Finding tech co founders - Sales in challenging environments - Impact and recruiting and more - Tactician #0013

01/12/2023

INTERVIEWS

Harry Stebbings, Founder at 20VC interviews Guillaume Cabane, Co-Founder and General Partner at HyperGrowth Partners, discussing growth strategies and tactics in for SaaS startups in:

• Ideal profile of first growth team hires:

  • Quote: "If you don't have a former Founder, go for somebody from a consulting background. Somebody who's really focused on data, on precision, on running hypothesis, and on running a process."

• On Avoiding Senior Hires for Hands-On Roles:

  • "Have I hired a senior person in a let’s say position where there’s no one else to empower them and they told me they would get their hands dirty? Not once. They lost it."

• On Using Data and AI for Marketing:

  • "With large language models, you... can build personalised content with a scale you never dreamed of before, which is at a quality that was unachievable before."

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel Managing Directors at Y Combinator advise founders with business backgrounds on the importance of recruiting a great technical co-founder and how to take action in ”How To Build A Tech Startup With No Technical Skills”

• On Embracing the Startup Adventure:

  • "They don't realise you're offering Adventure, you're offering the unknown. An adventure isn't here's my idea for a social network for dogs, will you build my website? No, let's build a company together. That's adventure."

• On the Necessity of Great Engineers in Tech-Enabled Businesses:

  • "The more that we're exposed to seeing what these companies look like at the earliest stages, even if they don't look like strictly tech businesses... there's no way these things would have gotten off the ground without having a really great person who cared as much as a co-founder cares."

• On the Compounding Effect of Hiring:

  • "When you start with a team of business people assessing engineers... all of your future engineers are... it compounds bad."

• On the Value of Recruiting Skills:

  • "There are a lot of very successful non-technical people in our network that do amazing work, and one of the things... they're great recruiters... they find a way to get that person to work with them."

GROWTH

Janelle Teng, Vice President of Bessemer Venture Partners and Elliott Robinson, Partner, Growth Equity at Bessemer Venture Partners provides strategic guidance for SaaS companies navigating volatile market conditions in “Seven SaaS resiliency lessons for doing business in a volatile market”

• Revisit Pricing Strategy:

  • "Several introduced 'starter packs' to make it more frictionless to land new customers as companies selling initial $1M+ annual contracts faced a disproportionate lengthening of sales cycles."

  • "Some introduced a freemium tier to allow customers to downgrade for a period of time, but still stay within the product ecosystem until their budgets could be unlocked."

• Engage Customers with a Mission-Critical Narrative:

  • "In boom times, customers do not always check if they are using software they have paid for."

  • "During the past 18 months, many customers have dug into product engagement metrics as a 'north star' for whether a software solution is considered 'mission-critical' to the organisation."

• Renewed Focus on Employees as the Heart of Your Organization:

  • "The biggest cost to an organisation during challenging times is often the impact to employees and company culture."

  • "There is no one-size-fits-all all approach to executing upon such a difficult decision, but all actions should stem from compassion and preparedness."

Doug Pepper and Christine Edmonds,  both General Partners at ICONIQ Capital share insights on scaling Go-to-Market strategies for companies across their different growth stages in “How to Scale Go-to-Market Through IPO with ICONIQ Growth’s General Partners”

• The Importance of GTM in Early Stage ($0 to $20M ARR)

  • "According to ICONIQ’s data, many successful companies hit a growth plateau at around $15M ARR. Because founder-led sales worked really well for most of the early stages, but you eventually start running out of juice around $15M ARR. And especially with great products, there’s always pull from initial early adopters that runs out. The key is to start to build a GTM strategy that allows you to attack a larger market."

• Transitioning to a Sales-Oriented Culture

  • "The main job of that first Head of Sales is to come in and convert a more product-oriented company into a sales-oriented, performance-driven, meat-eating culture. That’s a big change, and they can do it by building the first incentive compensation plan that includes variable compensation for specific goals."performance-driven, meat-eating culture."

• Early Growth Stage ($20M to $50M ARR)

  • "This is the first time companies are really starting to build their GTM organizations for scale. Hiring a lot of people and segmenting teams along a number of dimensions."

  • "You can see the maturity of segmentation kicking in during this phase, with most companies prioritizing geography and size."

• Building a GTM Tech Stack

  • "Dramatically hiring a GTM team and segmenting them naturally leads to more and necessary complexity. To manage that, you need to build a tech stack. What’s notable at this stage is that the companies that are really successful with these technologies are data-obsessed."

STRATEGY

Rex Woodbury, Cofounder & Managing Partner at Daybreak, analyses the effect of the recent shift in economic mobility from the pandemic and the role of startups in creating impact across five key areas in “The Five Pillars of Startup Impact”

• “One rule-of-thumb in startups (and life): always follow the talent. And talent is migrating to “impactful” companies.”

• “People want to work for companies with missions they believe in. The companies that attract the best talent this decade will be those that make life tangibly better for people”

Sign up for Tactician

Curated newsletter of MUST-READ articles for startup founders and operators

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.