Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

Many mid-market software companies price with the goal of revenue maximization, negotiating for the highest possible price in each sale. Penetration (Market Share) - price the product at a low price to win dominant market share. The Seven Factors to Consider When Pricing Your Product 1.

SaaS Payments 283

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 283

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2025

“We just need one great CMO who can do it all” – Founders often search for a marketing unicorn who excels at brand, demand gen, product marketing, and digital programs. A smaller number of high-quality leads that convert at higher rates is vastly superior to a flood of poor-fit prospects. It’s messy.

Sales Hiring 207

Sales Hiring Marketing Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 207

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 19, 2020

Payback period is one of the best composite diagnostic metrics of product market fit. I've written before about the benefits of short payback periods. In short, startups with shorter payback periods require less capital and also grow more quickly. In 2020, what is an excellent payback period[1]?

Software 356

Software Acquisition Enterprise Startup 356

SaaStr

DECEMBER 10, 2024

The days of pure top-down enterprise sales are over when it comes to technical products. As software continues to “eat the world” (as Marc Andreessen famously predicted), developers have gained significant influence in purchasing decisions. Which segment has the best product-market fit?

Engineering 290

Engineering Development CTO Leadership 290

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2025

With over 20 years in the infrastructure software space, Dave previously held executive roles at Microsoft, VMware, and GitHub. 4 Unexpected Learnings from Dave’s Scaling Journey The $30M Revenue Threshold : Companies that can reach $30M in revenue have typically found sufficient product-market fit to scale to $100M.

Scale 191

Scale Systems Review Scaling Leadership 191

FastSpring

AUGUST 8, 2024

Is your product marketing team struggling to coordinate marketing resources to support an endless stream of product launches, with vague release dates and a chorus of product managers demanding tons of marketing attention for each release? I’m excited to chat about product marketing today.

Product Marketing 157

Product Marketing Marketing SaaS Payments Payment Methods 157

Casey Accidental

OCTOBER 31, 2022

I have written a lot about product/market fit in the past. Whether you are a founder, product or growth leader, being able to recognize and measure product/market fit is a critical tool to make the best decisions on driving success of a company. Cross-Side Network Effects (Marketplaces and Platforms).

Product Marketing 131

Product Marketing Marketing Scale Software Review 131

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2023

If there’s one rule almost everyone universally agrees with when building software, it’s that focus is critical. Point Solution Software Is Extremely Limiting There exists a set of companies that could be built and are often not built that would break this rule of building software with a singular focus. the compound startup.

Startup 264

Startup Software Sales Hiring Pricing 264

Tom Tunguz

JULY 21, 2022

” This sentence echoes in conference rooms across many software buyers today, irrespective of whether the business is healthy. Account executives selling mission-critical software should breathe easy. Software does more with less. AEs must convince the buyer can achieve their goals with software instead of a new hire.

Sales Hiring 189

Sales Hiring Headcount Software Finance 189

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 30, 2023

I’ve spent the last year working to find product-market fit for my startup, Dock. I’ve used our sales process to iterate our way to product market-fit and wanted to share what I’ve learned along the way. Get a few paying customers who really love your product and build from there.

Sales Recruiting 121

Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring 121

SaaStr

MARCH 4, 2021

Well, for SaaS companies, marketing broadly speaking breaks into three species — Corporate Marketing, Product Marketing and Demand Generation. With the larger software companies Corporate Marketing Is King, and Product Marketers are the Princes. Why’s that? Some sort of commit.

Sales Hiring 357

Sales Hiring Scale Marketing Branding 357

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2025

Untapped Market Opportunities The obsession with focus has left “undiscovered islands of product-market fit just beyond the horizon line.” This integration extends globally, eliminating the need for separate software stacks in different countriesa pain point for increasingly distributed companies.

Startup 162

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cloud 162

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 20, 2024

GitHub, founded in 2008, is a leading platform for software development and version control that has made waves since 2018 with its AI Copilot. Adjusting Your Assumptions Now you have strong product market fit, you’re listening to your customers, and you’re customer zero. Deciding where you don’t want to spend your time.

