Get your SaaS Startup Off the Ground

Today, I want to share a great post from Jason Lemkin that is worth a quick read for all early stage founders. Check it out below.

The Top 20 SaaStr Tips to Getting a SaaS Startup Going

1. Take your time to find a great co-founder. It may seem like you are in a hurry, but in the end, anything less than a great co-founder will set you back.
2. Find a co-founder complementary to your skills, ideally. Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. Great at engineering. Great at marketing.
3. Do at least 20–30 customer interviews before you start writing too much code. Otherwise, you often are building for an imaginary customer. A bit more here.
4. Somehow, find enough cash to make it 24 months to first real revenue. It just takes that long in SaaS and B2B, nine times out of ten.
5. Have confidence that if you get to 10 customers, you can get to 100. Those first 10 show you the way. Even if on their own, they aren’t enough revenue to really pay for all that much.
6. After you have 10 customers, build what they most value. Not what you want to build. You have to love the customers that get the most value from your product.
7. Make sure you have a key 10x feature when you launch — and always. A 10x feature that customers will pay for, that the key competition doesn’t have.
8. Sell the first 10–50 customers yourself. If you hire someone to do the first sales, you’ll never understand it yourself. Or be able to reproduce it. More here.
9. When you go to hire your first sales rep, hire 2. Otherwise, you’ll never really understand why they are good. You need to hire 2 to really see what works, and what doesn’t.
10. Hire a great marketer early. Even $20k a month isn’t too early. They’ll move the needle enough to more than pay for themselves, even at $20k a month in revenue.
11. Raise 25% more money than you planned. You’ll always end up wishing you’d raised more. At least as a buffer. Just don’t spend the extra 25%.
12. Worry a bit less about the competition. They matter. But as long as you are growing at a decent rate, they can’t really kill you.
13. Don’t hire any VPs you don’t truly, 100% believe in. They won’t work out, no matter how good they look on paper.
14. Don’t hire any VPs that haven’t hired at least 2–3 great folks before. 50% of the job for a VP is recruiting. And go talk to those 2-3 and make sure she or he really hired them.
15. It’s OK if your VP of Sales isn’t great at every part of sales. They just need to be great at the parts that move the needle for you. They can figure out the rest.
16. Don’t hire a VP of Marketing that isn’t great at demand gen. At least, not until you have a brand. What you need until $20m ARR at least is more qualified leads, not brand strategy.
17. Know 100% for sure what your “Zero Cash Date” is — when you run out of money. Too many founders don’t keep up with the burn rate and get this wrong. At their peril.
18. Drive NPS up, and churn down. Make NPS a top company metric. Once you have even $1m ARR, it’s just as important to keep your existing customers happy as it is to acquire new ones.
19. Do almost whatever it takes to make your first big customers happy. Unless you really don’t want big customers. Doing so will teach you how to get more of them. That doesn’t mean a ton of custom software. But it often means reprioritizing your roadmap, and bringing things forward that are important to them.
20. You need more folks in customer success. Most SaaS companies invest early in sales, but wait on customer success. That’s backwards. You want customers for life.

If you want to dive in on any of these, check out the original post on the SaaStr website here as there’s a more detailed article for each topic.

findfunding.vc ⭐ funder spotlight

findfunding.vc is our open sourced database of early stage VCs to help founders find the right investors. Check it out.

If you're a badass founder looking for a pre-seed lead / co-lead, you simply have to know this truly badass investor!

This week's findfunding.vc spotlight is on Samara Mejia Hernandez, founding partner of Chingona Ventures. Samara is:

🏙️ Chicago based
👏 Closed the largest VC fund by a sole Latin GP last year ($52M fund II)
⚡️ Reviews every website submission within 48 hours
💃 Before VC, she was a professional salsa dancer

Samara does whatever needs to get done to support her founders. Not only does she help with more "traditional" things like fundraising, sales process development, and interviewing candidates, she also regularly gets to work on "nontraditional" asks like filming promotional videos for a portfolio company's customer base.

✏️ Subscribe to the Chingona Ventures newsletter at https://lnkd.in/e-MXS9w8
✉️ To pitch her, reach out via chingona.ventures/apply

Until next week,

Pascal