Dear SaaStr: What’s The Toughest Skill to Learn to Scale in B2B?
You need to learn to become a parallel recruiter. To constantly, painfully, boring-ly be recruiting the next level of management and managers — all the time. Doing 30+ interviews a month — minimum.
In SaaS, you need more VPs earlier. By $2m in ARR, you need a VP of Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Product and Engineering (if you can afford them all). At least.
Where I see a lot of SaaS founders fail after $1m-$2m ARR or so, and definitely after $10m ARR or so, is when they are only able to be part-time recruiters, episodic recruiters, and/or sequential recruiters. “I’ll focus on the product hire first. Then I’ll get to customer success.”
That sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t, but it always does a disservice to a SaaS business.
You need them all.
"We wish we had built our our executive leadership earlier. Invest in them 6 months earlier than you think you need them." – @mitchellh on one thing he wish he knew earlier, on @saastr panel with @glennsolomon #SaaStrAnnual2018 #SaaStrAnnual #SaaStr pic.twitter.com/J5XkHWDjqQ
— Notable Capital (@notablecap) February 7, 2018
It’s a tough adjustment for many. And many take too long to make it. And those that don’t, never do something really big.
More here: https://www.saastr.com/po
And a bit more here:
