SaaStr

DECEMBER 25, 2023

G2 had us back for another great deep dive on just where SaaS investing is there days, and it was a great panel: Accel Partner Arun Mathew Inspired Capital Founder & Managing Partner Alexa von Tobel Salesforce Ventures Managing Partner Paul Drews and Jason Lemkin! Low investment multiples pose a key challenge.

B2B 282

B2B Investment Venture Capital Scale 282

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 17, 2020

Because of this, localization can seem unattainable to many small and medium-sized businesses that may not have the capital to invest in localization – or the resources to maintain it. The post Not investing in localization is costing you more than you think appeared first on Inside Intercom.

Investment 276

Investment Scale Software Review Systems Review 276

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2025

This includes even the fastest growing start-ups I’ve invested in , not just ones that are trying to manage the burn or manage slower growth. Is Sales Engagement Back? But … but … But every CFO and COO I talk to still talks about “vendor consolidation” as one of their top initiatives.

Technical Review 272

Technical Review AI SaaS B2B 272

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2025

SEO: How Rupa Health Dominated Search with Programmatic SEO and AI Rupa Health invested heavily in search, aiming to own the top spots for specific lab tests and biomarkers. On Facebook, they found success by posting links in the comments instead of the main post, boosting engagement by 100x.

Scale 229

Scale AI Search Sales Hiring Acquisition 229

SaaStr

MAY 1, 2023

Dear SaaStr: Is It Acceptable for VCs to “Ghost” Founders who have invested so much time and effort with them? I know it’s a lot of work and risk engaging with a VC. They meet 1000 startups a year, but they are lucky to meet 10 a year that they really want to invest in that also meets their investment criteria.

Investment 273

Investment Venture Capital Startup Engagement 273

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 28, 2022

That is, in order to stay competitive, businesses need to put customers first by creating engaging, personalized customer experiences. But in order to stay successful in this new landscape, businesses need to run with customer engagement in mind. But this is where many companies are struggling. Here’s what you need to know.

Scale 228

Scale Engagement Technical Review Business 228

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

The result was a 5x increase over initial projections – growing from an $8M revenue target to $40M actual results – driven by a belief that market demand justified the investment. This approach required immense trust from the CEO to invest millions ahead of proven results.

Scale 185

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Headcount 185

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 25, 2022

Now, during this time of economic uncertainty and against a competitive landscape, effective customer engagement is business critical. Poor cross-functional collaboration impedes success: 44% of executives say a lack of collaboration and siloed efforts are the top impediments to successful customer engagement.

Technical Review 209

Technical Review Engagement Artificial Intelligence Systems Review 209

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 17, 2021

Over the last few months, we’ve released updates that help you improve and measure your conversational support efforts, engage customers with multichannel transactional messaging and other customer engagement enhancements, and integrate the tools you use every day – including WhatsApp! ??. Conversational engagement.

Engagement 222

Engagement Mobile Metrics Investment 222

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 29, 2022

As costs and competition continue to rise, companies need to hone in on activating, engaging, and retaining their customers while minimizing their overheads. Leading companies are refocusing their customer engagement efforts to increase customer loyalty, while also enhancing efficiency.

Engagement 211

Engagement Onboarding Retention Strategy 211

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 27, 2024

Mangomint has worked hard to create an incentive structure that makes it attractive for sales reps to invest in customer success. And Mangomint invests a crazy amount into making sure its systems don’t go down since reliability and quality of product is so important for its customers.

SaaS Payments 257

SaaS Payments Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 257

SaaStr

JANUARY 23, 2025

You need to: Engage with procurement early – don’t treat them as a rubber stamp Build relationships with 20+ key accounts in year one Get executive sponsorship on both sides Never negotiate price with the business buyer Document clear ROI and business cases Remember: The actual buyer is often not the end user.

Enterprise 244

Enterprise Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 244

SaaStr

MARCH 9, 2025

The New AI ROI Framework Before investing in AI, Calendly’s team evaluates four key factors: Customer value (will this meaningfully improve outcomes?) As Shu concludes, “Gathering feedback early and often is crucial to making informed decisions about investments that yield returns for the customer.”

AI 202

AI Scale Education User Experience 202

SaaStr

APRIL 12, 2025

The point at which a lead should convert to an opportunity or deal is when it meets specific qualification criteria that indicate its worth investing sales resources. Engagement : The lead has shown meaningful interest, such as attending a discovery call, requesting a demo, or engaging with high-value content.

Systems Review 125

Systems Review SMB Engagement Sales 125

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2024

As developers, they immediately started to think about a PLG, pay-as-you-go motion to get to market and engage with developers quickly. Lesson #1: Invest In Customer Support Early Cloudinary strongly believes that customer success and support are enablers of PLG growth and aren’t just a cost center.

Scale 312

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Development 312

SaaStr

MARCH 16, 2025

The best candidates will find these tasks engaging, and itll save you hours of wasted meetings. Dont wait too long to make this hireits worth the investment. Use Screening Filters Create simple tests to weed out unqualified candidates before the first interview. Thats time you cant afford to lose.

Software Review 162

Software Review Interviewing Engineering Startup 162

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2024

To do this, Lucid invested in a growth team tasked with iterating on all aspects of pricing, packaging, click pathing, and CTAs. Those characteristics determine how the customer purchases, adopts and engages with your account team to derive value from the software. For Lucid, this meant a few things. Let’s look at Lucid’s timeline.

Scale 307

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring compliance 307

USIO

JULY 1, 2024

While many strategies involve significant investments in marketing, sales, and technology, there are also effective methods to boost recurring revenue that require minimal financial outlay. In the competitive world of Software as a Service (SaaS), generating recurring revenue is essential for sustainable growth.

