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What Order Should You Hire Your Management Team In?

SaaStr

IME, rough order to make hires in: VPM: $0.2m ARR VPS: $1-$1.5m ARR VPCS: $2m ARR VPP: $3m-$4m ARR VPE: $5m-$6m ARR CFO: $10m ARR COO: $20m ARR. He’d found several good First VP candidates, in particular, a strong first head of marketing and a strong first head of product. He asked which to hire first.

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The Top 10 Things to Know Before Starting a SaaS Company

SaaStr

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. Finally you have great customers and 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.

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Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders?

SaaStr

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.

Scale 246
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My 7 Biggest Mistakes as a SaaS Founder-CEO

SaaStr

Ok now that some time has gone by I can reflect a bit more thoughtfully here. My top mistakes as a SaaS founder/CEO: Not convincing the very, very, very best VPE I knew to join as our VPE. I had a great CTO, but I also needed a truly great VPE to scale past $10m ARR and deal with all those issues. Selling the company.

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VPs That Can’t Hire … They Aren’t Real VPs. At Least, Not Yet.

SaaStr

Perhaps the single most important thing you can ever do in SaaS, at least after $1m in ARR or so, is hire the best VPs you can. We’ve talked a lot over the years about how not to hire a wrong VP of Sales — 70%+ of the first VPs of Sales don’t make it even 10 months. Talk to them.

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How to Hire A Great VP Sales: The Full Video and Transcript

SaaStr

As part of that, we wanted to look back at some of our most iconic content and sessions. One of the first what How to Hire a Great VP of Sales at the New York Enterprise Tech Meet-Up (thank you to John Lehr and Work-Bench for setting this up). I don’t know anything about sales. SaaStr is Turning 10!

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10 Things That Would Have Helped Me Go From $1m to $10m Faster with Less Stress

SaaStr

I thought it would be worth drilling down deeper into each of them, and sharing the learnings and mistakes: 1/ Spending less time fixing things, more time recruiting senior folks to own them. No one spends enough time recruiting as it is, after $1m ARR or so. Yes, you can manage the sales team yourself.