Squeezing Out That Last 10%-20% Growth
Once you have something in SaaS, somewhere on the path from $1m to $10m where you’re either on your way to Initial Scale or getting past it, you’ll often end up with a subtle choice: Should you go for the extra 10%-20% of growth a year? After a few years, a few management team mistakes, […]
When to Add a European (or Other International) Office
SaaS has been global from the earliest days, although how and when you go global can vary. Salesforce went very early into Japan (it takes a lot longer to add a lot of Japanese customers for most of us), which quickly accounted for almost 10% of their revenue in the early days. I had 15% […]
15+ of The Top Sales & Marketing Mistakes SaaS Startups Make
Recently I assembled my “Top 15” list of Sales & Marketing mistakes SaaS startups make as things start to take-off. We’ve touched on quite a few of these before on SaaStr (will link to them), but I thought this might be a helpful checklist to challenge your thinking at a minimum. We’ve all made many […]
How to Know if a Key Hire is an A or a B (or even a C)
The biggest mistake you are probably going to make is hiring B or even C players for key director and VP positions when you get your startup going. This will set you back many, many months. Time and money lost investing in a key individual who simply doesn’t deliver in a critical position. As a […]
2018-2025: The Golden Age of SaaS Freemium
Way back in 2012, in the early days of SaaStr, we wrote a piece challenging everyone out there who dreamed of going freemium in SaaS. That’d you’d need at least 50 million users to build a Unicorn, or at least, to build something big. To challenge you to make sure you can really get at […]
The One Best, “Secret” Hack to Getting Venture Funding
I am fairly confident there are at least 10,000 Medium posts, 20,000 WordPress articles, and over well over 1,000,000 Tweets on How to Get Funded. It bores me personally, but I know it’s an important topic. Raising money for many CEOs is one of the their top 5 priorities. Without venture capital, I’d be nowhere. […]
Small Checks From Large Venture Funds: Maybe One is Enough
Apologies in advance to my friends and colleagues that will disagree and/or dislike this post. But anyhow … The world of venture fundraising has changed again dramatically the past 24 months. 250+ new seed funds have been raised (wow!) in the past 24 months. That really is crazy. And Big Funds have added even more […]
Field Sales: When Domain Expertise Does Matter. Just Don’t Over-index.
Imagine you are selling a $100,000+ product and you yourself as CEO/founders have limited knowledge selling to the customer base. You’ll be very tempted to hire someone with a seemingly magical rolodex. What doesn’t work for sure is hiring someone with (x) no domain expertise who also (y) has also only sold small (e.g, $10k) […]
7 “Easy” Ways to Increase Sales
7 top tips: Hire a great VP of Sales. Yes, I am a broken record here. But I’ve seen it 100+ times. Hire a great VP of Sales, and even if nothing else changes … she’ll increase the revenue per lead by 20–100%+. In one sales cycle or less. More here: How My VP, Sales […]
Should I Sell for $50m … Or Push On And Try to Build a Unicorn?
BusinessInsider had a great story this week on Datto’s $1b exit to Vista Private Equity (more on the new role of PE in SaaS here). So much of it resonated with me, especially the story of the CEO’s 10 year journey, and turning down a $100m offer to sell. A decent offer to buy your […]
