market fit and seeing value back when Docebo got traction in 2012, they gave away a ton of value with ridiculously low ARR. They’re also growing fast and are nicely profitable.

Sales Hiring 282

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 282

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2024

Get product and product marketing involved in those calls early on because you will need to evolve the product quickly to serve upmarket customers, which takes a while. Make sure you can make that investment from a product perspective. Can the roadmap support what these upmarket customers are looking for?

Sales Hiring 305

Sales Hiring Scale SMB compliance 305

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

It might be a website, brand, messaging, podcasts, blogs, or paid marketing. As a marketer, you ask the same thing. What are the top 3 things you’re looking for in marketing? Sometimes, a deeply technical product founder with product market fit might not be interested in marketing, but they have a vision to get to developers.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 307

Sales Hacker

APRIL 23, 2024

Before Common Room, Linda led product marketing for serverless computing at Amazon Web Services, where she saw firsthand the impact connected data and person-level insights had on accelerating product adoption, earning new customers, and expanding account revenue.

Sales Recruiting 117

Sales Recruiting Scale AWS Management 117

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Ten years ago, there was nobody who SaaS founders could ask in order to learn how to do, for example, inbound marketing, low-touch sales or customer success. In it he argues that an eCommerce business with $10 to $20 million in revenues is not that hard to build and also not very valuable.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

To answer this question, focus on how much you really need to get to that stage where you have product market fit. 1M-$10M — Building, Innovation, and Customers Now, it’s time for the next stage of sustainable growth in SaaS, typically B and C at product-market fit and getting early customers.

Scale 243

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 243

Outseta

OCTOBER 11, 2019

What I’ve learned about product market fit over a decade of working with SaaS start-ups By Geoff Roberts Few topics are discussed in start-up land more than product market fit —founders spend countless cycles iterating on their products, trying to find this often enigmatic state where it’s clear that there’s a real market for their new creation.

Product Marketing 50

Product Marketing Marketing Sales Hiring Education 50

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

The report’s authors already laid out how to get back to hyper-growth , and their article inspired me to share my predictions for 2021’s most important product marketing trends: 1. More SaaS companies will adopt product-led growth. It provides a seamless expansion path as customers get hooked on a product.

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Product Marketing Trends Scale Marketing 58

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 8, 2023

Likewise, the new products you launch do not determine your success. Instead, how you launch them into the market is a huge factor in success. Today, we’re diving straight into the details with product marketing leaders. Start early! Use timing as a forcing function. Frame solutions, rather than features alone.

Sales Recruiting 125

Sales Recruiting Generative AI AWS AI 125

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

We can save companies $100,000 on their AWS bill. Everybody wants to save $100,000 on their AWS bill right now. We want to tell anybody that listens, you can save $100,000 on your AWS bill and demos are actually as high as they’ve ever been in late stage tech. We found something that works. Jason Lemkin: Got it.

Merchant Services 265

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 265

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

And if you think about AWS, if you think about the rise of cloud data warehousing, that is a big technology change and a big game changer for a lot of companies. Here’s a case in point: as a product marketer by training, Alex spoke about how he often struggled to stay on top of the competition.

Scale 181

Scale Marketing AWS Artificial Intelligence 181

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

10% basically means you don’t have any product market fit. That’s typically the AWS model, depending on how much space you take, service space, you will pay more. Once you’ve found your product market fit, you’re immediately looking at acquiring new customers. Five percent is okay.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2022

. “[Our research] opened up new markets for this product without them having to go through the other kinds of experimentation they were originally planning” After doing a bunch of analysis and digging into it, they realized the videos were too slow in certain countries because of where their data centers or AWS environments were located.

Data 151

Data Airlines AWS Underperforming Technical Team 151

Casey Accidental

DECEMBER 11, 2023

In a previous post , I talked about how product work post-product/market fit shifts from zero to one innovation to features, growth, and scaling work. I highlight six different types of product expansion, in increasing levels of difficulty based on these vectors. But Snapchat’s second product was a lot more successful.

Payments 113

Payments Scale Payment Solutions Technical Review 113

User Pilot

AUGUST 21, 2024

Improved personalization Many companies struggle to deliver targeted product marketing messages. The initial investment to build your own solution may seem expensive, but it will lead to long-term cost savings because you can improve your ROI on marketing campaigns and product development. How, you ask?

