SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2025

About Dave Kellogg Dave Kellogg brings a rare combination of marketing and executive leadership experience to his analysis of SaaS businesses. “We just need one great CMO who can do it all” – Founders often search for a marketing unicorn who excels at brand, demand gen, product marketing, and digital programs.

Sales Hiring 207

Sales Hiring Marketing Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 207

FastSpring

AUGUST 8, 2024

Is your product marketing team struggling to coordinate marketing resources to support an endless stream of product launches, with vague release dates and a chorus of product managers demanding tons of marketing attention for each release? I’m excited to chat about product marketing today.

Product Marketing 157

Product Marketing Marketing SaaS Payments Payment Methods 157

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

Speakers share their playbooks on everything from achieving product-market fit to optimizing CAC:LTV ratios and scaling go-to-market strategies. SaaStr Annual attracts thousands of high-quality SaaS professionals across functions like engineering, product, marketing, sales, and customer success.

Sales Recruiting 195

Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring 195

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

That’s why some of Intercom’s first marketing hires were product marketers and why we’ve had a “seat at the table” from the early days of the company. . Product marketing looks different in every company, but one common trend is that many product marketing managers (PMMs) feel undervalued.

Product Marketing 138

Product Marketing Marketing Sales Hiring Scale 138

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2022

Migrating from the hyper-growth and chaos of the early days seeking product-market fit is critical to managing growth in customers, employees, products, and geographies. Know when to diversify leadership. Focus on the long-term, and be willing to create a leadership that can handle the tasks ahead. Key takeaways.

Startup 316

Startup Leadership Innovation Scaling 316

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2024

The Difference Between Kind and Nice Hannah asks how you balance a culture of hiring for kindness with the leadership team’s intensity for hard work, ambition, and getting things done. How Can You Tell When You Have Product Market Fit? Over time, you establish product-market fit and determine how to sell at scale.

Scale 264

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales Recruiting 264

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2021

It can be easy for SaaS companies to lose momentum if they haven’t quite found the perfect product-market fit. The reality was that they were heavily relying on the enterprise deals closed by the leadership team. The product grew more mature, with three main functions: data collection, data warehouse, and data analysis. .

Sales Hiring 312

Sales Hiring Data AWS Leadership 312

Kellblog

JULY 24, 2021

I sometimes get asked about how to structure an enterprise software marketing organization and the relative roles of product marketing vs. competitive analysis. My first job in marketing, which served as my bridge from a technical to a sales-and-marketing career, was as a competitive analyst.

Product Marketing 142

Product Marketing Marketing Sales Hiring Payment Services 142

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 6, 2021

Today, Stripe is synonymous with payments and tallies more than 15 products. This level of success requires masterful leadership. Bringing with her over 20 years of experience in sales, product marketing and operational scaling, she continues to provide strategic counsel to Stripe’s leadership team as an Advisor.

Scale 298

Scale Payment Services Payment Methods Payment Solutions 298

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2022

Product-Market Fit. Don’t rush your product-market fit too early. Your leadership team will focus on creating these systems with the goal-system-outcome framework, but it’s essential that as the company grows, the systems shift as well. Leadership Team: 18-month horizon. Phase 1: $0 – $10M.

Scaling 246

Scaling Leadership Startup Product Marketing 246

User Pilot

MAY 30, 2024

Overlapping responsibilities and conflicting priorities are just a couple of the many friction points between product managers and product marketing managers – leading to inefficient workflows and potential product failures. Product marketing managers focus on getting the product in the right hands.

Product Marketing 103

Product Marketing Interviewing Management Scale 103

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

Go-to-Market matters because sales and marketing spend remain the biggest proportion of SaaS spend, so honing in on that spend to build an engine and drive growth is paramount. But to develop a GTM strategy, you must have Product Market Fit. That’s why getting the right leadership in place is so important.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Outsourced Development 278

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2023

Jessica Gilmartin is the Chief Marketing Officer at Calendly, where she leads all aspects of marketing including brand awareness, creative, demand generation, and product marketing. Jessica brings nearly 20 years of marketing and leadership experience to Calendly.

