Q: What are your top tips for making life easier as an early-stage SaaS CEO? For a start-up CEO, here’s my list, force-ranked: 1.  Spend more of your time recruiting VPs and your senior team — and help in general.  At least — 20% of your tim...

If you are doing your job as CEO, you already have 1 or 2 investors that want to invest in the next round No matter when that round is — Jason BeKind Lemkin (@jasonlk) April 29, 2021 I am fairly confident there are at least 1,000 Substacks, 10...

The hardest investment rounds to price are seed rounds.   They’re incredibly situationally dependent: A founder that sold her last company for $400m or IPO’d might be able to raise a pre-seed round at $40m pre (not uncommon). A founder with litt...

The toughest hire of all is probably your VP of Sales. What trade-offs should you make? What are the right interview questions? When is too early to make the hire? When do you know that you’ve made a mis-hire? How far can you stretch to make the...

Everyone of us that are hyper-driven wants to grow our careers faster. We’re impatient. We want to learn, grow, manage more, earlier. Let me share my best hack. My uber-learning: Find the best boss you can; and Take on every initiative, project,...

Events.  Not digital events, which exploded since Covid.  But good old fashioned, in-a-convention-center events are coming back.  And boy, has it been a while.  Many events like Coachella, Dreamforce, SaaStr Annual and more haven’t been produced ...

Q: I’m a startup founder weighing multiple VC term sheets at similar valuations. How should I choose? My force-ranked list of criteria: #1.  Who do I truly trust the most?  This doesn’t mean who is the “best guy”, or smiley-est, or nicest.  In ...

In scaling the cash-flow side of SaaS, there’s almost nothing more powerful than annual contracts combined with prepaid cash.  It’s just such a huge benefit. You get all the cash up-front, and your churn almost by definition goes down. Because th...

Lately at SaaStr, we’ve become more and more buyers of SaaS software ourselves.  Our own tiny little team and organization has grown, and we have to start putting the infrastructure in place for a $20m+ business. And it’s been a vivid reminder of...

A lot of our SaaS older times don’t quite know what to make with a lot of B2B startups these days, let alone some public SaaS companies. So many startups these days are claiming they have “ARR” from revenue that … doesn’t recur. Doesn’t ARR stand...

Q:  Is venture capital really necessary to do a start-up? Maybe it isn’t. Squarespace’s solo CEO managed to go years without taking any investment at all. It will soon be worth $15B+. And he’ll be worth $5B+. More here. Atlassian never raised ...

Salesforce Growth: 2021 $20.8B Guidance 2020 $17.1B 2019 $13.2B 2018 $10.5B 2017 $8.4B 2016 $6.7B 2015 $5.4B 2014 $4.1B Thank you Ohana! — Marc Benioff (@Benioff) August 25, 2020 If you haven’t done a SaaS start-up before, it’s different.  The...

The 4 things that matter most are things that it’s often hard to take too seriously in the early days. Culture? Yes, there’s nothing more important.  But in the early days the culture really just is the co-founders.  There’s just not that much mo...

So for 5+ years we’ve had a very specific set of speaker guidelines at SaaStr Annual and related events.  We’ve had a majority of women speakers since 2017, and aim for 66% less represented speakers.  We’re not close to perfect and keep learning....

The founder of Squarespace still owns 36% of the company What is 36% of $15 Billion, anyone know?#founderpower — Jason BeKind Lemkin (@jasonlk) April 16, 2021 Not too long ago, we took a look at Wix at $1 Billion in ARR.  Now, Squarespace has...

I’m worried. You don’t need a CMO. At least, not yet. Let’s roughly break up what “marketing” means at different stages of a SaaS company: $0-$1m ARR. Marketing = Growth Hacking. You are the 10,000th SaaS company to market. Why would anyone even...

I have nothing profound to add, but let me share what I see happening in SaaS post-Covid: Office life will vary based on the age of the company: Older tech companies (Google, Amazon, etc) want most folks to go back to the office and in fact are...

Your API.  If you are a B2D company, it’s your product itself, your API. But for most B2B companies, your API, your partner programs, and the like are extensions.  Not your core product, but an important layer for improving customer experience. B...

Q: What’s a healthy number of deals an Account Executive for a B2B SaaS company be working? How many is too many? Deal size is $4k/yr and sales cycle ~25 days. You can back into it. First, what’s the On Target Earnings (OTE = base + bonus) for...

I try to avoid raw pitches at all at this point. Send me the deck ahead of time, with as much detail as possible. I promise to read it carefully, and have questions. Still, the pitch is part of most processes. Here’s what I love, that I don’t see...