SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2025

In the world of SaaS, conventional wisdom has long dictated that focus is paramount. The narrow approach has been picked over fifteen years ago, you could start a SaaS company in any vertical and likely succeed by being first. His rationale: Training capacity : Sales teams can only absorb so much product knowledge.

Startup 157

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cloud 157

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

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

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

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

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.

VP of Engineering 293

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 293

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 7, 2023

Within the next 12 months, Adam Seligman, VP of Generative Builders at AWS, believes there will be an inversion of SaaS. That many of the standard assumptions and ways of doing SaaS will change a lot. He believes we’re rapidly approaching that new world where anyone can build a great SaaS product. What does that mean?

Generative AI 293

Generative AI AWS Artificial Intelligence AI 293

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

The underperformers who aren’t putting in the effort get a conversation, and if things don’t change, it’s not a good fit. Jameson and Sam also recommend that across the org: sales, marketing and CS — the early and sooner you can get the entire team re-focused on creating their own pipeline, the better. Guess what?

Sales Hiring 281

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 281

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 23, 2023

I’m watching public company earnings to identify early weaknesses in the software market. Microsoft’s Ability to Cross-Sell its Suite is Driving Dominance in Many Categories GitHub is now home to 100 million developers. About 70% of commercial Office subscribers use Teams. Yesterday, Microsoft announced earnings.

Azure 256

Azure Underperforming Technical Team Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 256

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.

SaaS Payments 225

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Merchant Services Payment Methods 225

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

Stax

MARCH 16, 2025

That said, industry experts agree that your SaaS companys goal churn should be below 2%. As a SaaS business leader, reducing software user churn is an important part of maintaining your customer base and increasing revenue. TL;DR The average software industry churn rate is 14%, but SaaS companies should aim for under 2%.

Payment Solutions 88

Payment Solutions Software Review Churn SaaS Payments 88

User Pilot

OCTOBER 31, 2024

How to apply actionable metrics to different SaaS business stages. A product analytics strategy is essential for any business looking to make informed decisions about product development and user experience. Enables teams to track progress toward key performance indicators (KPIs). Lack of team resources.

Strategy 105

Strategy Underperforming Technical Team Government Customer Lifetime Value 105

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.

Sales Hiring 336

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 336

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

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? Owning an airbnb, doing a podcast, coaching a team, volunteering or trading cards – that’s a hobby and a side-hustle and very much encouraged). Same holds true for developers.”

Underperforming Technical Team 322

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 322

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

Both are two of the most impressive and inspiring public SaaS CEOs — but their products and companies couldn’t be more different. One was to get a sense of what the bar was to pull off a successful SaaS IPO these days (answer = oh man, very high). Do you have two sales teams? It’s not just building the 1.0,

Underperforming Technical Team 356

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Revenue Acquisition 356

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

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. It’s about enabling the people on your team to be more productive and efficient. Lesson 6: Pivoting isn’t a bad thing.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 246

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.

Underperforming Technical Team 124

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring Scale 124

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2024

Then, you’ll have enough folks and experience to put a small team on a new initiative / segment / market. Micromanaging Your First (and Second) Management Team. Bad operational model / misunderstanding the burn rate. Your happy customers beget more happy customers in SaaS. Leave the pipedreams for $100m in ARR.

Scaling 301

Scaling Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Market Segmentation 301

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.

Sales Hiring 230

Sales Hiring Venture Capital Scale SaaS 230

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2023

That doesn’t mean they are “bad” Many, in fact, will thrive as a VP or Director somewhere else. Someone selling Gong today often will really struggle selling a complex developer product or nuanced pharma SaaS.

Sales Hiring 327

Sales Hiring Startup Underperforming Technical Team Branding 327

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

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

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2021

Hmmmm … well, to me, that’s not a bad place to be once a space, a category, gets to $100m+. But that’s not Disruption — in SaaS at least. Sometimes in SaaS, there are natural monopolies. But more often, SaaS categories with significant complexity in workflows and features end up in natural oligopolies.

Scale 294

Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 294

User Pilot

DECEMBER 31, 2024

While your product managers use our analytics reports to track product usage, your engineering teams can use our session replays to uncover bugs, and your customer support team may use our in-app help center feature to offer self-service and reduce support tickets. Userpilot is perfect for non-technical teams.

Technical Review 105

Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Software Review Onboarding 105

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 highs and lows always come, usually involving the people on your team.

Scale 300

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 300

BetterCloud

JANUARY 15, 2025

With both high complexity and large volume, data within SaaS apps can be difficult to protect. This is why security teams require SaaS security assessments. Get answers to these 7 key InfoSec questions when buying your next SaaS app. A rogue actor can penetrate a SaaS app using an outdated or insecure integration.

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Payment Services SaaS Payments Payment Methods 52

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.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

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. Not only is Klaviyo a rocketship but also the first to IPO in over 2 years (since December 2021) when it went public in September of 2023.

Revenue 307

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 307

SaaStr

DECEMBER 31, 2020

What you really want if your deal size isn’t tiny are at least somewhat qualified leads for your team to follow-up with. What you really want if your deal size isn’t tiny are at least somewhat qualified leads for your team to follow-up with. After all, no one on that list opted in to hear about your product.

Underperforming Technical Team 242

Underperforming Technical Team Content Marketing Innovation Investment 242

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2021

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? Helping the engineering teams run smoothly and being super productive thanks to mentoring.

Scale 317

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 317

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2023

After three months, this talented guy came to Harbaugh with the recognition that LaunchDarkly’s customers were developers. He didn’t like to sell to developers, so he quit. because they needed to rebuild the sales team. They rebuilt the sales team and closed some big deals. A bad one can torpedo you.

Sales Recruiting 293

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 293

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2024

These nine sales concepts, when done correctly, will greatly improve your sales and sales teams. #1: Most people think you need to hire more salespeople in a demand-poor environment. Demand-poor environments lead to problems like: Sales reps clinging on to opportunities for too long. That’s the wrong answer.

Sales Recruiting 290

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Outsourced Development 290

SaaStr

AUGUST 1, 2022

The developed world revolves around e-commerce. In a crowded field, how can SaaS companies prove themselves and shift from being completely irrelevant to their markets to delivering services their market and buyer personas value? Embed innovation into your team’s DNA. Becoming market leaders. Global approach. Product evolution.

Underperforming Technical Team 261

Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Innovation Investment 261

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2023

Management teams must determine how to thrive in a downturn to position their businesses for profitable growth. However, management teams that pursued growth at all costs were punished severely. For companies in B2B SaaS, it also means understanding to whom they’re selling. Strategy to win. Key takeaways.

Consulting 49

Consulting Underperforming Technical Team Management Marketing 49

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

So how feasible do you think that works for a typical B2B SaaS business that probably our user-base is not too knowledgeable about [inaudible] on the internet for something specific in their day-to-day use case? Jason Lemkin: But usually your teams can’t do that. This always works. If you do Salesforce, try to do Pipedrive.

Scale 293

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 293