Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 24, 2015

Once a startup has found an initial product market fit, the business must evolve the way it models its growth. Before product market fit, a startup’s financial projections focus on costs. The Fundamental Unit of SaaS growth is the atomic go-to-market team of a startup.

Sales Recruiting 113

Sales Recruiting Startup Revenue Sales Hiring 113

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 112

Pricing Scale SaaS Technical Review 112

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2023

PST, G shares low CAC, scalable tactics for earlier growth-stage startups. Whereas G used to build out a complex martech stack that was just focused on personalized emails with several different tools (with different subscriptions and costs), now he has his teams use only 1 or 2 AI-backed tools to help their personalized outbound at scale.

Scale 246

Scale Sales Hiring Banking AI 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

From a Go-To-Market perspective, Zapier uses a hybrid model that involves a combination of freemium offerings, subscription plans, and partnerships. You have to think about where your product maturity is before making the hire. In a startup, you might have a strong hypothesis, but it might not work out. At the same time?

Scale 317

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 317

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 7, 2022

Product-Market Fit . Going from $0 to $1M ARR is the first baby step for any SaaS startup. Hitting $1M ARR is the benchmark to figure out if you have a product-market fit.” – Veronika Riederle, CEO @Demodesk. Getting the first ten customers is like shooting in the dark. How to get the first ten customers.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Revenue Sales 246

OpenView Labs

APRIL 3, 2019

90% of startups fail, according to an in-depth analysis of 3,200 companies as part of the Startup Genome Report. It’s no wonder that the startup community obsesses over finding product-market fit. Product-market-price fit. more likely to say they botched their go-to-market strategy.

Product Marketing 63

Product Marketing Pricing Scale Marketing 63

FastSpring

JUNE 22, 2022

Products Are Finding New Growth in the Opposite Segment. Historically, when SaaS businesses have gone to market, they’ve done so by finding product-market fit with one of two core audiences: consumers or businesses. And that decision shapes their product and sales processes for the life of their company.

B2C 148

B2C Payments SaaS Payments B2B 148

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2019

Show it to them in the context of your existing product. Market your new product within your existing product. Show the integration, show the new product with the customer’s data already in it. Alright, strategy number three – Finding product market fit again and again.

Scale 248

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Strategy 248

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 11, 2014

The modern SaaS startup asks marketing to fill the top of the funnel, sales to qualify and close leads, and customer success to retain customers. In other words, the sales team closes all kinds of customers, both who truly benefit from the product and those who may not.

Customer Success 113

Customer Success Startup Sales Hiring SaaS 113

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 5, 2014

There's no silver bullet, but the closest thing to a silver bullet is inbound marketing – besides having a fantastic product with a very high NPS (net promoter score) and being obsessively focused on funnel optimization. getting your product distributed by big partners), which can work but comes with its own challenges.

Scale 280

Scale Business Customer Lifetime Value Enterprise 280

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

An early entrant to the SaaS field, the company has pioneered a number of fields that are now commonplace in the industry — content marketing, the transparent startups movement, and remote work. We spoke to Buffer’s CEO Joel Gascoigne about his experience building Buffer and the role and place subscription data plays for the company.

Payment Solutions 113

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Social Media 113

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

As a tiny startup who might be commercializing its first product, are there any general guidelines that you can stick to that would prevent the massive companies out there from crushing the baby? And you can build that in a way with the startup that you can’t in a bigger company. But even the CEO of a four-person startup.

Scale 293

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 293

Chart Mogul

OCTOBER 3, 2019

The design of your product? . Marketing? . After your product/market fit, your business model is the most important consideration if you’re to save your business from the startup graveyard. Typically developing the software is much more expensive than the initial (subscription) fee a customer would pay.

Acquisition 91

Acquisition Underperforming Technical Team Startup Customer Lifetime Value 91

Baremetrics

AUGUST 23, 2021

With more than 15,000 SaaS companies operating worldwide, the global SaaS market is constantly growing as new products continue to enter the market. Whether you're a startup or an established company, launching a new SaaS product isn't as easy as it was 15 years ago. Product innovation isn't enough 2.

