Intercom, Inc.

JULY 2, 2020

For Pam, it all stems from a long-held belief that investing in the customer’s success will chart a direct path to the company’s. In the return of the Scale podcast, Pam details her support philosophy and the investments she’s making to drive better customer outcomes, for the long term. The evolution of customer support.

Outsourcing Services 253

Outsourcing Services Investment Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development 253

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 13, 2020

But the answer more and more business owners are turning to is a simple one: outsourcing. Outsourcing is giving your work to someone else outside of your main business. You could even outsource by shipping a business process like manufacturing overseas. Understand Why You Want to Outsource. Make a List of Common Tasks.

Outsourcing Services 141

Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Sales Hiring Technical Review 141

Clouded Judgement

AUGUST 16, 2024

Today, IT budgets are roughly broken down into: ~50% headcount / personnel, ~25% software, ~15% hardware, and ~10% outsourcing / consultants. As software grows as a percentage, I think we see headcount / outsourcing shrinking. Let’s discuss why this matters. Consider a hypothetical budget scenario.

Outsourcing Services 274

Outsourcing Services Cloud Software Outsourced Development 274

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2020

Today, the company is a massively successful SaaS business and another example of the flywheel business model that creates demand at the individual user and leverages that interest to sell department and company-wide contracts. Asana records a contract size advantage of about 44%, with an ACV of $2165. per month on average.

Payment Solutions 363

Payment Solutions Payments Outsourced Development Payment Services 363

SaaStr

DECEMBER 16, 2022

Brokers and accountants were two of the channels that Rippling identified would help them scale quickly, so they invested in them from early on. You have to invest a lot of time to get a channel going, to get referrals, to acquire customers…and then work on customer satisfaction.

Outsourcing Services 282

Outsourcing Services Scale Sales Hiring Outsourced Development 282

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2024

1: Don’t Outsource Recruiting Founders and sales leaders often ask Sam, “Which external recruiting firm do you recommend for sourcing and hiring sales leaders, AEs, or whatever the hire-of-the-day is?” So much effort goes into developing a product for a new product launch. They were everywhere on social that day.

Sales Recruiting 290

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 290

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

are making it easier and faster for software developers to develop complex software applications atop this infrastructure. What took you months to ideate, design and develop can now be copied in days or weeks thanks to these new tools. Outsource Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting. Outsource undifferentiated heavy lifting.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

with Peter Fernandez, COO & Co-Founder at Sirius Support Innovative businesses, investing, m&a and meeting great people with Paul Evans, EGM, Corporate Development at Xero SaaS distribution for SMBs in the African continent with Karan Bathija, VP, Customer Success at Terragon Limited PLUS 13 more Braindates that are ALREADY FULL!

VP of Engineering 293

VP of Engineering Technical Cofounder Outsourcing Services CTO Coach 293

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2023

Having backed more than 115 companies and facilitated over 420 add-on acquisitions, we bring extensive investment experience, deep expertise in software and technology, and a firm commitment to collaborating with management teams. Vertice is a tech-enabled SaaS purchasing platform. We think about it in 2 parts.

Outsourced Development 271

Outsourced Development Acquisition B2B Technology 271

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 24, 2020

We already do this today for software with contract values at $50k. But the US has the potential to increase grocery delivery 5x if we look to other developed nations as a proxy for long-term adoption. Could we do it at $500k or $5M? Video might quicken the de-urbanization of the US. Entertainment is changing.

Software Review 361

Software Review Technical Review Entertainment Outsourced Development 361

SaaStr

JUNE 29, 2023

AI-Powered Tools: AI-related purchases in Q1: Made up 41% of new investments in Q1. Contract values are up nearly 30% from two years ago, representing massive growth in company SaaS spend, which is already a top five line item.” Less investment and reduced funding have caused serious market ripple effects. weakest link.

VP of Engineering 293

VP of Engineering Trends Cybersecurity Sales Hiring 293

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason Lemkin: Yeah, I think if you ask how applicable is SEO, programmable is maybe a different question, but I tell you every single SaaS company I have invested in or worked with that has made a commitment to building at least one high quality piece of content per week has seen significant ROI from SEO over a period of months or a year.

