SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2025

“Even with a bad hand, if the potential reward is great enough, taking a risk can make mathematical sense.” Market Selection: Tackle Problems with High Barriers to Entry The financial services industry presents massive barriers to entry most successful banks are centenarians, with some like Ax being over 160 years old.

CTO Hire 216

CTO Hire CTO Coach Scale CTO 216

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2025

Untapped Market Opportunities The obsession with focus has left “undiscovered islands of product-market fit just beyond the horizon line.” Sales Organization Structure Conrad reveals his preference for dedicated sales teams for each product, despite internal disagreement. The advantages are substantial: 1.

Startup 162

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cloud 162

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

How To Build A High-Performing Team And Retain Top Talent. Every leader needs to have a strategic playbook to build high-performing teams and retain top talent,” says Guan Wang, Global Director of Market Intelligence for Snowflake. . Stage 3: Employee Development. People are the most valuable asset of an organization.

Underperforming Technical Team 246

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Acquisition Company Culture 246

SaaStr

AUGUST 31, 2022

Scalability is about capability, so businesses need to understand whether they have the capacity to grow and whether their infrastructure and team can accommodate growth. Once you have solidified your company’s vision and have developed a strategic plan on how you will achieve success, don’t get too comfortable. Creating a category.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Company Culture 246

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2022

From a venture capital perspective, there’s now a premium on driving efficient growth rather than growth at any cost. . “Sales and marketing alignment is a terrific place to figure out and improve efficient growth.” . From the get-go, ensure alignment between sales and marketing teams on goals and anticipated outcomes.

Scale 328

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital Marketing 328

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

You know how everyone says you'll never look and wish you'd kept a bad VP as long as you did? Because to scale, you are going to need to add a true management team, and then a second one, and then layers of management. The fewer weak hires they continue to make. The less they slow down feature development.

Sales Hiring 269

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Underperforming Technical Team 269

Incredo

MARCH 20, 2020

The Incredo team switched to a fully remote working system in September 2019. At the beginning it was a bit hard to track the progress of tasks and communicate with team members effectively. Since you started working from home, your whole team already saves around 1 hour of their day.

Underperforming Technical Team 227

Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Systems Review Software Review 227

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Developers act, think, and behave differently than your average customer. So selling, marketing and supporting them should be different too. As an API-first company, WorkOS focuses on selling primarily to developers. Doing Business with Developers. Anyone who says the developer market is not strong is behind the times.

Outsourced Development 214

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 214

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 264

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 264

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

AUGUST 1, 2022

The developed world revolves around e-commerce. In a crowded field, how can SaaS companies prove themselves and shift from being completely irrelevant to their markets to delivering services their market and buyer personas value? Becoming market leaders. Embed innovation into your team’s DNA. Global approach.

Underperforming Technical Team 264

Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Innovation Investment 264

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2022

Have you ever had a sudden realization that you’re spending more on sales and marketing than research and development? If so, you aren’t alone –– the median enterprise SaaS company spends twice as much on sales and marketing than R&D. So how can a CEO manage their marketing effectively? CEOs love models.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Market Research 264

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2024

Paul Mander currently leads all of go-to-market for B2B at Optery. He previously built the pre and post sales solutions team at mParticle from zero to supporting hundreds of enterprise customers. Is there a lot of internal or customer work that needs to be done or managed by your team? How easy is it to implement your product?

Underperforming Technical Team 124

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring Scale 124

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

Over the years, though, Asthana has learned a lot about what can go wrong while building a market-leading company and how to avoid those missteps before they happen. He also observed that after product-market fit had been achieved, companies would only ever have to worry about marketing and sales. Verify product-user fit.

Underperforming Technical Team 290

Underperforming Technical Team Company Culture Customer Success Product Marketing 290

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

sales team. We ended up capturing 92% of this health care market share within the state of Michigan. I did all sorts of things there from sales, to project management, to running the engineering team, hiring. This is where I got my chops in growing and scaling enterprise sales teams. Want to see more content like this?

Scale 295

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 295

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2023

Management teams must determine how to thrive in a downturn to position their businesses for profitable growth. However, management teams that pursued growth at all costs were punished severely. The right strategy to win means reassessing fundamental issues like the product-market fit and centering on the best ICP. Go to market.

Consulting 49

Consulting Underperforming Technical Team Management Marketing 49

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 24, 2020

There’s a CEO at the top in red, VPs in orange, senior contributors in dark gray, team leads in green, and junior individual contributors in light gray. Sometimes there are directors running teams that should be headed by VPs. Is this so bad? Hiring a large team is necessary, but insufficient.