Marketing 306

Marketing Leadership Engineering Enterprise 306

SaaStr

JULY 16, 2019

Join Rene Yang Stewart, Co-Head and Principal, Vista Equity Partners, and Monica Enand, Founder and CEO, Zapproved, as they discuss growing a company from product market fit to scale. René Stewart: So, Monica, you have, obviously, taken a company from figuring out product market fit to now a company of scale.

Scale 153

Scale Product Marketing Scaling Marketing 153

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

The Startup Stage: Finding Product-Market Fit The startup stage is the foundation of any SaaS companys journey. During this phase, the primary focus is on building a product that meets a specific market need and ensuring that early users validate its core functionality.

Pricing 113

Pricing Scale SaaS Technical Review 113

SaaStr

OCTOBER 22, 2023

Chandar Pattabhiram is the CMO of Coupa for the past six years, Previously, Chandar recently was CMO at Marketo In prior roles, Chandar ran worldwide marketing for Badgeville, and vice president product marketing at IBM Cast Iron Systems. He is a Strategic Advisor to the CEO of Freshworks.

AI Search 290

AI Search Consulting Leadership AI 290

SaaStr

MAY 17, 2024

Phase Three: Goal-Setting Stage three is about setting and creating strategy together with the leadership team. If you bring in a really senior person too early, they may want to take the reigns before you have enough product market fit, and they may try to take on the CEO role. Do you have strong product market fit?

Scale 304

Scale Technical Review Sales Hiring Artificial Intelligence 304

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2024

. “Typically that was the marketing hat in my case, but sometimes it was the sales hat or thinking about finance or other areas of the business. So you need context from leadership to what you ultimately need to deliver on in your function to be successful. Marketing should be built into the business, not bolted on.

Sales Hiring 311

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Review Leadership 311

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2023

But the drive and passion remained, and leadership didn’t give up. Blosser comments, “The big thing I want to share with everyone is just stick with it if you feel like you have product-market fit. Leadership introduced a high-velocity playbook and refocused the company downstream. Sometimes it can take longer.”

Scale 246

Scale Scaling SMB Marketing 246

User Pilot

JULY 31, 2023

What does a product marketing manager (PMM) do? This is the question on the lips of many marketing professionals browsing through opportunities at tech companies. Chances are you already know their broad responsibility is to develop and implement a marketing strategy roadmap for a specific product.

Product Marketing 98

Product Marketing Management Marketing Customer Lifetime Value 98

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

It includes leadership development courses, and responsibilities of managing and hiring one or two reps to get experience. . Roberge recommends starting with product-market fit. Your customer retention is the best quantifiable measure of product-market fit; however, retention is a lagging indicator.

Sales Hiring 260

Sales Hiring Scale Compensation Sales 260

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2024

Product Go to market Talent Product is at the Core of Everything Before thinking about sales or GTM motions, you have to start with product market fit. The most important thing to consider when building a product is the problem it will solve.

Scale 314

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Innovation 314

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2023

You may have a one-person representative in each continent who does the job of an SDR, closes deals, takes care of partnerships, marketing, and more. The size of your team is inconsequential when you’ve found a product market fit and can demonstrably grow your business. “If

Sales Hiring 278

Sales Hiring Payment Services SaaS Payments Scale 278

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2024

Finding Alignment: The Role of Marketing in Company Leadership The best VPs of Marketing in SaaS should own a delivery to sales metric and ensure someone cares about the customers, not just upselling. CROs and Marketing SaaStr Meetup in 2012 or 2013 had 800 attendees without an email list or content, showing product-market fit.

