SaaStr

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

But a great head of demand gen (or maybe growth hacking if you are SMB) should be very accretive at even $20k in MRR. No matter how great a hacker your CTO is. This will seem crazy early to many of you. Imagine you are organically growing 4x, so from say $200k in ARR this year to $800k by the end of the year. Are their exceptions here?

Part-Time VPE 363

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale 363

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2023

Mike Wiacek, CEO at Stairwell, Mo Jebrini, CTO at Mashvisor, and Michael Ermolenko, CTO at Inworld.ai, discuss with Helene Ambiana, Global SMB and Startups Marketing Director at Google Cloud, how they overcame the hurdles of scaling and reached their goals. . Build an irreplaceable team .

Scale 256

Scale CTO Hire Cloud Scaling 256

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

Another top mistake SMB folks make trying to sell enterprise. ” — Echeyde Cubillo, Co-founder and CTO, Acme Ticketing. This sounds so basic, but again it often isn’t, especially if you are using less experienced and/or SMB trained sales reps to sell into the enterprise. Did we prioritize the roadmap right?

CTO Hire 321

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 321

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2021

5/ Moving from CTO-led -> VPE-led dev team. Most of us hire a VP of Engineering to take over from our CTO because we see the CTO is getting burnt out, or has trouble building a dev team > 8-9 folks, or gets disinterested in solving technical debt, bugs, etc. Field vs. mid-market vs SMB early. More here.

Part-Time VPE 286

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 286

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

A simplistic way to look at it — Revert back to sales closing 3-5x what they take home—at least 3x for SMB, 4x for mid-market, and 5x for enterprise. Truly great founders that have a great CTO that can build amazing software and they do not quit and commit for years and understand a market, I’ve seen zero percent fail,” says Lemkin.

CTO Hire 242

CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale 242

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. You will fail if you: 1) try to build a suite of products out of the gate, 2) focus solely on SMBs, or 3) have an MBA. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!

Part-Time VPE 283

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 283

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2019

When we were SMB focused in the early years, our sales cycles were quick. Product org changes quite a bit as well and as one chief product officer shared with me, he said, “You know, when we made the transition from SMB to enterprise, we went from being kind of in control of our own destiny and certainly of our own time.

Scale 234

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 234

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

So to serve both segments at the simultaneously, ZoomInfo has been rolling out a Product-led sales motion, that gives the ability for an SMB customer to sign up directly on their website for a free trial and grow into a paid customer, without ever having to talk to an sales rep or go through a demo process.

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New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 305

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

Maybe if you have the ex-CTO of Github, but that’s still a super speculative bet. They’re very SMB and just closed their first $750k TCV deal. If they’re the next OpenAI doing $2B in 18 months, that’s a bet you want to make. But you might lose on all the others. Are brand-new companies that seem epic with no revenue really worth $1.5B

CTO Hire 141

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 141

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

Nikos : In your case, I understand your company also shifted slightly on the market, like from SMB to bigger customers. Dialpad effectively integrates with Google apps or Office 365 to give a cohesive product. It makes sense that that would be the role that comes in as the CTO. Craig : Yeah. Nikos : The same for everyone?

Sales Hiring 258

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 258

Payrix

OCTOBER 1, 2024

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), which make up a large portion of the market, are particularly vulnerable. A single data breach can cost a SMB up to $650,000, making it essential for software companies to partner with payment processors who prioritize security. In most cases, software companies are serving SMB merchants.

Payment Services 113

Payment Services Merchant Services Payments compliance 113

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

So up to 100-150K and SMB, we’re at 2K. And we were acting as the CTO of Gap and whatever, another title. The next stage was we hired more junior people who would do the first call and work on SMB accounts and we would have the more senior work on mid-market and enterprise accounts. Gaetan Gachet : Depends on the segment.

Scale 141

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 141

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 21, 2020

SMB Sales & SDRs at (Smaller) Scale [18:20]. Angus Davis: Mike was the VP of Technology, and my job was to build prototypes of next generation products that our group was dreaming up. We were part of the office of the CTO. SMB Sales & SDRs at (Smaller) Scale [18:20]. Show Agenda and Timestamps.

Payment Methods 63

Payment Methods Scale CTO Coach SMB 63

OpenView Labs

MARCH 10, 2020

While the CTOs may be directly involved in the purchase decision-making at the startup and SMB organizations, the role of the CTO at larger organizations can be very different, and not all CTOs look the same. “A A lot of our clients want to target CTOs or C-level executives,” said Valentino Volonghi, CTO of AdRoll.

Enterprise 52

Enterprise Software Review CTO Hire Software 52

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

Do you segment enterprise and SMB? It’s not like I just go … I can’t just go to my CTO and go, “Do that,” and he goes, “Yep. Not having the right account structure for us meant we took customers on, and we just spread them across account managers. Do you treat them by usage together?

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 246

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

Touching it, playing with it in a way a CIO or CTO might not before? We are still heavily oriented to SMB and to entrepreneurs. You say that Shopify is an SMB customer when I see 29%. I think Slack the majority of their revenue is enterprise even though their roots is SMB. Shopify has never moved up market.

Payment Methods 263

Payment Methods Merchant Services Scale Payments 263

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2025

The ability to roll out AI agents to 16,000 small and medium-sized business (SMB) brands is attributed to the investment in an evaluation pipeline, which includes data sets for each step and utilizes various tools such as GT4, mini, or Sonet, depending on the specific needs.

