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. If, in one sales cycle, things aren’t improving on several core metrics, they never will. Hiring someone too junior. Do you need to hire for a VP role?

Part-Time VPE 242

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 242

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

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.

Outsourced Development 214

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 214

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

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. For example, I referenced hiring a Chief Revenue Officer, Bill. This is never going to work.”

CTO Hire 178

CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 178

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Emilie : The way I see it, the bar is higher because on the … because of education, there has been a metrics war. So what we see when our companies are pitching to investors is that you know what metrics investors will open the email. Everyone probably knows all the metrics that Jason talks about.

New CTO 182

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 182

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

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 24, 2021

A thanks to [Marsh 00:00:34] for stepping in at the beginning of the month, and a great session with our own Jason Warner and Adrian, the CTO of Zendesk. Lionetti, the CMO at Confluent, and most recently, the CTO from Zendesk, Adrian. I wouldn’t say I have an exact metric, but-. Excited to be back emceeing.

CTO Coach 164

CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 164

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

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?

CTO Hire 147

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 147

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

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 60 is probably where your core plan should be. We have a 60% chance that we can do it.

Outsourcing Services 243

Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 243

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

Panintelligence

JUNE 7, 2024

In this blog, we asked Panintelligence CEO Zandra Moore and CTO Ken Miller what they think are some of the most frequent mistakes in SaaS development and offer actionable insights to help you steer clear of them. Make sure the key stakeholders are involved in the definition of those metrics. Ken: measuring the wrong thing.

CTO Hire 98

CTO Hire SaaS Business Underperforming Technical Team 98

ProfitWell

JANUARY 29, 2019

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.

Churn 103

Churn CTO Hire Data CTO 103

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

While Baremetrics was fulfilling the desire for public transparency, internally the team was using Looker almost exclusively to track and report revenue metrics. MRR numbers were changing all the time. I realized we had a moving target for the most important metric in our company. 2 different North Star metrics?

Payment Solutions 113

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Social Media 113

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. One more output metric from Dave: I had around 10,000 LinkedIn followers a year ago, and I'm now north of 27,000.

Social Media 22

Social Media CTO Coach CTO Hire New CTO 22

OpenView Labs

JULY 2, 2020

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. The Value Metric: Optimize Your Pricing Strategy for High Growth. There are Only 3 Pricing Strategies for Your Startup.

Pricing 135

Pricing SaaS Payments Payments SaaS 135

Baremetrics

MARCH 16, 2021

Baremetrics spoke with co-founder Dmitry Shklovsky to learn more about QuikNode and how they use Baremetrics to understand key financial metrics, translate cancellation data to inform product iteration, and sustain long-term growth. To continue fundraising, it was clear that QuikNode had to dial deeper into business metrics.

Blockchain 90

Blockchain Payment Solutions Artificial Intelligence Payment Services 90

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2020

I just came out of Stripe, I just came out of Datadog, I came out of Fastly, I’m an engineer, I love the guy that was the CTO of Fastly who [inaudible 00:08:34] making it up. Just like a whole bunch of people said, “I’ll never hire remote.” And all of a sudden they’re like, “I guess, I could hire remote.”

Sales Recruiting 225

Sales Recruiting Development Team Review Technical Review Sales Hiring 225

OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

The siloed management structure paralleled the key components of Operating Expense, making it easy to report backward-looking Income Statement expenses and recognized revenues, but not cross-functional customer and product lifecycle metrics, critical to managing a SaaS company. Chief Product Officer.

Part-Time CTO 69

Part-Time CTO CTO CTO Hire Management 69

ProfitWell

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

MRR is the best way to start measuring revenue but as you grow, different metrics will come into play. They will help align teams and all the different metrics. When Co-founder and CTO of Chargify , Michael Klett isn’t brewing his own beer, he’s crafting billing experiences. You need a RevOps team or manager focused on revenue.

CTO Hire 98

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 98

Sales Hacker

JUNE 12, 2020

If you are trying to overcome no brand and market, you can’t ask somebody for a three year contract. Or, if you do ask for a three year contract, have some terms in there that show that you’re going to prove ROI. Down the road, you can say, “ I demand a two year contract. You would approach it by hiring more people.

Enterprise 82

Enterprise CTO Hire Startup Technical Cofounder 82

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 8, 2018

Follow the Demand and Hire Accordingly [16:07]. Chris was actually the first sales hire at Snowflake. They are now well past $100 million in ARR and one of the most successful enterprise technology businesses to come out of Silicon Valley and, in fact, out of the US in a long, long time. Follow the Demand and Hire Accordingly.

Scale 83

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 83

Sales Hacker

MAY 5, 2021

As Director of RevOps, he scaled his team at Sendoso by hiring smart generalists to lead their own teams of MOps, SOps, CSOps. As an operational leader, he shares his thoughts on the top plays and metrics that led to 100,000 HubSpot customers reaching their first $1B in ARR. Alex Miller , Director of RevOps at Sendoso.

