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I found, when I was a SaaS CEO, that the CEOs that complained about needing a COO early, that it was too hard (which it is), etc. I felt part of your core job as CEO was to assemble a management team, not complain about how you couldn’t get it all done. Or couldn’t stand your CTO. Hiring a strong COO between Management Team 1.0
IME, rough order to make hires in: VPM: $0.2m He asked which to hire first. If you have a few nickels in the bank, and you somehow find a great VP a half stage or even full stage early, just hire her. Hiring is so hard as it is. Make the hire now. ARR VPS: $1-$1.5m More here: [link].
Dear SaaStr: What Makes a Bad CTO? While there is no legal definition for CTO or bright line between CTO and VPE, I’d suggest a start-up CTO really only has to do a few things — which are very hard: Assemble a small team (3–9) of very good engineers. That often were never anticipated and aren’t part of the job spec.
Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders? In SaaS, once you have even a few million in ARR, the #1 challenge is recruiting top-tier VPs and building a truly top-tier management team: SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. SaaS products get too complex to hack a product roadmap too long.
Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Be Careful Hiring “Dualies” — Folks That Are a VP of More Than One Thing. In The End, The “Covid Boost” in SaaS Was a Bust. Growing & ScalingSaaS Businesses from $1M to $500M in ARR with Intercom CEO Karen Peacock.
Q: What’s the number one challenge for scale-up founders? In SaaS, it is recruiting your VPs and management team : SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. SaaS products get too complex to hack a product roadmap too long. You will need a VP of Product to scale your roadmap. She can be your CTO forever.
Perhaps the single most important thing you can ever do in SaaS, at least after $1m in ARR or so, is hire the best VPs you can. We’ve talked a lot over the years about how not to hire a wrong VP of Sales — 70%+ of the first VPs of Sales don’t make it even 10 months. You need to hire up-and-comers.
To convert an idea into a successful venture, startups need to be equipped to scale. 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. . Build an irreplaceable team .
Lately I’ve been working with 5+ SaaS companies all hiring their first VP of Product. And critically, most have a really strong CEO-CTO partnership. A few general learnings: A VP of Product that Reports to CTO / Engineering Rarely Meets With That Many Customers. I just see this time and time again.
Unparalleled Networking Opportunities SaaStr Annual brings together thousands of SaaS, Cloud and AI executives, founders, VCs, and industry leaders under one roof across our 40+ acre campus, May 13-15 in SF Bay! Finding and recruiting top talent is consistently ranked as one of the biggest challenges for growing SaaS companies.
Do you anticipate scale issues presently or in the future? While the appearance matters, remember you are hiring the development firm primarily for its development skills, not its graphic design skills. cto , product , saas Do you have the basics already defined and merely need them fleshed out?
As your SaaS company grows and you go through various fundraising stages, your company size also grows. You’ll need to hire aggressively to get to the next level and continue that rapid growth. But what roles should you hire for, and what will your org chart look like at each stage? David Sacks: SaaS Background and Investments.
You’ll never truly understand how to lead a SaaS company until you’ve done it firsthand. Dan Robinson, current Advisor and former CTO at Heap , shares five essential learnings from nearly a decade of building a SaaS business. Software is Fractal A SaaS product is richly nuanced and contains multiple layers.
Anyhow the one thing I learned, beyond getting help screening and hiring for these positions from domain experts, is to look for Flags. For signs the prospective hire just won’t work out, no matter how strong they might look on paper. At that point, VPEs need them to scale. Why join a start-up? Not for start-ups.
There, Amplitude has become part of the core product stack for many SaaS and software leaders for product analytics. Use overages to renegotiate contracts, not charge per event. They’re growing even faster at scale. CEO Spencer Skates owns 8.5%, CTO Curtis Liu 8.0%. 5 Interesting Learnings: #1.
I hear again and again from SaaS founders growing to $5m, $10m ARR or even more that they don’t need a certain VP — with the exception of a VP of Sales. Basically, in SaaS, everyone “gets” that they need a VP of Sales. in ARR, get to Initial Traction , we then realize we have to scale. But trust me.
What started as a simple WordPress blog in 2012 has now become the world’s largest community of SaaS executives, founders, and entrepreneurs. And SaaStr Europa brings 2,500+ SaaS execs, founders, and VCs together to Europe every summer. We were the first major SaaS event back in the SF Bay Area. SaaStr is turning 10!
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. CS became professionalized.
Still, if you’re a business leader and your developers haven’t asked you these questions, look for a FractionalCTO to help navigate the critical early stage of development. How quickly will we need to scale the application? The innovator/developer relationship needs to be a conversation. Six months from now?
