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We’ve discussed most before individually, but let me throw ’em together: It may well take 24 months to get to true product-market fit and Initial Traction. A mediocre tech team, a part-time CTO, or even just a decent CTO just doesn’t get you there. Wait until you find a great partner here.
That you absolutely, positively, have to only hire “Rockstars” in your startups. A Rockstar engineer really is 10x better than the next tier. And a Rockstar VP is really what you need in every position. So I’d hire earlier here rather than wait. Head of Marketing – Where Can I Settle?
The top 5, with links to the related posts: It may well take 24 months to get to true product-market fit and Initial Traction. but you can’t afford to hire all the people you need to meet their needs. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the startup. You have to love, or at least commit to, recruiting constantly.
In SaaS, once you have even a few million in ARR, the #1 challenge is recruiting top-tier VPs and building a truly top-tier management team: SaaS products mostly don’t sell themselves. You can hack managing and finding 1–3 reps yourself, but after that, you really need a VP of Sales. She can be your CTO forever.
But I think the biggest, #1, mistake successful first-time entrepreneurs in SaaS make time and time again these days is they micromanage too long. I think it’s a byproduct, in part, of the fact that founders are just so much better these days. Engineering. Go hire them. In every single function.
1: Don’t hire a VP (or anyone in the early days) that you aren’t 95% sure is great. Founders between a million and $250M are talking about lowering the bar for hiring because they aren’t sure if the person is great or they’re trying to fill a gap. If you aren’t meeting that many, you aren’t taking hiring seriously.
No one has time to have coffee with all of those folks. 2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.” You can’t always expect a great VP of Sales to double sales in 30-60-90 days. They know the product or learn it fast, bring a couple of ringers with them, and move out low performers. Hiring someone too junior.
It also probably shows you’ve sort of fallen out of product-market fit. If you have product-market fit. I wrote a piece some time ago here, a person favorite, about Our Year of Hell. I wrote a piece some time ago here, a person favorite, about Our Year of Hell. At least some times.
And that’s really good when you’re scaling part of the team that looks like yourself. So if you’re an engineer and you need more engineers, having a network of engineers is an awesome thing. You don’t know where to find them. You guys are awesome. You don’t know how to interview them.
Okta’s VP of Engineering, Monica Bajaj, and Senior Director of Platform ProductMarketing, Priya Ramamurthi, share Okta’s playbook to PLG, developer experience, and Enterprise ARR. Let’s start with product-led growth (PLG). Adopt At the time of adoption, the user starts to feel confident about the product.
And that’s really good when you’re scaling part of the team that looks like yourself. So if you’re an engineer and you need more engineers, having a network of engineers is an awesome thing. You don’t know where to find them. You guys are awesome. You don’t know how to interview them.
SaaStr favorite Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures was gracious enough to sit down with Nick Caldwell, former CPO of Looker and current VP of Engineering at Twitter. 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.
Scott Beechuk, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners, brings together world-class SaaS engineering leaders Claire Hough, Vijay Gill and Weiping Peng for a dynamic conversation on where SaaS technology is headed, how to build top performing engineering teams and what it takes to lead in today’s high-velocity engineering environment.
We’ll have some time. It sounds minor or technical, but if you want to due diligence on a human being, I get to do it a few 100 times a year. I used it in kind of my breakfast pre warm-up, the crazy times we’re in. From Satya from Homebrew, we just heard that seed’s at an all time high.
They wanted real-time results. And so we actually had to make some major adjustments and look for an alternative way to deliver the software which clearly meant that we needed to move to the cloud full-time. Traditionally we’ve been around since 2005 and traditionally have been a software on-prem business. How can you automate?
It’s a great time to be a founder. Let’s qualify that statement: It’s a great time to be a founder of a revenue-generating, venture-funded company. These are optimistic times. A founder, on the other hand, has deep institutional knowledge, and many times only they know what they know. Now you have help.
“Because leadership doesn’t value our contribution, or all the behind-the-scenes work that goes into keeping our customers happy – especially when dealing with problems like product bugs or bad-fit customers that were never our fault to begin with; we can’t control the cards we’re dealt. You can work up the ladder over time.
. * Why do founders have to sell the product themselves at the start? When is the right time to hire their first sales reps? What are the most common mistakes founders make when hiring their first reps? What can be done to minimize ramp time of new reps? So nowadays I’m all go to market all the time.
From there, he created HubSpot’s freemium, go-to-marketproduct, before moving into his current role. In his spare time, he also hosts his own growth-focused podcast, called The Growth TL;DR. Short on time? Product-led growth generally is a good fit for companies that have a freemium option or a free trial.
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