SaaStr Annual Day #1 Recap: A Billion in Exits, 5 Things I’m Doing 5 Times Better This Time
A Billion in Exits: 5 Things I’m Doing 5 Times Better This Time
A Billion in Exits: 5 Things I’m Doing 5 Times Better This Time
Auren Hoffman — Liveramp Co-Founder
1- All around athletes beat position players… in the early days
Start-ups need All-around athletes
Scaling needs position players
2- put yourself in a defined box (eschew optionality)
Clearly state what you will not do
Do not A/B test your strategy
The clearer your strategy, the easier it is to push the effort, to drive the team and to onboard new employees.
3- Focus on a small (and fast growing) market… that you will win
Initial product: Can your startup get to just $10M in revenues in the current market you are pursuing?
Dominance: Will your startup be the dominant player in that micro niche?
Team: Once your company is no longer going to grow at 100% + a year, is the team good enough to move into and dominate other adjacent markets?
How to identify a small fast growing market?
You must have some proprietary knowledge
Use your experience to your advantage
find some weirdness in the market that you get from your proprietary knowledge
4- Product oriented companies need product oriented salespeople (and not relationship oriented salespeople)
Commodity product and high competition: relationship salesperson
Differentiated product and low competition: product-oriented salesperson
Ex: you’re selling a software to agencies ? You need to have relationship oriented sales. You’re selling a very technical tool to technical people? You need to have product oriented salespeople.
5- Future of enterprise software is abundance
The number of vendors has 10X the last ten years
Selling into the enterprise has never been easier and it will get even easier
if you are in a very competitive space then you’ll need a big differentiator