SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

Unicorn companies often need to scale quickly to meet the demands of their rapidly growing customer base. Lesson 1: Everything is about your team. Every startup needs strong team dynamics to pull through tough times. It’s all about the team 99% of the time and 1% product and process. SaaS markets are saturated.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 246

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about scaling from $1M to $10M. We did a good AMA on this scaling at SaaStr Europa in Barcelona, a couple weeks back. That will scale, and then take those emails after four great pieces of content and do a weekly webinar and do a weekly get-together for them.

Scale 293

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 293

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2025

Companies can meet stringent quality requirements at a fraction of the cost of in-house teams, while accelerating their AI initiatives. Why It Matters : Customer support teams are drowning in tickets, with resolution times getting longer, not shorter. Why It Matters : Business users waste hours navigating complex SaaS UIs.

AI Search 175

AI Search AI Startup Scale 175

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. Applying data and science to scaling has become easier because of the shift that’s happened in the software industry over the past 15 years, from outside sales to inside sales. A data-driven framework for scaling.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about how to scale faster. But maybe in SaaS and B2B things are pretty good. This morning, a pretty slow growing player, Ping Identity, slow to move to SaaS, slow to move to the cloud, struggled in some ways to compete with Okta and others, was acquired for 2.3

Scale 272

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 272

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

Mark Roberge , SaaStr fan-favorite and Co-Founder and Managing Director of Stage 2 Capital brought together some of the top CROs in SaaS during the SaaStr Annual to share some of their greatest learnings and pivotal moments leading some of the Cloud 100 SaaS companies. The bad news is it wasn’t driving the results they wanted.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 273

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about how to scale faster. And I’ve watched them fairly quickly scale, to soon they’ll be at 10 million in revenue. Subsidizing a little bit of hardware in the early days of SaaS isn’t that big deal. Jason Lemkin: Okay. Times are good.

Scale 273

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 273

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

What’s the secret to SaaS success at YCombinator? Sam : We’re going to talk today about a lot of topics, but the general theme is, what’s the difference between good and great SaaS companies? The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Getting the team right is so key here.

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VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 293

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

If your SaaS business has a sales team, there’s no way to grow 100% year-over-year without also growing your sales leadership. Knowing the common pitfalls won’t stop you or your team from making them, but it will help build the most important skill any manager can have: resiliency. SaaS = Software that scales.

Scale 183

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 183

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

And for Intercom’s VP of Sales EMEA, Sanj Bhayro , scaling is just what you need to invest in to ensure growth becomes as constant and linear as it can be. Sanj has plenty of experience scaling sales teams at growing businesses, and that’s precisely why, as of November of last year, he‘s overseeing EMEA sales at Intercom.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

So let’s take a look back to a deep dive with the CEOs on what they learned building their first senior teams: ———-. As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. What makes you feel that you need to level up your management, set up your first management team?

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 261

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Basically all of the SaaS CEOs/founders I know of have made at least one terrible VP+ level hire. Sometimes it’s VP Sales (OK, often, this is the most common mishire — another post here on what a really great VPS can do for you, and how a poor one can wreck your company, coming). Sometimes it’s VP Marketing.

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Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 336

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

While it can be frightening to think differently, doing so has helped him make Veeva the biggest vertical SaaS success story of all time. If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! I was a software developer, a product person. As Veeva grew, that’s when the long-term vision came into play.

Sales Hiring 339

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 339

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2024

At the closing AMA of SaaStr Annual, SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin shared candid insights about what’s really happening in SaaS today. In this Ask Me Anything Part 1, Lemkin answers the questions: What does SaaStr Annual attendee data tell us about the state of SaaS? Is outbound sales dead? Lets find out the answers.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Social Media 273

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Developers act, think, and behave differently than your average customer. As an API-first company, WorkOS focuses on selling primarily to developers. Doing Business with Developers. Developers haven’t typically been the buyers in enterprise software, so why should you build for developers?

Outsourced Development 210

Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Development Part-Time VPE 210

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about scaling and VC funding. I think it’s a challenge to folks that think we are in some sort of terrible downturn for SaaS and cloud. While Azure and Google Cloud grew at record rates, Shopify for example, its SaaS business only grew 10% last quarter.

Scale 245

Scale SaaS Payments Scaling SaaS 245

Stax

MARCH 18, 2025

The SaaS industry has seen explosive growth in the past decadeand this is expected to continue this year. 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. Churn rate. Customer lifetime value. Customer acquisition cost.

Scale 117

Scale Payment Services Payments SaaS Payments 117

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

Sequoia Capital’s India arm put together a terrific summary of all their learnings about SaaS and Cloud from SaaStr Annual this year. They also did an A+ session at Annual with several top India SaaS founders, which you can catch below! Here’s 22 of the most relevant takeaways for India’s SaaS ecosystem.

Scale 293

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cybersecurity 293

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 13, 2019

When we announced a few weeks ago that we would be bringing our leading SaaS conference to Asia, and running it in Hong Kong, many locals thanked us for choosing the city. was created by a team with 25+ years of experience in location-based tech, spanning various services and real-time asset tracking systems. Founders : Max Armbruster.

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SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Merchant Services Payment Methods 225

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2022

At Maxio , we help B2B SaaS companies unlock their next stage of growth. Our financial operations platform is designed to meet the unique financial challenges of B2B SaaS, including billing, subscription management, revenue and expense recognition, and SaaS analytics. Vendr is forever changing how companies buy and renew SaaS.

