Dear SaaStr: Why would any big business take a risk on a start-up? They wouldn’t. Unless, the gain way outweighs the risk. And yet … they do all the | Continue reading
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui1QtIIgqoU So in theory, SMB SaaS is better than enterprise, at least 9 times out of 10: Deals close much faster | Continue reading
Q: How Common Is It For Founders To Get Some Liquidity in A Venture Round? These days, if you raise money at a >=$80m-100m valuation, and are | Continue reading
So no source of funding data is perfect. Essentially every source lags, because deals are often reported far after they close. Most unicorn press | Continue reading
So now that we've been doing our 5 Interesting Learning series on public SaaS companies for a while, we can pull out a number of trends. Maybe the most | Continue reading
I'm not ashamed to admit that when I set up our first SaaS sales comp plan, I had no idea what I was doing. In my first start-up, yes, I sold to the | Continue reading
https://twitter.com/dharmesh/status/1392498820206956555 The other day I had a whiplash moment as a customer of a Unicorn SaaS company. I had a large | Continue reading
Q: As an entrepreneur, what are some tips and strategies to avoid burning out? It’s a huge risk. A lot of “pretty successful” startups all sell at about | Continue reading
https://twitter.com/jasonlk/status/1383177239496257538 Not too long ago, we took a look at Wix at $1 Billion in ARR. Now, Squarespace has filed to go | Continue reading
Why would you not work in a VC fund? There may be times, maybe even many times, in the earlier days when you look at VCs and Venture Capital and think -- | Continue reading
The past 30 months or so (24 of them as a VC) I've had a chance to observe a lot of SaaS founders, and the vast majority I've worked with have just killed | Continue reading
Q: How much does a venture capitalist make? It varies widely. First, are you talking about cash or “carry” (i.e., share of the gains)? The partners in a | Continue reading
We defied all market odds and became one of the fastest growing software companies ever, bootstrapping our way to $20M ARR. And unlike most of today’s startups, we didn’t do it the traditional way. | Continue reading
Michael Seibel, Y Combinator CEO of shares the top risks founders should be aware of after funding and his best tips on how to avoid them. | Continue reading
It seems like everyone wants to be a SaaS founder these days. I meet with great VPs of Sales and Product in particular who are Ready. It's time. To go | Continue reading
Just a few years ago, as the next generation of SaaS companies were beginning to scale, the idea of building a Big or Biggish SaaS Company using | Continue reading
Because it takes so, so long to make money from it. At least from very early-stage investing. So while not a young person's game per se, it really helps | Continue reading
Mar 5, 2020, by The SaaStr Team This evening Santa Clara County issued a statement recommending large community events no longer proceed: “At this time, | Continue reading
We've added a series of additional Health & Safety rules to the 2020 SaaStr Annual. You can review them in more detail here. Note they are more | Continue reading
Former Gainsight CMO Anthony Kennada walks through the six reasons you should NOT create a category in his new book. Take a look! | Continue reading
These days, you clearly can build a successful SaaS and Cloud company outside the Bay Area. Shopify, Atlassian, Canva, Hubspot and so many others leaders | Continue reading
As you begin to scale and add a sales team, you'll encounter more and more drama with "bad" customers. These so called "bad" customers from a sales team | Continue reading
A few things that surprise you especially as a founder: Things are sort of … slooow. Yes, lots is always seemingly going on at a start-up. But the reality | Continue reading
In SaaS, they all have top-tier net revenue retention. Even, and even especially, if their customers are SMBs (which churn at a higher rate): PagerDuty, | Continue reading
Recently on LinkedIn and Twitter I put together a list of things that later, once you are successful, even very successful, you'll regret. It got a lot | Continue reading
Ok this isn't the most profound SaaS post of all time, but now that there are 100+ public SaaS companies and unicorns, we can finally answer a question -- | Continue reading
The main advantage is you can pursue a market or opportunity that is not worth their time. Yet. Big, established tech companies aren’t stupid, or | Continue reading
The other day I was meeting with a great CEO who had raised a modest seed round. Enough to invest, but not enough to go crazy with. He'd found several | Continue reading
If you're past $4m-$5m or so in revenue, this post isn't for you. You'll have figured this out, at least mostly. But if you are on either side of $1m in | Continue reading
Shorten them up a bit.Don’t fear paid pilots or smaller deployments. Prove yourself and put a few nickels in the bank.And then — just get used to | Continue reading
The best salesteams seem to just do amazing things together. What differentiates them? Well, they do tend to work at some of the best companies, so | Continue reading
Dropbox is public so we have a general sense — it spends ~28% of each dollar that comes in on sales and marketing:But … averages are misleading.A | Continue reading
It is maybe a bit high, but generally, is market-correct.On the face of it, a 3x — and $3 billion — gain in 2 years seems … high.In May of | Continue reading
What follows is a true story. Names, places, and companies have been changed to protect the innocent (or not so innocent). I was catfished by a candidate. And not just during a phone screen. This guy made it through a recruiting agency, a phone scree... | Continue reading