Sales Hiring 298

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Technical Review Scale 298

SaaStr

OCTOBER 3, 2023

Finding product market fit Moving from SMB to Enterprise or vice versa Achieving Enterprise repeatability Strategic expansion Borland has experienced all four stages at three different companies and knows what teams and functions look like for each stage of growth. Through customer stories.

Enterprise 297

Enterprise B2B Scale SMB 297

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 3, 2018

” You can identify product insufficiency simply. You don’t have product/market fit. For companies in existing markets: customers ask for critical features that your competition offers, but your product doesn’t offer. Sales execution appears in the numbers. The remainder don’t.

Sales Hiring 236

Sales Hiring Sales Leadership Startup 236

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

What is your product-market fit? Are you a new product, or are you replacing an existing service? Enablement is the answer to it—be it across sales, or product marketing. The world is moving very fast—the technology, competition, product releases, customers’ needs, and situations worldwide.

Scale 278

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales 278

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

External value beyond the product Building loyalty means going beyond functional benefits. Examples include: Thought Leadership : Actively source and share opportunities for customers to showcase their expertise. This could mean speaking engagements, guest posts, or industry panels.

Scale 113

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AI Search 113

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2024

You have to be scrappy at this stage, and Braze was trying to find product market fit with no product, no revenue, and no customers. In the chart above, showing the growth from $2M to $20M, you can see what product market fit looks like. Braze invested in this, and the leadership team agreed to do so.

Scale 296

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Startup 296

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 10, 2017

This works against the interests of the leadership and the company, confounding progress. But for most daily business decisions about strategy, product, marketing, engineering and other teams, disagree and commit is a powerful notion to capitalize upon a startup’s principal advantage in a market: execution speed.

Management 230

Management Leadership Engineering Startup 230

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2020

Nick has vast experience when it comes to B2B and B2C, which is why we asked them to share their best tips for growing product and engineering orgs from 0 to IPO. When founders are starting companies, it’s crucial to have product-market fit. However, the expectations for leadership are quite different from that of management.

Engineering 289

Engineering Part-Time VPE Scale B2C 289

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

Sydney pulled someone from Salesloft with a product marketing background who understands operations, running programs, and being strategic. This person has built out a partnership marketing team within the product marketing team. Product marketing and product owners have specific KPIs on adoption that they track.

AWS 285

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 285

SaaStr

JULY 24, 2024

The best leadership finds a way even in slightly tougher times. Jason’s earliest investment had strong product market fit, but it took them four years to come out with their mobile app. The best leaders find a way. Is it easy to hire mercenary VPs when you’re growing 500%, or you’ve raised $100M? The one who can iterate faster.

Sales Hiring 306

Sales Hiring Startup Scale SMB 306

SaaStr

MAY 29, 2019

Dave Kellogg has a lengthy history in tech from his start in product marketing at Ingres Corp in 1985 to his ensuing leadership positions at Versant and Business Objects. In 2004 he became CEO of MarkLogic where he stayed until 2010.

Payment Methods 252

Payment Methods Payment Solutions Payment Services Banking 252

User Pilot

OCTOBER 31, 2024

Improves product-market fit through actionable insights. How to build a product analytics strategy? Building a product analytics strategy ensures you’re collecting data and using it effectively to solve real problems. For instance, let’s say you find that users aren’t realizing the value of your product.

Strategy 105

Strategy Underperforming Technical Team Government Customer Lifetime Value 105

SaaStr

AUGUST 4, 2021

Typically startups have a small team grinding out product improvements based on early customer feedback. Growth Phase: At this stage, you have achieved product-market fit, you are generating consistent income, you’ve attracted more customers and you are building your workforce.

Innovation 264

Innovation Startup Leadership Investment 264

SaaStr

DECEMBER 21, 2022

Businesses must effectively evolve their strategies, operations, and overall product-market fit to target and win those enterprise accounts. But leadership at Airtable saw themselves moving into the overall agile workspace years down the road and chose their competitors based on that goal.

Scale 245

Scale Enterprise Scaling Management 245