Less than 30 Days Until the start off SaaStr Annual 2023: September 6, 7 and 8. 

Don't Miss Out on the Biggest SaaS Event of the Year!

This year's Annual will bring together an impressive lineup of over 12,000 SaaS CEOs, founders, and investors, eager to share their insights and network with fellow industry leaders just like you.

If you're considering attending SaaStr, now's the time to act as this will be another SELL OUT SaaStr event. 

With so many amazing speakers, sessions, and networking opportunities, you'll have everything you need to take your business to the next level. Not to mention the chance to connect with some of the brightest minds in the industry and discover new partnership opportunities.

So, don't miss out on this incredible opportunity! Register now to join us at SaaStr Annual 2023 in the San Francisco Bay Area this September.

Hey SaaStr Community,

Our top post this week was on how to drive down churn.

A few things that always work to drive down churn in the early days — and later:

First - make sure you have a strong Head of Customer Success … whose #1 goal is reducing churn.

Too many early stage VPs of Sales don’t have a strong “wing person” running customer success.

Go help the founders make the hire if there isn’t one.

And importantly — resist the urge to have this Head of CS own upsells.

That may seem to help you, but it will lead to a de-focusing on driving down churn.

Next, go visit all your top customers in person, even once a quarter if you can.

Far fewer customers churn if you visit them in person.  

We’ve been saying this on SaaStr for 10+ years (!), and yet I see fewer and fewer sales execs flying to meet customers.  

Yes, it was tough in 2020.  It’s not tough today.

Read your team’s emails and listen to their calls.

If you don’t, they’ll often say things that are just plain wrong. And lead to unnecessary churn.

Ok here is basically a bible for you for raising venture funding. Trust me.  There’s too much advice that is biased, or from the inexperienced out there.  Raising venture capital is not a game. But it is a process.

Here’s the insider guides to making it easier:

#1. 5 Things That Can Make a Good VC Pitch Deck … Great.

The differences between good and great.

#2. 16 Rookie Errors Founders Make Pitching to VCs — And Passing the “20 Minute” Test.

The top errors founders make pitching to VCs.

#3. 9 Tips to Do Better at a Full VC Partner Pitch.

How to handle the final pitch in front of all the partners.  At that point, it’s often yours to lose:

4. 10 Things Not to Say During a VC Pitch. 

Read this one, and avoid a ton of unforced errors.

5. How to Stand Out to VCs. 

The #1 way to stand out and make a difference.

This edition of the SaaStr Weekly is sponsored in part by Booking.com

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So we’ve covered hero company Atlassian many times on this series. 

First, it’s an epic bootstrapping success story.

Second, it showed early you can build a SaaS and enterprise leader from anywhere. 

And third, it’s a SaaS and Cloud leader we all have opinions on. We have a sense of.

And Atlassian has been saying something for quite a while — that while things have gotten harder the past 18 months or so, buyers are still buying.  

Atlassian has seen some modest macro impacts, but they’ve just kept selling.  Through PLG motions, through partner-led motions, and through a modest sales team as well.

A ways back during lockdown, we had some of the best founders in SaaS join us for SaaStr Summit: Bridging the Gap to buck people up.  

It was great, and incredible 20,000+ attended digitally.  But it was a short downturn!  

SaaS stocks actually rapidly recovered, even as lockdown and shutdowns lasted far longer than any of us thought it ever would at the time.

Among others, one of my favorite CEOs and founders, Jeff Lawson came back and shared his top learnings from tougher times.  

And now that I look back, the learnings actually are even more useful now than before, because this “downturn” we’re in for some has lasted far longer.

There was one point Jeff Lawson CEO of Twilio made that really resonated with me then, but faster forward to today, resonates even more:  

"If you don’t commit 100%, you never really make any money.  

You never really get anywhere."

This edition of the SaaStr Weekly is sponsored in part by New Zealand Trade & Enterprise 

We think globally from day one and understand how to partner internationally, scale at speed, and deliver localized solutions to meet the needs of markets worldwide. There’s a reason why our companies are trusted by some of the biggest brands in the world.

So there’s a strategy I really only see a handful of vendors using, but it really, really works IMHO.

It’s to turn your drip campaigns to prospects into an incredible weekly set of industry-leading content.