Scale 272

Scale Underperforming Technical Team B2B AI 272

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

If a VP of Sales has a $500k+ OTE and a big team to manage, does it even make senses to sell courses on the side? Once you had something, once you had scale, then go help one other startup. I don’t wish to see more people in increasingly bad financial standing this year. Same holds true for developers.”

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Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 322

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

sales team. I would argue it was one of the first SaaS companies of its time, but back then we called it an ASP, an application service provider. I did all sorts of things there from sales, to project management, to running the engineering team, hiring. This is where I got my chops in growing and scaling enterprise sales teams.

Scale 294

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 294

User Pilot

OCTOBER 19, 2024

What does customer satisfaction look like for SaaS businesses? Unlike traditional businesses, most SaaS businesses operate the subscription pricing model. As a result, satisfying customers is key to any success in SaaS. Satisfaction in SaaS, therefore, isn’t simply about developing a nice product and launching it in the market.

Business 111

Business Underperforming Technical Team Customer Lifetime Value Systems Review 111

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2020

More on that here: The $2 Million Dollar Man/Woman: How to Think About Scaling Your Customer Success Team. More on that here: Two SaaS Metrics That Actually Don’t Matter That Much: Absolute Churn and Sales Cycles. Now some bonus tips: Build an enterprise-only sales team. You need human beings to do this. A lot more.

Scale 307

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Point of Sale 307

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2021

Hmmmm … well, to me, that’s not a bad place to be once a space, a category, gets to $100m+. Because at this scale, there will be room at the bottom. But that’s not Disruption — in SaaS at least. Sometimes in SaaS, there are natural monopolies. You’ll have to develop a very lean sales culture.

Scale 294

Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 294

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2021

We can look back at how Datadog scaled. Pomel focused his session on: Making your SaaS startup customer-centric: Hw event marketing has helped him integrate his engineering and sales teams. How many of you guys’ product rely on the highly functioning engineering team? We hired everybody on our teams.

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Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 317

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

So the first question is what made SaaS so successful. If you kind of that question, thinking about the stakeholders and the decisions and companies of using SaaS products, there’s kind of three types. Customers love SaaS products and tools because it simply works. The second constituent there is the developer.

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SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2024

Earlier this month, Gong’s CEO and Co-Founder Amit Bendov sat down with SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin at SaaStr Europa 2024 to talk about all things AI and the lessons learned while scaling to billions. Over the last 20 years, SaaS companies have become hyper-specialized with very specific roles. No more SDRs, CSMs, AEs.

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Scale AI Sales Underperforming Technical Team 306

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

In today’s dynamic SaaS landscape of hyperfuncational SaaS, the journey of building a product that customers adore, while simultaneously scaling revenue to nearly $1B, is still quite a feat. At the time, Shopify was still a new player. What product would you recommend? The bet paid off.

Revenue 307

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 307

User Pilot

JANUARY 17, 2024

Scaling SaaS is not for the faint of heart. If you do not scale, you will be unable to reach a new pool of customers and your competitors will leave you in the dust. If you scale prematurely, you may struggle to satisfy customer expectations. Provide the necessary training for your sales teams.

Scale 105

Scale Scaling SaaS Underperforming Technical Team 105

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 29, 2019

In this week’s episode we’ve dug down into the podcast vaults to bring you some of the best insights shared by our guests about scaling sales. It’s no surprise that one of the key levers for growth as you go from startup to scale-up is your sales team. John Barrows: Passion and work ethic.

Scale 172

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Payment Services 172

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

Different Pathways to CRO For Jane Kim, former CRO of CircleCl,, she used to work in finance before transitioning to SaaS. After switching to SaaS, she started as an SMB sales leader with no prior management or SMB sales experience. The decision to leave a fairly scaled role leading 200+ AEs at LinkedIn to join a smaller-stage startup.

Scale 300

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 300

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2019

It got a lot of engagement from the SaaS veterans out there, so I thought it would be worth digging in more on each point: Regrets are different than mistakes. So what’s my list of SaaS regrets? The best ones are always accretive in SaaS. What Order Should You Hire Your Management Team In? #4. It Compounds.

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Sales Hiring Venture Capital Scale SaaS 230

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2024

He previously built the pre and post sales solutions team at mParticle from zero to supporting hundreds of enterprise customers. Is there a lot of internal or customer work that needs to be done or managed by your team? As the lens of efficiency is further applied in SaaS, Customer Success is coming under greater scrutiny.

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Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring Scale 122

SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2019

Scaling the company’s employee base, sales teams, marketing, and operations—all while preserving its culture—has required a laser focus on first principles, smart processes, and effective hiring. In this talk, Claire will share these and other lessons for scaling high-growth organizations. Dare I say SaaS.

Scale 160

Scale Payment Services Payment Methods Scaling 160

SaaStr

JANUARY 13, 2023

After scaling from $0 to $100,000,000 in two years, Jones has a fair share of experience with things breaking. To thrive in those environments, they develop the skill sets needed. At Wiz, the leadership team thinks of the company as a child. While your team is small, your communication process can be simple.

Scale 284

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Leadership Communication 284

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. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team. Yes, Dropbox started off with no traditional sales team. It’s become apparent that for hypergrowth SaaS startups today, there are two distinct phases.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162