SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2025

Key points about SaaStr Annual : Focus on SaaS: Primarily focused on all aspects of SaaS business including sales, marketing, product development, and customer success. Large Audience: Considered the biggest SaaS conference with a large number of attendees from leading SaaS companies, startups, and venture capital firms.

Software 243

Software Scale Venture Capital SaaS 243

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

General Partner Doug Pepper and General Partner and Head of Analytics at ICONIQ Growth, Christine Edmonds, share the art and science of scaling GTM at this year’s SaaStr Annual. Because founder-led sales worked really well for most of the early stages, but you eventually start running out of juice around $15M ARR.

Scale 274

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Outsourced Development 274

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview Flippa CEO Blake Hutchison about how Flippa works, as well as insights on what you should know if you’re a digital business owner looking to sell your business. What got you into this particular business model? Like what led you to become the CEO, Flip?

Scale 112

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 112

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2021

It’s been great to have the CEOs of Qualtrics join us multiple times over the years, as it scaled from a late-stage startup to IPO to $8B+ acquisition. Fast forward to today, and Qualtrics is now worth $20B and CEO Zig Serafin joined us to share his lessons in scaling with Julia Laroche, Correspondent at Yahoo Finance.

Scale 250

Scale Scaling Business Model Company Culture 250

SaaStr

JUNE 22, 2021

This is a positive trajectory, but it presents a challenge for your customer success efforts: How can you scale your support and CS while still delivering a memorable, quality customer experience? According to the Totango report, 77% of respondents said that scale was their top challenge. Key Takeaways For Scaling Growth.

Scale 278

Scale Customer Success Scaling Compensation 278

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2022

Scale-ups are exciting. They demonstrate spectacular growth and expansion while revolutionizing and disrupting industries with new business models. Scaling to satisfy customers’ demands depends on innovation and foresight combined with enterprise-ready technology and the right partners. How Atlassian does business

Scale 261

Scale Scaling Marketplace as a Service Entrepreneurship 261

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about how to scale faster. And I’ve watched them fairly quickly scale, to soon they’ll be at 10 million in revenue. As they scaled, they radically changed how they did sales. Jason Lemkin: Okay. Let’s get it going. Times are good.

Scale 273

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 273

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2024

How do you build GTM efficiency in SMB sales? Ways to scale that don’t include rampant inefficiency and burn. You shouldn’t be adding a bunch of sales reps or spending a bunch of money on marketing if the economics aren’t sustainable. While this title is SMB-oriented, the advice applies to Mid-Market and Enterprise, too.

Scale 301

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Sales 301

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 16, 2019

The SaaS industry is constantly evolving, and for many companies in the space, that means having to evolve their business model. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean a “pivot”, but more often the evolution is a shifting business model as the company scales and the user base grows and changes.

Business Model 195

Business Model Scale Pricing Payment Methods 195

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 18, 2021

Box has grown to almost $1B in revenue , but it “tilted” from a mostly freemium product to an enterprise focus, with freemium today being about 9% of their revenue — although a key source of leads (see below). Slack added a big enterprise sales team. Slack added a big enterprise sales team. Which creates leads.

Business Model 293

Business Model Scale Business PayPal 293

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 10, 2020

He’s also elaborated on this concept in a new book , written with Allison Pickens, called The Customer Success Economy: Why Every Aspect of Your Business Model Needs a Paradigm Shift. As Nick explains it, the “as a service” business model fundamentally changes the dynamic between company and customer.

Scale 223

Scale Customer Success Scaling B2B 223

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

Whether you’re going from nothing to something or already scaling and thriving beyond $10-100M, healthy, sustainable growth in SaaS is on every founder’s mind. 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. Ideas Are Cheap.

Scale 243

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 243

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

Strategic finance can be thought of as a project management function for your company’s underlying business model or a BizOps team that operates within a more financial lens. Strategic Finance optimizes a company’s underlying business model to create long-term value by increasing revenue and decreasing costs.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

They credit this growth to their global team, a switch to an enterprise business model switch, and flexible work operations. Moving from self-service to enterprise As your product improves, your user demands change, requiring a revamp of the business model to satisfy high-paying customers. We listened to our employees.

