The Latest from SaaStr: Your 2023 SaaStr New Year’s Resolutions

So we have a classic set of New Year’s Resolutions in SaaS that we update every year.  

But 2023 is so … unique.  

The Best in SaaS are still growing at incredible rates, but the overhang from the crazy multiples and VC funding run of late 2020-early 2022 will hang over our heads for the rest of the year.  

And the combo of inflation and CFO-level scrutiny for deals is wreaking havoc with all our plans.

So with that … here are Your Top 10 New Year’s SaaS Resolutions for 2023.

In the age of Unicorns, there’s often a story folks miss.  It’s when about 5 years in, at a reasonably successful company, the founder moves on.  I don’t mean fired.  

I mean after 4.5-5 hard years, of finally getting the company to $5m or $10m or $8.32m in ARR, the founder CEO thinks it’s just time to Bring Someone Better In.  And raises their hand.

Which brings up a question, as a CEO / founder:  

When is it time to move on?

Where it gets harder to answer this is when you are doing well, but not completely killing it.  

For SaaS, this often can be growing in the 30-60% YoY range.  Not > 100%, when it all comes together.  Not < 30%-40% … where it clearly isn’t quite working.

If you've missed any of our 2022 Workshop Wednesdays, catch up here!

We've had

• Airtable
• Snowflake
• Battery Ventures
• GitLab
• Airtable

All join us for 45-minute, completely live, interactive sessions with the SaaStr community. These workshops have been a hit, and we're thrilled to say we're continuing them into the New Year.

Kicking off Workshop Wednesdays in 2023 will be Sarah Breathnach, Head of Demand Generation and Field Marketing at Hunters. She'll be sharing Why Hiring a Marketing Team to do Lead Generation is a Big Mistake.

DigitalOcean has been the “just right tool for SMBs and startups” and have avoided diluting their efforts by going upmarket to achieve growth. Instead, their growth has been fueled by continuously serving its customers—SMBs and Startups—by adding the products they want and need.

As a result, they achieved $640M+ in ARR, a staggering 41% increase in ARR YoY, and a 7% increase in revenue YoY.  And as of December 2022, DigitalOcean now serves over 620,000 customers in over 185 countries.

Cliff Bockard, Senior Vice President of Revenue at DigitalOcean, joined us at SaaStr Scale to discuss how businesses can serve SMBs and still bring in large numbers of revenue.

Some ideas:

1. Find a truly great co-founder. Slow it down until you do. There is too much to do in SaaS — sales, customer success, product, engineering, demand gen, etc. If you don’t have a great co-founder, slow down and find one.
2. Get those First 10 Customers — However and Whenever. We all get the first customers differently, based on who we are and what our app does. Outbound? Events? PR? Content Marketing? Try it all — and lean in on what you are good at. Don’t worry if you aren’t sure where the Next 10 will come from. Just get the First 10 however, whenever, wherever.

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!

For the first time in my career, I’ve worked with amazing first-time managers as CEOs.  

Before I was a CEO, I was a mid-level manager, a director.  And then a VP. Across a few start-ups.  Before I was first a founder.  Those management teams weren’t perfect, and I wouldn’t copy everything they did.  But at least I got to observe how a few seasoned CEOs managed their executive teams.

For better and for worse.

So … just one bit of advice.

There are two things you just gotta do, even if you don’t see the point or want to.

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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