SaaS startup

“You're really looking to find a repeatable and ideally predictable sales model before you go out and hire, ah, the sales team.”

“If you're at a startup, right, for me, pipeline is a sign of failure, right? How much revenue are you going to close this month? I don't need to see the charts, and I don't need to see seven million dollars next to Comcast, or twelve million dollars next to wh…”

“Whatever you do, have two reps that are performing well before you hire head of sales. If you only have one, you're not running an A-B test, and you really have no idea why this one rep is doing well, right?”

“The instrumentation that I see early stage is shocking. The data, the metrics, their insight, Their cohort. I still don't even know how to do a cohort analysis myself. Their ability to do that in year one to segment churn by category, right? They get it.”

“Let's hire a bunch of salespeople all at once. It's not good. It kills company. It's the number one killer.”

“What does a mediocre VP of sales do if there's sixty million in the bank? They spend it all. They spend, the mediocre ones, a hundred percent of them spend it all.”

“When you get to 20, you need to start really building a team with dedicated specialists and so that, that was kind of a big aha, and I think that's important to think about, is you don't want to be playing peewee soccer, and you don't want every day to be an a…”

“Why is it that companies sometimes go from boom to bust in a matter of months? There can be many reasons for this, but I think the two, like, most important or two most frequent reasons are a couple of things. If you suddenly find your situation, yourself in a…”

“And the people who got you from zero to 10 are almost by definition figure it outers, right? If a scale it upper joined your company at zero million dollars, they probably quit pretty quickly.”

“We all just really start with a 10 X feature. One little thing that matters to a buyer that someone else doesn't do or ignores or doesn't have time to do anymore. That's what matters, not, not immediately building, being irreplaceable your first year. It's not…”

“What, because this is all about, once you hit even a million in revenue, it's all about who you can recruit, right? Before that, it's your founding team.”

“If you project exponential revenue growth and spend money based on that, that's super risky. As I showed in the very beginning, if the growth just happens to be a little bit slower than you expected because of this compounding effect of exponential growth, the…”

“I think it's great if you can have five years of runway, if you can be default alive, but it just doesn't work for every company”

“I mean, I think if you're saying at the same price as that 20, 21 valuation, I think it's close to a hundred percent.”

“So if you can do it in, in single digit millions, I think that's my challenge. Try to do it in, try to fully localize your app in, in single digit millions, right?”

“If you're doubling, you can raise venture capital. If you're growing 65%, that's still pretty good growth. You can't raise money.”

“And I think there will be a rebound in marketing by the end of this year. Everyone that cut marketing to zero in the beginning of this year is going to have no pipeline at the end of this year. That is the looming cliff for so many. Everyone below the public c…”

“For every dollar in new revenue you bring in, I guess that really should be ARR spend 75%. Instead of spending two times what you bring in, spend 75% of it. You'll, you'll, you'll never fail if you spend most but not all of your new bookings.”

“This is my number one tip. It always works. It always works. You have to constantly every month do an L four M analysis. Okay. You do not need 20 people in finance or operations or planning to do this. Any founder can do this. Take your financials, and all you…”

“So this idea that you get one big deal and it's the sign of something new, I'd encourage you to get two or three before you scale up”

“Top 10, 10 to 15% that already have venture backed are in a position today to raise another round.”

“The biggest mistake folks make on the journey from one to 10 is the shiny penny. Is finding, I want something that's easier. This is too hard. What if we had a self-serve motion? What if we did this? What if we did that?”

“I actually think once you even have two million in revenue, all that matters is the management team. Nothing else matters. You think competition matters, but a great head of engineering and product will outpace the competition, right? A great growth marketer w…”

“There's no great answers to the question that some great businesses will compound to Epic rates, but they're unfundable now, and they would have been fundable two years ago.”