Scale 264

Scale AI Scaling Marketing 264

User Pilot

JULY 10, 2024

Businesses invest heavily in product marketing through webinars, blog posts, and video content for a reason – it gets them notable results. If you’re looking to start or improve your SaaS product marketing strategy, this is the article to read. Product management focuses on building the right SaaS products.

Product Marketing 98

Product Marketing Strategy Marketing SaaS 98

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2020

Mailchimp took years to transition from an agency to a software business, and then years until it finally took off when they added freemium. They waited until $1b in ARR to go upmarket more, to add a much richer and broader product suite that took them out of “just” email. to get to real Product Market Fit.

Branding 354

Branding Scale Software Business Model 354

User Pilot

MAY 30, 2024

Overlapping responsibilities and conflicting priorities are just a couple of the many friction points between product managers and product marketing managers – leading to inefficient workflows and potential product failures. Product marketing managers focus on getting the product in the right hands.

Product Marketing 103

Product Marketing Interviewing Management Scale 103

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2024

The current business model for software companies involves spending a significant portion of revenue on sales, regardless of available tools and automation. Consistency is key in marketing. Product Marketing and Early-Stage Priorities Product marketing is not a priority for most startups.

Sales Hiring 306

Sales Hiring Startup Marketing Technical Review 306

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 8, 2024

Flexport started out by giving the software away for free and charging for moving the freight, which has worked amazingly well for them. 2) Spend all your time on achieving product-market fit until you have it. Pricing is always evolving. Talk to users non-stop, and build things based on their feedback.

Sales Recruiting 325

Sales Recruiting Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring 325

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 3, 2022

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein is the founder of Surfboard , a software company that offers scheduling tooling for customer support teams. By automating planning, businesses can save time, increase productivity and turn support from a cost center into a profit driver. Number one, creating the spreadsheets; number two, procuring software.

Scale 206

Scale Outsourcing Services Software Sales Hiring 206

SaaStr

AUGUST 31, 2021

Procore is a $16B+ leader in construction software, but took a full decade to take off. But the early days are still all about finding true product-market fit, and that can just take time. 2002-2012 were slow. It took Squarespace 3 years just to get to $1M in ARR and 7+ years to get to the first $10M ARR.

Construction 349

Construction Cloud Scaling Product Marketing 349

User Pilot

MAY 13, 2024

Is your team struggling to determine the return on investment (ROI) of product marketing strategies? Or are you looking for ways to improve the performance of your marketing campaigns? In either case, marketing analytics tools can come to your rescue. It can help you monitor the effectiveness of in-app marketing efforts.

Software 105

Software Marketing Scale Social Media 105

Kellblog

JULY 17, 2022

Go sell some software. Go sell some software. Go sell some software. Create a product. Get product-market fit (PMF), i.e., determine some problem you solve for some person with some product. Get product-market fit (PMF), i.e., determine some problem you solve for some person with some product.

Branding 140

Branding Startup Software Sales Recruiting 140

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2023

Nivas brings 7+ years of SaaS marketing experience and has led multiple growth and product marketing initiatives at Freshworks. Previously, he has led Startup Partnership and Product Marketing Teams at Freshworks. The post My App Stack: Nivas Ravichandran, Head of Marketing at Spendflo appeared first on SaaStr.

Marketing 303

Marketing Product Marketing Startup Engagement 303

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2024

Lucid is the leading provider of visual collaboration software with over 70M users worldwide. As we know today, a strong product-led motion starts with a strong product. But for product-led sales, you incorporate the customer’s needs based on the characteristics of their industries, geographies, languages, etc.

Scale 312

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring compliance 312

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 2, 2022

During Bill Binch’s Office Hours , he predicted many more software startups would achieve 200% net dollar retention. They imply strong product market fit. In other words, the average customer’s spend would double each year. I’ve only seen a handful of companies achieve that mark.

