SaaStr

JUNE 17, 2023

In the ever-evolving landscape of SaaS, Venture Capital, Bootstrapping, and Valuations – understanding market trends and investment patterns is critical. We’ll explain Jason’s take on the recent market fluctuations, highlighting major deals that shaped investment patterns and their effects on valuation trends.

Venture Capital 277

Venture Capital Scale Technical Review Software Review 277

SaaStr

JUNE 6, 2024

Our priority is identifying opportunities where we can add value to a startup, so we look for companies that have initial traction, early product-market fit, a clear understanding of their target customers, and a scalable, repeatable sales motion. Our typical check size is in the mid-to-high single digit millions. #3.

SaaS Payments 298

SaaS Payments Management Scale Venture Capital 298

The Angel VC

JULY 5, 2017

In the first part of this post , I looked at what some of the most knowledgeable people in the industry said about Product/Market Fit (PMF) and how they try to define and measure it. Note that this definition intentionally doesn’t say anything about market size. Let me know if you have any feedback!

Venture Capital 252

Venture Capital Product Marketing Startup SaaS 252

SaaStr

JANUARY 22, 2023

SaaStr 627: Move Over, Sales: Why Product & Marketing are the C-Suite’s New Power Partnership with Checkout.com CMO Leela Srinivasan and CPO Meron Colbeci    4. SaaStr 624: Investing and Venture Capital in 2023 with SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin and Atrium Founder and CRO Pete Kazanjy  5.

Scale 245

Scale Customer Success Venture Capital Sales Hiring 245

SaaStr

OCTOBER 7, 2022

The number of global venture capital (VC) investments dipped in 2022, thanks to ongoing geopolitical tensions, turbulence in global capital markets, supply chain issues, and increasing interest rates. Venture capital firms pumped a lot of money into the economy during the pandemic, buying countless software companies.

Venture Capital 263

Venture Capital Marketing Construction Startup 263

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2022

This focus can be a risk because it is shrinking your market. Many start-ups think they need to net venture capital to jumpstart their growth. Sales and marketing are still significant, but consider dedicating more research and design to the user experience. Know how to market your product.

Scale 246

Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring SMB 246

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2023

The Most Surprising Thing About VC This Year Shen has been in venture capital for 12 years now, and it’s been a crazy ride to watch the whole bull market back in ‘10 and ‘11 when 10x revenue was insanely expensive for a SaaS company. Shen likes to use the super-human definition of product market fit.

AI 316

AI Generative AI Venture Capital SaaS 316

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

Q: Should Product Marketing Work for Product or Marketing? Product marketing is a weird art, with many over-indexing. These days, CEOs are looking for too much magic from product marketing. Maybe we expect too much, even up to $10-20M ARR, and expect magic from product marketing.

Scale 290

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 290

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 22, 2017

Whether it’s Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Google search engine marketing and retargeting, email marketing, or outbound calling, all of these channels bear some hallmarks of saturation. The surge of venture capital in the last five years worsens this predicament. A product that is hard to sell isn’t the right product.

Scale 189

Scale SaaS Venture Capital Machine Learning 189

SaaStr

JUNE 30, 2023

Those companies will have a headstart on the competition when the market arrives. When I look at the purpose of venture capital, it’s not to burn a dollar five in order to grow a dollar of revenue,” says Magnuson. Braze didn’t find a true product-market fit until around 2014-2015.

Scale 245

Scale Mobile Venture Capital Scaling 245

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 21, 2017

This rivalry causes four major responses: Verticalization - compete with a horizontal player by picking one customer segment and building a product better suited to them. Trades market size for better product market fit. Segmentation - focus on SMB, Mid-Market, or Enterprise, to play where competition isn’t present.

Venture Capital 189

Venture Capital SaaS Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 189

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2024

There are so many great SaaS veterans today from great companies, so it’s harder to determine which marketers know how to get you more leads. You don’t want to hire a product marketer, a corporate marketer, or a strategist. The product marketer doesn’t make sense between $2M and $10M in revenue.

