staysaasy

11 ms·

61.
by staysaasy 6y ago
Burnout really sucks and it can have major business consequences to say nothing of the more significant personal ones. A management lesson that I almost learned the hard way is that some people will push themselves to burnout without inte
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by staysaasy 6y ago
100% and I see this kill startups from time to time. Particularly ones with very technically sharp but unwise founders. That said I think that investing in a minimal, quick and dirty CD system can be valuable for very early startups that ne
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by staysaasy 6y ago
Some ideas that have worked well for me in b2b/SaaS: * If you're pre-product/market fit, just reach out to users via email, in-product messaging etc. You can incentivize them with Amazon gift cards as well. At this stage nobo
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by staysaasy 6y ago
Genuine question – what's the alternative to trying? Being data-driven is definitely hard but imho teams should be commended for striving towards it. Even imperfect shifts towards data-driven decision making can be valuable as well (eg
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by staysaasy 6y ago
OP here, thanks for reading! You hit the nail on the head. Put more casually, there are a lot of startup problems that arise due to people fiddling around with stuff that should have just been left alone (I always picture my parents yelling
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by staysaasy 6y ago
Analyst firms (Gartner, Forrester, et al) suffer from this as well. They both rate and draw subscription revenue from IT and technology companies.
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by staysaasy 6y ago
Agreed. We wrote about this and described it as having a well-balanced portfolio of technology. https://staysaasy.com/engineering/2020/05/30/Picking-Your-Te...
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by staysaasy 6y ago
Nice article. On a semi-related topic, I find that one mistake that folks make is buying into the "hype" around Head of Sales / Marketing candidates. The first thing that these people learn how to market or sell is themselves
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by staysaasy 6y ago
I agree and on a related note, I often see startup employees valuing their equity at either $0 or #retirementmoney. In reality the expected value is pretty much always in between those two, and really warrants critical attention. There&#x27
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by staysaasy 6y ago
It's not quite as detailed, but BVP actually published their "anti-portfolio" from back in the day which is exactly you're asking about: https://www.bvp.com/anti-portfolio/
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by staysaasy 6y ago
Yes, it has to be done extremely carefully. Picking metrics well is one of the most important jobs of company leadership.
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by staysaasy 6y ago
Decide and communicate the metrics that matter for your business, then constantly educate and remind engineers of how they can help to reach those goals. Increases the number of good ideas from people with the best context and reduces the b
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by staysaasy 6y ago
That's actually kind of the point – if you're working on a new project whose requirements might change rapidly Mongo can be a really great fit (eg a toy project; a prototype for a new internal service; a hackathon; a pre-traction
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by staysaasy 6y ago
I think that this is a great question that isn't asked nearly enough. There are all sorts of stories about companies moving up market successfully, but I'd love to see more written about the cases where it's attempted and fai
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by staysaasy 6y ago
It's interesting to observe the difference between Apple's great treatment of consumers and their actions towards businesses that they interact with, as the App Store is fundamentally a b2b experience. It really highlights the dif
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by staysaasy 6y ago
100%. It's typically a multi-month endeavor that has been planned on a multi-year time horizon.
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by staysaasy 6y ago
Absolutely phenomenal product and company. I have a huge enterprise SaaS crush on these folks. Very solid, thoughtful team as well in my experience. Their massive marketing spend is interesting, I suspect that they perceive themselves to be
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by staysaasy 6y ago
IMHO this type of learning can be work as long as it aligns with what the company needs. Dicking around with Rust because you think it might be useful one day doesn't count. There's a grey area for sure. I also think that it&#x2
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by staysaasy 6y ago
Really great article! I think that another element driving the push to brand oneself a category-creator is the ego factor. Everybody wants to consider themselves a category redefining innovation powerhouse.
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by staysaasy 6y ago
Heh, yeah. If you have a less buzzwordy way to phrase that I'd be curious to hear it ;-), I think that the description is accurate although upon reflection I'm with you that it feels pulled out of corporate hell.
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by staysaasy 6y ago
I continue to be really impressed by Datadog. They're in the very exciting post-IPO enterprise SaaS phase where they still have startup mojo + the resources of a large company + the need to continually grow and expand. I feel for the t
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by staysaasy 6y ago
I've put together a reading list for VPs of Product here, which is pretty analogous to the tech lead concept but for PMs: https://staysaasy.com/product/2020/06/14/a-vp-products-readi... (edit: we wr
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by staysaasy 6y ago
IMO being able to cut through work that you don't love is a tremendous skill, especially for software engineers. Many of the most successful engineers I've worked with had a really valuable trait where they were 100% effective on
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by staysaasy 6y ago
I hear you! As a lazy slob, I find that it's really important to remove any possible obstacle to working out that my mind can latch onto. So being locked down with nothing fun to do and time back from my commute has actually been a god
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by staysaasy 6y ago
One tip that helped me a ton – if you're WFH, turn your former commute (or some % of your former commute), and force yourself to work out during this time. I started that at the beginning of COVID and without exaggeration it's bee
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by staysaasy 6y ago
It's almost certainly based upon a multiple of revenue. That multiple will be adjusted for growth, margins, and sector-specific hype.
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by staysaasy 6y ago
(author here, thanks for reading!) Fwiw, this post isn't meant to be an endorsement or condemnation of the venture backed high-growth model – it's just a description of a phenomenon that seems to occur fairly predictably in those
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by staysaasy 6y ago
100%, this problem is endemic to human society. Generally most people are reasonably smart, are not assholes, are doing their best. But the incentives and team structures inherent to any organization make people behave in bad ways.
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by staysaasy 6y ago
Kudos to Github for trying this. I'm excited to see more SaaS companies "call their shots" and provide insight into their roadmap plans. It seems like a natural evolution of the industry. For any enterprise SaaS businesses tr
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by staysaasy 6y ago
Thanks for reading! A big theme that my co-author and I write about is that process / incentive / team structure problems can easily masquerade as people problems. That is, it's common for someone to appear to be incompetent

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