The Latest from SaaStr: The Top Reasons Startups Fail

THE LATEST FROM SAASTR

By Amelia Ibarra · Tuesday, November 15 2022 | SaaStr APAC

It's official! 

We are excited to announce today that SaaStr is heading to Singapore to host our first ever SaaStr APAC event in 2023!

Feb 22-23 2023, Singapore

We'll be heading to the historic Fullerton Hotel in downtown Singapore to host 600+ SaaS CEOs, Founders, Revenue Leaders, Investors, and more. 

For the first time ever, we'll be bringing the actionable, SaaStr style content to APAC and of course, bringing some of the very best speakers in SaaS with us as well. 

It'll be 2 days of SaaStr content, meetups and much more. We can't wait to host our first SaaStr Asia-Pacific event! 

Grab your early bird tickets now and we'll see you for the first-ever SaaStr APAC in Singapore!

HIRING & RETENTION

By Amelia Ibarra · Monday, November 14, 2022 | Company Culture, Hiring

Have you checked in on your employees lately? If they aren’t happy, they may leave, which can spell problems for your employee retention rate, which in turn can negatively impact your business as a whole.

Fortunately, there are strategies you can implement to ensure that your workforce is engaged, happy, and driving the business forward. In a special presentation, Secureframe COO Seema Kumar shares common leadership challenges in today’s modern workforce, best practices, and tips for talent retention.

Q&A

By Jason Lemkin  · Monday, November 14, 2022 | Growth, Q&A

This is one of the trickiest questions of all.  Especially these days, with so many struggling unicorns, and public SaaS stocks down 50% or more in many cases.

As a start-up employee:

You can’t possibly have enough experience or information to know if you should exercise or not;

Even if the company is doing well — is the price too high? How do you know? 

SAASTR EVENTS

By Gretchen DeKnikker  · Sunday, November 13, 2022 | Blog Posts

2023 will be here before you know it — and it’s time to plan your team offsites.  We’ve got 2 great ideas:

Bring your team to London on 6-7 June for SaaStr Europa 2023.

Bring your team to the SF Bay Area on September 6-8 for SaaStr Annual 2023.

You’ve got to do your quarterly team retreats now, and doing at least one of them in 2023 centered around the largest gathering in the world in SaaS is a big built-in win.  The team loves coming to Annual and Europa.  It’s fun.  It inspires them.  And it’s one of the few chances they’ll get to come to 1,000s of workshops and meet their peers IRL.

Workshop Wednesdays

Our live Workshop Wednesdays will be live this Wednesday at 10 am 

Ashley Kramer, CMO & CSO @ Gitlab will be hosting live: 

The Importance of OS Communities: Product Incubators and Your Best Marketing Asset with Gitlab

Workshop Wednesdays are live every Wednesday and free to join. They are 30-45 minutes each and completely interactive between the speakers, the audience and one another.

Sign up for free and we'll see you there tomorrow for Workshop Wednesday. 

DEAR SAASTR

By Jason Lemkin  · Sunday, November 13 , 2022 | Early, Q&A

I haven’t failed as an entrepeneur, at least not yet. But I’ve made 30+ investments, and while many have been big wins, some haven’t.

Here’s what’s caused startups I’ve invested in to fail, or at least, not to thrive and succeed:

Founder conflict. This really can kill some startups. I’ve had one where 3 co-founders forced the CEO founder out. The problem was, the CEO was the only one who could sell, or really understood the customers.

Unable to control the burn rate. This hasn’t driven any startup I’ve invest in 100% to failure, but it’s driven them to unoptimal exits. Even if you raise a big round, it’s never infinite. Hire too many expensive VPs especially, that can’t deliver … and your burn rate can quickly grow 3x-5x bigger, or more.

GROWTH

By Jason Lemkin  · Saturday, November 12, 2022 |Growth

I’ve had the privilege to invest, one way or another, in about 35 SaaS companies, both as a VC and as angel.  6 have become decacorns and unicorns, and 3 have sold for $1B+ cash. It’s a pretty solid group, and I’ve learned a lot from it.

One experience that confuses a lot of founders is when it really starts to take off — I mean, when it’s really now clearly good — and they still get “No”s from VCs.  They understand why they got “No”s in the early, pre-traction days, and even in the early-ish days when they had a handful of customers but weren’t really taking off yet (my favorite time to invest).

But then, once they get to, say, $1m+ ARR, growing 15%, 16, 20% a month — why isn’t everyVC they meet offering a term sheet?  Especially when some other crappy company just got funded last week with worse metrics.  Or their friends got 7 term sheets with good-but-not-as-good companies.

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© SaaStr 2022

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