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

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 316

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 316

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 211

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO Venture Capital 211

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 312

Scale CTO Hire New CTO CTO 312

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 263

Scale CTO Hire Cloud Scaling 263

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 299

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 299

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

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 290

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 290

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 328

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 328

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 299

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire AWS New CTO 299

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 278

Management CTO Hire New CTO CTO 278

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 290

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 290

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

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 296

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 296

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 182

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 182

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 214

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 214

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 107

SMB Sales Recruiting Branding Sales Hiring 107

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 207

Merchant Services Scale Technical Review Sales Hiring 207

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 147

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 147

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

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

SaaStr

JANUARY 14, 2020

What sets apart some of the most successful, high-growth companies we see today—Slack, Dropbox, Atlassian—has been their ability to tap into and master a new GTM strategy: B2C2B. We saw inside the company this tension between our classroom business and this new B2C digital business, and we knew we had to make a decision.

B2B 173

B2B B2C Scale New CTO 173

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 ).

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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 178

CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 178

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 145

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 145

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

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

Along the way, we’ve interviewed trailblazers, business leaders, makers and doers to share their experience and insights on all things startup strategy, product management, design, marketing, customer experience, and much, much more. Rachel Hepworth: Introducing growth marketing to Slack. That just blows my mind. Here’s Rachel.

Outsourcing Services 215

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

Valerian Tech

MAY 4, 2023

In this article, we'll explore the benefits of DevOps for legacy businesses and how a Fractional CTO can help overcome the challenges of DevOps adoption. First, legacy businesses often face cultural barriers and resistance to change when it comes to implementing new technologies and practices.

CTO Hire 52

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Business 52

Outseta

APRIL 11, 2019

Why most SaaS companies are blind to some of the best talent on the market By Geoff Roberts 9 min read I believe that most SaaS companies are missing out of a major opportunity when hiring—the opportunity to hire more part-time help, where the employee acts as a fully integrated (albeit part-time) member of the team on an ongoing basis.

CTO Hire 52

CTO Hire Sales Hiring B2B New CTO 52

Buffer Resources

DECEMBER 1, 2023

Given that their guidance is so universal — both for people just stepping into new roles and those at fast-paced companies like Buffer — I thought I’d share their wisdom here. ⏰ Time at Buffer: 11 years, 6 months Andy was one of Buffer’s earliest hires.

VP of Engineering 124

VP of Engineering Part-Time CTO New CTO CTO 124

Stax

AUGUST 14, 2024

“I am passionate about working with partners to grow existing relationships and forging new partnerships to ultimately help grow businesses through product innovation and Stax is the perfect place to do this.”

Payments 88

Payments Stax Payment Solutions Payment Services 88