Payments 306

Payments SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 306

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2024

As a consequence of this very manual process, the output was a low volume of emails and engagement and a fairly high CAC. Outbound volume exploded, and the cost per contact engaged decreased, but so did the conversion rate because everyone was spamming everyone. We got below a 1% engagement rate at a high volume for a time.

Scale 292

Scale AI Marketing Advertising 292

User Pilot

JANUARY 19, 2025

At first, this seemed like a smart investment for my company, so I invested. Reasons why you shouldn’t invest in standalone session recording tools You might think standalone session replay tools have one flaw, but theres more to the story. Reasons for not investing in standalone session recording tools.

Investment 52

Investment Scale Software Review Technical Review 52

Valuize Consulting

NOVEMBER 11, 2024

No more waiting until renewal time to justify CS investment—when customers feel they’re paying for true value, they engage more readily and pursue broader goals. Clarifying Investment Decisions – Beyond satisfying the CFO, new models empower CS leaders to make smarter resource decisions.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Pricing Investment Revenue 52

SaaStr

APRIL 10, 2020

And more importantly, they are invested in you. Make sure net negative churn is at least covered and invested in. And engage everyone with their best ideas. Maybe they can invest a little more, maybe they can’t. As a startup, there are few things more important than Being Present: Your customers need to believe.

Sales Hiring 350

Sales Hiring Startup Investment Revenue 350

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2024

Invest in People You want to keep the bar high on talent, especially in hypergrowth, and not just in the early stages. Invest Heavily in Onboarding Your typical employee takes about three to six months to get ramped. Invest Early in Your Marketing When scaling the GTM engine, you want to invest early in marketing.

Sales Recruiting 299

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Engineering 299

Buffer Resources

AUGUST 1, 2024

LinkedIn Audio Events offer a unique way to engage with your professional network in real-time, providing opportunities for meaningful discussions, knowledge sharing, and community building. This functionality opens up new possibilities for engaging with your audience in a dynamic and interactive way without the need for video.

Social Media 111

Social Media Branding Engagement Investment 111

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2022

Invest here if that’s you. #7. Confluent is still investing in hyper-growth, and may like Snowflake not end up generating significant free cash-flow until $1B in ARR or so. With $2B in cash on the balance sheet, it makes sense to invest as much here as the public markets will allow, given the torrid growth: #9.

Scale 61

Scale Cloud Headcount Scaling 61

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2020

Certain, far more SaaS unicorn and decacorn CEOs are active on Twitter, and they engage with us on Twitter. But LinkedIn is now bigger than Twitter for us in terms of engagement. Maybe you should invest a tiny bit more there, too. Yes, these don’t get the same engagement as a “native” text post.

Communication 288

Communication B2B Branding Engagement 288

Buffer Resources

AUGUST 26, 2024

Ask engaging questions Engaging your target audience with thought-provoking questions is a clever, lightweight way to boost engagement and gather useful information for your content, work, or life. They're a great way to generate engagement and even spark ideas for new content you can share. Short-form video ideas 7.

Social Media 114

Social Media Trends Branding Engagement 114

SaaStr

MAY 10, 2021

If you are doing your job as CEO, you already have 1 or 2 investors that want to invest in the next round. And then of the say 100 potential investments a VC might take seriously … they know only maybe 10-20 are going to end up being in their sweet spot. Similarly, VCs invest in stages. No matter when that round is.

Venture Capital 293

Venture Capital Investment Metrics Startup 293

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 24, 2020

Better for the leagues and athletes to sell more products and subscriptions, better for the fans who engage more, over longer seasons, in different formats. And could online learning create a better learning experience at a fraction of the price, changing the return on investment calculations for going to college?

Software Review 361

Software Review Technical Review Entertainment Outsourced Development 361

SaaStr

DECEMBER 10, 2023

This year, many companies, including Gong, have been focused on how to optimize and drive value with existing tech stack investments, rather than adding new tools. What’s the number one top new app you’ve added the past year?

Leadership 349

Leadership B2B Branding Startup 349

User Pilot

OCTOBER 31, 2024

These issues might range from low engagement with specific features to a high churn rate or poor user onboarding. Depending on these gaps (and your budget), you’ll need to decide whether to invest in buying data or building a data infrastructure. This process may reveal gaps such as: Insufficient raw data. Outdated technology.

Strategy 105

Strategy Underperforming Technical Team Government Customer Lifetime Value 105

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2020

In a world where customers can readily switch brands, all companies need to invest in customer relationships and the best way to do that is to shift to conversational relationships. Not only do businesses need to invest in conversational customer experiences, but they also need ways to make those experiences scalable.

Scale 290

Scale Scaling Engagement Branding 290

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2020

Klue , which operates an AI-based competitive analysis platform, announced a $15 million Series A investment this week. The round also saw investments from angels like Frederic Kerrest, who is the co-founder of Okta. . The engagement may last a few months and involve extensive interviews and online research (yes, lots of Googling!)

Consulting 274

Consulting Interviewing AI Innovation 274

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2022

And our events are a massive source of content and engagement, both IRL ( Annual , Europa , etc), and since Covid, almost 100,000 have attended our digital events. But a lot of engagement and energy. We’re investing much more here in 2022. We still love Quora and invest there, but it’s not what it was for us.

Social Media 284

Social Media AI Search Scaling Engagement 284

SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2023

Optimizing short-term gains with long-term investments and controlling customer acquisition costs (CAC) leads to more sustainable growth. Driving engagement through brand value As marketing grows increasingly noisy, standing out can be tough with so much competition for attention. It’s not enough to focus on one channel.

Scale 49

Scale Entertainment Marketing Construction 49