Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2021

If you’ve been paying attention to any loud marketing efforts over the last few years, you have definitely heard about multi-cloud. Even thinking about implementing a multi-cloud architecture is prematurely optimizing for practically all businesses – especially startups – and not a trap you want to fall into.

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

Let’s review everything your customer success team has to do in the absence of any customer success tools. Best customer success software for startups and small companies. Top customer success management platforms for mid-market and enterprise companies. Defining a customer success tool and other FAQs.

Customer Success 105

Customer Success Enterprise Software Review Startup 105

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

While many startups aspire toward unicorn status, only a few achieve it. To achieve this level of success, startups need a combination of strong financial performance, innovative products or services, and a favorable market environment. Lesson 1: Everything is about your team. Don’t be scared to explore new markets.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 246

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

So let’s take a look back to a deep dive with the CEOs on what they learned building their first senior teams: ———-. As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. What makes you feel that you need to level up your management, set up your first management team?

Sales Hiring 265

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 265

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Sometimes it’s VP Sales (OK, often, this is the most common mishire — another post here on what a really great VPS can do for you, and how a poor one can wreck your company, coming). Sometimes it’s VP Marketing. The #1 reason to do a start-up is Career Development. Or VP of Eng, or whatever. Only money.

Sales Hiring 337

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 337

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2023

Founders are responsible for ensuring a startup always has enough money, setting the vision for the company, and driving things forward. Lesson #1: If You Aren’t Making Mistakes, You Aren’t In A Startup If you do things that always work and maintain the status quo, you’re likely at a major company like Microsoft. And it was true.

Sales Recruiting 300

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 300

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

Duo Security is an Ann Arbor, Michigan based cyber-security startup. sales team. As everyone left to work for an investment bank in California or New York that summer of ’99, I went to work at a startup in Ann Arbor. Now, we did really cool stuff at this startup. So marketing owns a pipeline, not just a megaphone.

Scale 287

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 287

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 10, 2020

I hope this post allows people and teams to safely talk about Product Judgment. If you ever had to face a Manager, Director or Exec as they make bad product decisions and you’re struggling to persuade them otherwise, this post will help you. It takes years to build, and therefore ranges from very weak to very strong.

Underperforming Technical Team 291

Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Communication B2B 291

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

In the early days, it was about setting expectations that startups are hard and you must work hard to succeed. We are a tech startup, and in order to be successful, we expect you to put in a lot of hard work. The underperformers who aren’t putting in the effort get a conversation, and if things don’t change, it’s not a good fit.

Sales Hiring 287

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 287

Kellblog

AUGUST 31, 2022

To adapt Julius Caesar’s famous opening line of the Gallic Wars : marketing as a whole is divided in three parts. Product marketing (prodmkt), responsible in a word, for the message and how well it resonates with customers in the market [1]. Whether this team should report into sales or marketing is a separate debate.

Underperforming Technical Team 145

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Marketing Startup 145

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

I built a marketplace for specialty food and I’ve worked in the Valley based in San Francisco across a number of, well across one startup and then a very established online publishing business called Lonely Planet, which of course at one point in It’s the biggest guidebook publisher in the world.

Scale 121

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 121

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

Do you have two sales teams? Who gets what part of the long-term development budget? Where does marketing allocate its resources? And most importantly, multiple products can be very distracting at the management team level. A second product can’t bail out your sales team. I wish I had some magic answers.

Underperforming Technical Team 356

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Revenue Acquisition 356

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2023

A bad experience with a revenue operations leader might taint your view of the position at all future companies, but that would be a mistake, as CRO Confidential podcast host Sam Blond learned first-hand. For example, how do you think about ICP, and what markets should you go after? Not every leader is created equally. Enablement.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Education Scale Strategy 245

SaaStr

APRIL 1, 2021

Not necessarily in revenue, and often not in their core market. But in a related market that becomes strategically important. Some examples: Okta basically won the corporate side of identity (rocketed to #1) but wasn’t #1 on the developer side. Smaller deals can sometimes just be about experiments, and teams.

Underperforming Technical Team 275

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Acquisition Communication 275

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 23, 2023

I’m watching public company earnings to identify early weaknesses in the software market. Microsoft’s Ability to Cross-Sell its Suite is Driving Dominance in Many Categories GitHub is now home to 100 million developers. About 70% of commercial Office subscribers use Teams.

Azure 256

Azure Underperforming Technical Team Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 256

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 11, 2019

This week on Scale , we’re getting an inside look at how marketing helped them grow to a $1.5 Startup marketing is tough. But today, marketing is the primary driver of revenue at your typical, fast growing B2B startup. content marketing), organic costs are rising fast too. billion dollar valuation.

Scale 162

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Startup 162

Neil Patel

DECEMBER 2, 2020

It’s around this time that some businesses start to consider startup funding. Access to more capital means implementing better growth tools, expanding the team, and generally making the journey to profitability much smoother. Does your business need startup funding? How Do I Get Startup Funding for My Business?

Startup 145

Startup Underperforming Technical Team Government Investment 145

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 12, 2018

Known as the Martech 5000 — nicknamed after the 5,000 companies that were competing in the global marketing technology space in 2017, it’s said to be the most frequently shared slide of all time. – lie beyond the realms of this article but one thing is clear: this market is HUGE. What is a marketing technology stack?

