How do you build a successful, high-growth company that is also profitable? Expensify’s COO, Anu Muralidharan, debunks the fallacy that profitability comes at the expense of growth.
“When You Hire Your First Sales Rep — Just Make Sure You Hire Two” was one of the very first classic SaaStr posts, and I think it’s become somewhat conventional thinking now. Don’t just hire 1 to start — it doesn’t save you money or time, and worse, you won’t...
Dear SaaStr: What Are The Biggest Problems You Face as a Startup Founder? The list of problems is endless (this is one of the hardest parts of the job), but let me try to order a few of the biggest challenges roughly based on stage: Pre-Revenue: Finding a Truly Great...
Dear SaaStr: What is The Biggest Difference Between Running a 10 Person Startup and a 100 Person Startup? The biggest structural difference is you have to hire all the VPs by employee 50–100. You won’t be able to scale this far without a full management team — VPs of...
Sometimes, you just have to lower the bar to get a hire done You've just run out of time, and you can't find someone great Only thing is I've never seen a single one of those hires work out — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) September 19, 2023 I...
The very best hires in SaaS cost you nothing. You can always afford them. Who should you hire, with limited budget? A VP of Sales? A Director of Demand Gen? Or A Head of Product? The answer is Yes. A truly great hire is >always< accretive. At least within just...
Dear SaaStr: What Are The Top Things To Look for When Reviewing New Account Exec Resumes? Here’s what I look for to try to get a sense if they’ll perform: Do they call out top performance with metrics? The best reps are often quite precise. E.g., hit 152% of Quota...
Dear SaaStr: How does a First Time Founder Identify 10x Hires? How do you hire a great CTO, a great VP of Product, a great VP of Sales … if you’ve never worked with one? It’s hard. There’s a reason almost every founder you talk to had a...
You’re the founder of a nicely growing SaaS startup that has just raised a Series A, Series B, or Series C funding round. You need to hire rapidly to seize the opportunity. But how much should you hire, what roles should you hire, and what should the org chart look like when you’re done?
David Sacks, co-founder and general partner at Craft will share what works from the 20 unicorns he’s invested in, including AirBnB, ClickUp, Slack, SpaceX, Twitter, Uber, and Wish.
Dear SaaStr: At what stage should SaaS founders fully stop being individual contributors? I’ve come up with 2 rough rules here to avoid stalling out: Try to have a complete 1.0 management team by $4m ARR at least. Earlier is better, of course. And try to hire at...
Dear SaaStr: Who Should I Hire First to Get My Customer Success Function Going? Key criteria for first customer success hire: – smart – truly understands and cares about the problem your product solves– lives and breathes making customers happy Rest,...
Amplitude CEO Spenser Skates lays out the mistakes young companies will often make as they grow, and how he positioned Amplitude for growth and success.
We all screw a lot of things up. But I think the biggest, #1, mistake successful first-time entrepreneurs in SaaS make time and time again these days is they own a key function area or two too long. They stay the VP of Sales, Marketing, Product, etc. for far longer...
There’s nothing wrong with hiring folks from the competition It’s just, when you do, you’ll overlook too many of their weakness, and give them too much credit for their competitive experience Only hire them if you still would if they worked somewhere else —...
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