Contributors
Meet our contributors who made this possible by sharing their experiences
Jirka Helmich
Chief Product Officer at Mews
Topics Discussed: Product management, People
You are probably doing it better than you think.
Bill Macaitis
Growth Advisor & Board Member at Macaitis Advisory
Topics Discussed: Marketing, Go-to-Market
Users don't want 1,000 features. They want something easy, simple, and fun to use. If you keep that as a North Star as you go from Series A to Series B to Series C, that's going to serve you well.
Micha Breakstone
Co-founder and CEO at NeuraLight
Topics Discussed: Founder Challenges
.. you spend more time with your founders and co-founders than you would with your spouse. The relationship is as intense as marriage gets, both emotionally and financially.
Richard Brooks
Chief Product & Marketing Officer at Avrios
Topics Discussed: Product, Marketing, HR
There is a time and a place where you need to have measurements and processes. There is a time and a place to get it done and tidy up afterward. The trick is understanding at what point you need to put the processes in.
João Graça
Co-founder and CTO at Unbabel
Topics Discussed: Tech Management, Founder Challenges, HR
Trust yourself and don't just be convinced by other people solely because of their credentials.
Jacco van der Kooij
Founder and Co-CEO at Winning by Design, the second fastest-growing private company in Silicon Valley
Topics Discussed: Go-to-Market, Sales
Three key elements allow a SaaS company to become profitable: don't lose your customer, create more sales to existing, happy customers, and extend lifetimes
Joyce Mackenzie Liu
Founder at Pegafund, Contributor to Forbes and Tech.eu
Topics Discussed: Financing, Fundraising, HR
The companies that have successfully grown, have scaled all parts of the business proportionately, not just product development, but also sales, marketing, finance, and operations.
Fred Becker
COO at Aire
Topics Discussed: Tooling & Processes, Finance
I know what large companies do and what so-called best practices are. However, you don't necessarily want to bring all those practices to a startup from day one because it would be too much. It would kill the company in the process.
Jordi Pedrol
Founding Partner at Metrix Partners
Topics Discussed: Finance, Tools & Processes
I try to do the same thing for all companies: building a platform where we can follow all metrics, no matter what their ARR is.
Matt Chappell
SVP of Sales at Legion Technologies
Topics Discussed: Sales, Go-to-Market, Pricing
The sales process must reflect the key evaluation milestones along the customer's journey to purchase your product. So it all begins with the customer's journey, which guides how you should build your sales process.
Herbert Sablotny
CFO at Beekeeper
Topics Discussed: Strategy, Finance, HR
I approach the finance function in terms of different levels of maturity.
Maria McMenamin
VP Sales at Pitch
Topics Discussed: Sales, HR
You cannot keep doing the unscalable thing, but you also cannot scale too early because you need to know what works.
Adam Tesan
CRO at Chargebee
Topics Discussed: Go-to-Market, Sales, HR
When you are mapping your sales process and marketing messaging, you need to think in terms of what is going through the buyer's mind and who additional is being looped into the processes at each stage in the journey.
Jen Grant
CEO at Appify
Topics Discussed: Marketing
A really critical part of growing your startup, even in the early stages, is to make sure that your brand is unique enough and sufficiently interesting for people to remember and then come back.
Ray Rike
Founder and CEO at RevOps Squared
Topics Discussed: Finance, Go-to-Market, Metrics
I want to provide others the ability to make better metrics-informed decisions using benchmarks. So they can not only see how they are performing against internal historical trends using a timeline series approach, but also how they are performing against similar cohort groups measured against similar companies.
Patrick Campbell
Founder and CEO at ProfitWell
Topics Discussed: Pricing, Metrics
simplicity and price differentiation are not mutually exclusive concepts. Normally a really good designer can create something simple that still has multiple options.
Mads Faurholt
Founder at CVX Ventures
Topics Discussed: Personal growth, Leadership, Hiring
Nail it before you scale it. Don’t scale before the organization is ready for it.
Sami Hero
Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at HappyOrNot
Topics Discussed: Go-to-Market
Analytics without action is just reporting.
Tristan Rouselle
Founder & Deputy CEO at Aryballe Technologies
Topics Discussed: Innovation
Being open-minded and respecting others' opinions is much more important than just coming up with good ideas. Ideas do not have value until they are transformed into a robust concept.
Tom Brady
Founder and Chief Technology Officer at SkySpecs
Topics Discussed: Founder Challenges
As a founder, your role will change many times. I've been able to find people who are complementary to me in doing the things that I don't excel at.
Mike Dias
Founder and CEO of ScaleUpValley, Host of ScaleUpValley podcast
Topics Discussed: Scaling Framework
Not all people fit in with all stages: as I said, you need to look for the person that you might need in the next phase of growth at least a year before you need them.
Jennifer Tacheff
Founder and CEO at Manifest Advisors
Topics Discussed: Diversity, Go-to-Market, Leadership
Slowing down to speed up matters. Set a clear strategy and then win against that.
