Kellblog

JULY 8, 2020

I was talking with my old friend, Mark Tice , the other day and he referred to a startup mistake as, “on his top ten list.” ” Mark’s been a startup CEO twice, selling two companies in strategic acquisitions, and he’s run worldwide sales and channels a few times.

Sales Hiring 143

Sales Hiring Startup Software Review Enterprise 143

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 14, 2019

Since writing The AI Agency: A Novel GTM for Machine Learning Startups , I’ve been meeting many companies who operate this way. These startups use machine learning to disrupt an industry traditionally dominated by agencies: law, accounting, recruiting, translation, debt collection, marketing…the list is long.

AI 203

AI Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Machine Learning 203

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

I built a marketplace for specialty food and I’ve worked in the Valley based in San Francisco across a number of, well across one startup and then a very established online publishing business called Lonely Planet, which of course at one point in It’s the biggest guidebook publisher in the world. Blake Hutchison (28:59) Yeah.

Scale 120

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 120

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Even as a three person team, we went through an exercise to figure out what do we stand for, as a team? Sam : This is not my insight, but someone else says… I really do believe it, that the team you build is the company you build.

VP of Engineering 290

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 290

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason Lemkin: You certainly can hire a whole content team and build 10,000 pieces of content, but I will tell you what I have always seen work is one incredible piece a week. Getting access to the crown jewels and highly sensitive data as a four-person startup is hard, but if it’s a segregated piece of data and a pilot.

Scale 289

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 289

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

The fastest growing software companies in recent years all have something in common – they started with little to no sales team. They relied on a great product, with a passionate userbase that helped kickstart an organic growth engine which sold the product for them. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

It’s an approach that’s served him well along the road to building the HubSpot sales team, where he was CRO for nine years. This has created large amounts of data for running teams. . Yet in Mark’s experience working with and mentoring startups, he’s found that many entrepreneurs go with intuition over information.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2020

Sam Blond, CSO at Brex explains why recruiting, networking and employee happiness is the key to this playbook on recruiting your sales team. I’m doing The Playbook To Recruiting Your Sales Team. Once again, amazing job to the SaaStr team. I’m really honored to share this stage with some really bad ass speakers.

Sales Recruiting 189

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 189

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

This is the recipe for a mediocre sales team. Like a sports franchise, a top team should be both collaborative and competitive. It’s a timely conversation for us, coming hot on the heels of the release of our book Intercom on Sales last month and Steli’s own book The 2020 Startup Sales Playbook this week. to Close.com.

Sales Hiring 184

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales 184

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]. It’s the physiological needs level of marketing.

Underperforming Technical Team 145

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Marketing Startup 145

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

They built one platform that does it all, but also made it simple so that these small businesses they wanted to serve, could actually use it to grow revenue without needing a developer that they didn’t have. They initially tried to sell to other startups on the basis that Klaviyo could help you with your customer marketing.

Revenue 304

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 304

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

You get to work with a lot of different teams. Is your big company doing a return to office and you have to badge in for four hours every day to sit on Zoom with your team that lives in Virginia? And I hear a lot of startup founders, they’re like, oh, I want someone that’s so into working for equity.

SMB 108

SMB Sales Recruiting Branding Sales Hiring 108

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

Four years ago, after launching and failing my first startup I realized I had a lot to learn. I considered the four companies and chose Gorgias based on my experience with their team during the interview process. I had also worked in customer service and e-commerce in the past and knew this market was prime for disruption.

Scale 281

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 281

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! When you get that thing where you’re a rational person and you think it will be great and 99 out of 100 people think it’s bad, that’s when you have opportunity. I was a software developer, a product person. Get tickets here.

Sales Hiring 338

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 338

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. You can have the great product and a great team, but the market of small or very niche. Dev Ittycheria : Thank you. Jyoti Bansal: Yeah.

Sales Recruiting 260

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 260

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 11, 2019

This week on Scale , we’re getting an inside look at how marketing helped them grow to a $1.5 Startup marketing is tough. But today, marketing is the primary driver of revenue at your typical, fast growing B2B startup. With marketing hiring projected to increase 10% by 2026 , this might look easy.

Scale 162

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Startup 162

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

What should you look for in an Enterprise rep vs. a Mid-Market rep? How should you handle presenting challenges to your C-suite team when you’ve just joined the company? Solving High Volume, Low Conversion at Lattice Dini Mehta joined Lattice at $3M in revenue when it had just 10 people in seat for Go-To-Market and 7 salespeople.

Scale 271

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 271

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 20, 2022

Not too long ago, when Intercom turned 10 , we dedicated an entire episode to speed , or why startups should always strive to keep momentum as they scale. We surveyed and interviewed key people in our teams to understand how they worked and how they saw Intercom’s internal operations. Paul: Yeah. Some of this cut deep.

Underperforming Technical Team 249

Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Sales Hiring Scale 249

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 7, 2018

Today he’s the founder and CEO at GrowthHackers , whose software, community and annual conference help teams work together to drive breakout growth results for “must have” products and services. Sean: I came up with the phrase because I thought startups had no choice but to be super focused on growth.

VP of Engineering 196

VP of Engineering Growth Hacking Underperforming Technical Team Onboarding 196

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. Or it can be segmented by marketing channel, geography/market, cohort, or any other way that makes sense to your business.

