The Latest from SaaStr: Maybe A Little Less LinkedIn and More List Building

THE LATEST FROM SAASTR

By Jason Lemkin · Monday, November 28, 2022 | Blog Posts

So I don’t really know as much about digital marketing as I should, and as you might think, but every time I look at our Google Analytics, I learn a few new things.

One small reminder is that, at least for SaaStr, LinkedIn now drives materially more traffic than Twitter. 

It may be different for you, but it’s a reminder of the growing power of LinkedIn overall and especially in B2B.

But when I pulled up our data from the past few months above, I had one big takeaway:  we put too much energy into Twitter and LinkedIn, and not enough into Blogs and especially building our core list and email.

GO-TO-MARKET

By Amelia Ibarra · Monday, November 28 2022 | Marketing, Metrics

These two departments are a SaaS company’s most important; without their alignment, there is no growth or scale. Prakash Raina, Co-Founder of Subskribe, and Leslie Hui, VP of Accounting Operations and Finance Transformation at Okta, break down the secrets to unifying SaaS teams, processes, and systems.

GROWTH

By Jason Lemkin  · Saturday, November 28, 2022 | Blog Posts, Growth

So it’s the season where there are … some tough board meetings. Plans are missed, which is tough enough. Worse, cash sometimes gets tight.  Look, this stuff is stressful.

Very stressful.

So don’t make it even harder on yourself. First, whatever you do, don’t stop sending regular investor emails — at the same pace.  Don’t stop sending them on the 1st of the month just because the news isn’t great. Don’t hide from Bad News. In fact, run to it.  And investors are wired to get some bad news. They get much more worried when the updates stop coming. Then they fear that maybe, the founders are hiding from bad news, rather than running toward it.

Our super popular new series - Workshop Wednesday continues this week!

Join us live this wednesday, November 30th at 10am PT for:

Building for Builders: Creating Enterprise Platforms with Airtable

Speaker: Helen Zeng, Product Manager at Airtable

This will be a live, 45-minute interactive session with plenty of audience time to connect with fellow community members and engage in Q&A. 

MARKETING

By Jason Lemkin · Sunday, November 27, 2022 | Blog Posts

The #1 flag your marketing efforts aren’t working is that you are spending too much — but importantly, in the aggregate. 

Don’t overindex on any individual campaign or initiative.

Let me dig in a bit. Most SaaS companies, once they have a mini-brand, start to get some amount of organic, “free” leads. People hear about you. They come to you. Not a ton, at first, but some. The CPA here is basically $0.  And that’s the boost that all marketing teams get.  It flatters marketing.  It makes it look more cost-effective, and effective overall, than it really is.

Q&A

By Jason Lemkin · Sunday, November 27, 2022 | Blog Posts, Q&A

The answer is you do All of It.  Just more of it.

Category creation is hard because you have to build awareness of both a new vendor AND a new category.

But … the problem you are solving isn’t new. That’s the key.

So go everywhere that problem is.

By Jason Lemkin · Saturday, November 26, 2022 | Blog Posts, Early

So this is just a personal post, not as an investor or blogger or community runner, but as an SMB owner.  Running “SaaStr Inc.” as an SMB.  My 2 Favorite Apps of 2022.  And … why.

Favorite #01 as an SMB Admin:  Gusto.

So Gusto is not the most important app at SaaStr, but it’s fairly important.  People need to get paid.  It’s important. We’ve used Gusto for years, but recently I became an Admin for the first time and saw the magic.

FUNDRAISING

By Jason Lemkin · Saturday, November 26, 2022 | Fundraising, Q&A

Being a CEO, in general, is pretty stressful.

Being venture-backed is really only more stressful than any other company for two reasons:

You have to carefully manage to your Zero Cash Date. You need to know exactly when you run out of money. Of course, cash in the bank also matters if you aren’t VC-backed. It’s just different. VC cash in the early days is used to let you run at a larger loss than you otherwise would. But it doesn’t last forever.

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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