TechEmpower SaaS

JULY 24, 2023

It’s part of our job to ask questions about their plans, challenge their assumptions, and suggest paths to success. The conversations are interesting and varied because they’re about new, exciting, different things. How will you be taking this to market? Often this ties to marketing support.

Innovation 780

Innovation Development CTO Hire Technical Review 780

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2021

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. These webinars will also be great training for the new folks. Simplify to a 1 page contract. Just do this.

Scale 348

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 348

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2021

But what they don’t have is a good enough founding team: Sometimes, if the prospective founder isn’t super technical, then the CTO/VPE isn’t really great. They’ve got a rent-a-CTO. Or sometimes they are great, but the team members are just not great enough for their new C-level roles (CEO, CTO, CMO, CSO, CBO, C?O).

Part-Time VPE 260

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire New CTO CTO 260

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

In the latest installment of SaaStr’s What’s New series – where we sit down with the leaders in SaaS and Cloud for the inside scoop on what’s top of mind and what’s new, SaaStr CEO and Jason Lemkin chats with the CEO of ZoomInfo , Henry Schuck. So, what’s new at ZoomInfo? ” And there can be some truth to that, right? .”

New CTO 312

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 312

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2024

Some are decades-old problems, while others have emerged from this new world we’re in. They hire a VP of Sales who doesn’t want to sell or learn the product. You also don’t want to hire a VP of Sales who won’t carry a bag. There wouldn’t be enough time for them to carry a bag for six months and hire those ten people.

CTO Hire 209

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO Venture Capital 209

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2021

Some leaders like Slack have seen the same, but most Cloud leaders at scale with high NRR end up getting more and more of their revenue from their existing base, not new customers. Use overages to renegotiate contracts, not charge per event. 245 employees in Sales & Marketing — vs. 101 in Engineering / R&D.

Scale 307

Scale CTO Hire New CTO CTO 307

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2023

They need to act fast and take first-mover advantage to compete in the dynamic market. Hiring a reliable team is an all-encompassing issue where startups dive in head-first but fail to optimize it for success. . Hiring an expert produces 1000x better results than someone with interests elsewhere. . “A

Scale 259

Scale CTO Hire Cloud Scaling 259

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

No one spends enough time recruiting as it is, after $1m ARR or so. You can do the drip marketing campaigns if you have to. These are all full-time jobs by $1m ARR. Fixing it yourself becomes the biggest time sink and excuse for not hiring there is. That’s not good enough, especially in competitive markets.

Part-Time VPE 293

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 293

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. Q: Where Should SDRs Report — Marketing or Sales?

CTO Hire 242

CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 242

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2021

A new edition, new services, an outbound sales team, an account management / upsell team. Something new to boost your ACV and TCV. Double your pricing for new customer, on the largest deals. And importantly, you need to spend more time with your existing customers (vs. Add a layer. At least on the big customers.

Part-Time VPE 284

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 284

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2020

They’ll revolt when you make a senior or mid-level hire that as a group, they simply cannot suffer one day longer. But I forced us to hire him, over my CTO’s strong objection and my VPE’s grudging acknowledgment we had no choice. A senior marketing manager that offended everyone culturally.

Part-Time VPE 284

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 284

Valerian Tech

DECEMBER 30, 2022

The role of a Fractional Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is to provide technical expertise and leadership to a company on a part-time or temporary basis. This can be a useful option for startups or small businesses that may not have the resources to hire a full-time CTO or may not need one on a permanent basis.

Fractional CTO 52

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Part-Time CTO CTO 52

SaaStr

JUNE 18, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: About 70% of SaaS Public Companies Are New Versions of Existing Categories of Software (Updated) Growth Slowed Down About 33% On Average For Everyone in Q1 The Top 20 SaaStr Tips to Getting a SaaS Start-Up Going When Should You Add a Second Product?

CTO Hire 246

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Startup 246

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 it was much easier to do more in order to keep that customer than to get a new “top” customer.

CTO Hire 325

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 325

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

Recently, I spent several hours with a new but great friend who has been on a vaguely similar journey to me. And he made an observation to me that I’d been thinking about for a very long time, but didn’t know how to express. Second, hire the best management team you can as early as you can.

Part-Time VPE 293

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire AWS New CTO 293

SaaStr

JANUARY 4, 2024

“Doubling Down” is a new series where we hear from top B2B SaaS investors on their most recent activities and takes on the current market. Jason Warner , who was CTO of GitHub before and during my time as COO there (and a former partner at Redpoint!) Check that out here. Why did you do the deal?

Management 273

Management CTO Hire New CTO CTO 273

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

For part one of this Ask Me Anything session, Jason covers everything you need to know about hiring your first VP of Sales, what he really thinks about AI, what the future of lead generation in 2024 looks like, and much more. Q: Should Product Marketing Work for Product or Marketing? Let’s jump right into the questions.

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 284

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 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 261

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2020

Brendon introduces his playbook to hiring the first VP of Sales from his experiences as VP of Sales at LinkedIn, EchoSign, Talkdesk and more. Learn the dos and don’ts to make the correct hire the first time and not rush into hiring the wrong VP of Sales, which can cost the company months or even years. Roughly 90%.