Acquisition 91

Acquisition Underperforming Technical Team Startup Customer Lifetime Value 91

Casey Accidental

JANUARY 2, 2018

I receive a lot of questions about growth teams. Is this marketing being re-branded? Who does this team report to? When do I start a growth team for my business? The purpose of growth is to scale the usage of a product that has product-market fit. Above is the traditional marketing.

Underperforming Technical Team 111

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Retention Engineering 111

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 31, 2019

And as the organization grows, the work involved to get teams aligned on who you’re selling to and how you’re selling is not something to be taken for granted either. For today’s episode, we’re sharing go-to-market insights from past interviews that have resonated with us. When you’re a small team, your time is everything.

Underperforming Technical Team 165

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Benchmarks Sales 165

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

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Check out this 2018 Europa session with Guillaume Princen, Head of France and Southern Europe @ Stripe, where he talks about the metrics you need to be focused on in your startup. Basically you can more easily start using products. The second constituent there is the developer. Why do developers love SaaS products?

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 16, 2023

One of the toughest challenges for founders — and especially technical founders who are used to focusing so much on product features over sales — is striking “product-market fit”. What are the key milestones that go into both, and in different phases of company building — especially pre to post product-market fit?

Product Marketing 78

Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 78

Casey Accidental

MARCH 29, 2022

What is not sexy can differ by company, but usually the sexy things are new products and few features. Non-sexy things include general user experience improvements, performance, developer velocity, infrastructure, technical debt, and, fortunately less than it used to be, growth. That is not the target for product/market fit.

Investment 139

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Scale User Experience 139

SaaStr

APRIL 23, 2019

Opening video: Hey, all these startups, they have a lot of trouble getting corporate credit cards. How they came up with the idea of Brex, and product market fit. Henrique: So, we applied to YC with this VR idea, which, looking back, it was pretty bad, but at the time we thought it was great. Interested in sponsoring?

Sales Hiring 212

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Payment Methods 212

Kellblog

NOVEMBER 2, 2023

With capital scarce and expensive, with companies increasingly trapped in Schrödinger’s startup paradox , and with more startups than ever focused on positive cashflow and The Rule of 40 , it’s safe to say that Silicon Valley is still very much in a cost-cutting mood. Ditto for product marketers.

VP of Engineering 124

VP of Engineering Travel Underperforming Technical Team Headcount 124

User Pilot

DECEMBER 9, 2021

In the competitive world of SaaS products, product positioning is definitely something your product marketing team can’t afford to ignore. Product positioning allows you to identify your market niche. Why is product positioning important? The sales team could be a good source of information.

Underperforming Technical Team 98

Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Software Review Marketplace as a Service 98

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 17, 2018

The below chart averages all of our live chat related DRLPs, some of which performed better than others, but even including the underperforming DRLPs, we’ve seen positive results. If you’re a startup aiming to generate demand through online advertising, DRLPs are a cost-effective way of doing it. Step 5: Test everything.

Scale 136

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Advertising Market Research 136

Totango

MAY 15, 2024

From the urgent need for organizations to operate like startups to the surprising disparity in AI adoption between CS and support teams, these experts didn’t hold back. 1: For CS to jump ahead with AI, teams will need to operate like a startup Startups are known for their agility, adaptability, and willingness to experiment.

Customer Success 110

Customer Success Underperforming Technical Team AI Technical Review 110

User Pilot

APRIL 6, 2023

Developing and releasing sophisticated products with all the bells and whistles imaginable might seem like a great idea. Overengineered products are difficult to use, filled with bugs, and instead of improving your users’ lives, they make them unnecessarily complicated. Why do developers overengineer software products?

Underperforming Technical Team 105

Underperforming Technical Team Management Interviewing Scale 105

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 15, 2020

Then I worked on “Pokemon: Mac and Cheese” for Kraft” Bob: When I was part of the new product team, we would not only design things we also worked with suppliers and would fly all over the world to actually get those lines up and running and do that kind of stuff. People keep talking about product market fit.

Sales Hiring 265

Sales Hiring Sales VP of Engineering Underperforming Technical Team 265

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2019

Businesses also win if, as a result of AI, teams are able to create more white-glove moments that turn users into customers for life. Here are five quick takeaways: Businesses focused on scaling need to think of customer support as a revenue team , not a cost center. Kaitlyn : As you mentioned, this is your second startup journey.

Scale 156

Scale Scaling Underperforming Technical Team AI Search 156

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 12, 2018

In this guide we’ll show you how your business can navigate the martech landscape to build a lean, productive marketing stack, and how some of the fasted growing software companies are building theirs. What is a marketing technology stack? ABM has evolved from buzzword to a “must-have” for marketing teams today.

Technical Review 223

Technical Review Technology Scale Marketing 223

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Since 2010 we’ve seen more startups, funds, and capital than ever before, but with this drastic increase, investors are seeing unexpected new trends reshaping the future of the industry. Emilie Maret | Fellowship Team @ The Family. Our mission is to back the best product founders in Europe and yes. Join us at SaaStr Annual 2020.

New CTO 177

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 177

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

We’ve been in the consumer market for a very long time. And we’re about to add basically a team collaboration tier on top of the product. One, if you have good examples of companies who did both single player and multiplayer in the product that worked really well. So that’s one question.

Scale 270

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 270