The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors SaaStr 038: Rainforest QA's Fred Stevens-Smith on Firing Fast, The Transition From Founder To CEO & Why You Should Spend The Most Time with Your Highest Performers
Fred Stevens-Smith is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Rainforest QA, which if you listened to 20VC with Byron Deeter, you will remember he discussed them and their amazing trajectory. So for QA first, it is essentially QA as a service making it fast and easy to test your webapp in multiple browsers and they are backed by some of the best as we said there Byron Deeter @ Bessemer, our own Jason Lemkin, Y Combinator, previous guest Kris Duggan @ Betterworks and Marc Benioff just to name a few. As for Fred he is the man at the helm as Co-Founder & CEO and absolutely smashing it I might add. In the show Fred mentions his favourite reading material to be Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross's new book From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth Companies Create Predictable Revenue and if you have not read that, that is a must and can be found here!
In Our Discussion with Fred You Will Learn:
- How did Fred come to found Rainforest QA? What was his origin story to YC?
- How did Fred look to establish the pricing model with Rainforest? Why does Fred believe most software companies undervalue their software?
- What are the challenges of going upstream? How does it affect product? Sales cycle?
- Does Fred agree with Mark Organ that in a new category, the company CEO must be the category CMO? How much of a role does content play in Rainforest QA's education funnel for customers?
- Why does Fred believe you should spend the most time with your best people? Similarly, the least amount of time with your worst people?
- How has Fred gone about building out the sales team? What did Fred look for in sales reps and Heads of Sales?
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