SaaStr

JULY 5, 2024

Some are decades-old problems, while others have emerged from this new world we’re in. GTM Mistake #1: A VP of Sales That Can’t Sell or Demo the Product Mistake number one has always been an issue, and it’s the number one reason startups struggle in today’s world. They hire a VP of Sales who doesn’t want to sell or learn the product.

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CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO Venture Capital 211

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: How Do You Get Sustainable Output In A Startup?

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CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 242

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?

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CTO Hire New CTO CTO Startup 246

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.

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Fractional CTO CTO Hire Part-Time CTO CTO 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

Indeed this was also my #1 mistake and the #1 I see from so many startups learning to go upmarket. 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. Are we sure?

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CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 328

SaaStr

JUNE 16, 2019

We passed a new milestone on Quora — crossing 50,000,000 total views. What makes a bad CTO? Do startups ever have one founder with substantially more equity than the other founder(s)? What are the advantages of being a startup vs being an established business? What is the cheapest thing a salesperson did to you?

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CTO Hire New CTO CTO Payment Methods 171

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. You’re not building a product or getting any new customers. You can’t hire a magician Head of Product.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 290

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%.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire Scale 232

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2024

Is the CTO involved in these decisions? App contraction is still happening, and AI is absorbing all of the energy in the industry. But if you want to grow fast, you want to innovate and take care of those customers and the energy that goes into these pricing games, especially for new CROs and revenue teams. It’s too early.”

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AI Pricing Artificial Intelligence Scale 304

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.

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Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 264

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. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!

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Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 296

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.

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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?

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Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup Outsourced Development 121

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

If you’re running a smaller digital business, you may find it challenging to hire great talent. If you’re facing challenges winning the best candidates for your roles, or if you have a small number of roles and every hire really matters, then don’t miss this episode of Growth Stage. Why are you looking for a new job?

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

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. 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. More likely than not, but barely.

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Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 243

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.

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New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 182

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.

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CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 113

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 27, 2018

Back in the early days of Intercom, our CTO Ciaran was the entirety of the on call team, both in and out of the office. Soon after, new teams started building a lot of new features and services, and they assumed full on call responsibilities. The history of on call at Intercom. There were too many people on call at any moment.

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Engineering Software Review Technical Review Systems Review 209

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. For example, you hire a developer to move you over to an ERP like NetSuite.

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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. 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. What happened?

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CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 147

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

In part, my shift in thinking could pertain to not being the “front man” handling the pitch. But thanks to our VP of Business Development, I realize team-based selling for an early-stage startup or company is still likely a necessity, and far outweighs specialization when your sales org is fewer than five people or so.

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Underperforming Technical Team CTO Hire CTO Coach Technical Review 131

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 173

Scale Scaling CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 173

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

Some of the things we talked about were operational overhead and cost of various data stores we were running, along with whether or not we needed to hire dedicated database administrators for various different technologies. Ciaran, our CTO , came up with this magical line. He said, “I want to run less software, not more software.

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Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

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. After building their initial prototype, the team presented at Startup Weekend in Columbia and won. “The Cadence: How to Turn Your SaaS Startup into an Army.”

Payment Services 113

Payment Services CTO Hire Payments New CTO 113

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.

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CTO Hire Investment New CTO CTO 64

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

I was working with a company that … Because people will write big checks today into early stage companies, where someone came in very early and gave an early startup $50 million too early, and just started telling them how to raise the company, immediately told them to go buy competitors, which they’re not ready for.

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Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 246

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. For Slack, that was clearly the engineering and dev communities, who love new tools.

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Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

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. He was a VP of product at a series D startup, so a little bit ahead of us and we just had a real connection. We had no New York city presence. I had a good sense.

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CTO Hire Travel Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach 178

OpenView Labs

JULY 2, 2020

New for 2020: SaaS Pricing and COVID-19. In this brand-new report, we finally answer the question “Freemium or free trial?” Patrick Campbell deconstructs and walks through the elements of a pricing strategy that enables startups to more effectively acquire customers. Nudging Customers with Behavioral Tactics.

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Pricing SaaS Payments Payments SaaS 135

Kellblog

JANUARY 29, 2020

The majority of startups solve a problem that is already being solved in some way today. Unless you are solving a brand-new problem (e.g., Unless you are solving a brand-new problem (e.g., If they are already solving the problem in some way, your new solution more likely represents an optimization than a breakthrough.

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Startup Sales Hiring CTO Hire New CTO 99

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. Major challenges facing a new CEO [19:40]. Sam Jacobs: Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract.

Scale 119

Scale CTO Hire CTO Coach Scaling 119

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 5, 2022

Suddenly, the team got to know SOC 2 Reports all too well and realized just how burdensome and unscalable it could become, especially for high-growth startups. And then, in the 50s, they introduced this new thing, and there was resistance. Evernote’s CTO on Your Biggest Security Worries From 3 to 300 Employees.

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Scale Software Review compliance Technical Review 211

User Pilot

MARCH 7, 2024

This could be explained by the fact that it was women, more often than men, who had to step down and work part-time to take care of stay-at-home children during the pandemic. Then I got hired at a tech company in Lithuania before I knew what tech even was. Sima Banijamali – Sr. I knew nothing about tech.

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Technical Review CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire 105

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 31, 2019

When a company is moving from the startup to the scale-up phase, there is the potential for productivity practices to be lost along the wayside. Tim: I was hired in 2010, when Facebook was what I like to call a “teenage company”. That was actually a pretty tall order at the time. Tim: There’s always a fear of change.

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Artificial Intelligence Scale CTO Hire Technology 169

Sales Hacker

JUNE 12, 2020

In it, Co-Founder and CRO of Kronologic, Aaron Bollinger, shows us how to close enterprise level deals when you’re a startup. How to overcome no credible timing event. All right guys, welcome to the Sales Hacker’s Success Summit presentation, How To Close The Enterprise When You Are Just A Startup. What You’ll Learn.

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Enterprise CTO Hire Startup Technical Cofounder 81

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Here’s an overview of the series: Part 1: How to Categorize Expenses in a SaaS Startup v2.0 What’s their new CAC Payback Time? New Gross Margins? Start by creating a new account from clicking the button New on the top-right. Use area charts for more detail. Let’s start with Payroll – Support.

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Startup Merchant Services DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. Customer Onboarding Specialist: Responsible for helping new customers get up and running with the company’s products. Before the hiring process, take some time to decide on your current needs and hire as your company grows.

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Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98