Hey everyone -

Not long now until SaaStr Annual 2023! 

This is gonna be epic, September 6, 7 and 8th in the SF Bay Area. 

If you feel like everyone you know in SaaS is going to be there - 

that's because they are ;) 

The very best speakers, CEOs, revenue leaders, investors and 12,000 of your best SaaS friends will all be coming to SaaStr soon for the biggest SaaS event of the year! 

Don't miss your chance to grab one of the very last passes here before they're gone.

So there’s a pickle a lot of you will get yourselves into.

That critical team member, that you just have to have, that you need — that’s also toxic.

I remember when it happened to me.

In my first start-up, there were literally only a handful of engineers who understood our technology.  The best we made our CTO.  

The second best, “William”?  Well he was toxic.  Literally no one wanted to work with him. No one.  He was cruel, snarky, and had burnt every bridge you could burn.

But I pulled our team together and said look — I know no one wants to work with William.  But what if our CTO gets hit by a bus? We can’t have no one who can make it all work.  

We owe it to our investors, our customers, our team members to have some basic redundancy here.  The team’s heads hung low, but they finally agreed.  They never thought they’d have to work with William.  But we needed one more here.  He was off the charts in his skill set.

I’ve envolved my learnings and thinking here.

Until a few years ago, my advice for CS hire #1 was: just hire a veteran.

I didn’t mean a true VP of Customer Success in the early days of revenues … you’re not ready for that yet.

But my advice until recently was always hire an experienced individual contributor to start in CS with:

• at least a few years of CS experience;
• at roughly the high-end of your price point; that
• you believe in and would trust with your hard-won customers.

I still think this is the right combo, if you can get it.  And yes, there are 1000s of CS veterans around now, so go interview 30+ of them!

I used to say:

Don’t hire someone without CS experience. You need that, and there are plenty of folks with experience now.  There’s no reason to take that risk any more in most cases.

And don’t hire someone to manage $250k ACV customers that did $2.5k ACV customers in their last job, no matter how much you like them.  They won’t understand your customer base.

Don’t hire someone you don’t intuitively believe in, no matter what their experience. They need to make you comfortable in the interview process with your product and processes. If they don’t make you comfortable — they won’t make the customers comfortable, either.

To get off the ground, if you hire a vet you believe in, the customers will too. If she’s done a good job at the ACV of your largest customers … that will be a huge upgrade from an all reactive / support model.

This edition of the SaaStr Daily is sponsored in part by Mission Cloud

Whether you're getting started on your generative AI journey, or you're scaling your LLMs for business growth, Mission Cloud is here to help.

So SaaStr itself is a little funky — we only have 9 team members but a fair amount of scale in terms of reach, revenue, and in some cases, software utilization.

We don’t need many CRM seats for example but we do a ton of marketing.

So it was interesting when we tried to migrate off an existing enterprise-focused marketing tool we use.

We mainly use it for legacy reasons, and no one on our current team really wants to use it.  So we reached out to the leading SMB vendor.

The price?  

5x more for the SMB vendor! 

$50k plus a migration fee (almost $100k total, really) for the SMB Vendor vs. $15k a year today for The Enterprise Vendor.

What’s happening here?

To some extent, it’s just a natural output of how enterprises price. They are focused on pricing per units that scale organically in the enterprise — seats, workflows, etc. From that perspective, we’re tiny. 

“My App Stack” is a new series where we dig in with top CMOs, CROs, CTOs and CEOs on just what apps they’re really using to run their business.  I always learn a lot from these — they are in essence a best practices list from each leader. This week we have Carin van Vuuren up, CMO of Greenhouse.

Ok we are close!!  We’re adding the final batches of Workshops and Braindates for 2023 SaaStr Annual!!

Take a look at some of the epic workshops and braindates you can join, and importantly — meet great colleagues at in these less formal sessions.

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

Webinars are a lot of work, and repurposing that content takes hours, and no one seems to want to own it. Using gen AI, Hubilo Webinar+ with it’s new Snackable Content Hub can create 40+ assets in minutes, including video snippets and video shorts, blogs, social posts, and even ebooks. 

The simplest way to go from $500k to $1m ARR is to treat every prospect like a king or queen.

Like they are the single most important prospect / customer in the world.

Even for a $49/mo deal, spend 10 hours with them if they need it. Tune the product. Provide 24×7 support.

I slept with my laptop next to my bed at this phase to be the “swing shift” support.

Go and meet any possible customer you can in person, especially if they are local.  Even if they pay $20 a month.

Ask every single customer what more you can do for them.  And go build that.

Treat each customer like they are paying you $100,000 a year. 

They deserve that.  They’re taking risk on you.  A vendor no one has ever heard of.

So our good friend Lloyed Lobo as part of his new book and series on Building Community did a deep dive with Jason on how SaaStr built the world’s largest community for business software — somewhat on accident.

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