The top SaaS companies grow faster than ever these days. The first type is the kind of management team hired by second+ time founders. Veterans of the SaaS journey. But most of us are first-time founders, or close to it. That CTO that doesn’t quite have the traditional background. More on that here ).
They’ll revolt when you make a senior or mid-level hire that as a group, they simply cannot suffer one day longer. He was literally the only person on the planet with the specific scaling experience we needed. It did work — we got the scaling done. You see this all the time. Everyone hated him.
These are all full-time jobs by $1m ARR. Fixing it yourself becomes the biggest time sink and excuse for not hiring there is. You end up spending all your time backfilling roles you should have hired. And even worse, you often sort of give up trying to make the hire. Get on a jet, at least twice a quarter.
Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Zendesk and Anaplan: A Tale of Two Very Similar, And Very Different, $10B SaaS Acquisitions. The Ultimate Guide for Hiring a Great VP of Sales. Balancing Growth and Efficiency in Tougher Times | Point Nine Managing Partner Christoph Janz.
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?
Ode to the $100,000,000 Exit Dear SaaStr: Should You Hire Someone That Seems Good … But Always Job Hops? SaaStr 638: Lessons Learned in Scaling Your Team & Revenue from $1M ARR to $1B+ with Cloudflare CRO Chris Merritt 2. SaaStr 639: Scaling a SaaS Sales Team While Building Culture with Figma VP of Sales Scott Pugh 3.
Hundreds of thousands of experts are telling you how to succeed in SaaS. On top of that, founders are full of excuses preventing them from scaling. 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. Yes, you do.
Each year, tens of thousands of SaaS fans attend SaaStr Annual. 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. Find and hire two other similar reps.
“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!) What’s the #1 bit of advice you’d give to SaaS founders today?
This post will walk you through what SaaS companies need to know about sales tax compliance, how to know when and from which customers you should collect sales tax, and best of all, how to automate sales tax so you can check “Do something about sales tax” off your to-do list once and for all. Why is sales tax such a pain for SaaS companies?
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.
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. It can’t come from scaling something five years ago from 10 to 400 SDRs, but real innovation.
Last year, the message was that it’s harder, so what is the theme for many SaaS companies this year? SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin shares his take on the current SaaS landscape midway through 2024 and what might be coming next in 2025 at the opener to this year’s SaaStr Europa. Or Scale AI securing $1B. Just build.
When you treat your cloud provider as a fractional colo. The B2B SaaS arms race will be won by those who can consistently translate technical debt into development versatility: adding new features, integrating new data sources and workflow integrations, trying new technologies, retiring locked-in dependencies.
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!
Today on the show, we’ve got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. Keys to success when scaling a company [10:56]. 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.
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.
As a global technology provider powering thousands of SaaS companies, Google is at the forefront of driving exciting and innovative technologies to market. You’ll also learn how leading SaaS companies are able to scale and thrive in this complex, dynamic environment. Who’s here on a CEO or more on a business hat SaaS?
Pricing is a SaaS company’s most efficient profit lever, but it’s also one of the easiest things to screw up. Nailing your SaaS pricing strategy requires more than just picking the optimal price and forgetting about it. It includes the latest and greatest SaaS pricing resources, as well as some timeless staples.
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. The contract size grows. Doing Business with Developers. Bottom-up sales.
The margin for error is slim in the fast-paced world of Software as a Service (SaaS). To ensure your SaaS application stands out and thrives, it's crucial to avoid common pitfalls that can hinder your success. It’s a factor of their size as they become successful – it’s hard to innovate at a very large scale.
Confused about trying to understand SaaS roles? SaaS companies have many moving parts, and it can be difficult to determine who does what. TL;DR SaaS, or “Software as a Service,” is a business model that delivers centrally hosted software to subscribers over the internet. What is a SaaS business model?
Learn how Pendo built a product, team, and culture in its Raleigh hometown that could scale coast-to-coast and continent-to-continent. Also, part of that is being intentional about who you want to be as a company. We ended up signing that contract in the uber back to the airport on the way home. Join us for SaaStr Annual 2020.
In this presentation, Pluralsight co-founder and CEO Aaron Skonnard will discuss how Pluralsight successfully transformed its business to serve both individual and enterprise customers independently and will share his lessons for SaaS companies looking to tap into individual customers to sell into enterprises and vice versa.
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. Wade Foster is Co-founder and CEO of Zapier, a SaaS company that allows users to integrate web applications they use. “The Cadence: How to Turn Your SaaS Startup into an Army.”
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