The Top 100 SaaStr Posts on How to Build a World-Class SaaSt Startup

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It's time to get organized. The Top 100 posts on how to build a world-class B2B business.

Building A World-Class Sales Team:

• How Cheap a Product Can You Have And Still Have Salespeople?
• How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days. And No, It Wasn’t Magic.
• 10 Great Questions to Ask a VP Sales During an Interview
• What a Great VP Sales Actually Does. Where The Magic Is. And When to Hire One.
• The 48 Types of VP Sales. Make Deadly Sure You Hire the Right One.
• An Initial Sales Rep Comp Plan to Lower Your Stress Level, Increase Cash, and Make Everyone a Lot of Money
• A Basic Structure for a VP, Sales Comp Plan: 50/50/25+
• Your #1 Sales Rep Should Be Driving an M6 Convertible By Month 12. (And Not Buying a Panerai Watch.)
• If Your VP Sales Isn’t Going to Work Out — You’ll Know in 30 Days
• When You Hire Your First Sales Rep — Just Make Sure You Hire Two
• Inbound or Outbound Sales? The Answer is Yes
• Why The Greatest Sales Teams Just Kill It On Dec 31. When Everyone Else Has Gone Home.
• Why It May Take You 12-18 Months to Hire a Great VP, Sales — Period. And What to Do About It.
• Should Your VP Sales Start Off as a Player-Coach?
• How to Hire A Great VP Sales: The Full Video (and Transcript)
• Curse of the ‘Middlers': Why Happiness Officers Can’t Stand In for True Sales Professionals
• Beware of the Confidence of High Win Rates

Getting from 10 Customers to Initial Traction (~$1.5m):

• How To Know You’ve Hit First Traction In SaaS. The Moment When You’ve Got A Real Company.
• If You Don’t Have a Truly Great Founding Team, Just Take a Pause. Don’t Start Your Start-Up Yet.
• How to Get From 1.0 Launch to Traction in SaaS
• If You Have 10 {Unaffiliated} Customers in SaaS — You Have Something.
• Want to Understand SaaS? If Nothing Else — Understand That It Compounds
• My Top 10 Year One SaaS Mistakes. Save Yourself Some Pain & Just Don’t Make Them Yourself.
• You Really Don’t Know if Your Market is Too Small For Quite a While
• In SaaS, You Have to Love the One You’re With
• Unfortunately, We (Probably) Have No Idea If Your SaaS Idea is Any Good

Getting from Initial Traction (~$1.5m) to Initial Scale ($10m) and Beyond

• Post-Traction, You Need to Spend 20% of Your Time Recruiting
• Don’t Accidentally Bootstrap Yourself to Death
• From Initial Traction to Initial Scale (~$10M in ARR): The Hardest Phase. But — The Cavalry is Coming.
• In The Early Days, You Won’t Have Enough Customers. But Your Mini-Brand Will Come to Your Rescue.
• Around $4-$5m in ARR, You Probably Will Need a Chief MRR Officer
• The SaaS Year of Hell. And Then – Reignition.
• What Lies Beyond $100m ARR? Your Company-as-a-Platform. For Others.
• Why You’ll Want to Raise $100,000,000 for Your SaaS Start-Up: The Incremental Customer
• The $64,000,000 Question: When Things Become Unstoppable
• Everything is Sort of the Same at a Given ACV (Annual Contract Value)
• Workday is Growing 90% this Year. At $250m in ARR. So Wake Up: You Probably Need to Do A Lot, Lot Better.
• SaaS and The 7-10 Year Sales Cycle
• Silos-in-the-Enterprise: Good. But Not All They Are Cracked Up to Be.
• Why Most SaaS Companies Add/Have an Overseas Dev Team to Help Scale
• Do You Scale? It’s Harder in SaaS.
• SaaS Start-Ups: Buck Up – It Really Does Get Easier.
• Imagine a World With Unlimited Capital, and See Where It Takes You

The Journey

• If You Go Small, You’ll Never Have a Legacy
• I Don’t Know about CEO Coaches. But We All Could Use CEO Trainers.
• The Workday IPO and ‘F You Money
• I’m Tired of Running My Successful Start-up After X Years. What Should I Do?
• Great CEOs are Really Coaches, So Let’s Learn from Phil Jackson
• You {Probably} Aren’t Changing the World, So Let’s Make it Better
• To a Better Place: When is It Time as CEO/Founder to Move On?
• Those Brief, Rare Moments of True Wonderfulness in Start-Ups

Mergers & Acquisitions (To Sell – Or Not?), IPOs and Exits:

