Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 10, 2020

I hope this post allows people and teams to safely talk about Product Judgment. If you ever had to face a Manager, Director or Exec as they make bad product decisions and you’re struggling to persuade them otherwise, this post will help you. It takes years to build, and therefore ranges from very weak to very strong.

Underperforming Technical Team 291

Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Communication B2B 291

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

Duo Security is an Ann Arbor, Michigan based cyber-security startup. sales team. As everyone left to work for an investment bank in California or New York that summer of ’99, I went to work at a startup in Ann Arbor. Now, we did really cool stuff at this startup. Want to see more content like this? .”

Scale 295

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 295

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 145

Sales Hiring Startup Software Review Enterprise 145

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 264

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 264

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 23, 2023

I’m watching public company earnings to identify early weaknesses in the software market. The transcript highlights the major trends in software of 2023. Machine Learning is a Secular Platform Change & a Growth Driver for Software The age of AI is upon us, and Microsoft is powering it.

Azure 256

Azure Underperforming Technical Team Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 256

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

and now very big in the case of, say, a zero, which is cloud accounting software. The future opportunity is for the new owner to realize, which is actually more analogous to buying property than it is to investing in a startup or buying public stock. Are you using accounting software? And I’ve done that.

Scale 120

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 120

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

Yet competition and the exponential rate of change in software are pushing against that mission. Enter our philosophy of Run Less Software. It means reducing choices amongst engineering teams and standardizing technology, so our team can spend as much time as possible delivering value to customers.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! The other thing is I’ve studied enterprise software for literally 30 years. I was an intern at IBM mainframe software when I was 20 years old. “Look, here’s enterprise software. I was a software developer, a product person.

Sales Hiring 340

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 340

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

PlanGrid builds beautiful, simple software for the construction industry. 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? Getting the team right is so key here.

VP of Engineering 299

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 299

SaaStr

OCTOBER 26, 2023

Co-founder and CEO at Greenhouse, Daniel Chait, sits down with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin to share what’s new at Greenhouse, a successful recruiting software company at $200M in ARR today. Getting off the ground is one thing — an easy pitch of being an HR tech startup focused on improving hiring. Is Greenhouse multi-product?

Sales Hiring 286

Sales Hiring AI SMB Scale 286

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

They supply their customers with a full marketing suite and customer data software for thousands of SMB, e-commerce businesses. There wasn’t software that did this back in the 2010s when Klaviyo was founded. And we actually asked them, like, well, what software matters, and they all said marketing. Is there a downturn?”

Revenue 312

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 312

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

OnStartups

MAY 18, 2021

All the points below have been pulled from startup sales teams that I think work pretty well (including the team at CRM software company, HubSpot). Building Startup Sales Teams. They’re not bad people, they’re just different from you, especially if you're an introverted geek like me.

Sales Hiring 110

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 110

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

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

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

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 298

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 298

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 20, 2018

In the early stages of most SaaS startups’ lives, the CEO or founder often acts as the initial head of sales. It is important that these friendly connections represent the target persona market you have outlined, as otherwise, the feedback loop is likely to be weak. Iterate the product based on feedback.

Startup 178

Startup Sales SaaS Systems Review 178

Kellblog

JUNE 27, 2022

Bernard , Suranga , Alice , Rob ) as well as my other European startup colleagues (e.g., The US poses numerous, often unique, challenges for a European technology startup. So is developing a geographic strategy. Think: “so who that I might have heard of is using your software?”. The market is vast. It’s worse.

Startup 134

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Compensation 134

Trint

NOVEMBER 23, 2020

I’d never been exposed to software developers and the mysterious world of coding. I was introduced to a team of software engineers who’d been working on tech that aligned audio and text so that you could follow it like karaoke. I remember saying to the team, “We just invented the future.”

Branding 130

Branding Advertising Underperforming Technical Team VP of Engineering 130

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 195

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team 195

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. When I first joined the Gorgias team, there were two founders, two engineers, and myself as the first non-technical hire.

Scale 290

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 290

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. But how fast should companies hire?

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

Kellblog

AUGUST 31, 2022

Two important notes: There is an optional fourth part, sales development , i.e., managing the team of sales development reps (SDRs) who convert MQLs into stage-1 oppties. Whether this team should report into sales or marketing is a separate debate. The lines between these parts are not black and white.