Drip-marketing is part of almost every start-up’s toolkit now, but it’s often just become an endless automated set of offers and product reminders.

And yes, do this.  

It’s often said only 10% of your prospects are really in market now, and ready to buy today, and that sounds right.

Guillaume “G”Cabane of HyperGrowth Partners, ex-VPM at Drift, Segment and Gorgias ran the actually numbers and found something similar. And that you can’t push it.

You can’t force prospects to buy faster.

Ok now that some time has gone by I can reflect a bit more thoughtfully here.

My top mistakes as a SaaS founder/CEO:

Not convincing the very, very, very best VPE I knew to join as our VPE. 

I tried and I tried for years. But looking back, I should have tried even harder. I should have camped in his office and literally never taken No for an answer.

It would have solved our top problems and been a game-changer. I had a great CTO, but I also needed a truly great VPE to scale past $10m ARR and deal with all those issues. I’m 100% confident we’d be running a multi-billion dollar public company together if I’d closed him.

Overreacting to competitive threats.

We were growing 100% at $10m ARR, with 120% NRR. Respecting the competition is critical, but worrying too much can hurt you. They couldn’t stop us, even if they could maim us a bit.  

Not seeing other chances would come. 

We had a few tough hits with one strategic partner, and lost a few big deals. That seemed like such a huge deal, and at the moment, it was. But we got more chances later on.

Not finding a way to work through team conflicts better. 

Our CTO was amazing, but we didn’t work together as well as we should of. In some ways, it was a different time. But while I used all the tools I knew to have a better relationship, I should have done more.

Not raising a bit more money.

We did fine, and got cash-flow positive by $5m ARR. But I could have done a lot more with just a bit more money.

Harry and Jason did their latest deep dive on 20VC the other day and there’s a lot in it.

In Today’s Episode with Harry We Discuss:

1. WTF is Happening At Seed Right Now:

Why does Jason believe seed is more active than ever? Is the pricing of seed rounds impacted since the downturn? Why does Jason believe it is not only not the end of party rounds but just the beginning of them? Why does Jason believe you cannot fail if you have $1M in ARR and an amazing founder? Why does Jason believe that seed investors cannot participate in “hot seed rounds” anymore?

2. Is Series A a Dead Zone:

How does Jason analyze the Series A and B environment today? What has changed in what investors expect and want to see in potential Series A and B investments? What happens to the many companies who raised pre-emptive Series As and have 10 years of runway but no product-market fit? Why does Jason believe founders should offer to give the money back when it is not working? What happens to the Series A and B market in the next 18 months? When does it come back?

3. Growth: People are Too Negative!

Why does Jason believe that growth is more active than many are giving credit for? What are the ARR benchmarks required to get a good growth round term sheet today? Why does Jason believe that VC DD is a load of BS? Why does Jason believe that every VC has fraud in their portfolio? Will they come out?

4. Ring That Bell: IPOs and M&A:

Why does Jason believe 2024 will be an amazing year for IPOs? Why does much of the IPO market rely on Stripe and Databricks? What is needed for an amazing 2024 IPO market? How does Jason evaluate the M&A market in 2024? Will regulation get in the way?

5. Jason Lemkin: AMA:

Why does Jason Lemkin believe this generation of workers will never work hard again? What is the only way for seed funds to make money investing in serial entrepreneurs? What does Jason know now that he wishes he had known when he started investing?”

• SaaStr 681: Scaling to $5B with Cockroach Labs' CEO Spencer Kimball's Formula for Sustained Growth and Resilience      

• SaaStr 680: The Most Important SaaS Metrics of 2023 with monday.com Co-Founders and SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin              

• SaaStr 679: Scalable, Low CAC Growth Tactics with Hypergrowth Partners Co-Founder Guillaume Cabane

Listen on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts or Spotify

Macromanage the best,

Really just get out of their way

Micromanage the rest,

Unfortunately no choice

Never hire anyone in sales that doesn't care about money

You'll see

The toughest hole to pull yourself out of isn't slow growth

It's not even almost running out of money

Or losing a top customer

Or even losing a cofounder

No, the toughest hole is getting too tired

And the only solution is making a great hire to help

Go find her

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