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New CTO CTO Artificial Intelligence Technical Review 161

Point Nine Land

OCTOBER 8, 2021

Graneet is live in France and servicing all types of SMB customers; from general contractors to very specialised service providers. Graneet’s beautiful UI :) The platform is beautiful and super easy to use and ultimately becomes the key sidekick of the business owner becoming a solution that is used ongoingly throughout the month.

Technical Cofounder 52

Technical Cofounder Construction Payment Solutions SaaS Payments 52

SaaStr

MAY 2, 2019

Vlad : And we went through that stage, as many start-ups do, like literally our CTO would get, he’d read all of the feedback from every customer and in our business we have tens of thousands of customers almost immediately, he would actually read all of the stuff that they write. So what does it mean?

Scale 199

Scale Business Sales Hiring CTO Hire 199

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 9, 2022

We had to say: what does SMB want? So, we combined our 20 products into one and said here’s a package for SMB, here’s a package for mid-market, and here’s a package for enterprise. What does the sub-100 (emerging) want? What does the middle market want, and what are they trying to do? It gets quite complex.

CTO Coach 52

CTO Coach Customer Success VP of Engineering CTO Hire 52

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

From there, you will also want to enable me and Tony, once we are so convinced, to easily have a conversation with the our CTO or our Chief Financial Officer when there's opportunity to buy new developer software. They’re the CEO, they’re the CTO, they never are interested in testing out the product as well. That's great.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2024

Investors should immediately engage with the CTO to assess their technical capabilities and potential, as great CTOs can demonstrate their exceptional skills quickly. The Qualities of Great CTOs (00:15:54) To identify great CTOs, it may take interviewing 20 candidates.

CTO Hire 285

CTO Hire Development Team Review Software Review Technical Review 285

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

Bret was formerly the CTO at Facebook. And so, as you can imagine, some of it landed, most of it didn’t early on, but we skipped the whole go from SMB to mid-market to enterprise and just went SMB transactional right after the Fortune 500. Quip was founded by Bret Taylor and Kevin Gibbs. Sam Taylor: And so, I met Bret. .”

Scale 240

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 240

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

How can founders know when is the right time to make the move from SMB to enterprise? Because one message isn’t necessarily always transferable when considering kind of SMB to enterprise. ” How do you know when’s the right time to think about moving from an SMB and mid-market to enterprise?

Scale 206

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 206

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2025

At SaaStr Annual Neo4j’s CTO Philip Rathle shared their playbook for scaling from $0 to the first $100M. The Customer Segment Choice: Enterprise-First, But PLG-Ready Around the $10-20M ARR mark, Neo4j made an explicit choice to focus on enterprise customers while maintaining a background investment in SMB/self-serve motion.

Scale 248

Scale New CTO CTO Scaling 248

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2025

We’ll have 1000+ speakers, braindates, workshops, and 1-on-1’s, but here are some of the core speakers for this year: AI Speakers: CEO Snowflake Sridhar Ramaswamy + CEO Observe: “Where B2B Applications Are Going” CEO Box Aaron Levie : “AI, Agents and The Next Era of SaaS” COO Google Cloud Francis deSouz a: “Hyperscalers: (..)

VP of Engineering 257

VP of Engineering VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) AI Scale 257

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2025

Co-founders Dharmesh Shah (CTO) and Brian Halligan (Chairperson) shared at SaaStr Annual the unfiltered truth on building an SMB powerhouse, pivoting to product-led growth, and why the “M” segment is SaaS gold. The SMB market offered a sweet spot between enterprise complexity and consumer scale.

Scale 187

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Scaling 187

OnStartups

JULY 7, 2021

Is your title CTO? Dharmesh: Yes, CTO. And then I met Brian in grad school and we both have this kind of shared passion for SMB. And I think part of it's because you've been in the game for a while and you're incredibly successful. So this is Dharmesh. Dharmesh is the. You're the co-founder of HubSpot. Sam: Are you active?

Payment Methods 140

Payment Methods Technical Review Software Review Payment Solutions 140

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2025

Lessons Learned Rolling out AI Agents to 16,000+ SMB brands with Gorgias CTO #3. Top Posts: #1. There Is No Downturn Anymore. From $1M to $3B ARR: Databricks CRO Ron Gabrisko on Scaling a Revenue Rocket Ship #4. The Arguments For Not Raising at a Unicorn Valuation #5. S-Tier AI is Coming For B-Tier Employees Top VIdeos and Pods: #1.

AI 130

AI Scale CTO SMB 130

OnStartups

JULY 7, 2021

Is your title CTO? Dharmesh: Yes, CTO. And then I met Brian in grad school and we both have this kind of shared passion for SMB. And I think part of it's because you've been in the game for a while and you're incredibly successful. So this is Dharmesh. Dharmesh is the. You're the co-founder of HubSpot. Sam: Are you active?

Payment Methods 40

Payment Methods Technical Review Software Review Payment Solutions 40

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 10, 2024

35:30) Optimal team structures for SMB sales organizations. (52:25) And that made it a lot easier for me to build the SMB sales motion that we ended up being the core sales motion that we built at Levelset. Martin Roth: [44:10] For transactional sales teams, for SMB sales teams… It’s kind of a math problem.

Scale 116

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling CTO Coach 116

SaaStr

JULY 19, 2019

Previously, Peter was also the CTO/CIO of CBS Interactive where he brought CBS into the cloud. At Sun, Peter was the CTO of the Liberty identity consortium that designed SAML 2. In terms of timing, how should entrepreneurs think about whether to start at SMB and move to enterprise or start enterprise and move to SMB?

VP of Engineering 150

VP of Engineering CTO Hire Technical Review Sales Hiring 150