The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

GitLab started as an open-source project that expanded into a public company with a buyer-based open-core business model. With over 300+ code contributions per month, innovating with the wider community is key to accelerating development efforts. Join GitLab CEO, Sid Sijbrandij, as he discusses GitLab's journey, choosing the right business model that balances high revenue potential and community contributions, and co-creating the product with the wider community to deliver safer software faster.

In today's SaaStr podcast, SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin shares 5 interesting learnings from Samsara at $500M ARR, growing 72% year-over-year. Video and episode notes: https://www.saastr.com/5-interesting-learnings-from-samsara-at-500000000-in-arr/

Over the past ten years, Zapier has grown from a weekend side project to global unicorn, serving millions of small and medium businesses around the world. But Zapier isn't your typical startup story and their roots aren't in Silicon Valley. Come hear what Zapier's early employees learned from building the foundation of one of today's most successful startups.

Many start-ups today start with an amazing Product Led Growth (PLG) engine that hasn't required an outbound sales and marketing motion. As amazing as this is, if your company wants to move into the mid-market or enterprise business, you're going to have to build and hire a Sales team, and expand the capabilities of your Marketing function. How can you add this GTM motion effectively, without cannibalizing your existing business? How do you balance the two for the right target markets and audiences? Product-market fit, pricing, packaging, messaging, strategic investments, culture, evangelism all play a critical part and will change as soon as you add this team. Hear from the CMOs of top tech companies on they helped Freshworks, Twilio, Salesforce, 1Password, Atlassian, Litmus, CircleCi, Coda and many others have faced this challenge and led their companies through this successful transition. Stacey Epstein, CMO @ Freshworks Sara Varni Bright, CMO @ Twilio Carilu Dietrich, Fractional CMO @ 1Password Viviana Faga, General Partner @ Coda

Pricing can kill your product, or make it soar. To start with, create pricing tiers and make pricing easy and convenient for your customers. Beyond that, the decisions are difficult, such as usage-based vs. predictable pricing. In this presentation, we discuss the key principles of pricing and app or online service, showing the pros and cons of your choices. Blog post & video: https://www.saastr.com/picking-the-perfect-pricing-model-that-fits-your-app-with-hackerone-ceo-marten-mickos-podcast-508-and-video/

When is the best time to find your next gear of growth? Now. Whether you are growing rapidly or seeing growth start to slow, this talk will share proven ways to accelerate. Karen Peacock, CEO of Intercom and former SVP of Small Business at Intuit, will discuss how putting customers at the forefront of your business is the key to hitting that next level. She'll cover how to segment your customer base and analyze the health of each part as input to strategy, design and package your product based on value and build highly contextual and personalized customer experiences that lead to happy customers, retention, expansion, and growth. Karen will share stories based on her experience at Intuit building one of the world's largest SaaS product lines from $500M to $2.5B and in her current role leading Intercom's high growth on the path to IPO. Blog post & video: https://www.saastr.com/shifting-to-the-next-gear-proven-strategies-to-accelerate-growth-with-intercom/

Treasure Data was founded as a big data platform company, but struggled to compete against larger tech companies. After pivoting to a more vertical solution (CDP - Customer Data Platform), revenue growth accelerated, going from $20m to $100m in 3 years. Kazuki will share the struggles and decisions a part of pivoting the company. Blog post & video: https://www.saastr.com/100-million-arr-pivot-with-treasure-data-ceo-kazuki-ohta/

Ali Ghodsi, CEO and Co-Founder of Databricks, and Nithya Ruff, Head of Open Source at Comcast, dive into the transformative power of open source in technology. They discuss how open source fosters innovation and attracts top engineering talent while emphasizing its role in the shift from on-premise to SaaS. The conversation highlights the growing importance of multi-cloud strategies and the challenges startups face in commercializing open source effectively, all while maintaining community engagement.

In this episode, Bryan Smith, Co-Founder at Leon Health sits down with SaaStr's own VP of Sales, Bryan Elsesser, to talk about the best techniques to overcome Q4 and end-of-year stress in sales teams.

Gone are the days of Sales and Marketing building their own tech fiefdoms. In this podcast, Sydney Sloan, CMO at SalesLoft shares a holistic approach to adding technology that powers your revenue engine and shares examples of tech stacks, best practices, and org designs from successful companies at different growth stages. Blog post and video: https://www.saastr.com/the-revtech-stack-playbook-going-from-1m-to-100m-with-salesloft/