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

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 20, 2024

Once they brought it to market, they knew they needed better user admin features, onboarding capabilities, SSO integration, etc. Don’t underestimate the investments you need to make here to be compelling to your customers. Another big investment during rapid growth is digital moments.

Scale 261

Scale AI Scaling Marketing 261

SaaStr

MARCH 9, 2025

Previously, he led design teams at LinkedIn where he built recommendation products for product onboarding and developed AI chatbots. The 86% loyalty factor : Companies that provide strong onboarding and continuous educational experiences see 86% higher customer loyalty rates – making AI-powered personalization a critical retention tool.

AI 202

AI Scale Education User Experience 202

SaaStr

JANUARY 23, 2025

Focus on: Building robust security and compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001) Automating customer onboarding/offboarding Creating enterprise-grade support processes Developing procurement relationship expertise Having clear data handling procedures 5. Master Enterprise-Grade Operations The operational bar is much higher in enterprise.

Enterprise 244

Enterprise Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 244

USIO

FEBRUARY 19, 2025

Usio PayFac-as-a-Service Without the Drama Best for: SaaS companies that want revenue share, fast onboarding, and actual human support. Payrix Flexible, but Bring a Developer (or Five) Best for: SaaS companies willing to invest developer time into embedded payments. Want revenue share and fast onboarding? Lets break it down.

PayFac as a Service 179

PayFac as a Service Merchant Services Payfac Payments 179

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2025

Customers expect AI to be baked into your product, whether its automating workflows, improving onboarding, or delivering predictive insights. Onboarding should feel seamless, emails should write themselves, and insights should be delivered without lifting a finger. Now It’s Time to Make It S-Tier. Mediocre AI wont cut it. #2.

AI 147

AI Trends SaaS AWS 147

ChurnZero

APRIL 11, 2025

Your customer onboarding strategy is the foundation of your future retention and expansion revenue. The right onboarding strategy means more than just getting a customer using your product. But how do you know if your onboarding tactics really work? Is your onboarding process a framework or a free-for-all?

Onboarding 52

Onboarding Strategy Technical Review Systems Review 52

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

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 7, 2024

So one of SaaStr Fund’s latest investments is Mangomint, a vertical SaaS platform for spas and salons. Onboarding has to be much slicker for SMBs. One of the lesser-discussed challenges with more complex SMB SaaS is there’s often no one to implement and managing onboarding and business process change.

SaaS Payments 312

SaaS Payments Payments Payment Methods SMB 312

Andreessen Horowitz

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

Developers loved the intuitive onboarding and the meticulous design of the SDKs. That’s why we’re so proud to invest in Upstash, and to help their team build this serverless future where more application developers can bring their dream apps to fruition!

Investment 115

Investment DevOps as a Service AI Search Application Development 115

SaaStr

DECEMBER 25, 2021

Adam #18: Invest in a strong hiring and onboarding process from day one. Adam attributes the caliber of the people at Zapier to hiring and onboarding. In the early days, Zapier invested a lot into all-hands support. Mike #2: Don’t forget to invest in innovation, or you’ll risk getting left behind.

Scale 332

Scale Scaling Innovation Investment 332

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2022

Most for SaaStr itself (a lot of learnings there, but we have $30m+ of sponsors to keep happy), but also for a number of my investments and more. A chat bot isn’t going to solve my onboarding challenges. So as I’ve written about before, I’ve interviewed a ton of folks for CS roles in the past 12 months. They don’t have time.

Customer Success 332

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale Interviewing 332

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

Leveling Up PLG to Accelerate SMB Customers, Including More Attention to Onboarding I love seeing this, it can seem hard to invest heavily in small customers, but if you don’t especially invest in onboarding, that’s a big shame.

SMB 293

SMB AI Onboarding Cloud 293

Andreessen Horowitz

MARCH 26, 2024

For example, one customer pointed out that the ability to automate processes around new customer onboarding is a revenue-accelerating outcome because it enables them to serve more customers. We’re quick to think of time and cost savings, but the impact is much larger.

Investment 130

Investment Healthcare AI Business Model 130

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 30, 2024

What I do know is many of the billion+ SaaS companies I invested in a decade ago would not be remotely competitive today. Even complex onboarding to be fully automated. Why can’t my payroll app handle onboarding and 401k and pension and contractors? And that’s how it should be. Not in a week or a month.

AI Search 300

AI Search SaaS Headcount AI 300

SaaStr

JULY 17, 2020

It’s tools that facilitate collaboration and distributed project planning and remote onboarding and much more. Why would you invest anywhere else? But VCs only want to invest in the 4/10 in the above portfolio. It’s contact centers and call centers. It’s tools that help us build more apps. Is this fair?

Airlines 343

Airlines SaaS Travel Cloud 343

User Pilot

JULY 21, 2024

Which SaaS industry has the highest customer onboarding checklist completion rate? You will also learn best practices for designing excellent onboarding checklists! TL;DR An onboarding checklist guides new users through the activities they must complete to discover product value and use it to achieve their goals. Book the demo!

