SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

Startups come in all shapes and sizes on various stages of a timeline, yet it’s not surprising how many have the same questions and concerns about how to scale from x to y to z, the right time to hire and fire, and how to keep a team motivated during hard times. His answers didn’t disappoint. They wanted a one-call close.

CTO Hire 242

CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 242

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2023

Scaling a PLG company While it’s great to figure out a PLG model that allows you to scale your revenue with inbound, it cannot stop there. Strategy: To get started, identify playbooks that yield the highest revenue. The next hiring focus should be growth marketing. Once this is in place, start investing in paid channels.

Scale 244

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scaling 244

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

As a founder, you’ll just run out of time to properly manage key customers and partners yourself. Hire that person, and make sure they are someone the top customers can really trust and count on. That you can’t have a majority of y our revenue dependent on one customer. ” — Ankit Sindhi, Founder, Spurt.

CTO Hire 328

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 328

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

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.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 264

SaaStr

MARCH 15, 2019

I remember my CTO once arguing with a Fortune 500 company on a “security” concern they had which really made no sense. More here: I Never Lost a Customer I Actually Visited | SaaStr Not hiring a full-time RFP person. Not hiring a full-time Chief Security & Compliance Offer. Didn’t matter. They were concerned.

Sales Hiring 174

Sales Hiring Enterprise CTO Hire CTO 174

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

You have to see: A couple of good hires brought in Improvement on some metrics A big deal or two hanging out there, brought in and closed Things taken off your plate. More time may make them better if they’re already progressing, even if it’s just 10-15% in the first sales cycle. Hiring someone too junior. That often compounds.

Part-Time VPE 242

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 242

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

They’ve invested in all of these other businesses. Immediately told them to hire 50 reps in a different city, in a different city, and they did. The CEO was deferential because that was 10 times what he’d ever raised before, and did all of it. We might’ve touched on this one too on the hiring and the people.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 246

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

But as time went on, we shared lessons, what best practices were in customer success and revenue retention and all these things are, right. They were aware of it, but startups that I work with closely or invested in, if they got all the way to 25 million with 75% NRR, I would tell them to quit today. I want to invest in her.”

Outsourcing Services 243

Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 243

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

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.

Part-Time VPE 296

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 296

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

Many people are doing great, even private companies like Netskope, which are growing over 30% at $500M in revenue. Canva is growing at 40% and has a revenue of $2.3B. Klaviyo is growing 42% at $750M, coming up on a billion in revenue, and number one in the Shopify ecosystem. Samsara is growing 39% at $1.1B. It’s a rocket ship.

CTO Hire 147

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 147

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2019

We ended up signing that contract in the uber back to the airport on the way home. It was our largest contract to date, kind of helps the other quarter. I had my CTO and everyone would be like, “You can’t do this. Our Chief Revenue officer, another one of our senior leadership lives in Scottsdale, Arizona.

CTO Hire 178

CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 178

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Join this panel of investors from Connect Ventures, Blossom Capital, Dawn Capital, The Family, and Indico Partners as they provide an overview of the current investment landscape, and discuss whether the seed stage is emerging as the new Series A. We are a $50 million fund based in Lisbon, and we invest mainly in seed stage.

New CTO 182

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 182

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2020

Hiring managers are also just trying to sell as well. Users come to us all the time and they say, Hey, this company looks awesome. Are they hiring? That goes to the hiring manager. And if you get hired, RepVue will actually pay you $500. And it’s easy to inflate that for companies during the hiring process.

Marketplace as a Service 113

Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 113

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

Last night I read this question on Quora : In general terms, what is the ideal size and make-up of a team for a pre-revenue SaaS startup? I think the second part of the question is more important. This can be a huge advantage, especially for a bootstrapped startup that can't afford to hire many people.

CTO Hire 106

CTO Hire Startup Sales Hiring New CTO 106

Sales Hacker

MARCH 25, 2019

Simmone talks about her experience building Gilt City and Kidpass as a woman of color and how she advises companies to build diversity and inclusion into their hiring practices and sales teams. How to build diversity into your hiring practices. How to Increase Revenue by 19% [36:37]. How to Increase Revenue by 19%.

Sales Hiring 94

Sales Hiring Revenue CTO Coach CTO Hire 94

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

Well, we did the heavy lifting and highlighted a few here for you… “When to Hire and When to Automate” with Zapier CEO Wade Foster. David Sacks has a long history in tech from his time as a Founder and CEO of Geni.com and Yammer to his stint as COO of Paypal. So, how do you choose amongst the stable of unicorns?

Payment Services 113

Payment Services CTO Hire Payments New CTO 113

SaaStr

JANUARY 14, 2020

That was our first transitionary moment, and from that point forward, we began investing heavily in building a way to teach people technology skills outside of a physical classroom. So we kept investing, we knew we were onto something, and little by little we saw our traction improve. We were not an enterprise company yet.

B2B 173

B2B B2C Scale New CTO 173

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

CEO Joel Gascoigne tells us about the decision to invest in new analytics tools and how Buffer sustained long-term growth thanks to growing their ARPA. While Baremetrics was fulfilling the desire for public transparency, internally the team was using Looker almost exclusively to track and report revenue metrics. What is Buffer.

Payment Solutions 113

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Social Media 113

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

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.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

Adam Risman , a former host of the podcast, asked Rachel what made that point when Rachel joined Slack in 2016 the right time to invest in growth marketing? And so we hired somebody who had a lot of experience and could recommend ways to build the team. They had occasional advertising here and there. Here’s Rachel.