Daniel Gebler
CTO at Picnic
Topics Discussed: Tech management, HR
Which kinds of elements to build up
tech-wise and through scalable tech excellence, and which ones to keep pretty
low tech is an important consideration for a founder at each stage.
Katie Christian
Head of Customer Success at Calendly
Topics Discussed: Customer success
What's the ROI metric that you share with customers?
Felix Eichler
CTO & Co-Founder at Userlane
Topics Discussed: Leadership, Culture, Founder Challenges
There is a balance between letting go and being drawn too much into the details. Sometimes details can send a massive signal.
Kasper Sommer
CFO at Dixa
Topics Discussed: Finance, HR, Tools & Processes
As a CFO, you need to be a storyteller and business executive more than just being the finance executive.
Michael Waldner
CEO & Co-Founder at Pexapark
Topics Discussed: Go-to-Market
What I have learned is that when you want to improve a market in which you have a lot of insights and knowledge, it’s better first to get investors on board who really understand what you’re after.
Mads Fosselius
CEO & Co-founder of Dixa
Topics Discussed: Go-to-Market, Sales, HR
There’s a lot of pain in doing so, but I think it's an extremely important thing to become as mature as you can in your go-to-market, as soon as you can.
Mark Roberge
Managing Director at Stage 2 Capital
Topics Discussed: Go-to-Market, Sales
Most people decide their pace according to industry trends like “triple, triple, double, double". However, your pace needs to be determined by the capabilities that your business has developed.
Ben Murray
Founder at TheSaaSCFO.com and TheSaaSAcademy.com
Topics Discussed: Finance, Processes & Tools, Metrics
The problem is often that you are trying to measure too many metrics. You must think about the top three metrics that align with your corporate objectives.
Sean Ellis
Co-Founder at GoPractice
Topics Discussed: Growth-Hacking, HR, Processes & Tools
Start by understanding how growth works in your business, and then look for opportunities for improvement.
Wes Bush
Founder and CEO at ProductLed
Topics Discussed: Marketing, Product Led Growth
The first way of building a PLG culture is by building a culture of user empathy.
Tami McQueen
VP of Marketing at Panoramic Ventures, Host at SaaStr Events
Topics Discussed: Marketing, Go-to-Market
You sell the process. We didn't sell the product; we sold the process of how much time it can save you.
Yaniv Leven
Founder and CEO at Panoply
Topics Discussed: Data Management, Internationalization
The minute you raise a buck in a startup, you're fighting against the clock.
Sampo Hietanen
Founder and CEO at MaaS Global
Topics Discussed: Investors
In the startup community, we often think in terms of startup versus corporate. Do realize that corporations have smart people as well. Be in your learning mode.
Cory Munchbach
Chief Operating Officer at BlueConic
Topics Discussed: Go-to-Market
Product-market fit is a non-linear, elusive process. It's actually very bumpy and you might have a couple of quarters where you feel like you're totally hitting it, then maybe a quarter where you're not.
Braydan Young
Co-founder and Chief Partnerships Officer at Sendoso
Topics Discussed: Founder Challenges, Culture
In the early days and even today, it's all on the founder. The culture is a direct line from that person.
Dan Koh
Chief of Staff at U.S. Department of Labor
Topics Discussed: HR, Leadership
Thinking about how you're engaging your employees, and about how they're buying into the culture and the long-term vision is important.
Alex Iskold
Co-Founder of 2048 Ventures, an institutional Seed-Investor
Topics Discussed: Competition
Premature scaling is also a big mistake. Stepping on the gas with sales or raising a mega-round of funding without having customer success locked down is a mistake.
Brian Requarth
Co-founder at Latitud
Topics Discussed: Finance, Leadership
Everything should be uncomfortable. Get comfortable with the discomfort. You should be growing fast enough, which is super uncomfortable in itself.
Jonno Southam
Previously Senior Venture Capital Business Development at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Topics Discussed: HR
If there’s no wow factor or there is a move to hiring by giving the benefit of the doubt, strongly disagree, and just find somebody else who can be better for the long-term cultural fit. It's never usually worth it to make compromises.
Andrew Parker
Director at Silicon Valley Bank
Topics Discussed: Finance
Ultimately, try and think about your financing partner in the same way you would about your VC partner. You want them to be bringing value to the business and not just their cheque book and some cash in your bank account.
Richard Valtr
Founder at Mews
Topics Discussed: Leadership, Culture, Fundraising
In my view it’s not bad to spread yourself too thin in the beginning: it’s much more important to know when the time is right to focus.
Rene Kantehm
CFO at VMRay
Topics Discussed: Finance, HR, Processes & Tools
Training for the right leadership skills is a key point in a scaling team and should not be underestimated.
Sterling Snow
CRO at Divvy
Topics Discussed: Go-to-Market, Marketing, Sales, HR
Anything you do in a startup has a shelf life.
Alex Theuma
Founder and CEO at SaaStock
Topics Discussed: Founder Challenges, Marketing
You cannot underestimate the value of a support network.
Nathan Latka
Founder at Founderpath and GetLatka.com
Topics Discussed: Finance, Metrics
The only thing that matters in building wealth is ownership.