So Snowflake is the high flier in Cloud. It’s one of the few still commanding a premium multiple in today’s world, and still growing at tremendous rates.

Snowflake is also a barometer of everything in SaaS and Cloud, because a significant amount of its revenue is consumption-based, at least in part.

So when CFOs and others tighten budgets, they’ll also try to buy less Snowflake.  Not none, just less.  AWS is seeing this, and so is Snowflake. Growing remains jaw-dropping at 50% at $2.4 Billion in ARR, but customers are trying to reduce their spend or at least slow the increase in spend.  Which just makes sense.

So one of the latest SaaStr surveys confirms what I’m seeing, and we’re seeing across many public SaaS companies. 

Hiring has way slowed down, but many folks are still hiring, albeit at a reduced rate. 

56% of you aren’t hiring, or barely hiring.  And very few of you are doubling headcount, vs everyone in 2021.  But a good chunk of you are still hiring, albeit in moderation.

This is what we are starting to see across public SaaS leaders as well.  Many did layoffs and capped hiring to get radically more efficient — and it worked.  In just 1 year, everyone from Monday to HubSpot to Freshworks became radically more efficient, with much higher non-GAAP margins. In just a few quarters.

And they’re still growing at very strong rates, from 50% for Monday to 30% at HubSpot. So hiring is beginning again, albeit for now often mainly focused on engineering and product. Monday for example held the line on headcount over the past 4 quarters, but now is slowly hiring in R&D and product.

This edition of the SaaStr Daily is sponsored in part by Infinicept

Learn how to earn more revenue by embedding payments into your solution, without doing it all yourself.

Building a company for $0-$1M in revenue differs wildly from $1-10M ARR. And scaling from $10M to $100M is wildly different still. 

Sameer Dholakia, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners with decades of operational experience, shares what you need to change as you scale from $10M to $100M ARR. 

The short answer is almost everything. 

Keep an open mind as you move into the next chapter of your company. 

“Everything that got you to where you are isn’t going to get you where you want to be,” says Dholakia. 

CMO is a tough job. The half-life is short. The pressure is high. And the job often is so multi-faceted. A CMO has to:

• Own demand gen (hopefully)
• Own product marketing
• Own customer marketing (hopefully)
• Support and partner with sales
• Own brand & brand positioning

It’s a big job.

And part of being a good marketer is … well, marketing yourself.

Many of the top CMOs are out there are always marketing. Both their company and many times, themselves.

And that’s good. Having a CMO that is present, that is visible, is great for recruiting and much more.

I’ve just observed one thing: CMOs that spend too much time marketing themselves generally fail.

This edition of the SaaStr Daily is sponsored in part by Notion

Notion combines project management with your docs and knowledge base, so you can stop jumping between tools, and stop paying too much for them too.

When you think about Nike, it’s not just a pair of shoes that comes to mind. Instead, you imagine yourself as an unstoppable athlete, sprinting towards victory or pushing your limits in the gym. This is because Nike has mastered the art of storytelling, transforming their products into symbols of determination and athletic prowess.

Monte Carlo’s CEO and Co-founder, Bar Moses, and Head of Content and Communications, Molly Vorwerck, engage in a captivating dialogue, drawing from their unique experiences at Uber and Gainsight.

The pair unravels the transformative potential of storytelling and reveal how they skillfully applied their acquired wisdom to forge a compelling brand at Monte Carlo.

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