SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

With Databricks now one of the largest pre-IPO technology companies, with $10 billion of expected non-dilutive financing and a valuation of $62 billion, Ron’s insights are gold for any revenue leader looking to scale. So we have a mix of both, but I think as we’ve scaled it’s become an advantage. ” The lesson?

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Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 179

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

It’s an incredible look back on scaling and more: Colin Jones, first Chief Revenue Officer at Wiz. ” This unexpected dynamic completely inverted their growth bottleneck – the constraint wasn’t generating demand or securing funding, but scaling the sales team fast enough to capture the overwhelming market opportunity.

Scale 188

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Headcount 188

SaaStr

OCTOBER 14, 2024

Here’s a subtle but very important mistake so many VCs, blogs, social media, etc. Yes, as you scale you do need to maintain efficiency in sales and marketing. Sometimes, the market just isn’t big enough for Product #1 alone to get you to $100m+ ARR growing at a decent clip. where your playbook is still evolving.

Scale 300

Scale Social Media SaaS Acquisition 300

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2024

Klaviyo dominates marketing in the Shopify ecosystem and in ecommerce, and just keeps on scaling. Cavna Integration is Their Fastest Adopted Integration in History Canva is a beast, and integrating them with Klaviyo’s scale in ecommerce just makes sense. So the latest SaaS leader to cross $1B ARR is Klaviyo. The only one!

Scale 304

Scale SMB Scaling Enterprise 304

SaaStr

JANUARY 19, 2025

We’ll hear from the CRO of $3B Clio (legal SaaS), the CEO and CRO of Flock Safety (police and safety SaaS), and dozens of others on how to scale their vertical SaaS industries and platforms. The post The Best of Scaling Vertical SaaS: 3 Deep Dives with The CROs of Slice, Owner and Mangomint appeared first on SaaStr.

Scale 189

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling SMB 189

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2024

Blogs Documentation That was how they drove visibility through Google searches and how developers found them. A couple of months ago, someone in their Discord channel asked a question, and someone else referred them to a blog post written nine years ago that was relevant in 2024. That’s huge!

Scale 315

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Development 315

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

If you own a SaaS or other digital product business such as a Slack plugin, Chrome extension, online publishing business, mobile app, or even a blog and youre looking to exit, you may have a lot of questions about how best to go about it. When I was running it, it was a lot smaller than that, but scaled that up very, very quickly.

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Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 118

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2024

There’s always someone a few years ahead of you on the scaling journey who can share their lessons learned. Robbie O’Connor, the GM EMEA at Notion and the first European hire at Asana and Dropbox takes the stage at SaaStr Europa to talk about the building blocks required to scale GTM teams and operations. Timing is also essential.

Scale 312

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Innovation 312

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

The post Transitioning from Sales-Led to Product-Led Growth and Scaling to $100M ARR With Apollo’s CEO Tim Zheng appeared first on SaaStr. Implementation of Product-Led Growth The transition to product-led growth (PLG) required understanding and implementing a fundamentally different business model.

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Scale Scaling Outsourced Development Sales 164

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2024

It required Lucid to change its product, process, and overall user and administration systems to be able to scale with the customer. Your first hire wears many hats, but as you scale, you start building out more specific roles. Every knowledge worker can use them, so they have a scaled and diversified user base.

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring compliance 310

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2024

From startup to $500M CARR, Spencer Burke, SVP of Growth at Braze, shares how Braze scaled a growth and customer success team. In this AI moment we’re in, there are still many moments in scaling a company where intuition still matters. You don’t have to leave as the organization scales. This isn’t new.

Scale 294

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Startup 294

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2024

Scaling to $150M ARR and beyond is no simple task. Will this change as Grafana Labs scales? But they’re still one of the last remaining open-source companies at scale. The post Scaling to $150M ARR and Beyond with Grafana Labs and Lightspeed appeared first on SaaStr. How did it come to be? Probably not.

Scale 294

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 294

SaaStr

JANUARY 15, 2025

Cloudflare is what 20x ARR looks like at scale, post-IPO. 221,000 Total Paying Customers, But 65% of Revenue From 3,200 Large Customers This is what you should see when a “long tail” engine is just working at scale. Top-tier growth, cash-flow positive, and very durable revenue. The last point is key.