Strategy 104

Strategy Scale Payment Features Software Review 104

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

People could come in and experience the product via the website now, but it was ultimately sold through the sales team They defined their ICP, figuring out the types of organizations that see value in Lattice and qualified out the ones who didn’t. As a startup, it’s tempting to try and do everything.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 273

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 16, 2019

The classic example sees a company move from niche startup to mainstream scale-up, but it can also see companies hone their product-market fit by focusing on a more specialized, and yet more lucrative, user base. Paid marketing activity will be important here, as will brand equity.

Business Model 195

Business Model Scale Pricing Payment Methods 195

Neil Patel

MARCH 1, 2021

One solution to this problem may be productized services. The productized services model allows agency owners, freelancers, and consultants to break out of billing by the hour or per project and instead invoice by sets of services rendered. What Are Productized Services For? Marketing/B2B Solutions.

Scale 141

Scale Payment Features Consulting Sales Hiring 141

Stax

MARCH 18, 2025

Join the payments-led growth movement Sign up to keep up-to-date with the latest trends in payments, vertical SaaS, and technology from industry experts. This is what SaaS applications call “user churn,” and it can affect their monthly recurring revenue (MRR) , as well as their annual recurring revenue (ARR).

Scale 117

Scale Payment Services Payments SaaS Payments 117

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 7, 2019

If people aren’t looking for your solution, you have to educate them about the problem your product solves. Spendesk thinks about building its company in three stages: startup, growth, and scale. So virtual cards to help you buy a new subscription or do a new digital marketing advertising campaign on LinkedIn.

Scale 162

Scale Payment Methods Payment Solutions Marketing 162

Chart Mogul

JANUARY 22, 2021

Churn is a concept specific to subscription businesses. It signifies the rate at which a business is losing customers and/or revenue through subscription cancellations. 5 people cancel their subscription plans during March. lost in March, they also added $25 from existing customers who upgraded to a higher subscription plan.

Churn 136

Churn SaaS Benchmarks Subscription 136

Tom Tunguz

MAY 10, 2017

When building a SaaS product for salespeople, a startup’s price will inevitably be compared to Salesforce CRM’s cost of about $150 per seat. How expensive is this new product compared to Salesforce? This is why relative pricing questions are so effective when establishing product-market fit.

Pricing 113

Pricing Software Review Systems Review Mobile 113

ProfitWell

JANUARY 6, 2020

Imagine a world in which your customers sell your product for you. You just have to achieve stellar product-market fit. Marc Andreessen, cofounder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, put it this way, “product-market fit is when people sell for you.” What is product-market fit? Ideal, right?

Product Marketing 52

Product Marketing Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Advertising 52

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 25, 2019

Of course, when you’re working in a startup or high-growth SaaS company, the focus is often on maximizing active users and increasing revenue. We hear about all the growth hacks to get new users into your product, and the latest patterns in user onboarding (we’ve even written a book on it ). Dealing with reality.

Churn 183

Churn Wireless Growth Hacking Construction 183

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 31, 2017

Growth shows demand for a product. On the other hand, churn is a huge source of friction and raises questions of product market fit. To maintain the subscription revenue from the existing customer base requires ever greater mountains of cash. That’s a challenging marketing obstacle to overcome.

Churn 100

Churn Scale Venture Capital Acquisition 100

OpenView Labs

JULY 2, 2020

B2B and B2C SaaS and Subscription Report. Updated weekly to show the impact of COVID-19, this resource from ProfitWell includes data from their subscription companies. Patrick Campbell deconstructs and walks through the elements of a pricing strategy that enables startups to more effectively acquire customers. Find out here.

Pricing 135

Pricing SaaS Payments Payments SaaS 135

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 11, 2014

While competition exists in certain segments, SaaS penetration is just a few percentage points of the total software market, according to our internal analysis. Each time a customer sees the monthly or quarterly or annual subscription payment, they wonder, should I be paying for this? SaaS is transforming enterprise software.

