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Countdown to SaaStr Annual

IT'S ALMOST HERE

70% Of You Use ChatGPT for Work All The Time

By Jason Lemkin
Tuesday, August 6, 2024 | Blog Posts

70% Of You Use ChatGPT for Work All The Time

So a lot of AI is real … a bunch of it is OK … and a bunch is still a work in progress.

So I wanted to know — how many of us really use ChatGPT for work? And how often?

It turns out, 69% of you use ChatGPT either every day or several times a week.

And just 8% of you never use ChatGPT at work. Wow.

70% USE CHAT GPT

SaaStr Annual Running 105% of Last Year. This Week Is The Last Chance to Sponsor!!

By Jason Lemkin
Tuesday, August 6, 2024 | Blog Posts

SaaStr Annual Running 105% of Last Year. This Week Is The Last Chance to Sponsor!!

So we’re getting close to 2024 SaaStr Annual!! The 10th Annual!! Sep 10-12 in SF Bay Area, once again across our 40+ acre indoor-outdoor campus.

So much has changed in SaaS, Cloud and AI the past few years, and it’s become tougher to predict so many things. But the good news is attendance for this year’s Annual is already running at 105% of last year!

LAST CHANCE

This edition of the SaaStr Daily is sponsored by Prismatic

Is the effort worth the cost: Building vs buying native integrations

The question is not if your customers need integrations but what strategy you
will use to build them. Find the right strategy with this guide.

ACCESS THE GUIDE

You Can’t Hire a VP That You Don’t Love

By Jason Lemkin
Tuesday, August 6, 2024 | Hiring, Human Resources

Recently, a good friend of mine running a Hot SaaS Start-up asked me if he should hire a particular VP of Product candidate I knew well. The team he’d be managing was a big thumbs up on him. The board was in favor. And I knew this VP. This VP is a 10/10.

But … it wasn’t what this CEO was looking for. He wanted someone different. More visionary, less tactical. It just didn’t click. Not deep down.

My advice? Let him go. Just don’t hire him.

Even if everyone loves this VP … you have to love the VPs you’re with. Or you’ll never really trust them. And then, they’ll never really succeed. It’s just too hard unless everyone really, truly has each others’ backs.

VP YOU DON'T LOVE

How to Deliver a World-Class Customer Experience at Scale with Monday.com’s VP of CX

By Amelia Ibarra
Wednesday, August 7, 2024 | Customer Success, Scale

Customer experience determines whether your customers choose you or another company. At this year’s SaaStr Europa, Natalie Margolin, the VP of Customer Experience at Monday.com, shares strategies and lessons learned to elevate customer experience at scale.

Keep reading to learn more about Monday.com’s customer experience journey, the challenges and milestones you’ll face at scale, and how to deliver a world-class customer experience.

WORLD-CLASS CUSTOMER SERVICE

5 Interesting Learnings from Atlassian at $4.4 Billion in ARR

By Jason Lemkin
Wednesday, August 7, 2024 | 5 Interesting Things, Scale

5 Interesting Learnings from Atlassian at $4.4 Billion in ARR

So we’ve covered Atlassian a lot on the 5 Interesting Learning series — for good reason. First, it’s a Cloud and SaaS leader we all look up to and know. And also, it’s interesting in that it straddles the line between business and developer markets. So while “B2B2B” has seen a lot of headwinds and challenges the past 24 months, the developer, infrastructure and Cloud side of the world has been stronger overall. Cloudflare, GitLab, etc. remain on fire.

So Atlassian as you’d expect is also in the middle. They not only grew 20% last quarter — but are still projecting 20%+ growth in the coming years — even at $4.4 Billion in ARR! (Although they are projecting a dip to 16% next year due to the wind down of migrating on-prem to Cloud customers). But they are also seeing some continued macro impacts at the same time.

5 INTERESTING LEARNINGS

Dear SaaStr: Our VC Is Encouraging Us to Hire Aggressively and Increase the Burn Rate. Should We Listen to Them?

By Jason Lemkin
Wednesday, August 7, 2024 | Fundraising, Leadership

In my experience, about 66-70% of the time this is bad advice, especially if it is coming from a Very Large VC. Not always — but more often than not.

You pretty much know how much to spend already. Often, first-time founders, especially those who had to bootstrap a long-time to get to venture capital, don’t spend the capital they do raise quickly enough. It takes them too long to get comfortable expanding the time horizon on the ROI they are investing.

Most of the first-time founders I’ve invested in aren’t “spending enough” in that they are a bit too slow to make accretive hires.

But … so what.

Every SaaS founder I know, at least as they approach $6m, $8m ARR or so … they figure it out. How to invest $X to get $Y out. They don’t know at first, but they learn, as they cross 50, 100, 200 customers.

Pushing them to learn this quicker does no good IMHO.

Furthermore, sometimes, Big Funds that want to invest more in you (to own more) won’t worry too much about your burn rate and Zero Cash Date. But you should worry more than they do.

So mostly, in my experience, this advice is at often at least a little wrong or self-interested. And importantly, even where it is right … better to let the founders figure it out on their own, IMHO.

The best version of this advice is to help founders learn where to make certain hires faster. Point that out, and where the ROI can be on a great VP of Marketing, on expanding the Customer Success team, and putting a few more sales people on a new but expanding segment of sales. And see where it goes. Don’t tell them to spend more.

SHOULD YOU LISTEN?

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