Scaling 275

Scaling Cloud AI Engineering 275

SaaStr

OCTOBER 23, 2024

So at BILL’s scale, you have to put programs into place across the company to connect employees to customers, to help you focus on all the different stakeholders vs just the contract signer. SMB Unit Economics: Why Is 6 Quarters the Right Target for SMBs at Scale? Real TAM vs. VC Tam: How Do You Think About it at Scale?

SMB 310

SMB Payment Services Payments Payment Methods 310

SaaStr

OCTOBER 23, 2024

This potential for a decade of growth at scale here helps justify the high revenue multiple Palantir trades at. #4. Profitability Has Increased Even as Growth Has Reaccelerated Do you have to do it all today, at least once you are at scale? Grow AND be more efficient? Is you new customer count growing > 20%?

Artificial Intelligence 238

Artificial Intelligence Government AI Cloud 238

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What are The Most Common Mistakes Founders Make When They Are Just Starting to Scale Revenue? As you scale, your win rate — the % of deals you close vs. the competition — should go down. The post The 6 Most Common Mistakes Founders Make When They Are Just Starting to Scale Revenue appeared first on SaaStr.

Scaling 304

Scaling Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Market Segmentation 304

SaaStr

DECEMBER 26, 2024

Is usually see 15%-20% as start-ups scale, but 25% is probably the right target as you scale. And a few other data from the report: Gongs enterprise customers see about a 25% win rate, conversion from Opportunity to Closed. Thats a bit higher than I expected.

Scale 287

Scale Benchmarks B2B Enterprise 287

SaaStr

AUGUST 5, 2024

The post Three Revenue Growth Strategies to Scale Up Customer Success with Hook appeared first on SaaStr. It will help you build a compelling value narrative, a health score, and forecast. We genuinely need those things to drive revenue growth through customer success teams.

Scale 287

Scale Customer Success Scaling Revenue 287

SaaStr

JULY 11, 2024

There’s only a small chance that it’ll be an IPO exit, and Stacey Bishop with Scale Ventures shares what it takes to get to that next level of funding. To get VC to put money into your company, Scale Ventures looked at and calculated the minimum level of growth based on what typical venture investors require.

Scale 303

Scale Scaling Churn Investment 303

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2024

Bitly CEO Toby Gabriner and CPO Kelsey Stevenson share the three secret ingredients that helped them when scaling to $100M ARR and what they could have done differently. The post The 3 Secret Ingredients for Scaling to $100M ARR with Bitly CEO and CPO appeared first on SaaStr. Lean into the risks and experiment.

Scale 303

Scale Scaling Underperforming Technical Team User Experience 303

SaaStr

JANUARY 8, 2025

This isn’t unqiue to Asana, it’s true of many SaaS leaders at scale, from Zoom to Shopify. And probably be worth 50% more. #2. 150,000 Total Customers. 100k+ Customers Are The Fastest Growing. The enterprise customers are growing the fastest. Just remember not to leave the smaller ones behind! #3.

AI 304

AI B2B Scaling Trends 304

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

Meet Wyatt Jenkins: From Construction Sites to Chief Product Officer If you want to understand how vertical SaaS companies scale to $1B+ in revenue while staying true to their customers, there’s no better person to learn from than Wyatt Jenkins, Chief Product Officer at Procore Technologies.

Construction 253

Construction Scale SaaS Travel 253

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2024

And what you can see is there is really almost no liquidity for startups and scale-ups in SaaS and Cloud at the moment. So this is ongoing, albeit really only at the top start-ups and scale-ups. Just less so for start-ups and scale-ups. He summarized the M&A (acquisitions) of The Top 10 Software Acquirers. Epic times.

SaaS 315

SaaS Acquisition Cloud AI 315

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2024

A reminder to not stay too reliant on direct sales as you scale. RingCentral has followed, driving SBC down from 23.6% of revenue in 2021 to 15.7% 16,000 Channel Partners A very large percent of RingCentral’s revenue comes from the channel. Billion in ARR appeared first on SaaStr.

Scale 287

Scale SMB Compensation Cloud 287

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2024

Here’s what I see most often, the Top 6 Mistakes First Time SaaS Founders Make: Incomplete understanding of business model, and how it will scale. But hiring folks that haven’t done it at all doesn’t scale past a few million in ARR. But they also make mistakes we tend not to make with experience.

