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Dear SaaStr: What Happens if a VC Loses All Their Money on an Investment?
Dear SaaStr: What Happens if a VC Loses All Their Money on an Investment? It’s OK — if it’s not too much. As long as the founders did everything they possibly could to make it work. Everything. And were honest. There are two types of losses for VCs and professional investors: losses than fit into…
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Dear SaaStr: As a CEO New to Sales, How Can I Get Better at Closing Deals?
Dear SaaStr: How Can I Get Better at Closing Deals? If it’s very early, hire 1 or ideally 2 sales reps who you’d personally buy from. You’ll all learn from each other how to close better, and faster. The #1 trick to making sure your first sales reps work out? Only hire sales reps you'd…
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Dear SaaStr: How Do I Craft a Winning Investor Deck for an Early-Stage Startup?
Dear SaaStr: How Do I Craft a Winning Investor Deck for an Early-Stage Startup? Here’s my #1 piece of advice: Get it all down to One Slide. "How to Create a Compelling Investor Deck: The Power of the First Slide" pic.twitter.com/AyyS7lHATz — SaaStr (@saastr) March 22, 2024 With 6-7 points on that slide. Not more. …
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Dear SaaStr: What Are The Top 5 Things I Should Know Before Starting a SaaS Startup?
Dear SaaStr: What Are The Top 5 Things I Should Know Before Starting a SaaS Startup? My Top 5: It will take you at least 24 months to really get anywhere. Everyone mentally budgets 10–12 months. It’s never enough. At least, not to get enough paying customers from Code Zero. A little more here: https://www.saastr.com/if-youre-……
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Dear SaaStr: Does It Make Sense For Your First Marketing Hire Be a Product Marketer?
Dear SaaStr: Does It Make Sense For Your First Marketing Hire Be a Product Marketer? No. Strong Disagree. It does not make any sense, 99 times out of 100. And you can see in this short clip, the CMOs of Zapier and HubSpot agree 😉 "The Importance of Hiring a True Demand Gen Marketer for…
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Why Customers Hate So Many Salespeople. And Why They Love Some. And How to Do Better Here.
Dear SaaStr: Why do customers hate salespeople? Disalignment. A truly great salesperson is a resource. They help you: They educate you on the product. They honestly answer your questions. They address your concerns, seemingly patiently. They help you pilot / test the product first, in a way that drives things forward without too much pressure….
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Dear SaaStr: What Do You Do When Your Startup is Not Growing Anymore?
Dear SaaStr: What Do You Do When Your Startup is Not Growing Anymore? First, be honest about why. You can blame it on macro issues if you want, but if growth has radically decelerated, it’s likely because you are less competitive than you were before. You probably have fallen out of product-market fit, partially or…
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Dear SaaStr: A Big Tech Co Launched a Competitive Product. How Can I Tell How Serious They Are About It?
Dear SaaStr: A Big Tech Co Launched a Competitive Product. How Can I Tell How Serious They Are About It? In SaaS at least, I’ll give you one metric that is fairly reliable: How many dedicated sales professional do they have, just 100% selling the competitive product? If it’s none yet, it’s an experiment. If…
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Dear SaaStr: How Do You Build a Real Exit Strategy?
Dear SaaStr: How Do You Build a Real Exit Strategy? First, bear in mind acquisitions are relatively rare. The vast majority of startups will never get one acquisition offer, let alone a good one. Still, it’s not random. I’ve been through it twice as a founder and about ten times as an investor. At a…
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Dear SaaStr: When You Sold Your Startup, What Were the Downsides?
Dear SaaStr: When You Sold Your Startup, What Were the Downsides? When you sell: it’s not yours anymore; and your upside is capped. Start with Challenge #1. Ask yourself 4 “Are You OK With” questions: The name being changed? With the business being shut down in 2–5 years, if it isn’t strategic anymore — no…
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Dear SaaStr: Is it OK to Reschedule a Job Interview with a Founder?
Dear SaaStr: Is it OK to Reschedule a Job Interview with a Founder? It’s generally fine to reschedule an interview set up with a recruiting manager or similar. They’ll figure it out. That’s their job. But — be careful rescheduling a job interview with a founder CEO — especially at the last minute. If it’s…
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Dear SaaStr: What are Some Early Signs a New VP isn’t Going to Be a Fit?
Dear SaaStr: What are Some Early Signs a New VP isn’t Going to Be a Fit? The top one for me is when they don’t embrace the goals given to them. I see this again and again: A VP of Sales that just sort of ignores the plan for the next quarter or two. A…
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Dear SaaStr: Why Do VC Backed Startups Seem To Almost Always Be Running Out of Money?
Dear SaaStr: Why Do VC Backed Startups Seem To Almost Always Be Running Out of Money? The #1 issue I see is not understanding what investments really are accretive — and which aren’t. And so the money goes far, far faster than anticipated. Venture capital, if you raise it, is there to invest. You don’t…
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Should You Build a Feature Just to Close a $50k Deal? Probably, In the Early-ish Days.