Customer Success 100

Customer Success SaaS Payments Payment Services Development Team Review 100

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

In August of 2016, Rachel Hepworth embarked on a unique challenge: start a growth marketing team at one of the most successful startups of this generation – one that had long relied heavily on word of mouth. Adam: Rachel, you’re leading growth marketing at one of the fastest growing software companies of this generation.

Growth Marketing 174

Growth Marketing Scale Marketing Outsourcing Services 174

Chaotic Flow

APRIL 14, 2015

When I’m not completely absorbed with my agile marketing software startup , I do a bit of SaaS consulting on the side. SaaS businesses develop intimate, long term relationships with their customers that are enabled by the always-on connection between the SaaS customer and the SaaS business through the SaaS product.

Scale 156

Scale SaaS Compensation Churn 156

ChurnZero

MAY 6, 2022

“If your product or service can have an impact on ROI, that’s what you really need to do. Slack is a productivity tool and did really well. But for productivity tools, which don’t have ROI measurements, it’s harder to get started.”. Subscription businesses have focused on new logos for too long. “If

Retention 98

Retention Revenue Entrepreneurship B2C 98

Mucker Capital

OCTOBER 27, 2023

In this Mucker Growth session, Kyle Poyar from OpenView delves into the critical topic of pricing for SaaS startups, aiming to rectify prevailing mistakes in your pricing strategies. Optimizing SaaS pricing is an ongoing process, and one that most startup founders struggle to perfect. Achieving product-market-price fit is paramount.

Payments 59

Payments Pricing SaaS Payments Startup 59

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 8, 2020

In this article, the founder of Product Marketing Alliance (and Baremetrics customer) Richard King, shared how he turned a network of product marketers into a thriving paid community with over 20,000 members, using some simple but powerful content marketing tactics. Read his story below! Try Baremetrics Free.

Content Marketing 98

Content Marketing Marketing Business Product Marketing 98

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

It is a small but prominent element that drives every other component of your marketing strategy. As a product marketer , it is your job to identify the best target audience for your product, while also finding the best pricing options, distribution channels, and unique value propositions.

Strategy 98

Strategy Sales Recruiting Scale Marketing 98

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 23, 2024

At a16z’s recent Connect/Fintech event, a16z Partner Alex Immerman sat down for a broad conversation with Immad Akhund , co-founder and CEO of banking startup Mercury , and René Lacerte, founder and CEO of financial services company BILL. For both of you, subscription is a smaller-to-no piece of the story.

Payments 110

Payments Forecasting Payment Services Sales Hiring 110

SaaStr

JUNE 10, 2021

Ep #402: Mårten Mickos, CEO of HackerOne, explains their innovative approach of packaging customer value derived from a variety of activities into an annually recurring subscription offering that delivers outstanding value to customers while simplifying the buying process and the customer journey. Is it software? Is it delivery?

Outsourcing Services 162

Outsourcing Services Marketplace as a Service Outsourced Development Scale 162

User Pilot

DECEMBER 17, 2021

SaaS pricing strategies differ from traditional products because most businesses use a subscription-based SaaS pricing model. Freemium models lead to higher churn rates and lower recurring revenue but can be an effective way to maximize rapid adoption — especially for expensive or complex products. Lower revenue.

Pricing 98

Pricing SaaS Payments Scale Strategy 98

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 29, 2019

From our initial effort in late 2017, some problems we set out to solve for each stakeholder were: Marketing: Understand who our customers are, so we can effectively reach them. You can’t find email lists using Job-to-be-Done, but you can find ones for B2C subscription businesses that have a high volume of website traffic.

Business 184

Business B2C Scale Headcount 184

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

Jyoti Bansal : So first thing Dev is, I know you started as an operator running a startup company, you took it public and then you became a VC and then you became an operator again. To convince someone how big the market is, it could this really be a billion dollar company if everything goes right? Dev Ittycheria : Thank you.

Sales Recruiting 261

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 261