Scale 310

Scale SaaS Social Media Business Model 310

SaaStr

DECEMBER 25, 2024

Assume 1 per $1m in ARR, youll need to scale a team of 5 at least to get to $10m in ARR. And reps take time to scale. And youll need a real QA team as you scale. As you scale, youll need a dedicated 24×7 devops/techops team. Youll need another sales rep at least per every $500k in new ARR. You cant hack QA forever.

Sales Hiring 263

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS AI 263

SaaStr

OCTOBER 13, 2024

But now, I see that if you can hire a great COO as soon as possible after that, you can scale faster. is one of the top ways to help all of us scale faster. She should hire leaders for Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Product and Customer Success, or at least most of them. Hiring a strong COO between Management Team 1.0

Sales Hiring 262

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Startup 262

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2024

These outcomes might include: Driving user growth Maximizing revenue Ensuring user satisfaction Scaling adoption A different outcome would lead to a different pricing choice. Scaling stage: Reduced to single-user plans to maximize accessibility. There’s No Silver Bullet In Pricing There’s no silver bullet in pricing.

Payments 287

Payments Pricing Scale Revenue 287

SaaStr

OCTOBER 8, 2024

They make calls, go to meetings, do presentations, write copy, ads, and blog posts. The post The Secrets to Selling and Scaling in Vertical SaaS with Slice’s CRO Loren Padelford appeared first on SaaStr. “I fundamentally believe no one wakes up and does revenue,” Loren says. It’s an output of what people do. What do people do?

Scale 280

Scale Scaling SaaS Point of Sale 280

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2024

Start-ups, scale-ups and public companies in 2021 would hire a lot of folks they just wouldn’t hire today. I know for many, this seems a much harder time to find a new job What I can tell you is this. It’s not the crazy hiring market of 2021. But almost everyone growing even at “pretty good” rates is hiring.

Sales Hiring 287

Sales Hiring Scale Marketing SaaS 287

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2025

Over 60% haven’t raised funding since 2021 and likely never achieved the scale to do so, or have seen growth slow: Per Carta, a , : 374 of the original 616 pool had not raised any subsequent rounds. That’s tough, but you still have scale and often, the burn rate is low or in many cases these centicorns are cash-flow positive.

Scaling 309

Scaling Strategy 309

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

Speaker Bio Jason Lyman leads marketing at Customer.io, where he’s helped scale the platform to power over 35 billion customer interactions for 7,000+ high-growth companies. Before Customer.io, Jason built and scaled marketing teams at several B2B SaaS companies, with a focus on customer engagement and revenue operations. .

Scale 274

Scale SaaS B2B Scaling 274

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2025

But how did they scale so quickly? AI-Enhanced Content : By layering AI on top of metadata, Rupa scaled content creation, publishing 150 articles a month written by medical professionals. High-Quality Content at Scale : Conrad emphasized that the key to SEO success is publishing content thats better than what already exists.

Scale 231

Scale AI Search Sales Hiring Acquisition 231

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2025

And the scope might be even larger at an earlier stage company, but the scope/importance of most of these responsibilities dramatically increase as a company scales. As a company scales, founders/CEOs need to determine if their current finance leader is still meeting the needs of the business or if the role has outgrown them.

Scale 317

Scale Finance Headcount Leadership 317

SaaStr

MARCH 15, 2025

Its practical and relatable for SaaS founders struggling with scaling their sales teams. “ The Ultimate Guide to Scaling, Sales & Raising Capital.” “ The Ultimate Guide to Scaling, Sales & Raising Capital.” “10 Great Questions to Ask a VP Sales During an Interview.”

Sales Hiring 259

Sales Hiring AI Scale Compensation 259

SaaStr

MARCH 17, 2025

So we’ve all watched the mega VC rounds for OpenAI, Databricks, Anthropic etc as VCs deploy billions into the AI winners at scale. At a scale we haven’t seen before. But just how much of venture capital overall is going to … the top names? Far more than ever, per Redpoint’s latest data.

Venture Capital 316

Venture Capital AI Scaling Investment 316

SaaStr

DECEMBER 22, 2024

“Lessons Learned in Scaling Databricks, AWS, VMWare and More” with Databrick’s SVP and GM Ed Lenta #3. The Top 5 Lessons Learned Scaling Databricks’ to $1.5B The Future of AI, Open Source and Enterprise SaaS with Databrick’s Founder CEO Ali Ghodsi: #2. ARR with VP Product Nadim Hossain #5.

Scale 276

Scale AWS Leadership AI 276