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Two SaaS Metrics That Actually Don’t Matter That Much in the Earliest Days: Absolute Churn and Sales Cycles. SaaStr 564: Top 10 Learnings Architecting a High Throughput Critical API with RevenueCat CTO Miguel Carranza. with Jenn Knight, Co-founder and CTO of AgentSync, and Daryna Kulya, Co-founder of OpenPhone.
Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Be Careful Hiring “Dualies” — Folks That Are a VP of More Than One Thing. Big Companies Don’t Churn. SaaStr 564: Top 10 Learnings Architecting a High Throughput Critical API with RevenueCat CTO Miguel Carranza.
Perhaps the single most important thing you can ever do in SaaS, at least after $1m in ARR or so, is hire the best VPs you can. We’ve talked a lot over the years about how not to hire a wrong VP of Sales — 70%+ of the first VPs of Sales don’t make it even 10 months. You need to hire up-and-comers. Get on jets?
Or churn will increase, NPS will stagnate and decline, and upsell and revenue retention will be a fraction of what it could be. 95% of the time, your super-smart hacker co-founder is not that person. 95% of the time, your super-smart hacker co-founder is not that person. She can be your CTO forever.
Or churn will increase, NPS will stagnate and decline, and upsell and revenue retention will be a fraction of what it could be. 95% of the time, your super-smart hacker co-founder is not that person. 95% of the time, your super-smart hacker co-founder is not that person. She can be your CTO forever.
The first 2 scaled reps you hire that hit plan (some may churn before then) get special training. They get CTO training. And so we see reps 3-10, or reps-from-#3-until-The-VP-of-Sales-is-Hired … fail. Simplify to a 1 page contract. And the others perform so poorly vs. the 2 that are doing well?
Hire not just 1-2 reps, but 10. That it’s time to bring in someone that knows. But I’ve found many great SaaS founders take longer, too long, to decide to hire the other VPs. But I’ve found many great SaaS founders take longer, too long, to decide to hire the other VPs. I Need a VP of Sales.
Including: CEO Snowflake CEO HubSpot CEO DropBox CEO Descript CEO Clio CEO Flock Safety CEO Own CRO ServiceTitan CMO Databricks CMO Infinite Reality CTO Rubrik CCO Canva CCO Bill CCO GitHub VP AI Wiz CEO Calendly and 100s more!! Investor Connections and Funding Opportunities — And $5m AI VC Pitch Stage!!
You just close more, and churn less, and upsell more, when you show up. You have to be careful to pair that with someone strong to manage the relationship, that has more time and that also can be trusted. As a founder, you’ll just run out of time to properly manage key customers and partners yourself. Are we sure?
On this episode of the ProfitWell Report, Brendan Schwartz , Co-Founder and CTO at Wistia , wants to know what proportion of paid plans should be annual versus monthly. The beauty of the subscription model is that for the first time in the history of business, relationships are baked directly into how you make money. Click to enlarge.
Which role should you hire for first? For starters, your first hire should be someone who can complement your skills, someone who is strong in areas where you’re weak, but it goes much deeper than that. I am guessing it’s probably the hardest problem to solve, hiring a job, let alone at this level. And for good reason.
I remember my CTO once arguing with a Fortune 500 company on a “security” concern they had which really made no sense. But the ones I didn’t, were the ones that silently churned. More here: I Never Lost a Customer I Actually Visited | SaaStr Not hiring a full-time RFP person. Not being responsive to every key concern.
” For companies like ZoomInfo, their tech cohort of customers went from its fastest-growing for two decades running to now reducing spend or just churning outright. Second, AI is changing how ZoomInfo ranks and prioritizes accounts.
Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shared with us how they got there — and the top mistakes they made — just 3 quarters after their IPO. We have someone that probably 98 percent of you know virtually or socially in some sense, Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. ” We didn’t do any annual contracts.
They’re able to actually swipe a credit card, and what starts off similar to a freemium self-serve product can turn into a six-figure contract in just a few months. It might even be months later that a VP of Engineering or a CTO or CFO realizes that they’re built on a new platform. The contract size grows.
Deals are contracting, not because of layoffs, but because people are managing budgets so tightly. It Takes Time To Bounce Back Jason was the first investor in RevenueCat , a company that automates mobile subscriptions on your phone. Maybe if you have the ex-CTO of Github, but that’s still a super speculative bet. in 12 months?
What I mean is Ben broke the rule that he didn’t care what NRR and churn were. Your core models for sales, for marketing spend, for hiring and engineering and product. And the best CTO I know in the world is the CEO. Then I was the CTO at another YC company, Standard Treasury, acquired by Silicon Valley Bank.
“The biggest thing I can do for Slack is to hire people who know a lot more than I do and give them free rein to do their best work” Adam Risman: You mentioned the team started with performance marketing. And so we hired somebody who had a lot of experience and could recommend ways to build the team. Andrew Chen: Exactly.
Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. What to do before building a team for your SaaS company You can’t just jump into hiring without some forethought, or you’ll make many mistakes. Before the hiring process, take some time to decide on your current needs and hire as your company grows.
A successful price increase helps you acquire better customers, who are more serious about using your product and less likely to churn. Time and time again SaaS companies are promising customers that they will save hundreds of thousands of dollars, but their pricing strategies are only capturing a tiny fraction of that savings.
QuikNode wants to see technology transform decentralized applications, smart contracts, decentralized governance, voting systems, and more. Bunsen, a serial founder and multi-CTO before starting QuikNode, had used Baremetrics in previous roles and was familiar with the value it brought to growing businesses.
The volume of transactions was low enough that they could get by using database queries to calculate their MRR, churn, and even to perform some cohort analysis. However, as the company grew, their systems started to fail all the time, prompting the team to re-think their approach and look for a scalable solution. Click To Tweet.
When Co-founder and CTO of Chargify , Michael Klett isn’t brewing his own beer, he’s crafting billing experiences. This can range from help with pricing, retention, and churn, as well as providing subscription financial metrics so a customer can see everything that is going on from acquisition all the way through to retention.
Because the contracts are typically much higher in these sales agreements, B2B subscriptions often require a much longer sales process before your customer will consider making a purchase. Contract length. The length of a contract defines how often subscription payments recur. B2C contract length. B2B contract length.
Caught in the churn If we really are at the early stages of an emergence, what are the implications? Corey ’s fantastic sci-fi series The Expanse known as “the churn.” The churn can be seen as a metaphor for the unpredictable nature of life and the constant state of flux that people experience.
All-in-all, the community is the best way to keep users on top of the updates, and it certainly reduces the churn rate. ”. Of course, our team is involved to an extent, and we have an external part-time moderator for support. But mostly our members help each other, and it works like a charm.
More and more people are hiring leaders, not for past experience, but for capability and capacity. We hire a third-party firm. We’ve got to be OK with that because if we’re serving the entire market, we’re naturally going to have higher churn and therefore a lower CAC on the lower end of the market.
He references Dan Steinman from Gainsight , who says, “the natural tendency for customers is towards churn.”. If we fail, our customers will churn. How many CSMs should you hire? But we know customer success reduces churn and increases expansion revenue, so CSMs do have a very serious purpose in an organization.
We tend to believe that the technical aspects of our product are the most important differentiator because that’s what our CTO says. And most of the time, the unseen features will provide a better product positioning or marketing message against competitors. Step 5: Time for the interview.
The volume of transactions was low enough that they could get by using database queries to calculate their MRR, churn, and even to perform some cohort analysis. However, as the company grew, their systems started to fail all the time, prompting the team to re-think their approach and look for a scalable solution. Tweet this quote.
We were talking to Sean Place, who was the co founder and CTO, and it turned out that they were just giving gift cards to these drivers, but they had no way to authorize the right transaction at the right time for the right amount. And we felt that we couldn’t fail them and fail these new customers coming in at the same time.
We tend to believe that the technical aspects of our product are the most important differentiator because that’s what our CTO says. And most of the time, the unseen features will provide a better product positioning or marketing message against competitors. Step 5: Time for the interview.
Public valuations are still at a fraction of their 2021 peaks, but seed rounds are more expensive than ever. To IPO, companies need to triple their market share in their core market and have a churn rate of less than 3-4% per month. The Qualities of Great CTOs (00:15:54) To identify great CTOs, it may take interviewing 20 candidates.
You can prevent customer churn before it actually happens. These annual executive business meetings are a wonderful time to discuss contracts. Whatever suits the customer would be the right time. If the product is very technical, you can even include the CTO or such C-executives to get the best outcomes.
And by business technology function I want to define that because sometimes there’s a overlap with the CTO from an engineering side. Harry Stebbings: So given the centrality of that role there and the ever increasing prominence of it, I guess my next question is for operators listening, when is the right time to hire that first CIO?
At SaaStr Annual we had a great session with HubSpot Founder & CTO, Dharmesh Shah, and their Chief People Officer, Katie Burke, on building happier employees. We hire remarkable people, and we give them a lot of freedom for how they’re going to get their work done. Who actually knows stuff and does things?”
Co-founders Dharmesh Shah (CTO) and Brian Halligan (Chairperson) shared at SaaStr Annual the unfiltered truth on building an SMB powerhouse, pivoting to product-led growth, and why the “M” segment is SaaS gold. Focus obsessively on churn. They improved customer dollar retention from an initial 70% to around 90% over time.
Discussed in this Episode: When to hire your first account executives Key traits to look for in early sales hires Structuring compensation for first sales reps Should you ‘hire the buyer’ to be your sales rep? 31:55 Hiring for grit, curiosity & determination. What does Joe look like at that time?
Pursuit helps companies hire elite go-to-market talent on a non-retainer basis. If you’re hiring for sales or marketing roles, reach out to Pursuit at pursuitsalessolutions.com/gtm or message a GTMfund team member. And I would say detractors are 10 times louder in the market than the promoters are.
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