Sales Hiring 229

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire Scale 229

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

In 2016, Hubspot was still a scrappy player that had only recently IPO’d, with a market cap around $1B. 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. Otherwise, we are not doing our jobs, being in the marketing space.

Part-Time VPE 290

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 290

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2024

AI is coming for sales and marketing, and Jason is a super fan of AI in marketing. Because hundreds of the best founders are radically ripping through post-sales AI, and now it’s time for marketing. Is the CTO involved in these decisions? Q: What Are You Most Excited About with AI? Is SaaS dead right now?

AI 299

AI Pricing Artificial Intelligence Scale 299

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Since 2010 we’ve seen more startups, funds, and capital than ever before, but with this drastic increase, investors are seeing unexpected new trends reshaping the future of the industry. The panel that we are in is called Is Seed the New Series A, and this is a question that I’ve been asking informally yesterday and today.

New CTO 179

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 179

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

So selling, marketing and supporting them should be different too. WorkOS CEO Michael Grinich, Developer Success Manager Betsy Calender, and VP of Developer Experience Zeno Rocha share how to price your product for developers, how to market it to developers, how to how to support them as they scale and use the products.

Outsourced Development 210

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 210

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

If you’re running a smaller digital business, you may find it challenging to hire great talent. Larger technology companies can pay more, offer more benefits, and provide a more marketable brand on a candidate’s resume. Why is it so hard for SMBs to hire the best talent when competing with big companies?

SMB 102

SMB Sales Recruiting Branding Sales Hiring 102

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

Jason Lemkin: I think I noticed a pattern, and I wrote it up a couple of years ago and refreshed it, and then I’ll add a new anecdote. 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. We have a 60% chance that we can do it.

Outsourcing Services 243

Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 243

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

So even the freshest new SaaS startup celebrating their 50th customer may find themselves dealing with sales tax in multiple states. . hiring in-house talent). Expanding into new sales channels is a common growth play. Expanding into new sales channels is a common growth play.

Merchant Services 202

Merchant Services Scale Technical Review Sales Hiring 202

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

In my opinion, the founder team of a SaaS startup needs to excel in three areas: engineering/technology, product/UX and domain/market expertise. 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

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

Growth is still good for them, but they had no net new customers last quarter. Then Salesforce lost $50B in market cap. Deals are contracting, not because of layoffs, but because people are managing budgets so tightly. HubSpots NRR has fallen to 100%, so to grow 23%, they must add 23% net new customers. What happened?

CTO Hire 144

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 144

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 18, 2012

Continuing my little series using the "minimum viable" approach , here is my 2nd DO for SaaS startups: Build the right team I've written about the topic before, so if you've read this post from early this year most of what I'm going to write now won't be new for you and you may want to skip this article. What comes next?

Sales Hiring 121

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup Outsourced Development 121

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

They include that time is short, opportunities are fleeting, competition is fierce, and engineering resources are scarce. If we are actually trying to win our market and be the absolute best customer communications company, we need to make exquisitely good use of our precious engineering resources.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

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. Jason Lemkin: 50 reps in a new city that you’ve never met, and hired in 60 days when you’re in the low millions ARR.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 246

CloudGeometry

JULY 8, 2021

When you treat your cloud provider as a fractional colo. What starts as an easy hack for a new feature that accesses the database directly sprawls quickly into reads and writes that conflict with all kinds existing functions. and onboarding new customers. See a useful background talk from their CTO Pini Reznik here ).

Well Architected Framework 130

Well Architected Framework Payment Methods CTO Hire Payment Solutions 130

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. First, hire a management coach to work with you as the company grows. The best ways he found to learn leadership skills was to hire a management coach to meet him once per month, to talk through the issues facing him at Optimizely.

CTO Coach 113

CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 113

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2019

Can I see a show of hands for those of you that have headquarters outside of the Bay Area, a secondary market? Also, part of that is being intentional about who you want to be as a company. The world’s your market, right? We ended up signing that contract in the uber back to the airport on the way home.

CTO Hire 177

CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 177

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2019

Julian Lemoine, Co-Founder, and CTO of Algolia will share his lessons learned on how to stay focused and innovative as you scale while also avoiding the innovation for innovation’s sake pitfalls. Julien Lemoine | Co-founder and CTO @Algolia. So I’m Julien, Co-founder and CTO of Algolia. Want to see more content like this?

Scale 169

Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 169

OpenView Labs

APRIL 12, 2019

Getting hiring right is absolutely critical. I’d like to talk about two different companies with two very different approaches to hiring post-seed raise. To get the team started we hired several junior developers. There is a binary feeling that comes from making those first few technical hires. We needed a CTO.

CTO Hire 64

CTO Hire Investment New CTO CTO 64

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

And also, we always prioritize the features requested by our existing customers over the new prospects. Not only for the product side, but for the sales and marketing side. 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. Welcome Eric.

Sales Hiring 141

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 141