Welcome to Episode 117! Amit Agarwal is the Chief Product Officer at Datadog, the startup that provides cloud scale monitoring that tracks your dynamic infrastructure and applications. They have raised over $140m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including Index Ventures, IA Ventures, OpenView, and RRE, just to name a few. Before Datadog, Amit was the Director of Product Management at Quest Software (now Dell), where he led the team responsible for application performance monitoring. Previously, Amit held product management roles at Datamirror (now IBM) and Embarcadero Technologies.

In today’s episode you will learn:

  • How did Amit make his way into the world of SaaS and come to be Chief Product Officer @ Datadog?
  • Why did Datadog not have a marketing strategy for the early days? What would Amit advise early stage founders with regards to optimizing their marketing in the early days?
  • Obviously a multi-product line is crucial for a SaaS startup to be successful, what is Amit’s take on how, when and why to launch a second product? What have been his big learnings on this from Datadog?
  • Amit has said before that it is tough to sell to large enterprises in the early days, does that mean startups should always start with SMEs? At what price point does it become a challenge? Does Amit agree that if you are between 25K-100K you are in the valley of death pricewise?

60 Second SaaStr:

  1. What does Amit know now that he wishes he had known in the beginning?
  2. What is Amit’s favourite SaaS reading material?
  3. When is the right time to hire a CPO and why?

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Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
SaaStr
Amit Agarwal

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