What Can You Learn From Ring’s Astounding Success?
Many people will write the history on why Ring became an enormously successful company and why it became a real-world unicorn in a world when many startups are anointed that merely on paper. Since I had a ringside seat to the company before it really existed all the way through the end I thought I’d […]
5 Traits to Look For When Hiring An Early Marketing Team For Your Startup
As the CRO at SaaStr, I am doing a lot of hiring these days! A lot. And that means spending countless hours skimming through resumes, taking phone screens, and meeting candidates in person. Quick shameless plug–seriously, I am hiring for a lot of people, so if interested in working at SaaStr–check out our open jobs […]
How I Became a Tech Evangelist
Two questions I get asked quite often are: 1. How did you get to be where you are with your blogging? You’re not a native English speaker, nor a trained writer…. 2. What kind of name is “iamondemand?” So I figured it’s time to share my “tech evangelist” story. (In the feature picture of this […]
Comcast: How customer experience drives product development
Customer experience is one of those buzzwords that has come to mean anything, everything, and yet nothing at all. Although hype-mongers and tricksters have co-opted customer experience, in truth, the concept is profoundly important. At its heart, customer experience means all touchpoints or interactions between an organization or brand and its customers. It’s a simple […]
Matt Straz, CEO, Namely: What Changes At Employee 200 (Video + Transcript)
As we’re all aware, when your company grows, things start to change dramatically. The way you run a 20-person company is vastly different than how you run a 200-person company. Caroline Fairchild, New Economy Editor @ LinkedIn, sits down with Matt Straz, CEO at Namely, to discuss what exactly changes at 200 employees and how […]
The One Best, “Secret” Hack to Getting Venture Funding
I am fairly confident there are at least 10,000 Medium posts, 20,000 WordPress articles, and over well over 1,000,000 Tweets on How to Get Funded. It bores me personally, but I know it’s an important topic. Raising money for many CEOs is one of the their top 5 priorities. Without venture capital, I’d be nowhere. […]
What Happens When Startups Turn from Their Innovation Stage to Operational Excellence?
Nearly every successful tech startup I’ve observed over the past 20 years has gone through a similar growth pattern: Innovate, systematize then scale operations. An alternate outcome that I also unfortunately observer in some cases are companies who had extreme early success with an initial product adoption but failed in key areas that limited the […]
10 Amazing Sessions on Bootstrapped Startups at SaaStr Annual 2018
One request from last year’s SaaStr Annual was to add even more content for bootstrapped (vs venture funded) startups. We have! We’d like to think 100% of SaaStr content and speakers applies to bootstrapped startups just as well as any other type — but there are differences. So a few sessions to highlight: Ryan Smith, […]
Should I Sell for $50m … Or Push On And Try to Build a Unicorn?
BusinessInsider had a great story this week on Datto’s $1b exit to Vista Private Equity (more on the new role of PE in SaaS here). So much of it resonated with me, especially the story of the CEO’s 10 year journey, and turning down a $100m offer to sell. A decent offer to buy your […]
Why the Former President of Nickelodeon Joined mitú as CEO.
I am beyond excited to announce the Herb Scannell has agreed to move from NYC to Los Angeles to take on the role of CEO at mitú, the fast growing Latino digital media company, serving more than 100 million monthly unique viewers. Herb is a Puerto-Rican American media executive who was previously the President of […]
Want to Really Understand What all the Hype of Cryptocurrency is About?
If you read the headlines you may well think cryptocurrencies are a either a radically new way of paying that is our savior from ossified, corrupt governments or on the other side that they are speculative Ponzi schemes. The reality of course is that cryptocurrencies can be both and can be liberating and corrupting at […]
When to Stop Doing It All Yourself
Perhaps the biggest difference between most first-time founders and most second-time founders is how long they try to do it all themselves. This isn’t a criticism first time you usually sort of have to. You have less capital to hire a team, and less experience building teams. But then after that there are at least […]
SaaStr Tower unveiled!! The Annual has officially been upgraded!
We’ve already announced our first 70 speakers, and now we’re excited to share the biggest SaaStr Annual announcement of the year… we’ve upgraded the event venue for 2018! With ticket sales tracking at over 1.6x our 2017 numbers, our attendees are going to need a bigger and better experience than anything we’ve ever offered. SaaStr […]
IT heroes: Use customer service to build business relationships
Image from iStockphoto The importance of building bridges between IT and business stakeholders is obvious, but getting there is hard. In his book, Driving Digital, veteran CIO Isaac Sacolick describes the need to build these relationships from the bottom up: The solutions and transformational practices that I helped implement across these organizations had more similarities […]
What Do Boards Actually Do?
There’s a lot of mystique about what happens at board meetings and a lot of imagined board-room drama. I read commentary or Twitter or blogs and realize that there are also strongly held convictions that there are these evil VCs who do terrible things to mostly altruistic founders. The image of boards and of investors […]