Scale 245

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scaling 245

TechEmpower SaaS

JULY 31, 2023

One way to approach that last question is to use this simple model: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) How will your business reach prospects? Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) How much money will your business generate from each converted customer? Don’t worry about scaling just yet. How will you convert them?

Metrics 390

Metrics Startup Scale New CTO 390

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 9, 2022

Back in the day, premium comp for some software sales execs made simple and easy sense. Traditional software had 90% gross margins, and the classic enterprise sales reps, the best ones, could close a million or more dollars a year. Not a bad thing per se, but it also put a lot of pressure on business models.

Scale 345

Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring Sales 345

SaaStr

DECEMBER 21, 2022

Businesses must effectively evolve their strategies, operations, and overall product-market fit to target and win those enterprise accounts. Airtable CEO Howie Liu shared Airtable’s journey into enterprise, what he’s learned from scaling the company, and his best advice for other SaaS companies looking to make a similar move.

Scale 245

Scale Enterprise Scaling Management 245

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 23, 2021

I want to spend a few posts and some time on sales comp plans for early-ish stage SaaS companies (up to say $20m in ARR). Because almost all the sales comp plans you are going to read about, and learn about are great — for SaaS companies that are well post-Scale. And buy an M8 Convertible or Model S Performance.

Sales Hiring 326

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Business Model 326

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 31, 2023

Open source is a marketing strategy that fills the top of the sales funnel with users who may later convert to paying customers. But from a business perspective, this progression is logical. Companies a transition from one pricing model to another : Open source marketing strategy achieves penetration early on.

Business Model 225

Business Model Business Scale Sales Funnel 225

SaaStr

MAY 12, 2022

Offering its services as a freemium-based model, CircleCI recognizes driving trials as the cornerstone of a go-to-market strategy for any developer tool. . Jim Rose, CEO of CircleCI, leverages his experience marketing to software developers to discuss the merits of moving from a subscription-based to a usage-based business model.

Scale 261

Scale Payments SaaS Payments Payment Services 261

SaaStock

MARCH 21, 2019

The unique model that the Boston-based VC firm has is to provide strong support to companies post their investment to help them refine business models, pricing, marketing so they can ultimately scale. The post How to venture into product-led growth and scale successfully appeared first on SaaS Revolution Hub.

Scale 172

Scale Scaling Business Model B2B 172

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2021

For the past 10 years, I’ve been a sales advisor for the portfolio companies of early stage venture capital firm True Ventures. It’s fascinating work for a sales mind like mine that’s focused on helping brilliant people turn ideas into revenue-driving businesses. . A Pair of Sales Development Representatives.

Sales Hiring 247

Sales Hiring Scale Venture Capital Sales 247

Stax

MARCH 18, 2025

While traditional business models have a harder time estimating their future revenue, SaaS companies have access to more accurate revenue forecasts, such as their MRR and ARR. It can be easy to consistently double revenue if you’re an early-stage company, but as you scale up, sustaining that becomes more difficult.

Scale 117

Scale Payment Services Payments SaaS Payments 117

SaaStr

MAY 1, 2021

A Different Way to Approach Enterprise Leads . Zhao says, “Our business model is B2B SaaS, but our sales motion is similar to a consumer-like company…there’s a lot of B2C elements to it.”. Zhao furthers his point by emphasizing that: “This B2C plus B2B motion gives us a lot of sales efficiency.

Enterprise 314

Enterprise Scale B2C SaaS 314

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

You can hear him, even at Box’s scale, wishing API access can be as free as practical, to encourage their ecosystem to develop on Box: But free and free trials come with real costs, especially soft costs. And oftentimes, sales complaints and costs (sales much prefers deals to close faster, usually).

