There's no event quite like SaaStr Annual.

It's all about the SaaS community. We provide endless opportunities to share and learn with peers from every role, function, industry, company size, and beyond. It's all here to help you and your team scale.

SaaStr Annual is the go-to event for SaaS founders, execs, revenue leaders, and investors.

It's all SaaS. No Fluff. Period.

And we want you and your team to experience it for the first time.

We just dropped a new set of flat-rate SaaStr Annual 2024 tickets for first-timers like you, which save you $150. Best of all, no minimum ticket threshold is required to get in on this fantastic rate. No, seriously.

BUT, this offer ends at midnight PST on November 17.

So the Wall Street Journal did a great job slicing and dicing IPO data recently.  To me, the most jarring statistic was this one: 80% of IPOs since 2020 are trading below their IPO price, or “broken”.

So what, you might think?  Buyer beware?  Hooray for “efficient IPOs” that don’t leave money on the table, some say?

Perhaps.  But the problem is this — when folks don’t make money off startups, everything gums up and slows down.

How do you scale a product organization quickly?

VP of Product at Drata Brian Elmi and Director of Product Management Dana Mauger share five not-so-secret secrets of product velocity at SaaStr Annual this year. Spoiler alert: These are probably things you already know, but they’re much harder to do in action than in theory.

Let’s see how Drata does it — a relatively young company of only 2.5 years, has seen massive growth and over 14 different frameworks, trust center capabilities, Enterprise risk management capabilities, audit capabilities, work center capabilities, over 100 plus integrations, and 350 different features.

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

 Learn how the pre-integrated public cloud ERP from SAP can uniquely support the requirements for Everything as a Service (XaaS) for both product-centric and service-centric organizations.  Register here.

Maybe not slowing down just a little bit.

• The week in my first real professional job when I realized I’d been there long enough and had nothing left to learn … I walked in and quit that day on the spot. I had no idea what I would do next and had zero savings. It worked out but maybe I should have found at least one person who would hire me before I did that. Just one. Staying a little longer wouldn’t have been the end of the world.
• The moment I realized the arguably terrible idea I had for my first start-up made sense to me I dropped everything and did it — with no way to fund the company or make payroll. It worked out, but only barely, and I had to strike the worst deal in all of venture capital and sign away my house and all my savings to fund it. Maybe could have gone a little more slowly.
• The moment I realized I was 100.00% all-in on idea for my second start-up, I dropped everything, raised $2.5m for the team, and just started doing it. Good idea but maybe we should have mapped things out a smidge more. Going more slowly in the beginning in this case at least would have actually paid off a lot.
• The moment I realized I had nothing left to contribute as a corporate VP I moved on. I could have just chilled for a while and maybe that would have been better for everyone including myself.  I was too burnt and didn’t have a supportive enough boss to see it.  But I should have stayed a bit longer and just played one more card.  Even if there were no great economic reasons to do so.
• The moment I realized I would be half decent at investing I should have just chilled. I didn’t have to try so hard so quickly to take it up another notch. Didn’t really help.

“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.  Last week we had a great one with Krithika Muthukumar, VP Marketing at OpenAI, check it out here.

This week we have Sarah Kiefer, CMO at Pitch!

1000000000000.00% in SaaS. Commissioned salespeople sell more.

Lots of us try to run this experiment. At least, those of us who haven’t done software sales before, and have a low-ish price point and run an all in-bound model.

Why can’t someone just answer the phones, and take their orders? Wouldn’t it be more customer-centric if they weren’t just focused on that commission? Can’t I just have “happiness officers” and not traditional salespeople?

Well, best case:

• They won’t ask for 60 seats when the customers says they only “need” 20. A bad sales rep will break a deal here trying to maximize his commission. But a good one will learn the prospect actually needs 60 seats — and close 60. Tripling the revenue from this customer.
• They won’t ask the customer to buy this month, this quarter , etc. That dramatically increases the risk the deal never closes.
• They won’t be proactive or hustle. They won’t map out the stakeholders at the prospects. They won’t schedule the follow-ups. This will again decrease the odds the deal closes.
• They’ll let the deal go.  Non-commissioned “sales” people will generally only close the deals that close in 1 call.

So by closing less, and closing slower … in most cases, best case, that’s half the revenue you’d have gotten otherwise. Best case.

So the news is mixed out there in SaaS and Cloud land:

On the positive side:

• Datadog blew out the quarter growing 25% at $2.2 Billion in ARR and had its best day ever, popping 30%
• Shopify exceeded expectations, growth reaccelerated to 31% (!) at an almost $7 Billion run rate, and it popped 20%
• Wix went from basically 0% growth 12-18 months ago to double-digit growth again
• HubSpot exceeded expectations, growing 24% at over $2.2 Billion in ARR
• Micorsoft is at an all-time high on the back of AI and Cloud growth
• Nasdaq overall is up a stunning 40% for the year, and the BVP Index of leading SaaS and Cloud stocks is up a more modest but still impressive 15% this year

But that doesn’t mean it’s actually any easier for them, or for most of us. And for many, their growth rates are still materially lower than in 18-24 months ago.

The underlying trends aren’t necessarily rosy per se. Few if any SaaS leaders are saying things are harder than 6 months ago. Almost everyone agrees that things have at least bottomed out.

And some are seeing a rebound for sure. Datadog noted it saw better usage growth in Q3 from existing customers than it did in Q2, and that the start to Q4 was the healthiest it had seen in some time.

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