SaaStr |
- SaaStr Podcast 451: How Leveraging Partnerships Can 2x Your Growth with Gorgias.io
- If You Don’t Have a Truly Great Founding Team, Just Take a Pause. Don’t Start Your Start-Up Yet.
- Dear SaaStr: When Startup Founders “Exit”, How Often Do They Found Another Company?
| SaaStr Podcast 451: How Leveraging Partnerships Can 2x Your Growth with Gorgias.io Posted: 16 May 2021 12:16 PM PDT SaaS companies thrive on partnerships to share leads, mutually champion brands and collaborate on customer success efforts. But you must do it right to maximize your potential ARR. Gorgias CEO Romain Lapeyre, and Axelle Heems, the Gorgias Head of Operations, share steps to create a partnership program that scales and yields results. Partnerships Can Fuel 50% of Your GrowthPartnerships have a tremendous potential to tilt your growth curve, and at Gorgias, this potential amounts to about their revenue. But they’re not the only ones who have significantly boosted growth with the help of partners: HubSpot's agency partners account for 44% of all their customers, and Salesforce partners make five times more than Salesforce itself. So how do you classify partnerships? You and your partners share a common goal and collaborate to achieve this goal. The objective could be several things, from lead and revenue sharing, driving visibility or customer success. Types of partnerships include agencies, SaaS apps, CSMs, or brand evangelists. When considering whether partnerships will work for your business, ask yourself:
To find the answers the first thing you can look at is identifying the stakeholders in your sales process. Is it just the lead? Are they bringing in consultants? Then, examine your ecosystem. Start by looking at recurring sales frictions. Then, consider your customer base and look for trends in potential churn responses. You will get a sense of what is really happening and what is beneficial for customers and use market data to assess the total addressable market. Start Small: The Path to $1M ARR From PartnershipsLaunch a pilot program as soon as possible with around ten partners. Here are the essential pieces to create a successful pilot effort:
And remember to measure everything. Be sure to track your partnerships as you would a sales pipeline, track efforts like training and co-marketing, leads (on both sides), and revenue. Want more? Enter your email below for the latest SaaStr updates
Make It Repeatable: The Path to $10M ARR and BeyondAfter a strong start, you'll want to make sure you can scale as your company grows. Track how much value you provide and share that with your partners. Embed your partnerships within your app (e.g., an app directory) and consistently educate your team on your partnerships. Treat your partner acquisition like a sales funnel. Identify critical partner stages, partner tiers and then log them in your CRM with a dedicated pipeline. Manage Active Partners Like CustomersOnce you've established healthy partnerships, your customers act like CSMs and brand evangelists. To keep tabs on your most active partners, be sure to track these important metrics:
These metrics will help you identify the top-performing partnerships in terms of ROI and brand champions.
Key Takeaways: |
| If You Don’t Have a Truly Great Founding Team, Just Take a Pause. Don’t Start Your Start-Up Yet. Posted: 16 May 2021 06:20 AM PDT Ok I know this post and its title seems like the most obvious thing in the world. But empirically, I can tell you isn’t. Over the past years writing SaaStr, I’ve met with friends/colleagues/partners/ex-customers who are total rockstars and working on starting a company. (Yes, I know that’s an overused team).
As individuals, they are amazing. But what they don’t have is a good enough founding team:
Yes, I know statistically, the odds are horribly against you when you do a start-up. 2000:10 or something. The Series A Crunch. Whatever. It’s all true. {I also concede that markets are, unfortunately, probably even more important than teams. Controversial but I think true. Great markets can make up for good but not great teams. But great teams find great markets, so that doesn’t really matter} But. Personally, I don’t know of a single rockstar founding team that didn’t somehow, someway, scrape out at least a single. At least an acqui-hire. At least a soft landing, or a pay-everyone-back M&A. I know there are plenty of contraexamples, but in my network, all of the great teams find a way to make something of their start-ups. Sometimes a home run, sometimes a double. At least a single. But basically no one that is great, but without a great team, did. A few, but they almost died doing it. I guess here’s my point to my friends and colleagues anxious to do a start-up. I hear you. And Yes, you are Great. But Wait. Wait until you have a Great Team, a Truly Great Team. Even if this specific opportunity passes you by. Even if it takes 18 months. And if your Team is Almost Great — this is the hardest one — you should still Take a Pause. I’m not saying your team has to be 100% complete before you write a line of code. Of course, that’s impossible. But you have to have the rockstar team it takes you to get to reality, to pre-traction, on Day 1. If not, focus on team building. You’ll somehow come up with another idea, another vision. (note: an updated SaaStr Classic post) The post If You Don’t Have a Truly Great Founding Team, Just Take a Pause. Don’t Start Your Start-Up Yet. appeared first on SaaStr.  |
| Dear SaaStr: When Startup Founders “Exit”, How Often Do They Found Another Company? Posted: 16 May 2021 06:10 AM PDT
It's pretty common. Many founders learn they aren't "done" after all after selling. Sometimes it takes some time to see that, and the gap between starting a new one in many cases is a year or longer. But many do it again, even after relatively large exits with live-changing economics. Jyoti Bansal sold AppDynamics to Cisco for almost $4B. He ended up needing to do another one, and has already built Harness into a $1B+ startup. A second unicorn:
Auren Hoffman sold Liveramp for $310m, and then it IPO'd for $4B+. He wasn't done and started Safegraph, already worth hundreds of millions:
Lew Cirne first founded Wily, an early leader in the APM / observability space, and sol dit for $375,000,000. He took some time off, and realized he wasn’t done. He founded New Relic to do it again as SaaS. Today, New Relic is worth $4 Billion. Rene Lacerte sold PayCycle to Intuit for $170m. But the journey wasn't over. He did the same thing, just bigger, with Bill.com. Today, Bill is worth $12B:
The list could go on and one. The post Dear SaaStr: When Startup Founders “Exit”, How Often Do They Found Another Company? appeared first on SaaStr.  |
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