Top 10 GTM Mistakes Founders Make Again and Again

What are the biggest GTM (Go To Market) mistakes founders make? SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin shares The Top 10 Go To Market (Sales & Marketing & Revenue) Mistakes Founders Make Again and Again. Some are decades-old problems, while others have emerged from this new world we’re in:

1. Hire a VP of Sales that can sell or demo the product

2. Hire a VP of Marketing who can do demand generation

3. As a Founder or CEO, stay in sales

4. Don't cut your marketing budgets to almost nothing

5. Jump on the AI bandwagon in a meaningful way

6. Prioritize growth

7. Be cautious when hiring the broken, the bitter, and the fractional

8. Don't hire for the logo

9. ROI isn't always instant, build pipeline

10. Don't eliminate true customer success

Eric Torenbeng brought us on his Turpentine podcast to talk about a bunch of interesting topics:

• Where SaaS investing is today
• How SaaStr started, and why
• How combine venture and media

And much more!

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.

Startups can be acquired for a lot of reasons that have little to do with the exact MRR/ARR — team, technology, acceleration of time-to-market.  If a BigCo decides that buy makes more sense than build, and there is a lot of urgency … then sometimes they’ll buy something will relatively little revenue.  Sometimes.

But …

If an acquisition is to acquire something with scale to build real revenue upon, most Big Cos (and not coincidentally, most Private Equity firms) aren’t too interested until you are past $8m-$10m in ARR, and ideally, reasonably capital efficient.

And these days, for many PE firms (Thoma Bravo, Vista, etc.) the bar is more like $20m ARR and efficiency.  That’s the scale at which they feel they can confidently use their resources and playbooks to get to $200m ARR over time.

Those are the SaaS businesses BigCos and PE firms can add layers of management, marketing pushes, etc. beyond. The ones already with proven brands and go-to-market strategies.

The bar is probably more like $10m for a Big Tech Co to buy you.  If you’ve gotten that far, you’re a leader (if not the leader) and they generally think there is enough of a framework to build a $100m, $1B+ ARR business on top of.

Most BigCos won’t see anything much below $8m-$10m in ARR as “proven” or having yet broken out in the market.  So usually, they’ll wait … and see.  Unless market forces force them to do otherwise.

Synthesia has a great story, going from 0 to 50,000 customers. Accel Partner Philipe Botteri and Synthesia’s co-founder and CEO Victor Riparbelli deep dive into the lessons learned about building an Enterprise-focused Generative AI company and scaling it.

So I was going back to Salesforce’s Investor Relations pages to research a 5 Interesting Learnings post and I noticed something I’d seen the last time I went there.

The homepage for Salesforce’s investor relations still highlights a 2022 (!) investor presentation. When Salesforce is already in its fiscal 2025.

Now, if you scroll down, you’ll see the 2025 investor materials are all there.

But way is the 2022 presentation highlighted at the top? There may be a reason eluding me.

But I’m 90% sure it just hasn’t been touched. No one has seen it, or whomever has … didn’t care.  It wasn’t their job, or responsibility. Or whatever. Or a bug was logged, but no one fixed it.

© SaaStr 2024

644 Emerson St. Suite 200, Palo Alto, CA, 94301

If you'd like to stop receiving the SaaStr Daily, click here