CTO Hire 211

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO Venture Capital 211

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Silicon Valley-based venture capital companies might tell you to build productivity models around hiring salespeople and scaling your organization that way, but it’s not the way. It’s necessary, in every new market you go into, to go in and soften the beach. The country maturity model is critical.

Scale 262

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 262

Andreessen Horowitz

MAY 21, 2024

We often invest in companies well before they have clear “product-market fit” in the traditional sense. Unlike other large-scale venture capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz was started by and is still run by founders and serious technologists. The American Dynamism team at a16z shares that passion. It’s who we are.

Technical Review 106

Technical Review Engineering Venture Capital Software Review 106

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2020

And if you don’t have any mutual contacts with the investor, where they can do backchannel referring on you, you’re going to need to go the extra mile in terms of that communication style that we talked about over video, and also the proof of your commitment to what you’re building, and maybe even evidence of product-market fit.

Scale 317

Scale Investment Venture Capital Technical Review 317

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2023

If you’ve raised venture capital, you know net revenue retention is important. If you don’t know, it’s the hockey stick curve going from $2M to $6M to $18M to $36M and on and on after you’ve found product market fit. What is the highest form of product market fit? Product market fit never stops.

Scale 182

Scale Sales Hiring Customer Success Scaling 182

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2024

How Can You Tell When You Have Product Market Fit? Over time, you establish product-market fit and determine how to sell at scale. At what point do you know you have product market fit? That’s the long answer to knowing when you have product market fit.

Scale 264

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales Recruiting 264

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

You have to understand how venture capital works. A market is too small” is both a truism and an excuse. We don’t need a VP of Sales, Engineering, Product, Marketing, Customer Success.” And then some believe they don’t need one, especially a VP of Product or Engineering. 99% of startups aren’t that.

Part-Time VPE 242

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 242

SaaStr

JULY 24, 2024

Jason’s earliest investment had strong product market fit, but it took them four years to come out with their mobile app. The one who can iterate faster. If you can build great software 50% faster than the competition in two years, that compounds. The fastest absolutely wins.

Sales Hiring 306

Sales Hiring Startup Scale SMB 306

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 31, 2017

On one hand, growth is important in order to raise a venture capital round. Growth shows demand for a product. On the other hand, churn is a huge source of friction and raises questions of product market fit. That’s a challenging marketing obstacle to overcome.

Churn 100

Churn Scale Venture Capital Acquisition 100

The Angel VC

MAY 8, 2015

Ideally you have strong organic growth (which is strong proof of product/market fit) as well as some success with paid customer acquisition channels (which can be scaled more easily). Organic, paid, both? How does your conversion funnel look like for different sources of traffic?

Development Team Review 252

Development Team Review Software Review Scale Acquisition 252

Chart Mogul

JUNE 8, 2018

On what it takes for SaaS startups to get venture capital funding today. “If you want to raise capital from a VC fund then it only makes sense if you really have the ambition and a very strong desire to do something really really big.” On increasing transparency in venture capital. Let’s dive in!

Venture Capital 84

Venture Capital Software Review Scale Startup 84

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

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

You’re in the valley, you raise venture capital. We ended up so totally nailing product market fit because we were laser focused on the customer. Spencer : You have to hire someone who is an expert at it in product marketing. We don’t have anyone in product marketing.

VP of Engineering 299

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 299

SaaStr

JULY 24, 2020

The first is product, and that includes everything from technical risk, timing risk, those kinds of things related to establishing product market fit. But that’s only the beginning for them, collecting data is the thing that they can do right now. Unfortunately, accept that you don’t have it at the seed stage.

