The Latest from SaaStr: 70% of Startups Are Still Hiring

THE LATEST FROM SAASTR

By Jason Lemkin  · Friday, November 25, 2022 | Blog Posts

So with so much change and tumult, how can we get a handle on how SaaS startups are really doing?

Hiring is a great proxy.

It cuts through the baloney, the 100x ARR rounds, and the pretending.

And how we’re all doing in hiring pretty much reflects what I’m seeing in SaaS startups overall:

28% of you are hiring as fast as ever.   43% of you are still hiring, but have slowed the pace.  Like Monday and other SaaS and Cloud leaders.  And 29% of you aren’t hiring anymore.  A hiring freeze (or reduction).

SCALING

By Amelia Ibarra  · Friday, November 25, 2022 | Product, Sales,

Scale-ups are exciting. They demonstrate spectacular growth and expansion while revolutionizing and disrupting industries with new business models. Scaling to satisfy customers’ demands depends on innovation and foresight combined with enterprise-ready technology and the right partners.

On top of considerable dedication, creating a scale-up requires a functional edge—a unique and unreplicable capability compared to the players in the industry. Atlassian’s Chief Revenue Officer, Cameron Deatsch, walks us through how Atlassian grew over the course of 20 years and became one of the most successful startups today.

SAASTR EVENTS

By Amelia Ibarra  · Friday, November 25, 2022 

Ah yes, it's that time of year,

And we're getting into spirit of Holiday Cheer!

Join us next Friday, December 2nd from 4-7PM for the SaaStr Holiday Party 2022!

If you're in the SF Bay Area, we'll be taking over the Tacolicious in downtown Palo Alto for an evening of tacos, margaritas, and SaaS, of course!

GROWTH

By Jason Lemkin  · Friday, November 24, 2022 | Growth, Metrics

So one thing that’s back now is customers asking for longer payment terms.  Not all of them, and not in every industry.  And if your customers pay on credit card, for the most part, this won’t matter.

But customers you invoice in many cases are once again asking for much longer than classic Net 30 terms.

This isn’t new, we see it every time an industry comes under stress.  It’s one of the classic ways a Procurement and/or Finance department manages cash.

And it’s super stressful on startups, especially earlier-stage ones.  Hooray, you closed a big annual or even 2 year deal!  That’s great.  But … they want Net 90 to pay.  And then … they pay late.

By Amelia Ibarra  · Friday, November 25, 2022 

Spin-to-win your deal: Save $200+, 30% or even a win a  free ticket.

This is your chance to save big $ on tickets to the world's largest community gathering for SaaS and Cloud professionals: SaaStr Annual 2023 on Sept 6-8 in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Head on over to our SaaStr Annual 2023 site and play our spin-to-win game to unlock your discounted tickets. 

There's all sorts of different discounts you can unlock, including the chance of a free ticket for a few, lucky folks. 

Be there in 2023:  in just a few clicks you’ll have set yourself up to join 12,500 fellow SaaS CEOs, Founders, Revenue Leaders and Investors at next year's SaaStr Annual. Don't miss 3+ days of learning from speakers from your favorite SaaS companies like Atlassian, HubSpot, Y Combinator, Snowflake, Airtable, and many others.  

Q&A

By Jason Lemkin  · Thursday, November 24, 2022 | Exit, Q&A

Not as many as you’d think.

This is a really important question because it creates so many non-obvious VC-founder dynamics.

There are some partners that do more but the number is generally 1-2 per year at most traditional Series A/B/C VC firms, maybe 3–4 at pre-seed funds, and the partners do start to slow investment down after 7–10 board seats.

Some newer firms seem to find a way to do a lot more, I suspect by buying less in each deal and still taking about the same number of board seats, more or less.

SAASTR EVENTS

By Amelia Ibarra  · Thursday, November 24, 2022 | Blog Posts

SaaStr events couldn’t happen without our partners, and we wanted to give a special shout-out to some of our newest sponsors for SaaStr Annual 2023. At the 9th ever SaaStr Annual, ~200 of the best and hottest companies on earth will go BIG as partners/sponsors. Join these incredible companies to experience all the value of SaaStr!

Tip the payment scales in your favor by being one of the first to unlock exclusive early access to BlueSnap's 2023 Payment Predictions eBook.

Your sales and customer success teams are losing deals and customers due to backlogged integration requests.

But can you really justify spending months of development on each integration, when an embedded iPaaS can help offload 70% of the work?

There are a lot of factors to consider in this build vs. buy decision, and it's all outlined in this guide.

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