Enterprise 351

Enterprise Startup Retention Engagement 351

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 10, 2019

You’ve found product market fit. And then, right then, product innovation decelerates to zero. Suddenly, the product and engineering teams are bogged down. Why does this fact pattern evolve in many software companies? Second, the founder/CEO’s once singular focus on product is no longer possible.

Innovation 252

Innovation Engineering Acquisition Product Marketing 252

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 3, 2020

Product Marketing is the starting point for marketing. It includes: market intelligence: what are your competitors doing? Communication: how effective is the lifecycle marketing effort to existing customers? Marketing Operations. Process: How well defined is the process for executing marketing campaigns+.

Underperforming Technical Team 340

Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Scale Social Media 340

Tom Tunguz

MAY 23, 2021

Over the last ten years, the 75th percentile post-money valuation of a cloud software or infrastructure company has grown 11% annually. This has as much to do with novel GTM strategies, better product-market fit, and the consequent greater leverage in businesses, as does the demand side.

Software Review 364

Software Review Venture Capital Cloud Pricing 364

SaaStr

MAY 28, 2021

Product-market fit. But roughly, if you aren’t growing at least 10% a month in MRR on the way to $1m ARR, and at least 6% a month thereafter, you don’t quite have product-market fit yet. Passion and belief in your market, customers and journey. Passion and belief in your market, customers and journey.

SaaS 328

SaaS Market Segmentation Product Marketing Marketing 328

SaaStr

AUGUST 2, 2021

ServiceNow is a workflow, low-code/no-code software company with over 1500 partners worldwide. This early phase is where you’re still looking for that perfect product-market fit and scaling the product to market. In ServiceNow’s case, they were a single-product company focused on selling IT.

Outsourcing Services 290

Outsourcing Services Scale Scaling Outsourced Development 290

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 9, 2019

Marketing expertise falls into three segments: product marketing, demand generation, and brand marketing. Each of these kinds of marketers have critical skills for a startup. But the reason many marketing hires fail is the business doesn’t hire the right expertise at the right time. Why is this?

Scale 255

Scale Startup Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 255

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 23, 2022

Cloud founders are feeling the pressure of the current climate, and it’s understandable why: They’re grappling with inflation, rising interest rates, and all of that against a backdrop of a compressing public market. . These cloud businesses have product-market fit, scalable GTM, and a growing customer base. .

Cloud 309

Cloud Benchmarks Trends Business Model 309

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 11, 2020

The head of product would prefer someone with product marketing experience. And when I say pillar, I mean like a product marketing problem, a growth problem, or brand marketing problem. How do you know when a company has established product-market fit? Do the metrics suddenly change?

Sales Hiring 263

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Startup 263

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 25, 2018

For every one of the 23 software companies listed in the chart above who are worth more than $5B, there is an unhappy customer segment. I suspect old-fashioned product marketing may be the disruptive force to prise $1 billion worth of market away from some of these incumbents. 1% is not that much.

Revenue 275

Revenue Blockchain Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 275

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2024

It’s a SaaS startup that basically fell out of product-market fit after the 2021 boom … but has enough revenue and high enough NRR to keep going. If the founders are truly committed and truly want it, then that existing $2m-$20m in ARR becomes customer funding for the next generation of products and software.

Headcount 301

Headcount Finance Startup Trends 301

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 16, 2018

This requires understanding their budget and the value of the product to them. In software, we typically see three pricing structures. 2 Part Tariff (2PT) - The analytics software has a base platform fee of $10,000 and each analytics event processed by the system costs $0.10 All of these disciplines fall under product marketing.

Pricing 240

Pricing Market Research Interviewing Product Marketing 240

SaaStr

AUGUST 13, 2024

The best engineers and CTOs build and release better software faster than the competition. A truly great Head of Marketing or Demand Gen will get you more leads than the rest. Even with multiples and markets down, the prize in SaaS is bigger than in the past. #4: 4: You may be falling out of product market fit.

Sales Hiring 311

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Venture Capital Fractional VPE 311