Spin-to-win: Save $200+, 30% off, or even win a free ticket

Hey SaaStr Community,

It's almost Black Friday, so we've brought back the super popular discount wheel for a chance to save big bucks on tickets to SaaStr Annual 2024 — the world's largest community gathering for SaaS and Cloud professionals — from Sept 10-12 in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Head to the SaaStr Annual 2024 site and play our spin-to-win game to unlock your discount, including the chance to snag a free ticket! 

Once you claim your discount, you're just a few clicks away from joining more than 13,000 fellow SaaS CEOs, founders, revenue leaders, and investors at the 10th(!) SaaStr Annual 2024. It's three days of experiential learning and connecting with your favorite SaaS companies, like Drata, Zoom, DuploCloud, OpenAI, Deel, Monday.com, DevRev, Asana, 

Maast, Prescient Security, and many others.  

So what are you waiting for? You can't win if you don't spin.

Once you hit Initial Traction in SaaS, say that first $1m-$1.5m in ARR, you’ll finally find somethingthat works.

One channel, often.  E.g., partnerships.  Or Facebook ads.  Or an app store.  Or a specific outbound strategy.  Or blogging, or podcasting, or something.  Or paid webinars.

A channel that works.

Once you do, one thing I’ve learned, both as a founder, an investor, and now again at SaaStr: every marketing initiative, and almost every channel, plateaus.

There are limits.

There is only so much you can spend on Adwords in SaaS. There is only so much reach on FB.  Perhaps this isn’t true as much in B2C. If TikTok really spent ~$1 billion in ads (per Wall Street Journal) to become a dominant social network, then clearly the limits are high in B2C.

But in B2B, the world you are trying to reach is customers, not users.  At least usually.  And that world, while large, isn’t infinite.  And you can reach only so many on any given channel.

So AppFolio is a big vertical SaaS+ success story I frankly don’t know as much about as I should. There are several big leaders in property management software, and AppFolio is one of them.

It’s doing well, especially in today’s markets.

At $660m in “ARR” (a lot of that isn’t software, as we’ll see below), it’s trading at a $7.2 Billion market cap, even with lower than standard gross margins.

That’s pretty healthy. Growth is strong if not crazy, at +29% at $660m in “ARR”.  Importantly, it’s efficient growth as we’ll see.

Appfolio was founded way back in 2006, and they never quit.  10 years later, they hit $100m ARR in 2016 and growth just compounded from there.  Today, at a $660m run-rate, they are growing 29% a year, with substantial free-cash flow.

CEO. Although, perhaps say it in a neutral tone, with no bravado.

I always thought the title was a bit silly when running tiny start-ups.

But I missed an important point: Customers, Prospects, Recruits and Media like to talk to “the CEO”.

Even if it’s the CEO of a 5-person startup.

Customers, especially. They want to build a personal relationship with the CEO, the one person who is making a true commitment back to them on the 5+ year customer journey.

Use that title, at least externally.

Internally, if you prefer Founder, Chief Fixer, Trash Pickeruper, or whatever, understood. I did.

People have said “AI” more this year than any other year combined. Everyone is looking forward to what AI can do for them in business. 

In a recent Workshop Wednesday, held every Wednesday at 10 a.m. PST, the CIO and SVP of IT at Freshworks, Prasad Ramakrishnan, shares five ways organizations can leverage AI to solve problems and grow. 

“Don’t be a solution looking for a problem,” Prasad says. Instead, look for a problem to solve. 

We’ve been through big data and tech hype cycles since the early 2000s — when businesses were considered dead if they didn’t have a website, and mobile was everything. 

But this AI wave is slightly different. It isn’t new! AI has been around for 30-40 years now. What’s different is the aspect of generative AI. Instead of using AI tools only to analyze and automate things, it’s being used to create content. AI is enabling businesses to do a lot more than they could on human power alone. 

So, let’s look at five tips for how you can access the true value of AI. 

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I’ve hired a lot. Lost a bunch, but fired very, very few. 

But I’ve watched some tough ones, some truly potentially epic talent get fired. This seemed to happen for two different (though related) reasons in the BigCo vs. The Start-Up:

1. In a Big Co. It’s very easy to get fired if you are in any way a threat to your boss’ bonus, or boss’ corporate status. Period. Vs. it’s very hard to get fired if you are just in the Top 50% and aren’t a threat to your boss’ bonus.  Layoffs in BigCos happen all the time, but in reality, the folks impacted are the ones who are ranked in the bottom 5%-20% of the team.

But send that seemingly critical (but accurate) email to your boss’ boss? Good-bye sir. Thank you, Jerry McGuire. You’re out.

In the BigCo, it’s not about the name on the front of the jersey, it’s the name on the back. Your boss probably doesn’t care much at all about the overall corporate KPIs and success (if he or she even cares at all). He only cares about his own KPIs. And he really cares that you don’t undermine his chances of getting paid out > 100% on his personal KPIs.

2. In a Start-Up. You undermine the authority of the founders or other key leaders, consistently. This is really the one sin, past a certain point, you can’t tolerate. The team has to work together. You don’t have to respect The Man. But you do have to respect Your Man. If you take that too far, and treat the CEO or founder of a start-up as The Man … you may get fired.

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