Underperforming Technical Team 145

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Marketing Startup 145

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. Now, running MongoDB as CEO.

Sales Recruiting 264

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale VP of Engineering 264

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. We learned a lot. Paul, what did we exactly do?

Underperforming Technical Team 249

Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Sales Hiring Scale 249

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 13, 2019

Tienpay offers digital banking software that handles wallet, digital exchange, and digital assets. was created by a team with 25+ years of experience in location-based tech, spanning various services and real-time asset tracking systems. It provides smart hardware self-development and cloud service. Founded : 2013. South Korea.

SaaS Payments 225

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Merchant Services Payment Methods 225

The Angel VC

MAY 17, 2017

In our weekly investment team call earlier this week we decided to pass on two early-stage SaaS startups that were both on track to grow from zero to $100k in MRR in their first 12 months of going live. The other part is that even as recently as 6-24 months ago, we’d consider a SaaS startup with this growth pattern exceptional.

Business Model 180

Business Model Venture Capital SaaS Underperforming Technical Team 180

FastSpring

DECEMBER 7, 2023

As the Director of Corporate Development & Strategic Partnerships at WP Engine , Carl has worked on many acquisitions and partnerships, including brands like Flywheel, Perfect Dashboard, Block Lab, and recently, Delicious Brains. “This is everyday for me, so I love talking about it,” says Carl Hargreaves about mergers and acquisitions.

Software Review 148

Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review Branding 148

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 14, 2019

The SaaStock team will be landing in São Paulo to run the region’s first Pan-Latin American SaaS conference, SaaStock LatAm. He was also Coordinator and Trainer of startup sales at Gama Academy, the first sales training program for Brazilian startups. He’s been running SaaSholic, a blog where he writes about startups and SaaS.

Technical Review 207

Technical Review Scale Entrepreneurship Sales Hiring 207

User Pilot

MARCH 5, 2025

That’s where customer engagement software comes in. How I chose the best customer engagement software My evaluation process combined thorough feature analysis , a careful review of user feedback, and insights from industry reports. But how do you track and strengthen these connections? Criterion Does It Deliver?

Software Review 52

Software Review Engagement Software Scale 52

Incredo

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Precisely – about SaaS affiliate programs… SaaS partner programs entice both software providers and affiliate partners for various reasons: 1) SaaS products are usually low-cost. 2) Software companies can pay high commissions because they don’t sell physical products. 5) Everyone minds his own business.

SaaS Payments 139

SaaS Payments Payment Methods Merchant Services Sales Recruiting 139

Baremetrics

AUGUST 29, 2021

Luckily, these days we have access to sophisticated software to help solve that exact problem. Let’s say your ICP is a web developer running a startup on the East Coast. Firstly, for the next steps to work correctly, this data has to interface with other pieces of software that just don’t perform as well with larger datasets.

Scale 97

Scale Startup Sales Hiring Sales 97

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 21, 2018

Whether you’re at an early-stage startup that’s just made its first sales hires, or part of a fast-moving sales team in a large organization, the key to success often comes down to efficiency. That means your focus should be on building the right customer profile and developing precise messaging to reach them.

Sales Hiring 183

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 183

Scytale

NOVEMBER 4, 2024

Whether you’re a new entrepreneur in the software industry, scaling your startup, or a seasoned SaaS provider, securing a SOC 3 audit report can be a game-changer for your business , helping you strengthen customer trust while demonstrating your unwavering commitment to data security. The good news? The good news?

compliance 52

compliance Underperforming Technical Team Scale Technical Review 52

Hitenism

OCTOBER 3, 2016

Two tweets about raising money was all it took to get 81 email responses and 53 customer development calls with founders. That’s when I realized that fundraising may be startup founders’ biggest pain point. Startup founders are a confident bunch often with long track records of success in whatever they do.

Development Team Review 166

Development Team Review Software Review Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing 166

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 25, 2020

But should you build your own in-house marketing team or hire an agency partner? Digital agencies are companies that help other businesses perform a specific function such as marketing, development, or design. They act as a substitute for an in-house team, serving the same labor function but outside of the organization.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 145