The Latest from SaaStr: Your Family May Never Understand

THE LATEST FROM SAASTR

By Jason Lemkin · Sunday, December 4, 2022 | Career Growth & Advice

So as the years have gone by, we’ve all begun to understand SaaS a lot better.

And what we know now for sure, that we always still knew anyway, is that it both (x) takes 7-10 years to Go Big in SaaS, (y) and it probably takes 12-20 years to build something iconic.

And … asking your family to be 100% on that journey is asking too much.

It’s too much, and too hard, for non-founders to understand.

LEADERSHIP

By Jason Lemkin · Monday, December 5, 2022 | Career Growth & Advice, Leadership

For me, at least, I’ve seen five things make the biggest difference in reducing stress as you scale from $1m to $10m ARR … and beyond.

1.   Add an “ex-post facto co-founder” and/or upgrade the management team. 

In my first start-up, my co-founder and I met for 20 minutes at the end of every single day, and had lunch as often as we could. 50% of this was just dealing with stress and unscripted issues. It helped each of us so much.

The second time around, I didn’t have this.  But I found more help in my management team. Find at least one person on the team, later, that can share at least some of the burden with you. That cares so much about the company, that she can carry some of the stress as well. Find two like this — then they’ll really help carry you to the next level.

SCALING

By Amelia Ibarra · Monday, December 2 2022 | SaaS Product Pricing, Sales

Startups often begin with a bootstrapping phase with little to no outside investment. Many, however, will eventually switch to the funded phase since bootstrapping isn’t for every business. Some startups need constant cash infusions to achieve growth. Yet, funded startups can learn a lot from the bootstrapped ones to grow smoothly and generate revenue.

Paddle’s Senior Product Manager, Allissa Chan, and Chief Strategy Officer, Patrick Campbell, share their experience of scaling a bootstrapped startup. Allissa and Patrick believe that SaaS founders—bootstrapped or not—can pull six key levers to significantly impact their businesses. 

SAASTR NEWS

By Jason Lemkin  · Monday, December 5, 2022 | Blog Posts

Spotify has rolled out its latest metrics on the top podcasts and we’re pleased to note The Official SaaStr Podcast is in the Top 1% of most.

Our podcast is our quiet but great asset.  It’s an incredible mix of the best speakers and leaders in SaaS.  Just the past few have the CEOs and CROs and CXOs of Atlassian, HubSpot, Gusto, Talkdesk, Klaviyo, Divvy, Algolia, HashiCorp, Confluent, Mailchimp and so much more!

Our next digital mega-event, SaaStr Scale 2022 will be happening live, tomorrow Wednesday, December 7th.

Featuring the playbooks to scaling to $100M and beyond, SaaStr Scale brings together the top builders, revenue leaders and CEOs in SaaS. 

Including:

• 3 Lessons from Building a Marketing Engine to Grow Pipeline from Millions to Billions with Samsara’s CMO Sarah Patterson
• Revenue Confidential with Rippling and Founders Fund Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund Matt Plank, VP Sales at Rippling
• Move Over, Sales: Why Product & Marketing are the C-Suite's New Power Partnership with Checkout.com’s CMO Leela Srinivasan, and CPO, Meron Colbeci
• Sustainability In Marketing - Leveraging Compounding Channels For Long-Term Growth with Dave Gerhardt, Founder at Exit Five, Betsy Koliba, Head of Services at Demandwell and Bridget Poetker, Director of Content & Brand at Postal
• Secrets to SMB at Scale with Hubspot CEO Yamini Rangan and Jason Lemkin, Founder & CEO at SaaStr
• Secrets to Scale a Company in Hypergrowth Mode with Celonis SVP, Global Business Development and Customer Engagement, Shelli Vivona, and Chris Donato, President Global Sales and Field Engineering
• Managing a Thin Balance Sheet: 4 lessons Learned From a 2 Billion Acquisition (and How to Play Offense) with Laika Founder Eva Pittas and CFO, Dicken Chaplin
• True Story: What Breaks Going from $0-$100M ARR in Less Than 2 Years with Wiz's CRO Colin Jones
• Building a Brand with Data: 4 Overlooked Marketing Plays that Win the Long Game with Typeform's CMO Karrie Stephenson
• 10 Tips for Startups to Create Powerful Partnerships with Big Companies with SAP, Vice President, North and Latin America and Caribbean, Kange Kaneene, and Alok Kapur, VP, Global Business Development Team
• Removing Friction: How to Turn More Than 40% of Your Prospects Into Long Term Enterprise Customers with Attentive's CEO Brian Long
• Big Numbers from Small Customers: How DigitalOcean Accelerated at Scale with Cliff Bockard, SVP of Revenue - Global Sales, Customer Success, Support and Partnerships at DigitalOcean
• Leveraging Product-led Growth to Drive Sales Pipeline with Asana's General Manager of Americas, Amy Borsetti, and Jessica Gilmartin, Head of Revenue Marketing at Asana
• Pivoting from Growth-at-All-Costs: Four Focus Areas to Thrive in Any Market with Courtney Dong, Partner at Boston Consulting Group and JB Reed, Managing Director and Partner at Boston Consulting Group

PRODUCT

By Jason Lemkin · Sunday, December 4, 2022 | Metrics

I wrote a version of this post way back in 2016. It created a lot of discussions and was more controversial then — that NPS was a great core metric. 

We’ve all evolved a lot since then.  We’ve gotten great at measuring both NRR and GRR.  And almost everyone does some sort of regular NPS survey.  And most segment it across customer size or other segments.

Back then, I wrote that when I was a SaaS founder, I thought Net Promoter Score (“NPS”) was a somewhat dumb, Big Company metric.  There were a bunch of things I didn’t like about it.

But what I also saw was NPS, measured consistently, has big benefits.  Now I work with and have invested in 35+ SaaS companies.  And many track their NPS monthly, and carefully.  And … I love it.

HIRING

By Jason Lemkin · Saturday, December 3, 2022 | Growth, Hiring

My second boss came from a very big, very old tech company.  He inherited one of their firm rules:  “When you leave, if you leave … you can’t ever come back!”

I didn’t get that rule.  If someone great left, wouldn’t you want them back later?  Things change.  Life changes.

In fact, right after that, we hired a roundtrip employee as our CTO in my first start-up and it was amazing.

He already had years of domain knowledge and expertise, knew exactly what to do on Day 1 … and yet left all the drama of the past behind.  It was magical to have an A+ team member also be almost 100% scaled up his first day.  We did amazing things.

Still, as time has gone on, I’ve tried the trick again and again, and it hasn’t always worked.  The lessons may be obvious, but I thought I’d summarize them here.  Especially in tougher times, folks may be knocking on your door again.  Should you take them back?

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.

© SaaStr 2022

255 Kansas, Suite 300, San Francisco, CA 94103

If you'd like to stop receiving the SaaStr Daily, click here