Scale 293

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 293

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

But to develop a GTM strategy, you must have Product Market Fit. Companies are moving up-market, investing more in marketing, and orienting all processes around efficiency. Significant savings are possible when using a global workforce vs. onshore. The Early Stage — $0 to $20M ARR The early stage is crucial for GTM.

Scale 274

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Outsourced Development 274

SaaStr

MARCH 2, 2022

Use it to develop a hypothesis about what will work and turn it into a data-driven program. You can do this by creating community and developer advocacy teams that enable the community to succeed. The mandate for community and developer relations needs to be about community success and community growth.” – Asawari Samant.

Outsourcing Services 246

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development Marketing 246

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2020

For years, many developer-focused companies have migrated customers to fixed-price contracts once API usage hit certain levels, to better look like their B2B SaaS companies and have “repeatable revenue” But in many cases, this just isn’t how folks want to pay for an API. This is a big deal in B2D/API companies.

Scale 341

Scale Outsourced Development SMB Cloud 341

Clouded Judgement

JULY 16, 2024

The purpose of the detailed information is to help investors (both institutional and retail) make informed investment decisions. Our platform’s extensible architecture also enables customers to rapidly adopt and develop new solutions that meet the unique and continually evolving needs of their business.

Benchmarks 295

Benchmarks Data Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 295

SaaStr

MARCH 13, 2021

More often than not, developers buy first, and then other business stakeholders are brought in as the footprint and deal size expands. #2. World-class, but a bit lower than some other developer-focused leader. Instead, Mongo invests in supporting a rich SI ecosystem. #7. Not pushing annual contracts so much helped.

Scale 337

Scale Outsourced Development Cloud Scaling 337

Andreessen Horowitz

MARCH 11, 2024

Yet that growth has come with a price in the form of rising game development budgets. A recent UK CMA report shared that the average AAA game green-lit today has a development budget of over $200M. One way that developers have addressed rising costs has been to rely on outsourcing.

Outsourcing Services 93

Outsourcing Services Investment Outsourced Development Marketplace as a Service 93

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

As a result, maintaining the same “Rule of 40” score requires 1% of extra revenue growth for 1% of profit margin investment. To achieve that 1%:1% growth/margin ratio would require incredibly short investment payback periods. Rule of 40: Average Contract Value (ACV). All within the same financial measurement period.

SaaS 317

SaaS Technical Review Benchmarks Azure 317

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 20, 2023

Marketing teams develop a portfolio of different strategies to acquire leads. Like an investment portfolio, any individual strategy may thrive one day & suffer the next. Big Data, DevOps, microservices, AI, data contracts. I think of marketing teams as hedge funds. Some days, content marketing works. What are LLMs?

Marketing 230

Marketing Outsourced Development Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 230

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 30, 2020

” We’ve also chatted with many service providers – think agencies, business process outsourcers, systems integrators, and consultancies – who are keen to help their clients use Intercom to connect with their customers. . “These apps reach over 30,000 Intercom customers who installed apps more than 100,000 times last year alone.”

Outsourcing Services 223

Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Consulting Retention 223

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 13, 2018

Those investments have felt good for those in it for the ride, have raised an eyebrow for those on the sidelines, hitting budgets hard and somewhere along the line, have made business sense. You can’t just lock yourself in a room or outsource it to some agency. They can, however, outsource their executors. Don’t do this.

Branding 205

Branding Outsourced Development Scale Travel 205

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

The company is buying out customer contracts for six months to win over new business. They have developed a $100m ARR security line in a few quarters : In Q2, our AI offerings, which include XSIAM, Autonomous Digital Experience Management, or ADEM and AI ops crossed $100 million in ARR milestone. …but only up to a point.

AI 230

AI Outsourced Development Customer Lifetime Value Cybersecurity 230

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. It also required them to: Negotiate their first Enterprise customer contract Undergo deep security reviews Once you land your first Enterprise customer, it might be time to build that first sales team.

