So HubSpot had a great quarter, despite there being many challenges in the sales and marketing segments overall in the past 18 months: $2.5B ARR 23% Growth 22% Customer Growth 15% Operating Margins (non-GAAP) That’s about as good as it gets.  Even as many selling software to tech have struggled, HubSpot has maintained top-tier growth. But … that doesn’t mean it got easier. HubSpot was clear:  notwithstanding strong results, demand wasn’t any stronger.  It’s still tough out there.  CEO Yamini Rangan noted: December seemed to show a bit stronger macro demand, but tha ..read more

At this week’s Workshop Wednesday, Lucas Price, former SVP of Sales at Zipwhip and founder and CEO at Yardstick, shares his insights on how to hire and build a high-performing sales team. When he joined Zipwhip, they were at a quarter million in ARR, and he took the sales team to over $100M before it sold to Twilio for almost $850M. During that time, he wasted a lot of money on failed sales hires and decided to learn everything about hiring sellers. Sales Hires Have the Highest Failure Rate It’s a costly problem to have. The distance between top performers and everyone else has never been wi ..read more

Dear SaaStr: How Many Hours a Week and On The Weekends Did You Work as a Founder? The first time I worked at a start-up, I was confused. I came in that first Saturday to the office to work, and no one was there. Right before that first start-up job, I had been a young “grunt” in a services business before that for 22 months. I worked in the office constantly. That’s the way this services business was. We billed hourly in high stress, high paying situations. So it was working in the office from early morning to late nights all week long, then half of Saturday, and a chunk of Sunday. I took 2 va ..read more

So Datadog remains one of the most iconic Cloud and SaaS leaders of this generation.  Growth is still epic at almost $2.5 Billion — it’s still growing 27% a year (!).  But like Snowflake, it’s a bit less of a mind-bending rocketship that it used to be, and has focused on efficiency as well. Today its non-GAAP operating margins are 27%, and it’s generating almost $800m of free cash flow a year! From the hyper-growth of the past, to very efficient growth at $2.5 Billion.  It’s a sign of the times. 5 Interesting Learnings: #1.  $100k+ Customers Still Growing +15% a Year A go ..read more

Everyone loves Ask Me Anything sessions with SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin, and for good reason. As a SaaS veteran who built and sold a software company for nine figures, invested in startups since 2013, 10x-ing his fund, and continues to build a powerhouse community of SaaStr fans, he offers some hot takes on the communities’ burning questions. Let’s jump right into this set of community questions focused on SaaS metrics, growth, and efficiency. Q: There’s a lot of chatter about the overall buying environment changing because there is no more zero interest. What metrics should we expec ..read more

Does outbound still work?  It’s one of the questions so many sales leaders are asking out loud these days.  The outbound playbook from the past 5-10 years in SaaS clearly … isn’t.  Hiring 10, 20, 50 SDRs straight out of school to send the exact same email sequences to try to get meetings for an AE with more experience that them isn’t performing for 90%+ of us anymore. And yet … almost every CEO, almost every buyer, still opens and reads the best emails they get.  Every single day. I remember when I joined Adobe for a bit, I wonder if the very top execs really read their ema ..read more

At SaaStr AI Day, Siqi Chen, founder, and CEO of Runway, discussed his belief of why every role will become a prompt engineering role, along with some no-code AI tips showing how to build products without knowing how to code. Why Is Every Role a Prompt Engineering Role Runway is a next-generation finance platform. They’ve built four AI tools, three without writing code, and have developed an AI-first culture at Runway where everyone can develop and utilize these AI tools without a formal engineering background. AI is a force multiplier for human capital. “I consider AI the greatest invention s ..read more

So every week, Wednesday at 10am PST, we do an amazing, free, live Workshop Wednesday with the top SaaStr speakers, from CEOs to CROs to CMOs and more.  And we do live, open Q+A at the end! Sign up here. Some of the great upcoming ones include the CRO of Salesloft, G Cabane, ex-VPM at Segment, Drift and Gorgias; Logan Barlett of Redpoint Ventures, and so much more!! And past great ones you can catch up below include the CROs, CMOs, CPOs and CEOs of MongoDB, Owner, Brex, Gusto, Rippling, Databricks, GitLab, Bill, Justworks, Drata, Lattice, Harness and so so much more! Again sign up here ..read more

So long time friend of SaaStr Tomasz Tunguz, now heading his own VC fund Theory Ventures, has again summarized a lot of data into a few great charts.  This time, on Mergers & Acquisitions. My biggest take-away:  there are barely more than 50 acquisitions of $50,000,000 or more, at least disclosed one, in software of U.S.-based startups each year.   And that’s fairly constant for the past decade, outside of the 2021 bubble. Tomasz’s main point is that the dollars are only going up due to an increase in mega deals. But for founders, the bigger take away is that over the ..read more

Dear SaaStr: How Do I Motivate a Sales Team Working Commission Only? It is really, really tough. While I am sure there are examples of “1099 reps” that have done extremely well, I haven’t seen it work in SaaS. Pay the reps at least a small base salary, with a large commission. It’s what folks are used to. Otherwise, they sort of drift off when they don’t get a big commission check the first week or two … The reality is, almost anyone working “commission only” basically tries a few times, and if it’s too hard, gives up and moves on.  They just don’t see the money coming after that. If you ..read more