Scale 122

Scale Technical Cofounder Technical Advisors Sales Hiring 122

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

The main benefits of categorizing your SaaS company’s expenses are more accurate metrics and forecasts, and getting a better understanding of your company’s overall spending. While not a GAAP-metric, it’s widely adopted and understood (examples here , here and here ). This is a v2.0 Don’t forget the payroll’s subaccounts).

Startup 90

Startup Merchant Services DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

Natalia Luneva

APRIL 30, 2021

Of course, our team is involved to an extent, and we have an external part-time moderator for support. 5 Sebastian Schaeffer, CTO at dofollow.io (B2B PR SaaS) says: “ Our community is primarily on Facebook and Linkedin and it has been live for over a year. My main metric for success is engagement.

Marketing 98

Marketing Social Media SaaS New CTO 98

OPEXEngine

NOVEMBER 11, 2020

In HubSpot’s case, we eventually hired a world-class data science team, but our scoring only improved by a few points,” notes Redbord. You’ll need someone familiar with your data—perhaps a CTO or someone responsible for business operations. Let’s say you’re working on retention, and you have eight usage metrics with substantive volume.

Startup 91

Startup Scale Systems Review Technical Review 91

ProfitWell

JANUARY 2, 2020

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.

B2C 52

B2C Payment Features Subscription Payments 52

Casey Accidental

FEBRUARY 8, 2022

Programs are 4-6 weeks in length, part-time, and held in a virtual format, guided by an executive. Unlock your full potential as a Product Manager by learning to drive impact for the metrics that matter most for your product. Harsh Sinha , CTO at Wise, formerly PayPal, Ebay. Real problems require real depth.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach CTO Hire New CTO Scale 52

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

More and more people are hiring leaders, not for past experience, but for capability and capacity. They have a core philosophy that you cannot have a successful high-growth software company if your core metrics around Customer Success are not strong, including NPS. We hire a third-party firm. They give us NPS goals.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

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? What is their biggest challenge and what should they be focused on, whether they’re a CEO or a CTO, what would you say they should be focused on today?

Cloud 173

Cloud Scale Trends Machine Learning 173

OPEXEngine

OCTOBER 31, 2019

The metrics that drive SaaS are not GAAP metrics and companies need a strong Finance department to be the one source of truth about the financial AND the operating metrics. Ability to accurately benchmark key metrics against peers and market leaders. Skills & Experience.

Finance 40

Finance CTO Hire Headcount Sales Hiring 40

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

While Baremetrics was fulfilling the desire for public transparency, internally the team was using Looker almost exclusively to track and report revenue metrics. MRR numbers were changing all the time. I realized we had a moving target for the most important metric in our company. 2 different North Star metrics?

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Outsourcing Services 52

Point Nine Land

APRIL 9, 2021

To add to this, B2B marketplaces tend to have various different business models (commission, SaaS, not monetizing in the beginning), which makes it very difficult to come up with one-size-fits-all metrics for each funding round. Experienced VPs with a track record of building successful companies have been hired across multiple functions.

Marketplace as a Service 59

Marketplace as a Service Payments B2B SaaS Payments 59

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

Obviously if you target enterprise customers, you usually have a very large ACV (Annual Contract Value) and the product usually is complex. We talk about using the product complexity, your target customer size, your contract value, and whether there's individual use case–those four things--to help you decide if PLG is a fit.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

Outseta

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

The challenge in each case is the same—the company is hiring you at a lower level of commitment than a full-time hire, usually with the expectation that they will see some ROI relatively quickly. Full-time Head of Marketing I’ve been hired to lead marketing teams at four companies in a full-time capacity now.

Sales Hiring 50

Sales Hiring CTO Coach CTO Hire Underperforming Technical Team 50

Crafty CTO

JUNE 9, 2024

That led me down one final rabbit hole, but a very useful one, as I soon realized that Framework was a perfect fit for one of my fractional CTO client’s “data science reporting and dashboard” needs. They can also be used to declare top-level variables, say to load data or declare helper functions.

Data 52

Data CTO Hire Cloud New CTO 52

ProfitWell

OCTOBER 1, 2019

When HubSpot first launched its culture code, Dharmesh Shah, CTO and Founder of HubSpot, felt it was important to share it with candidates. Since then, its culture code has been viewed more than 4 million times. In fact, that's probably better for everyone than if you found that out after they've been hired.

Company Culture 40

Company Culture Sales Recruiting Scale Software Review 40

SmartKarrot

OCTOBER 18, 2022

Direct the hiring, orientation, and training plan for Relationship Management team members as applicable. Define and analyze staff metrics to gauge the productivity and efficiency of the team, and develop strategies to maximize performance. Nurture key relationships internally – product team, BD team, COO, CTO, etc.

Customer Success 19

Customer Success Sales Hiring CTO Hire New CTO 19