Startup 312

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling 312

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

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. Every startup needs strong team dynamics to pull through tough times. Don’t be scared to explore new markets.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 246

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

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

User Pilot

OCTOBER 31, 2024

A product analytics strategy is essential for any business looking to make informed decisions about product development and user experience. Plus, there are many reasons why you need a product analytics strategy: Aligns product development with user needs and business goals. Improves product-market fit through actionable insights.

Strategy 105

Strategy Underperforming Technical Team Government Customer Lifetime Value 105

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

The underperformers who aren’t putting in the effort get a conversation, and if things don’t change, it’s not a good fit. If you look at the number of Sales vs. Marketing. As we recently wrote, every marketing initiative and every channel plateaus. Others are doing little work and not working out. Jameson and Sam agree.

Sales Hiring 287

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 287

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

Jesse Paliotto (06:15) That’s that rings so true for me personally, because my I experienced flip of first, I think coming out of like a digital marketing background and probably 10 to maybe 15 years ago where I think at that time and please correct me if I get this wrong, it felt like very much like people were selling their blogs there.

Scale 118

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 118

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

MARCH 30, 2024

One of the biggest mistakes I see after $1m in trying to enter new market segments, new verticals, where you have zero traction. Then, you’ll have enough folks and experience to put a small team on a new initiative / segment / market. Micromanaging Your First (and Second) Management Team. The “I Give Up” VP Hire.

Scaling 306

Scaling Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Market Segmentation 306

User Pilot

OCTOBER 19, 2024

Satisfaction in SaaS, therefore, isn’t simply about developing a nice product and launching it in the market. For instance, you can launch a CSAT survey after a customer interacts with your support team. Similarly, unhappy customers are more likely to tell others of their poor experience. Userpilot review on G2.

Business 111

Business Underperforming Technical Team Customer Lifetime Value Systems Review 111

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. This is a good one.

Underperforming Technical Team 356

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Revenue Acquisition 356

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2023

After three months, this talented guy came to Harbaugh with the recognition that LaunchDarkly’s customers were developers. He didn’t like to sell to developers, so he quit. because they needed to rebuild the sales team. They rebuilt the sales team and closed some big deals. A bad one can torpedo you.

Sales Recruiting 298

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 298

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 23, 2022

The success of an executive team often depends as much on their interpersonal harmony as their professional expertise. How does a team establish rapport with one another? Algolia’s Bernadette Nixon (Chief Executive Officer) and Michelle Adams (Chief Revenue Officer) have spent the past few years developing this relational toolbox.

Underperforming Technical Team 317

Underperforming Technical Team Leadership Outsourced Development Finance 317

Stax

MARCH 16, 2025

Over a year, that translates to a loss of $300,000without factoring in additional costs like marketing spend to replace lost customers. This means having the right technology team in place, setting up ample customer support options, and ensuring that your team is available and trained to address software challenges when they occur.

Payment Solutions 88

Payment Solutions Software Review Churn SaaS Payments 88

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 312

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 312

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2023

Let’s find out the go-to-market models Divvy used to go from zero to a $2.5B The Team Matters More Than The Operating Model Snow’s greatest piece of advice is to choose your team wisely. He believes the team is more important than the operating model because you can have the best models in the world. How did they do it?

Strategy 246

Strategy Marketing Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 246

SaaStr

DECEMBER 31, 2020

What you really want if your deal size isn’t tiny are at least somewhat qualified leads for your team to follow-up with. What you really want if your deal size isn’t tiny are at least somewhat qualified leads for your team to follow-up with. Some ideas: Do joint marketing with other vendors in the space.

Underperforming Technical Team 247

Underperforming Technical Team Content Marketing Innovation Investment 247

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2022

Developing a product that solves a customer’s pain point provides a sense of pride and can drive the positive, emotional moment of awe that retains customers for the long haul. That doesn’t make them bad people. Most valuable employees will want to grow and develop new skills. Business model. The same goes for your investors.

Underperforming Technical Team 49

Underperforming Technical Team Business Scale Business Model 49

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.

DECEMBER 4, 2019

More recently, however, I’ve realized that the technology industry at large struggles with such clarity and consistency – in marketing terms, there is often a difficulty developing a clear value proposition that aligns with product and brand identity. And whatever you stand for must resonate with your identified target market.

Branding 209

Branding Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Airlines 209

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 274

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Acquisition Communication 274