Scale 335

Scale Engineering Enterprise Business Model 335

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2022

This is the secret sauce to Atlassian’s business model. 20% growth in customer accounts leads to 36% revenue growth. That leads to 36% revenue growth at $3B in ARR. Spends less than 20% of its revenues on sales and marketing. And half of Atlassian’s employees now live 2 or more hours from the office.

Scale 283

Scale Headcount Cloud Forecasting 283

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 5, 2019

Developing a sales strategy is one of the core activities every business will have to undertake. A well defined sales strategy is your path to meaningful, sustainable growth. Go without one and risk seeing your business flame out. They share their winning sales strategies and the lessons they’ve learned scaling sales.

Scale 177

Scale Strategy Sales Underperforming Technical Team 177

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2019

Scaling the company’s employee base, sales teams, marketing, and operations—all while preserving its culture—has required a laser focus on first principles, smart processes, and effective hiring. In this talk, Claire will share these and other lessons for scaling high-growth organizations. Manual processes first. Names stick.

Scale 160

Scale Payment Services Payment Methods Scaling 160

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2022

Expensify CEO David Barrett talks about what it takes for businesses to thrive, spotlighting the need to move from a traditional economic model to Conan Economics, a term inspired by Conan the Barbarian. He also shares some eye-opening insights on how Expensify scaled over the years. Changing the way you think about business.

Scale 306

Scale Marketplace as a Service Advertising Business Model 306

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

Gusto is a high-velocity, high-scale acquisition and expansion engine, and one we can all learn from. To be even more specific, Gusto realized the word “territory” was holding their sales team back. Today, many SaaS companies still divide up sales accounts in territories by city, country, or region, or round-robin them by rep.

Scale 272

Scale Sales Marketing Construction 272

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 23, 2024

But while the brand and market penetration is strong, the business model is challenging. It forced reps to close 13% more locations per sales rep. At least for now: Sales continues to grow at an epic 29% at $1.5 It did what it had to with its sales team. We’ve all used Toast 10s or 100s of times by now.

Scale 306

Scale Payment Solutions Payments Sales 306

SaaStr

JULY 16, 2019

Join Rene Yang Stewart, Co-Head and Principal, Vista Equity Partners, and Monica Enand, Founder and CEO, Zapproved, as they discuss growing a company from product market fit to scale. Hear perspectives from both the investor and founder as the company scaled. It’s hard business. Want to see more content like this?

Scale 149

Scale Product Marketing Scaling Marketing 149

Casey Accidental

OCTOBER 20, 2020

This is part two of a three part series on sequencing business models. Casey’s first sequencing business models essay talked about the transition from a SaaS business model to marketplace business model, and why it’s so difficult. This essay is a collaboration with Gilad Horev.

Marketplace as a Service 141

Marketplace as a Service Business Model SaaS Payments Payments 141

SaaStr

JUNE 8, 2023

Dear SaaStr: How Should I Design a Sales Reps Compensation Plan at Just $10k MRR ? Figuring out your very first sales comp plan when you don’t have a repeatable process or much revenue is confusing. And The business model does have to work. but You don’t have the capital to invest here … the rep has to be accretive.

Compensation 246

Compensation Scale Sales Business Model 246

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2019

The age-old sales funnel has worked fine for decades…until now. Flaws are being exposed, and a new model is imminent. Why is the sales funnel alone, no longer an appropriate way of thinking about customers? Brian Halligan: Whether we all like it or not, trust in sales and marketing is at an all-time low.

Scale 55

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Social Media 55

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

Options include: Curation and annotation of otherwise commoditized data Access to unique data sources (like wet lab data in life sciences) Creating new workflows that generate proprietary data Having a narrow focus often leads to higher quality data access and lower likelihood of disruption by generalist infrastructure companies.

Technical Review 189

Technical Review Artificial Intelligence AI Marketplace as a Service 189

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2024

They’ll discuss behind the scenes building GenAI, along with firsthand advice they wish they knew incorporating AI at scale.” However pricing these products is extremely challenging – even more so for incumbents who need to disrupt their current business models. ” #2. ” #4. ” #6.

AI Search 300

AI Search Scale AI Generative AI 300