Technical Review 223

Technical Review Technology Scale Marketing 223

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

The decision to leave a fairly scaled role leading 200+ AEs at LinkedIn to join a smaller-stage startup. The Worst Days of a CRO The job of CRO is a tough one, with lots of natural tensions in place between sales and marketing, sales and product, etc. The highs and lows always come, usually involving the people on your team.

Scale 306

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 306

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

It was a big milestone for the company and the markets as it had everything you want in a company going public: 39% annual revenue growth, 16% free cash margins, and 117% NRR. They supply their customers with a full marketing suite and customer data software for thousands of SMB, e-commerce businesses. More on that here.

Revenue 313

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 313

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason Lemkin: You certainly can hire a whole content team and build 10,000 pieces of content, but I will tell you what I have always seen work is one incredible piece a week. Getting access to the crown jewels and highly sensitive data as a four-person startup is hard, but if it’s a segregated piece of data and a pilot.

Scale 299

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 299

Sales Hacker

MAY 9, 2025

GTMnow shares insight around the go-to-market strategies responsible for explosive company growth. The optics were that if AI wasnt integral to your roadmap and marketing, you were losing relevance. Many venture capital firms shifted their investments almost entirely into AI startups.

AI Search 86

AI Search AI Scale SaaS 86

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 9, 2025

Self-service sales model This is when customers explore and experience your product independently without needing hands-on help from your sales team. Here, customers usually find your brand through marketing channels and then engage with it through tools like interactive self-guided demos, free trials, or freemium versions of your product.

Scale 52

Scale Sales Hiring Startup Sales Recruiting 52

Kellblog

JULY 8, 2020

I was talking with my old friend, Mark Tice , the other day and he referred to a startup mistake as, “on his top ten list.” ” Mark’s been a startup CEO twice, selling two companies in strategic acquisitions, and he’s run worldwide sales and channels a few times.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Startup Software Review Enterprise 145

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 14, 2019

Since writing The AI Agency: A Novel GTM for Machine Learning Startups , I’ve been meeting many companies who operate this way. These startups use machine learning to disrupt an industry traditionally dominated by agencies: law, accounting, recruiting, translation, debt collection, marketing…the list is long.

AI 203

AI Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Machine Learning 203

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2024

These nine sales concepts, when done correctly, will greatly improve your sales and sales teams. #1: Most people think you need to hire more salespeople in a demand-poor environment. Demand-poor environments lead to problems like: Sales reps clinging on to opportunities for too long. That’s the wrong answer.

Sales Recruiting 297

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 297

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Even as a three person team, we went through an exercise to figure out what do we stand for, as a team? Sam : This is not my insight, but someone else says… I really do believe it, that the team you build is the company you build.

VP of Engineering 300

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 300

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2023

When Greenhouse started, it was at a time when the market was growing up, and there weren’t any playbooks. Could something like the Greenhouse of 2015 even make it to market today? Getting off the ground is one thing — an easy pitch of being an HR tech startup focused on improving hiring. They did it.

Sales Hiring 287

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 287

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2021

Pomel focused his session on: Making your SaaS startup customer-centric: Hw event marketing has helped him integrate his engineering and sales teams. How many of you guys’ product rely on the highly functioning engineering team? We hired everybody on our teams. We can look back at how Datadog scaled.

Scale 322

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 322

OnStartups

MAY 18, 2021

All the points below have been pulled from startup sales teams that I think work pretty well (including the team at CRM software company, HubSpot). Building Startup Sales Teams. They’re not bad people, they’re just different from you, especially if you're an introverted geek like me. The math won’t work.

Sales Hiring 110

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 110

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 25, 2020

If you are looking to scale up your marketing, you will need talented people that can take charge of and execute your strategy. But should you build your own in-house marketing team or hire an agency partner? The Benefits of Working With a Digital Marketing Agency. The Benefits of Working With a Digital Marketing Agency.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 145

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Four years ago, after launching and failing my first startup I realized I had a lot to learn. I considered the four companies and chose Gorgias based on my experience with their team during the interview process. I had also worked in customer service and e-commerce in the past and knew this market was prime for disruption.

Scale 291

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 291

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

The fastest growing software companies in recent years all have something in common – they started with little to no sales team. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team. Yes, Dropbox started off with no traditional sales team. It’s become apparent that for hypergrowth SaaS startups today, there are two distinct phases.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

Kellblog

JUNE 27, 2022

Bernard , Suranga , Alice , Rob ) as well as my other European startup colleagues (e.g., The US has a massive total available market (TAM), which accounts for between 40% and 50% of worldwide technology spending. Much as Paris is a bellwether for the future of fashion, the US market is a bellwether for technology. It’s worse.

Startup 134

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Compensation 134

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

But back in 2017, CEO and co-founder Peter Gassner joined us after Veeva had recently IPO’d with a market cap less than a tenth of that size. If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! I was a software developer, a product person. Most startups do fail. Get tickets here.

Sales Hiring 340

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 340

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

No one knows this better than Sprout Social’s Director of Marketing Strategy, Tara Robertson. Tara joined the company in 2017 and has been instrumental in helping the company scale and retain more customers through a unique customer-centric approach to marketing. . A different approach is the Jobs-to-be-Done framework.

Retention 34

Retention Scale Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 34

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2023

At nine figures in revenue and 550 people, the CEO of Lattice, Jack Altman, has seen every stage of building a startup. Most of the time, a missing teams view or the ability to integrate with one more system isn’t the answer. They may hit you up with great startups to buy, important summits, and other valuable opportunities.

Underperforming Technical Team 49

Underperforming Technical Team Startup Investment Communication 49