Secrets of When and How to Talk to Customers at a Startup
Jason Lemkin says forget building wireframe UI’s and start out interviewing 20 customers, because you just won’t understand your customers until you do. Here’s the gist of why you need 20 interviews before you do anything else: And you have to do 20. I know it’s hard to get to 20. But it’s the right […]
Planning to Do a SaaS Startup? Don’t Forget the 20 Interview Rule.
Recently I spent some time with two seemingly similar SaaS start-ups. Both are at about $100k in MRR (congratulations!). Both have happy, enthusiastic customers. Both have really great products and are organically growing. Both have great founder CEOs. But even though both are now at $1m ARR … one is just so much better positioned […]
23 Great Websites for Entrepreneurs: Plus Some Radical Advice from an Entrepreneur-Bootstrapper
I recently came across two giant lists of websites for entrepreneurs, courtesy of Jason Lemkin (whose blog is listed in both): Inc.com 50 Forbes 100 Now for some radical advice: the vast majority of the sites listed in those publications won’t help the vast majority of entrepreneurs at all. In fact, many of them will […]
Let’s Try Another Verse of Your SaaS Company Does Not Need a Sales Force
It’s time for another installment of what some of the Enterprise Irregulars have called the Jason and Bob show. Jason and I have disagreed on a fair number of issues over time, though we have also agreed on a lot. Jason’s had a great run and is now in the rarefied atmosphere of VC’s. All […]
Inbound or Outbound Sales? The Answer is Yes
There’s a meme, a CommonThink, among certain segments that Outbound Sales is Bad, or at least, a Little Unseemly. And maybe a lot bit Old School. That we’re in a new world of sales, a new consultative world, where leads come in, prospects can try and learn before they even talk to a human, and […]
Does Your SaaS Company Have to Have a Sales Force?
Any time absolutes are being bandied about, I have to do the fact check. Sorry, it’s just an automatic reflex. We live in a world that is largely gray and seldom black and white. This was never more true than in the world of startups. Entrepreneurs need to see both sides of every coin before […]
Curse of the ‘Middlers’: Why Happiness Officers Can’t Stand In for True Sales Professionals
We’ve spent a ton of time on SaaStr talking about how to think about sales and sales teams; revenue/demand-focused marketing; and keeping those customers over their lifetime. A more fundamental question we’ve touched on but mostly bypassed is this: Do I Even Need Salespeople at All? I mean, Atlassian doesn’t have any. Can’t I just […]
You Have to Have an Overseas Dev Team to Scale? Baloney!
ba·lo·ney 2 also bo·lo·ney (b -l n ) Slang. n. Nonsense. interj. Used to express disagreement or exasperation. Recently, I was doing something on LinkedIn, and it asked me to endorse various people’s skills like it often does. One face in particular popped out at me: Anders Hejlsberg. I’ve known Anders for many years, so […]