Scale 208

Scale Finance Investment Government 208

Casey Accidental

MAY 12, 2021

After three years there, where we tripled the user base and unlocked international, I then decided to… hang out at a venture capital firm. Now, I’m a Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite, a public company. As Rick James might say, product/market fit is a hell of a drug. Then started an advising business.

Scale 101

Scale Venture Capital Growth Hacking Scaling 101

SaaSOptics

JUNE 9, 2022

Still, they’ll typically need to prepare a long-term strategy for growth, as well as the right product/market fit, before approaching investors. Venture capital. Venture capital/VC firms pool money for investment funds by asking their partners to contribute capital.

Investment 82

Investment Venture Capital Scale SaaS 82

Baremetrics

APRIL 16, 2021

For top-tier programs ( YC , Techstars , 500 Startups ), you need to be a top 10% company, fitting a near-term venture capital profile across your team, your product/market and your traction. These programs generally push companies onto the venture capital path. Venture Capital. Company Stage.

Venture Capital 66

Venture Capital Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team SaaS 66

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 24, 2020

Blake is a partner at one of the most well known SaaS venture capital firms in the world, OpenView Venture Partners, based in Boston. He spends most of his time trying to advance the product-led growth movement, both through thought leadership and investing at pioneers like Expensify and Calendly.

Startup 85

Startup Scale Venture Capital Forecasting 85

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 12, 2018

The “shiny penny” approach (focus all your attention on the hottest tools in the market) or “head in the sand” approach (fall victim to analysis paralysis and avoid choosing any tools) are no longer viable. What is a marketing technology stack? This year, marketers will spend $4.6 Alternatives: Salespanel, Infer.

Technical Review 223

Technical Review Technology Scale Marketing 223

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2019

Then also went into venture capital where I invested in API first products. On one half of it you have product market fit and on the other half you have partners and ideally developers integrating in order to reach your users. You really have to find product market fit. This went really really well.

Payments 133

Payments Scale Scaling Revenue 133

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 3, 2022

I spent a few years there and then went to a venture capital fund where I spent five years investing in online businesses with network effects. Natasha: I’m Canadian, for anyone curious about the accent, but I’ve lived in London for 13 years. Liam: I think that’s one of the things branding early.

Scale 206

Scale Outsourcing Services Software Sales Hiring 206

User Pilot

JUNE 13, 2022

We covered the best blogs on SaaS growth, product marketing , UX analytics, venture capital, and sales. The Userpilot blog provides well-researched, in-depth articles on user onboarding, product growth, product growth, user experience, and so much more. Product -led growth blog. Product marketing.

Venture Capital 52

Venture Capital SaaS Data Scale 52

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

To build the initial team, to build the product, to build the initial go to market, to build the first customers and to build the ARR, the starting. Pietro Bezza | Managing Partner @ Connect Ventures. Pietro : This journey used to end at the legendary, mythical product/market fit.

New CTO 182

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 182

FastSpring

MARCH 17, 2022

Same if you’re the development lead at a venture-backed startup that just crossed $10 million a year. That will be our focus in Global SaaS Leaders: to create a space where you can talk about the unique challenges that happen after you reach product-market fit and begin to grow. Not focused on venture capital or funding rounds.

SaaS 78

SaaS Venture Capital Scale Software 78

OpenView Labs

MAY 14, 2020

This advice comes by way of OpenView’s once-bootstrapped portfolio companies Deputy , Loopio and Calendly —as well as conversations I’ve had with the founders of Tuple and Whimsical , two bootstrapped product-led businesses. First things first: Not every business is a venture-scale business .

Venture Capital 64

Venture Capital Scale Compensation Pricing 64

Kellblog

JULY 8, 2020

They should have input, but startups should hire a VP of Marketing with strong product marketing skills at the same time as the first VP of Sales. (DK: That embrace needs to be deeper than just go-to-market; it has to include product in some way.). Expecting the sales leader to figure out positioning and pricing.

Sales Hiring 144

Sales Hiring Startup Software Review Enterprise 144