Scale 307

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring compliance 307

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2020

Should the (three) co-founders of a website invest their own money or get an angel investor instead? We’ll either outsource the web development to get a beta version running for users or make a non-working prototype to present to investors. What do the top 1% of sales people (software/SaaS) do that the other 99% don’t?

Outsourcing Services 227

Outsourcing Services Venture Capital Outsourced Development Web Development 227

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

AI is likely the next platform, dev tools are strategic given the scarcity of developers, cybersecurity is front and center for enterprises, and the data stack is still going strong. b) Some folks like to invest in the company they advise. For developer tools and infra, it is skewed towards brand and community.

Scale 293

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cybersecurity 293

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2023

Enablement — setting your team up for success and investing in their professional growth. Culture — developing sub-cultures within sales that enable the team to scale successfully. Instead, develop a scalable, streamlined enablement process to eliminate any bottlenecks in success. Invest in enablement.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scaling 273

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2024

Understanding the Importance of Revenue Goals Jason expresses concerns about the high costs associated with producing a podcast and questions the return on investment if not done thoughtfully. CEOs who are not interested in revenue and prioritize product development tend to hire CROs over CMOs.

Sales Hiring 293

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Technical Review Scale 293

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 2, 2018

Annual prepay contracts - wherein customers pay for a year’s cost on day - is a free loan from customers. Then the startup develops a go-to-market to identify others who belong to that segment, and sells the basic product to them. The company collects revenue, hires more engineers and develops the second version of the product.

Sales Hiring 227

Sales Hiring Outsourced Development Finance Startup 227

Incredo

JULY 8, 2019

The team of software engineers and testers is the main asset of any SaaS company – they develop, test and improve the product so the company can attract more and more interested users. How much percent of your gross revenue should you allocate to your marketing investments ? 3 You Should Have a Marketing Budget.

Outsourcing Services 200

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development Sales Hiring 200

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

This function can be outsourced in the early days of a startup, but it is usually brought in-house after Series B. Business Development Identify and assess partnership opportunities to drive growth Business Intelligence Turn data into insights to inform decision-making. Invest in next-gen finance tooling.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

If you outsource your content to some crappy agency that recycles ChatGPT, your content marketing will fail. When Lemkin started investing ten years ago, his first five early-stage investments were wildly successful. Talkdesk is worth $10B, and he invested when it was just five people. Develop a playbook.

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 284

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2022

Waze defines value as the deal size or amount of the contract. It’s important to ask yourself if you’re engaging your clients enough, helping them to want to invest more in your offerings. You’re not the only SMB asking this question as you navigate perpetual pitches, closing clients, and growth. . Let’s look at them: Value.

Scale 292

Scale Sales Hiring Compensation Sales 292

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 14, 2017

Once a business established product market fit, the cash conversion cycle is a key metric of a company’s cash efficiency - how quickly a company can convert a dollar of investment into a dollar of cash flow. Sales cycle is the number of days from first engaging a customer to when the customer signs a contract.

Startup 189

Startup Sales Hiring Payment Solutions Payment Services 189

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

They asked themselves, “what if we moved to some motion of licensing contracts?” To “soften the beach,” you need to expend as little energy and investment as possible while learning as much as possible. Invest in and put that into the market to start softening the beach. Invest in more than just linear resources.

Scale 259

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 259

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

For some context, Base10 is a research-driven investment firm focusing on companies automating the largest sectors of the real economy. We’re on the cusp of a golden age in AI, and the lesson learned from Cloud was that Cloud sped up the pace of development by a lot. Microsoft is a master class in strategy for us.

Generative AI 293

Generative AI Outsourcing Services AI Software Review 293

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2024

When they outbounded a prospect with an intent or predictive signal, the dollars per contract average were 3-4x higher than those with no signal. Essentially, you invest more into acquiring the customer as they become more aware and have higher intent to buy vs top-loading all your spend in your TAM. Let’s discuss an example.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Hiring Strategy Marketing 273