SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

That you absolutely, positively, have to only hire “Rockstars” in your startups. 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. The very best of the best.

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

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

2: What Keeps Someone Motivated In The Startup World Jason has been successful, has had exits, has invested in great companies, and has built SaaStr into what it is, so what motivates him and other founders to keep going? The marketers all want a team today. All of that is fine if your marketing budget is north of $10M.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 307

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Starting a new company is always hard and most SaaS startups never get to $1-2 million in ARR. The reason, I think, is that over the last 5-10 years it has become much easier to build a SaaS product and get initial traction: Building a web application has become much easier, faster and cheaper. Let me rephrase that.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

Cockroach Labs’ CEO Spencer Kimball shares hard-won lessons from scaling from $0 to $5B and his time as an angel investor for more than 80 different startups. And his answer, like many answers in startups, is it depends. How hot is the space, and what is the product category? How far along is the product idea?

Scale 243

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 243

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

It has a portion of its revenue that’s very sensitive to the economy and a lot of startups in the customer base, good and bad, right? We’re seeing pockets of strength and then we’re seeing pockets of startups that overnight not only are struggling but might even want to immediately stop their spend, right?

Merchant Services 265

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 265

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Check out this 2018 Europa session with Guillaume Princen, Head of France and Southern Europe @ Stripe, where he talks about the metrics you need to be focused on in your startup. 10% basically means you don’t have any product market fit. Want to know what to expect at SaaStr Europa? MRR, obviously. Five percent is okay.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

Andreessen Horowitz

SEPTEMBER 22, 2023

It’s easy to think that high growth can make up for a low stock price, especially for founders at fast-growing late-stage startups that are still burning cash. Customer testimonials backed up the numbers, showing that major enterprises viewed CrowdStrike as a security platform, not just a product.

Travel 113

Travel Forecasting Pricing Scale 113

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. The takeaway.

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

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

Hila Qu joined Mucker’s Tony Yang for an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) conversation about Product-Led Growth (PLG) for Startups to kickoff the 2023 Mucker Growth Series. Hila Qu has been the Head of Growth or VP of Growth at a number of different companies and startups, most notably Acorns and GitLab. should you be focusing on first?

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

OpenView Labs

DECEMBER 13, 2019

It’s a Rough Time to Be a Startup – Here’s What You Can Do About It. Everywhere you look there are dominant SaaS companies with thriving products. That’s certainly true in developer tooling (AWS), sales and support (Salesforce), MarTech (Adobe), commerce (Square), HR tech (Workday) and even vertical markets (Veeva).

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring Benchmarks AWS Scale 52

Chart Mogul

JUNE 23, 2022

SaaS startup growth has taken a hit as well as we noted. 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. . — Josh Kopelman (@joshk) May 18, 2022. Trust us, we did it recently and you can read more about our migration here. Further Reading.

SaaS 52

SaaS DevOps as a Service Marketplace as a Service Forecasting 52

User Pilot

FEBRUARY 21, 2023

For example, Nevzat, a Product Marketing Manager , writes: I like "Features & Events" to track user actions for insights. With an average rating of 4.7 on G2, Userpilot outcompetes both Heap and Pendo. Reviewers value Userpilot for its features, ease of use, intuitive user interface, and outstanding customer support.

Software Review 98

Software Review Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Systems Review 98

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 52

Scale SaaS Automotive AWS 52

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2019

This was anyone from a marketing analyst at a small startup, to a junior analyst at my firm, to a cloud CEO like him. Sameer Dhokalia: It turns out if you do ask those two basic questions of 100 people in your business, you will learn an awful lot about what needs to be focused on. That really stuck with me.

Scale 159

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 159

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 1, 2020

If you’re setting out on your roadmap journey it’s important that it reflect the point of the journey that you’re on – having everyone in a startup of 5 or 6 sharing daily tasks each morning makes sense as they work together to build a feature but in a larger company it’s a recipe for chaos.