• Acquisitions — If You Do Sell, Try to Make Sure It’s At a Local Maximum
• If You Sell Your Company, You’ll Either Feel Like A Used Car Salesman — Or Like Hugo
• The Simple Reason Why There Will be 10-20 Great CRM IPOs in the Next Few Years
• A Real Life SaaS Case Study: Eloqua. Marketo. Pardot. There Are 3 Different Paths to Success, My Young Padwan.
• Why I’d Go Big. And Why You Should Ignore Me, and Most of the Others That Tell You That.
• BATNA, And Oracle’s $811m Purchase of Eloqua
• What If There Are No Natural Acquirers (For Your Company)?
• If You Sell Your Company, Use a Banker
• If You Sell Your Company — Prioritize Dollars Over Prestige
• “Deal or No Deal? When — and If — To Sell Your Company” on NBC’s Press:Here
• My Top 3 Tips On How to Help Your Team Succeed if You Are Acquired
• SaaStr on TechCrunch! The M&A “Nibble” And What To Do When You Get One
• One More Reason to Take That M&A Offer – Sponsor Turnover
• Why Zynga was Right to Buy OMGPop and Words With Friends, And What it Means for SaaS
• If You Get Acquired, You’ll Need to Learn to Move from Persuasion to Alignment

SaaS Start-Ups:

• On “Paying” Your Mentors and Advisors: The 2.5x Rule
• Is 5x the New 2x in SaaS?
• What the Second Time SaaS CEOs are All Doing
• How to Figure Out Your Competitors’ Revenues in About 70 Seconds
• What to Do If Your Business Decelerates
• TAM is Great. But What Really Matters is That You Believe You Can Hit $100m ARR in 7 Years.
• The Pernicious Effect of Dilution in SaaS: The Cold, Hard, Bloody numbers
• Your (Belated) SaaS New Year’s Resolution: Add a Layer
• Very Good Days, and 5 Pretty Bad Days, as a SaaS CEO
• Day 1: Who Should Be CEO? A Checklist.
• The Best $500,000 I Ever Raised — And Why Party Rounds May Not Be the Way to Go in SaaS
• A Simple Commitment Test For You And Your Co-Founders
• Can an 8-Person StartUp Sell to a CIO? Yes — If You Understand The Social Contract.
• If You Want to Get Funded – Dude, Make It Easy On Them
• 4 Good Reasons Not to Start a SaaS Start-Up
• Why You Need 50 Million Active Users for Freemium to Actually Work
• In The Early Days, Don’t Forget To Pay Yourself, Too
• As The Year Winds Down: Get Some Rest. Or You’ll End Up Washing Out in SaaS in Year 5.
• It Takes at Least 7 Years in SaaS: Can You Do The Time?
• Start-Up Success in SaaS? You Have to Bend the Odds In Your Favor. Some Thoughts on How to Do It.
• Things Not to Share With VCs (and Others) Pre-Term Sheet
• Why If You Quit Every Year You Won’t Ever Make Any Money
• The All-In Dilution from an Outside CEO: Just Make Sure You Do the Math
• Hyperaggresiveness … Can You Do It?
• SaaS is Good for Old People
• Maybe It’s More Important Your Co-Founders’ Weaknesses are Complementary To Yours
• Beware the Necrotic Touch of Zombie Ex-Founders

Marketing, Leads and Partners:

• Why Lead Velocity Rate (LVR) Is The Most Important Metric in SaaS
• Hire the Right Type of VP Marketing — Or You’ll Just End Up With a Bunch of Blue Pens with Your Logo On Them
• How Much Can You Really Spend on Marketing? (And The “Problem” With The S+M=ACV Axiom
• 22 Critical Tips in Hiring a Great VP Marketing (From Marketo, EchoSign, Insightly)
• Yes, You Can Measure Everything. Marketing, PR, Dev, Lead Efficiency. Do It.
• 5 Simple Ideas to Immediately Improve Your Conversion Rates in SaaS
• The Law of Attach Rates, And Why Partners Can’t Really Move the Needle For You (Directly)
• The Shifting Sands of SaaS Relationships. Here’s How to Handle It.

