When I meet with founders and investors, they assume at SaaStr we are some sort of content and social marketing geniuses. Let’s be clear — nothing could be further from the truth. We have no one on our tiny team with a background in content or social...
No. Salespeople make great CEOs, too. There’s no firm rule here. Marc Benioff, though a programmer in his youth, ran a big chunk of sales at Oracle before founding Salesforce. What they do make is expensive CEOs, usually, at least in the early days. Salesperson CEOs...
How to be more patient. Big companies: Have more great engineers than almost any start-up; Have a great brand already; and have a customer base already to cross-sell too. Yet, they struggle to compete with start-ups with few resources, hacky software, and no brand....
It’s actually sort of impossible to know. On the one hand, we clearly get more “views” on Quora than on our blog, our podcast, etc. Quora also has been amazing for generating a specific type of content (“How should I _____”) that has performed amazingly (shockingly?)...
I certainly have. Among other things, I’ve built a conference, The SaaStrAnnual.com, which has scaled to 10,000+ attendees in 2017 (and on track for 20,000+ in 2018). We will have an almost $20,000,000 budget for ‘18/’19. While it’s tough to know exactly what % of it...
I’ve been shocked by the power & impact of our podcast. In one year, we’ve (and by we, I mean Harry Stebbings) done 100+ podcasts and now get 50,000+ downloads a week. 100 SaaStr Podcasts – The Top 10 Episodes So Far SaaStr Podcast #100: Aaron Levie, Founder &...
It’s hard to imagine. First, it’s difficult to imagine a price that would move the needle — at this point in life. You kind of want everything to be 10x what you did last time. Second, it’s difficult to imagine working for someone else. Third, I’d have no interest in...
The CSS is designed for start-ups with at least $100k in ARR that are growing quickly and can benefit more from being together, for a while, in an A+ grade space. It’s not a space to hang out for in 2 weeks, or for pre-revenue companies. It’s not a business. It’s...
The “secret” here is to understand that different VCs take different sort of risks … even late stage VCs. Here’s my list of 10 Risks Different SaaS VCs Do and Do Not Like To Take. And the key is, it really varies from VC to VC: Lack of A+ Engineering Team Risk. In...
Three relatively easy-to-implement ideas: #1: Take the Meeting. I’m not 100% sure all of the processes bigger companies are just starting to use, with HR departments, can fully work for most investors. VC firms and angels are just too small, for the most part. If you...
As the other answers have illustrated, it’s almost never worth it. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. You should do the right thing IMHO. Just understand it likely will fall on deaf ears. First, VCs are almost always going to back the CEO. So if you try to...
Press can make or break your company; and it good press can be pretty damn hard to come by when hundreds (thousands, really) of companies are vying for the attention of the TechCrunches, Bloombergs, and Forbes of the world. If you want your pitch to get heard, take...
It can be hard to tell how many deals a VC has done from his or her website, or Crunchbase, because there’s often a long lag between deals getting signed and being announced. Instead, just ask. Ask a VC you meet what her last deal was, and when. If it was very...
In neither of my start-ups did I come up with the “idea”. I did come up with the idea of how to execute the idea and bring it to life, however. Without that, there is nothing. In my first start-up, the original technology had been developed as a $50,000 internal lab...