Does the advice to always say no to sponsored features would also apply to a SaaS startup selling to mid-market (ACV 20k to 50k+) and has relatively few clients? No. This is not wise advice, it is bad advice in many cases. As long as the deal size is big enough. At least, in the…
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Dear SaaStr: What Will Venture Capitalists Do if Our Startup is a Loss?
Dear SaaStr: What Will Venture Capitalists Do if Our Startup is a Loss? Move on. Especially, if you’ve only raise one VC round or so. This is telling article re: Bill Gurley, one of the best VC investors of all time: “I give Bill a lot of credit because Bill said, ‘I understand, this happens,’”…
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Discounts, Expiring Deals, and Urgency: Understanding Human Behavior in Sales
I’m not that great at sales myself (not really), but I am a student of it. A few things I’ve observed about human behavior, negotiation, and good and bad sales processes in SaaS: Customers that expect a discount really expect a discount. It’s generally easier to mark up the pricing a bit, then discount —…
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Dear SaaStr: Is It Normal to Feel Like a Pest When Prospecting for Customers For a Startup?
Dear SaaStr: Is It Normal to Feel Like a Pest When Prospecting for Customers For a Startup? Yes. Get better at it, get over it, and hire folks who know how to do it. Boy sales is hard. It’s being told No a lot. It’s having literal, or virtual, doors shut on your face. Sales…
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Dear SaaStr: How Hard Is It To Get to $1m ARR Without Investors?
Dear SaaStr: How Hard Is It To Get to $1m ARR Without Investors? My learnings are three-fold. First, it depends on the team. Most of the SaaS unicorns have been built on at least some venture capital … but a number haven’t. Atlassian ($30b market cap), Qualtrics ($12B), Mailchimp ($12B) etc. have gotten there without…
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Dear SaaStr: What Do Founders Need to Know to Navigate a Merger/Acquisition?
Dear SaaStr: What Do Founders Need to Know to Navigate a Merger/Acquisition? My #1 tip: Get Zen. Once you sell it, it is not yours anymore. And both your upside and your downside are now capped. You can no longer fail or run out of money, but really, you can no longer win in the…
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Dear SaaStr: Funding Aside, What Are The Top 3 Things That Stop SaaS Companies From Growing From ~$25k MRR to ~$250k MRR?
Dear SaaStr: Funding Aside, What Are The Top 3 Things That Stop SaaS Companies From Growing From ~$25k MRR to ~$250k MRR? Let’s step back. If you have gotten to $25k in MRR ($300k in ARR) … you have something. Real. It’s not big enough yet. But it’s real. So … You WILL get to…
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The 6 Most Common Mistakes Founders Make When They Are Just Starting to Scale Revenue
Dear SaaStr: What are The Most Common Mistakes Founders Make When They Are Just Starting to Scale Revenue? Let me list some of the ones I see most often going from say $1m to $10m in ARR: Chasing the Shiny Penny. One of the biggest mistakes I see after $1m in trying to enter new…
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Dear SaaStr: When Do You Know It’s Time to Pivot?
Dear SaaStr: When Do You Know It’s Time to Pivot? I think in SaaS, it’s when you have a handful of customers, and they are happy, and it’s been 9+ months … and you are growing, but slowly. If you have no customers, it’s not really a pivot or tilt, it’s a restart. But in…
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Dear SaaStr: How Do I Best Prevent Churn?
Dear SaaStr: How Do I Best Prevent Churn? You don’t. Instead, you drive it down. Each quarter. You can’t eliminate churn. It’s a fact of business life in selling a product with recurring revenue and thus recurring sales. You can hide churn (e.g., by signing multiyear contracts). And you can drive it down. But you…
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Dear SaaStr: How Can an Early Stage SaaS Startup Get its First 1-3 Pilot Fortune 500 Paying Customers?
Dear SaaStr: How Can an Early Stage SaaS Startup Get its First 1-3 Pilot Fortune 500 Paying Customers? It’s not magic. And it’s not a mystery. Even though it can seem like it, until you’ve done it yourself. There are basically two paths, and one predicate step The predicate step is your product has to…
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Dear SaaStr: What Was it Like Acquiring Your First Customer?
Dear SaaStr: What Was it Like Acquiring Your First Customer? I had very different experiences in each of my startups. In my first start-up, we were whale hunting — big, large, Fortune 500 customers. So Customer #1 showed us the path to our future. My first customer signed a $10k contract (a small pilot) but…
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Popular Q&A
Why SMB Reps Struggle in the Enterprise. And Vice-Versa.
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The Top 50 SaaStr Answers on Quora in 2020
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The Playbook to Scaling Your Team in Hypergrowth with Flexport CRO Ben Braverman (Video + Transcript)
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Defining Your Customer Journey From Prospect to Champion with Sage People SVP Kathy Lord (Video + Transcript)
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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 unicorns by...