Pricing and Driving Up The Deal Size:

• The Next Wave of SMB SaaS: True Solutions. Priced as Such.
• A Solution Sale Can Capture 3-20x the Revenues of A Tool Sale. With Almost the Exact Same Core Product.
• Why Tilting Just a Smidge from Self-Service Can Grow Your Revenue 30x
• A Little Less About Pricing. A Little More About Deal Size. Please.
• 3 Tips for Building Discounts into Your SaaS Pricing Model (from OpenView Labs)
• Why There Is a 50/50 Chance You’ll Tilt Upmarket in SaaS
• The Enterprise: Go Biggish, or Go Home

Customer Success, Upsells and Retention:

• The $2 Million Dollar Man (/Woman): How to Think About Scaling Your Customer Success Team
• CLTV Isn’t The Whole Story. Don’t Shortchange Second-Order Revenue.
• Your Customer Success Team. Hire Early. And No Squishy Goals — It’s All About the Numbers.
• Want Happy Customers? Implement the 5-Visits-Plus-2-Badges Rule. For Your Customer Success Team — And You.
• Everyone in SaaS Needs to Do Customer Support. At Least Until You Have 50 Employees. But Ideally, Forever.
• Got 100 Customers? Believe It Or Not, It’s Time for Your First User Conference
• Dreamforce, BoxWorks, Arse-Kissing, and Behavioral vs. Attitudinal Loyalty
• Measure Your Churn. But What’s Even More Important is to Measure Your “Almost Churn”. 5 Tricks to Help You Here.
• Prisoners, And Why It Doesn’t Really Matter Your App Is So Hard to Rip Out
• I Never Lost a Customer I Actually Visited
• Why It’s Year 3 When You Lose Your Customers

Case Studies:

• How GuideSpark Tripled ARR Two Years in a Row, Growing to Almost Eight Figures in ARR — All Using Outbound Sales
• Eating My Own SaaStr Dogfood: Why I Invested in Algolia Search-as-a-Service
• Building the Enterprise SaaS Startup: An Interview with #BoxWorks Speaker Jason Lemkin
• A Discussion with Jon Bischke of Entelo: On Successfully Switching from B2C to B2B (SaaS)
• Eating My Own SaaStr Dogfood: Why I Invested in a Start-up With a Seeming 50+ Competitors

Competition:

• As Long As You Are Growing 60% Or More — Your Competition Can’t Really Hurt You
• It Doesn’t Really Matter When Your Competitor is Acquired. (Except It Means You Weren’t.)
• Why Competition Is So Bitter in SaaS: Oligopolies and Dominant Strategy Equilibriums
• Don’t Confuse Room at the Bottom with Disruption
• Why You Should Kill Your Competitor in SaaS
• The Virtues and Opportunities in Being #2
• When Big Companies Can Kill You. And When They Can’t.
• Why Are Those Founder/CEOs So Snooty? Because They are All Failing
• Sorry, But Your Start-Up’s Team Isn’t Actually Any More Agile Than the Big Guys. Why You Really Still Can Win.

Hiring and Retention:

• Don’t Ever Make Anyone “Head of Sales/Marketing/Engineering/Whatever” in SaaS
• By The Time You Give Them a Raise, They’re Already Out The Door
• At About $2m in ARR, Every Great Hire Will Be Accretive.
• Money, Bonuses, “Customers That Waste My Time”, and Greed: You Get What You Pay For
• You Can’t Hire a VP That You Don’t Love
• Alignment: Your VP Sales and VP Marketing Should Be Your Mom and Dad of Revenue
• When Are You Ready to Hire Pure BigCo Guys Into Your Start-Up?
• Why Hiring From Your Direct Competitors Usually Doesn’t Work Out
• How to Fire A Crummy Employee
• The Perils and Pitfalls of the “Been There, Done That” VP: Posers and Mercenaries
• Don’t Hire CEOs, Architects, Game Devs, or Dualies
• Don’t Forget to Pay People Right – Or at Least as Much as You Can

Metrics and Operations:

• Two SaaS Metrics That Actually Don’t Matter That Much: Absolute Churn and Sales Cycles
• The Bloomberg Scandal and SaaS. Don’t Let It Be You. Trust is Lost in a Heartbeat.
• 7 Steps to Getting to Cash-Flow Positive Faster (in SaaS)
• Knowing — and Sharing — Your Zero Cash Date
• We’re Still Waiting for a Cloud That Just Works

(Ad)Venture Capital:

• The 10x Rule: What Raising $1 of Venture Capital Really Means
• Why if You are a VC You Should be Insanely Rich
• Making Sense of Color after Meraki, and Going Big
• Tier 1 VC is Great. But More Money May Be Even Better.
• How to Know If You Should Go for Venture Capital, In One Easy Question
• What Is Your Social Contract With Your VCs?
• On Leaving Money on the Table and the Endless IPO Window

Product:

• Real Ent Software Don’t Need No Stinkin’ UI/UX
• On Not Forgetting to be 10x Better

Best Videos:

How to Hire (and Fire) Your VP of Sales:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY6Fy570J_8