Sometimes things just fall into place. Like this post. I had nascent inspiration to write it last week, but couldn’t quite find my passion for it. Then I had a couple of clients surface some things that really focused my thoughts on the SaaS CEO role. My personal experience as a tech CEO for 20 […]
SaaS Culture Best Practices
Read, listen and watch SaaS culture best practices for founders and leaders of growing technology companies. Join SaaS co-founders and operators for guidance on sales, marketing, customer success, culture, and institutional readiness.
SaaS Startup Hiring Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them
Hiring mistakes are inevitable, especially when you are scaling fast and trying to fill many open positions at once. Here are a few of the most common startup hiring mistakes I’ve seen and some thoughts on how to avoid them. Hiring people who aren’t passionate about your category and/or SaaS. When SaaS was just getting […]
SaaS CEO Temperament: Urgency vs. Stress
Everything a SaaS CEO does is steeped in urgency. We’re in growing businesses beholden to outpace fast-paced markets. We often run razor thin, allocating as much cash as we can to maximizing our growth rate. But if our outward CEO temperament crosses the line from urgency to stress, bad things happen. Teams lose faith. Investors lose confidence. […]
Video: How to Lead Your Company With Transparency
Simple guidelines to lead your company, or your team, with transparency, while balancing confidentiality and building value for your organization.
Dangers of Myopic SaaS Metrics Management
Just before we left for Europe a few weeks ago, we launched a couple of eBooks. One was Anna’s guide to Building the Startup Sales Team and the other was my Guide to SaaS Growth Metrics. While I’m grateful for how they’ve been received, being away from everything for a couple of weeks has given […]
High SaaS Employee Turnover? It’s You, Not Them.
I know it sounds harsh, but when you have a SaaS company with high turnover, it’s much more likely to be the company’s fault than the employees’. Sorry, but millennial tales of woe notwithstanding, people stay where they love to be. SaaS employee turnover is far more costly — in hard expense and lost growth […]
SaaS Engineering Talent Quality vs Quantity
In my experience, leading a tech company for over ten years, SaaS engineering talent is the hardest to find. I was at a barbecue over the weekend and ended up commiserating with another CEO over the challenges and philosophies around SaaS engineering quality vs. quantity. We all know that demand outstrips supply for software engineers, […]
How to Balance Your SaaS Product Development and Evolution
Yesterday, I wrote about my perspective on controlling and launching a minimally viable product (MVP) in SaaS. That MVP process could apply to a startup with an unreleased, pre-revenue product. But, it could also apply to an established product adding new capabilities or features. Today I want to focus on the SaaS product development process […]
SaaS MVP Development Process Management
Efficient and effective SaaS MVP development takes imagination, discipline, process, and above all, customer feedback. I recently met with a company that demoed what they were calling an MVP-stage product. In reality, it was a wireframe-stage product developed in a vacuum from actual, potential customers. They’d been at it for years, had yet to launch, […]
How to Lead Your Company With Transparency
“But how best to accomplish transparency? It’s a delicate balance — you want to keep employees in the loop, but you also want the company to function smoothly.” – TinyPulse Many modern companies, particularly tech startups, have transparency as a core value. Transparency as a core value for all stakeholders including employees, customers, partners, vendors […]