Benchmarks 105

Benchmarks Onboarding Healthcare Metrics 105

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

In addition, this year Mayfield is sponsoring our VC AI Pitch Stage and will invest from $500k-$5m in the winner! From optimizing your sales process to improving customer onboarding or refining your pricing strategy, the tactical takeaways often deliver ROI that far exceeds the cost of attendance. Meet and Find Your Next VP / CXO!

Sales Recruiting 195

Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring 195

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. Complex Adoption, Usage, and Engagement Onboarding and training look different for a customer vs. a user in PLG. With PLG, you’re onboarding your users, and their journey is defined on day zero.

Scale 307

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring compliance 307

SaaStr

JULY 11, 2024

If you don’t already do self-onboarding and procuring, it’s wildly difficult to add later. Are Marketing Agencies Worth Investing In? VCs looking for founders to invest in is a little different from founders hiring executives and VPs. What percent are onboarded in the fastest time possible?

Sales Hiring 285

Sales Hiring Scale Marketing Interviewing 285

User Pilot

OCTOBER 31, 2024

These issues might range from low engagement with specific features to a high churn rate or poor user onboarding. To address this, you could meet with your team to agree on metrics related to onboarding, such as activation rate , time-to-value, and so on. This process may reveal gaps such as: Insufficient raw data. Outdated technology.

Strategy 105

Strategy Underperforming Technical Team Government Customer Lifetime Value 105

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

Efficient TTV highlights an optimized onboarding experience and provides a clear indicator of early product satisfaction. Tracking this helps pinpoint onboarding bottlenecks, such as overly complex sign-up flows or unclear UX. Tracking this helps pinpoint onboarding bottlenecks, such as overly complex sign-up flows or unclear UX.

Scale 113

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AI Search 113

SaaStr

JULY 9, 2021

A few thoughts: Do better onboarding. Most startups, even up to $20m, $30m+ ARR, do a really poor job of training and onboarding new sales hires. If they do, they stop investing in the so-so ones. Yet, it’s the top skill of almost every successful sales rep. 80% of deals don’t close themselves. Probably 90%.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Sales Pricing Onboarding 300

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

User Pilot

JUNE 10, 2024

Researching customer onboarding strategies for your SaaS product? The article shares 17 tried-and-tested customer onboarding tactics that will help you build delightful user experiences and drive product growth. Create a welcome series of in-app and email messages to greet users and kick off onboarding. Ready to dive in?

Onboarding 105

Onboarding Strategy Social Media Churn 105

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2021

3 – Invest in your onboarding process. Providing quality in onboarding is more important than fitting immediate need. Flock Safety onboards classes, no more than one a month. . #4 Investing in your CRM and database is key. It’s easy to over-invest in sales and underinvest elsewhere.

Sales Recruiting 255

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 255

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2024

It could be a 6-month, 12-month, or multi-year venture, so you want the cash to invest in an upmarket strategy properly. Once you do, invest and go hard after this market and grow the sales team to serve that upmarket customer. #3: Make sure you can make that investment from a product perspective. Look at your team.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Scale SMB compliance 300

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 23, 2019

Invest in training and onboarding. Sales teams often do the worst investment in onboarding of almost any function. Invest heavily in training your reps. Invest in optimizing lead routing, scoring and management. They throw new reps in the mix, give them a ramp up period, but training usually is weak.

Scale 277

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Churn 277

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2022

But it then loses real money on onboarding, at -124% margins, and real money on hardware, at -183% margins. A reminder growth investing isn’t a space you automatically make money at. The Series B investors invested at $1.69, so they’re got a profit, but not a huge one. #8. Plenty of cash, not burning that much.

SaaS Payments 284

SaaS Payments Scale Payment Methods SMB 284

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2023

They also don’t think remote onboarding and training and culture is working well enough in sales. So many CROs, at top SaaS companies you’ve heard of, are taking on onboarding, QBRs, and much more post-sales themselves than they used to. I see this across my own portfolio of investments, too.

Sales Recruiting 297

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Onboarding Sales 297

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2022

It’s important to ask yourself if you’re engaging your clients enough, helping them to want to invest more in your offerings. Pay attention to your SLAs and, depending on their level of investment and commitment, commit your time and resources back into your partnership with them. Who: Who makes up your revenue, onboarded vs. retained?

Scale 292

Scale Sales Hiring Compensation Sales 292

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2023

It helps companies simplify every aspect of managing an international workforce, from culture and onboarding, to local payroll and compliance. Notion Capital is a Venture Capital investing firm focused on European SaaS and Cloud, with more than 100 investments to date. Deel is the all-in-one HR platform for global teams.

Cybersecurity 274

Cybersecurity Venture Capital compliance Government 274

SaaStr

DECEMBER 25, 2020

And/or, one piece of it — say 5%-10% — uses an edition of the product that you don’t really want to keep investing in and supporting, because you want to invest in the other 90%. But don’t assume the customer is lost, or not worth investing time in. The guys that paid > $100,000 a year?

Sales Hiring 337

Sales Hiring Customer Success Customer Support Revenue 337

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2022

Then, decide how much time, money, and effort your company is willing to invest in the CAB. . New customers add value to your CABs with their fresh experience with your sales cycle and onboarding processes. Will you onboard future Account Executives with recorded CAB calls? Next, identify your most strategic customers.

Sales Recruiting 246

Sales Recruiting Enterprise Onboarding Investment 246