Data 105

Data Social Media Interviewing User Experience 105

User Pilot

APRIL 21, 2023

The aim of product analysis is to better understand its strengths and weaknesses, to evaluate how effective it is at satisfying user needs , and to identify areas for improvement. Product analysis benefits teams from across the organization, including your product , marketing , customer success , and UX design colleagues.

Underperforming Technical Team 98

Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Onboarding Retention 98

Andreessen Horowitz

SEPTEMBER 22, 2023

Customer testimonials backed up the numbers, showing that major enterprises viewed CrowdStrike as a security platform, not just a product. ” —Deputy CISO, AWS “In my career, the deployment of the CrowdStrike Falcon platform was perhaps the easiest global security rollout I’ve seen.”

Travel 113

Travel Forecasting Pricing Scale 113

SaaStr

JUNE 15, 2021

I think of developers as the strategy to get into the market for whatever you’re doing. At the end of the day, Twilio still sells communications, AWS still sells servers, but the way we’re selling it is different than how it was done in yesteryear. Jason : The entry point. Jeff : The entry point.

Scale 306

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Engineering Wireless 306

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

Usage-based pricing (UBP) , also known as consumption-based pricing, allows customers to pay for products according to how much they use. AWS and other infrastructure providers have been using UBP for nearly a decade. These metrics are an indicator of product-market fit.

Headcount 73

Headcount SaaS Compensation Acquisition 73

Chart Mogul

OCTOBER 18, 2019

To power this shift, we need infrastructure, which supports the easy establishment and distribution of the new internet-enabled products and services. This is already at play — services like AWS, Stripe, and others have brought down the cost of starting and running a business to a fraction of what they used to be just a decade ago.

Scale 71

Scale SaaS Automotive AWS 71

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 18, 2023

” Is it something beyond just “we want bigger deal sizes to make our unit economics work” or do they feel they have a strong product market fit and can actually command those prices. Marketing…their demand gen motion changes, need different product marketing, etc. And why you think you can win?

Scale 90

Scale VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Enterprise 90

Outseta

JANUARY 20, 2020

In this post I’m going to share the most important lessons about growing a SaaS business that I learned at Buildium—collectively, these things had an awful lot to do with the company being valued so highly. I was offered a job as Buildium’s first full-time marketing hire, pulling in a cool $38,400 annually.

SaaS Payments 145

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Methods Payment Services 145

User Pilot

JANUARY 26, 2024

Once you develop the onboarding and support resources and set up processes that enable users to sign up for the product and upgrade to higher plans, it makes no difference how many customers you have. For example, your AWS bill will most likely go up, but this is the case regardless of the growth model.

SaaS 103

SaaS Acquisition Onboarding Retention 103

User Pilot

FEBRUARY 21, 2023

For example, Nevzat, a Product Marketing Manager , writes: I like "Features & Events" to track user actions for insights. Reviewers value Userpilot for its features, ease of use, intuitive user interface, and outstanding customer support. And its analytics functionality, of course.

Software Review 98

Software Review Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Systems Review 98

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 13, 2018

I saw we had the opportunity to do that in London and to do something that will be new for Facebook, in the same way that AWS was a new business model and product line for Amazon and a bet that paid off very well. Julien: It’s important to find your niche and to find product market fit.

Scale 151

Scale Marketplace as a Service Mobile Sales Hiring 151

OPEXEngine

JUNE 29, 2020

Generally speaking, SaaS companies who are new to the market should NOT be overly concerned with the Rule of 40 but focus on “T2D3”, which we’ll cover in a separate post. If your SaaS business is in its early years, the goal is really to realize product-market fit, and to grow as quickly as possible.

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks SaaS Sales Hiring Scale 52

Chart Mogul

JUNE 23, 2022

You might be hard-pressed by your AWS bill but you’re not going to start replacing the engine to lighten the load mid-flight. You will want to know more about it, too — growth might be skewing towards industries where you achieve better product-market fit, and doubling down on them might be a good idea.

SaaS 52

SaaS DevOps as a Service Marketplace as a Service Forecasting 52