15+ Due Diligence Questions You Really Should Be Asking Every VC You Meet
If you really want to diligence a VC, Talk to the CEO of a portfolio company not listed on their twitter — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) August 16, 2020 Q: What is the proper way to do due diligence on a VC firm? Here are the things, IMHO and IME, that are...
The 3 Types of Day 1 Pricing: Low End of Normal. Identical. And Anchor High.
Q: As an entrepreneur starting out, is it better to overprice your product or underprice it? I remember years ago I was at an event with the CEO of a SaaS leader. And I asked him how he came up with their freemium pricing model. A data science team? A/B Testing?...
7+ Tips On How To Build Your First Sales Team
Q: How do you structure a sales team when you’ve got zero experience doing sales? Well, first go get some experience with sales. 🙂 At least, close the first 10 customers yourself. If you don’t, you’ll never have any idea how to do it. And the odds your first rep...
Why SMB Reps Struggle in the Enterprise. And Vice-Versa.
Q: How is low/mid-ticket sales different from enterprise sales? They are very, very different. If I had to boil down how to filter potential sales professionals based on just 1 controlling criterion, it would be deal size. Enterprise sales: Reps often hunt many of...
The Top 50 SaaStr Answers on Quora in 2020
It’s been a fun experience being on Quora for … a decade 🙂 We’ve crossed 60,000,000 views of our answers there, so let’s take a look at the Top 50 most viewed SaaStr Answers on Quora in 2020: Why do many startup owners sell their firm and move...
Can an Entrepreneur Back Out of a Signed Term Sheet Without Damaging Their Reputation?
Can an entrepreneur back out of a signed term sheet without damaging his/her reputation? I’m going to say Yes, probably. There is a lot of drama around broken term sheets. Mostly around VCs backing out, not founders. But here’s the thing — term sheet are term sheets....
The Playbook to Scaling Your Team in Hypergrowth with Flexport CRO Ben Braverman (Video + Transcript)
Ben Braverman explains how Flexport entered a competitive market with a unique model and continues to grow. Hiring senior leaders can set companies up to fail and see how sticking with a current, successful model can be the key to hypergrowth. Rely on your success,...
Defining Your Customer Journey From Prospect to Champion with Sage People SVP Kathy Lord (Video + Transcript)
Creating champions requires detailed focus on the journey. Kathy Lord, SVP of Sage People explains how asking hard questions, embracing feedback and making personal connections with your customers can move the sales journey from prospect to champion. Want to see more...
SaaStr Podcasts for the Week with SocialChorus, Trello, Gremlin, Terminal, Guild Education, Gitlab, and Pleo — November 15, 2019
Ep. 282: Michael Pryor, Co-Founder & CEO @ Trello, now Head of Trello Product with Atlassian following their recent acquisition. Kolton Andrus is the Founder & CEO @ Gremlin, the failure as a service startup finds...
The Average SaaS Unicorn Raises $370,000,000. And Bootstrapping is Rare.
We were recently asked: Q: Are there any examples of a unicorn startup that was bootstrapped? Of course the answer is yes. But I didn’t have a sense of how many, and how the data might look. So I fired up the 2019 Forbes Cloud 100, which isn’t all private...
What is the hardest rejection you’ve ever had in sales?
What is the hardest rejection you’ve ever had in sales? The hardest rejection I’ve had in sales was around renewals. Especially ones I thought we really had earned. But still lost. In particular, in the early days of EchoSign / Adobe Sign, we had a particular...
SaaStr Podcasts for the Week with Zoom and Menlo Ventures — September 20, 2019
Ep. 266: Janine Pelosi is the CMO @ Zoom, the next-generation enterprise phone system. Prior to their very successful IPO, Zoom raised funding from some of the best in the business including Sequoia, Emergence Capital, Horizons Ventures and...
What skills do you look for in an entry level sales person?
What skills do you look for in an entry level sales person? If you are a founder hiring salespeople to manage yourself (i.e., you don’t have a VP of Sales or other sales leader yet) … your #1 criteria should be trust. Specifically, does your gut and time with him/her...
How difficult is to become a venture capitalist after 45?
It can be harder than you might think. The further you are along in your career, the easier it is to have the time, networks and personal capital to be an investor. No question. And it can take a decade or more to make any real money from investing. It’s hard to have...
Founder SaaStr
Related Posts
Industry News
- Salesforce doubles down on generative AI with Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT
- The Next Crisis Will Start With Empty Office Buildings
- LlamaIndex adds private data to large language models
- Glean Chat launches to unlock AI-driven search for the enterprise
- The Great SaaS Flattening | Cledara
- Coinbase and Binance Lawsuits Put Crypto on Ice
- Sequoia Is Splitting Into Three VC Firms
- Curri nabs $42M for its construction-focused last-mile logistics platform
- Google’s AI-powered search experience is way too slow
- Soonicorns wait in queue as India’s unicorn drought exceeds 8 months