VP of Engineering 165

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Engineering 165

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 1, 2020

If you’re setting out on your roadmap journey it’s important that it reflect the point of the journey that you’re on – having everyone in a startup of 5 or 6 sharing daily tasks each morning makes sense as they work together to build a feature but in a larger company it’s a recipe for chaos.

VP of Engineering 165

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Engineering 165

Chart Mogul

DECEMBER 22, 2021

This year, we also migrated ChartMogul to AWS cloud. As always, you can stay updated on what’s new with our product on our blog or in our release notes. We even did a collaborative video with Slidebean discussing “Why Startups have booths at Trade Shows?”. Most popular blog posts.

Software Review 52

Software Review Systems Review Payment Features PayPal 52

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2022

Liam: Was it challenging to get to this point with Mode in the startup journey? Every startup is going to be a challenge, and Mode is no different. They could solve that by saying, “Hey, let’s put our product in more data centers in AWS,” or in whatever hosting product they were using.

Data 151

Data Airlines AWS Underperforming Technical Team 151

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.

Outsourcing Services 119

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development AWS 119

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

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 13, 2018

It’s easy to connect the dots between mission and product when you consider the social media behemoth’s more than 2 billion worldwide users. But as the college-dorm-room startup matures, there’s a fascinating twist to be found in the way it applies its new mission to Workplace, a B2B startup within the (former) startup.

Scale 151

Scale Marketplace as a Service Mobile Sales Hiring 151

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. One, we chatted about backstage which is multiple product lines.

Scale 306

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Engineering Wireless 306

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2020

I went into product marketing for the commercial arm of Xerox Park, which is a big computer research company here. Did a lot of consulting for high tech startups, I really love the startup space. Then finally, there’s a company, Catalyst, which is a startup. And I remember AWS was growing really quickly.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Review Outsourcing Services 264

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2019

And I can only sell to other startups that were ready to take on risks and to whom I don’t look any different. If I were to try to sell to AT&T, who is a customer now, or to AWS, who’s a customer now, they actually walked me out the door of AWS. And what will you bet on a four or five person startup?

Scale 179

Scale Sales Hiring Construction Education 179

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 10, 2020

We’re excited to have on the show today, a luminary and one of the most dynamic tech startup CEOs out there, and the CEO and co-founder of a company called QuotaPath. So this is his second startup. I actually began my startup career in Austin. We went through an accelerator and almost got our startup MBA.

VP of Engineering 107

VP of Engineering Scale Development Team Review Technical Review 107

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 91

Scale VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Enterprise 91

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2019

In this session, Sandy Carter, AWS Vice President will hone your superpower – not of customer focus, or customer driven, but customer obsessed. I can only sell to other startups that were ready to take on risk and to whom I don’t look any different. Take your product, sell it. It’s all about customer obsession!

VP of Engineering 160

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Technical Review Development Team Review 160

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 7, 2019

If you missed episode 77, check it out here: PODCAST 77: Navigating the Pace and Pressure of Startup w/ Vikas Bhambri. Google’s Marketing Message and stance on competitors. Everything from brand and creative and media, to product marketing, to demand gen functions, to partner marketing, to industries.

Cloud 51

Cloud Artificial Intelligence Scale GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 51

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2020

Prior to founding Balsa, Paul was Senior Director of Product @ Slack and before Slack was a Group Product Manager @ Twitter where he was responsible for the home timeline, including timeline ranking. How does Paul approach such large product decisions today? What does really effective product marketing mean to Paul?

CTO Coach 221

CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Software Review 221

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 21, 2019

So when you’re making those decisions as a startup or as a mid-size company or as an enterprise, the software you select can make or break your business. When you’re in product marketing – and I know you’ve done this – you have paid for time to sit down with an analyst to schmooze him or her on how great Intercom is.

Education 123

Education Sales Hiring Software Review Sales Recruiting 123