Big Companies Don’t Churn. They Quit You.
“Churn” is a term we all use in SaaS as a core metric, but its roots, as near as I remember and can tell, come from our B2C colleagues. In a low-end subscription model for a tool, not a solution (e.g., semi-commodity storage, semi-commodity hosting, etc. etc.), individuals and small businesses, often paying on their […]
Claire Hughes-Johnson: Build, Break, Stretch, Repeat Lessons from Scaling Google & Stripe (Video + Transcript)
Jason Lemkin sits down with Stripe COO Claire Hughes-Johnson to discuss what it’s like to scale a fast-growing company and how to manage hypergrowth. Having over 10 years of experience with Google and being intrinsically motivated by Stripe’s mission certainly helps. When you’re the COO of a global company that only continues to expand across […]
What You Want to Hit: 50 and 20 at 10 (million in ARR)
The first SaaStr post that got widespread distribution was this one — “Want to Understand SaaS? If Nothing Else — Understand That It Compounds.” The excerpt here: “What does this mean, that SaaS compounds? It means it’s really, really hard to get revenues going. You close a customer for $120 in annualized revenue, you only […]
6 Things in SaaS That Are Only Obvious At Scale
Some thoughts: Churn Lurks. Churn doesn’t happen overnight, especially with annual contracts. It lurks. Use customer visits, NPS surveys, and more to root it out before it happens. Oftentimes, you don’t even lose customers until Year 3. So it really only hits you just when things are getting good. More on that here: Why It’s […]
One Simple Rule on When to Build a “Custom” Feature
“Custom” features … I feel this is perhaps the point founders get the worst advice of all. Especially from VCs, B2C folks, and folks that have never sold bigger deals and into the enterprise. One-off customization per se is bad. This is SaaS, not a services business. But Being paid a lot to build something […]
The 10-Year (And Longer) Customer
Salesforce likes to talk about “Customers for Life”, and while that’s sort of catchy, it’s a little hard to grok what it really means. It finally sunk in for me a bit the other day. At EchoSign, now Adobe Sign, there’s a large group of well-known customers that I closed, Back in The Day … […]
How Get Better at Recruiting. (We All Need To).
Recruiting is tough. I certainly don’t do it well enough. But to be a great CEO, you need to find a way to force yourself to be a great recruiter. Let me share some learnings, and what I do now to force myself to be a better recruiter. And what I wish I’d done better […]
Top Sales Lessons Scaling to $100m ARR: A Discussion with Zendesk, Atlassian and Optimizely at NextWorld Capital
The other day NextWorld Capital put on an outstanding event for SaaS founders and executives on Scaling to $100m ARR. I was asked to moderate a panel with three great speakers and SaaS companies — but with very different sales models. Atlassian is famously sort of traditional sales rep free (outside of its channel partners, and […]
Outbound Always Works
These days, it can really feel like the Old Bag of Sales Tricks is starting to just not work anymore: With maybe 500x the SaaS vendors of 10 years ago, there’s so much noise. Emails get blocked, spam filtered. No one even has voice mail anymore. 50 calls a day feels awfully dated. Everyone gets […]
7 Guidelines on Selling Some of Your Stock in a VC Round
These days, if you raise money at a >=$80m-100m valuation, and are oversubscribed, most bigger Silicon Valley VC firms will offer to provide some founder liquidity. It’s not out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s so they can buy more. Bigger funds want to own as much as they can, and if they can get another 2%-3% more […]