Outsourcing Services 215

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

Stax

AUGUST 14, 2024

Krahl’s appointment cements Stax’s commitment to investing in its team and bringing on new team members with deep industry knowledge and is the latest executive hire at Stax. Stax helps drive incremental revenue through frictionless, secure, and reliable payment processing and recurring billing solutions.

Payments 88

Payments Stax Payment Solutions Payment Services 88

Buffer Resources

JANUARY 30, 2023

Then he became CTO at Bezos Academy, a non-profit organization founded by Jeff Bezos. After leaving Bezos Academy, he decided to start a paid newsletter focused on career development, organization design, and hiring. “ I want to invest as little as possible to get 80% of the value.

Social Media 22

Social Media CTO Coach CTO Hire New CTO 22

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

And then, invest your energy and time into the product. Mallun Yen : So, you were an engineer by training and then you became an engineering leader, as the CTO of Webex, and then you became a CEO. You’ve got to learn about sales, about marketing and, otherwise, you need to hire a lot of other people around you to help.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 145

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Gaetan Gachet : All right, so usually the way I start this session is I ask the crowd which revenue stage they’re in. So when I joined we’re pretty much pre-revenue. I looked back at our investment memo, it was a 2K ACV when Jason invested after Y-C. So you were the first sales hire. One and 10?

Scale 150

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 150

SaaStock

MARCH 29, 2019

That’s the advice, Petri Hollmén picked up on the more technical side of things from the opening session on Day 2 with Cal Henderson, CTO of Slack. You can use them the next time you need to convince your manager brand investment makes sense. Hire Game Changers to Propel Growth. People were already looking for it.

Scale 103

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Social Media 103

Valerian Tech

JULY 5, 2023

Integrating property management systems with other systems such as point-of-sale and revenue management systems optimizes efficiency. Moreover, staff-scheduling software and real-time communication tools streamline workforce management and enhance staff productivity.

Payment Services 52

Payment Services Technology Payment Solutions CTO Hire 52

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Here’s an overview of the series: Part 1: How to Categorize Expenses in a SaaS Startup v2.0 Cost of Revenue Let’s start with your Cost of Revenue. The gist of it is that Cost of Revenue includes costs that go into providing your Software as a Service. Jason Cohen breaks down the question in his Quora post.

Startup 90

Startup Merchant Services DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

Eyal Manor : But there is a lot of investment in that direction. Megan Leuders: And when you were talking to CEOs and CTOs today, what do you believe is the biggest technology challenge that they are facing as a SaaS company? So deep integration from day one of the data pipelines in real time is super critical.

Cloud 173

Cloud Scale Trends Artificial Intelligence 173

Andreessen Horowitz

MARCH 20, 2024

You could either spend, you know, you raise some venture funding, you could either spend some of that funding on hiring out a whole team and developing all those competencies, or you can spend that on making your model even better. And so almost no other platforms provide this kind of revenue share today. Adam: Yeah.

AI Search 143

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 143

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 21, 2021

Will Larson , CTO of Calm. Des Traynor , Co-founder and CTO of Intercom. On this episode of Scale by Intercom, we spoke with Farhan to learn more about where the future of customer support is heading, and how understanding customer behavior can help to drive revenue in the future. Janeen Uzzell , COO for Wikimedia Foundation.

VP of Engineering 118

VP of Engineering Technical Review Scale Outsourcing Services 118

Outseta

OCTOBER 15, 2018

Investment funds like Indie.VC The company had for a few years prior followed a growth-first path, hiring aggressively and prioritizing projects designed to make an immediate impact on their growth rate. Buffer was so hot at the time - revenues were growing 150% per year - that the terms they got for their Series A were insanely good.

CTO Hire 65

CTO Hire CTO Coach SaaS New CTO 65

Hacking Revenue

AUGUST 4, 2016

We can put together a WordPress website and we have some fancy badges in CodeAcademy, but no CTO in his right mind will let either of us touch their production environment and/or keyboard. We know the tools, we know the methods and we know how to hire and manage people. With the full BOOK of instructions, we get busy hiring.

Software 75

Software CTO Hire Scale New CTO 75

OPEXEngine

NOVEMBER 11, 2020

This made it hard to chart a clear course: Jebbit’s message to the market was a bit too broad, causing Sales to bring in customers across a range of personas, prompting CS to invest extra resources to keep a wide variety of customers engaged.”. Accurately forecast revenue retention and expansion. Drive new levers of growth.

Startup 91

Startup Scale Systems Review Technical Review 91

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

CEO Joel Gascoigne tells us about the decision to invest in new analytics tools and how Buffer sustained long-term growth thanks to growing their ARPA. While Baremetrics was fulfilling the desire for public transparency, internally the team was using Looker almost exclusively to track and report revenue metrics. What is Buffer.

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Payment Features Outsourcing Services Payments 52

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

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 were doing great in revenue. We doubled revenue every year since 2015.

Merchant Services 81

Merchant Services Payment Methods Payments Payment Solutions 81

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 21, 2020

Now he’s a partner making investments on the VC side at Foundation Capital with over 20 years of operational experience. Now he’s a partner making investments on the VC side at Foundation Capital, but has over 20 years of operational experience. We invest in technology companies typically at the earliest stages.

Payment Methods 63

Payment Methods Scale CTO Coach SMB 63

Point Nine Land

APRIL 9, 2021

Having invested in 9 B2B marketplaces and gathered data from 20+ different investors, here are our findings on what it takes to raise money in 2021 for B2B marketplaces. A technical co-founder or CTO is always a great-to-have at this stage and becomes a must-have as the business scales beyond seed. Market Characteristics ??

Marketplace as a Service 59

Marketplace as a Service Payments B2B SaaS Payments 59