Inc - The Single Digit Growth Club

So what do Salesforce and Asana have in common?

• They both have large installed bases
• They both are doing a big AI push, and are deep into AI enhancing their products
• They both are now projecting … single digit growth for next year.

Less than 10% growth.

They are both the latest entrants into The Single Digit Club. Projecting growth below 10% next year.

So is “outbound dead”?

This has become a hot topic and almost a meme across LinkedIn and social media in SaaS. There’s no question for most of us, outbound is a lot harder than it was in 2021. And that the standard, automated cadences and break-up emails generally aren’t performing all that well.

But does that mean that high quality, truly value-add and tailored outreach to a prospect that’s in market or will be soon … doesn’t work?  That’s not my experience. That always works.

What do you think? We did a recent survey, and the feedback was almost split. Yes, 55% of you are shrinking or not growing your SDR and outbound teams. That’s the half-empty side.

But 45% of you are investing more in outbound and hiring more SDRs. It’s working for you. This also ties to a prior survey we did where 49% of folks said outbound wasn’t working for them — but 51% said it was still working.

This edition of the SaaStr Daily is sponsored in part by QA Wolf

Testing LLMs is not simple. The probabilistic output makes failures hard to identify while running the models repeatedly tends to become very expensive quickly.

In this blog post, QA Wolf engineer John Gluck covers 6 things the team learned about building automated black-box regression tests for genAI applications.

Dominic Grill, Head of Technical Success at OpenAI, and Eleanor Dorfman, Head of Sales at Retool, answer some of the most pressing questions from Harry Stebbings, Founder at 20VC, about mastering the customer lifecycle, how roles and motions in sales and post-sales have changed, the role of AI in sales, and some of the biggest lessons learned at these hyper-growth companies.

As Head of Technical Success, Dominic manages all pre- and post-sales at OpenAI. As Head of Sales, Eleanor manages the sales team at Retool. They dive into how have these roles changed over the last 18 months as businesses are quickly shifting.

Founders are often guarded toward most VCs. Perhaps they should be.  That’s a different, and longer conversation. And one thing founders tend to worry about is — can I be fired by my investors?

First, it’s tough to be truly fired if you control the majority of the board, voting shares, etc. So the more rounds you raise, the less it’s really up to you who the CEO is.  With more rounds of venture capital come more board seats, and after a few rounds, the founders often don’t control the board.  And the board decides who the CEO is.

Even if you control the board, contractual terms alone don’t eliminate all drama and stress in high-stakes situations. We saw this live with Uber. Even with Travis Kalanick controlling the board, in the end, he was still pushed out. It wasn’t easy, but the investors did push him out. We also saw it live in a crazy way with WeWork. The investors paid a crazy amount to push the CEO out.

The thing is, the last thing 98% of boards want to do is fire a CEO, and most especially in an earlier-stage startup. It’s simply way too much work, and way too risky, to try to find someone new to come in. That won’t know the business, the customers, the codebase, etc.

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

Can't keep up with your customers' requests for integrations? Read this Build vs. Buy: Native Integrations Guide.

Because you should always be asking yourself, if everyone in a senior role is the right person for the next stage. Including you.

Most of your VPs won’t scale all the way from $1m to $100m in ARR. So you need to both help them scale, and also, make sure you hire above them if necessary so the business does not stall out.

This may also be true of you. It may not be.

But as a founder — which also generally means you are both a very large shareholder and perhaps the single person most invested in the success of the company — you have to ask yourself the same question.

Having said that, if you aren’t 95%+ sure someone else could do the job better, then usually, don’t go beyond the exercise of challenging yourself. Instead, bring in a COO, a magical SVP, someone to help carry the load.  That’s almost always the better choice IMHE.

A CEO doesn’t have to know everything. She just has to be able to recruit the best people possible at each stage of the company’s existence. And the longer you stay CEO, the better you will get.

What does it take to scale a team from 2 to more than 1,100 people in just a few short years? Hannah Seal, Partner at Index Ventures, chats with Job van der Voort, CEO and co-founder of Remote, about just that. Remote launched in 2020, just as the pandemic hit, and it continues to be the fastest-growing portfolio company in Index Venture’s history.

Remote started in 2019 with nothing: no money and not a very good idea. In 2020, they still didn’t have a finished product until May, when they onboarded their first customer. In 2021, they grew from 50 people to 650 people in one year, and now they have over 1,100 people in 170+ countries and tens of thousands of customers.

Let’s see what Job’s biggest learnings are during this wild ride of growth.

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