SaaStr 038: Rainforest QA's Fred Stevens-Smith on Firing Fast, The Transition From Founder To CEO & Why You Should Spend The Most Time with Your Highest Performers

Fred Stevens-Smith is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Rainforest QA, which if you listened to 20VC with Byron Deeter, you will remember he discussed them and their amazing trajectory. So for QA first, it is essentially QA as a service making it fast and easy to test your webapp in multiple browsers and they are backed by some of the best as we said there Byron Deeter @ Bessemer, our own Jason Lemkin, Y Combinator, previous guest Kris Duggan @ Betterworks and Marc Benioff just to name a few. As for Fred he is the man at the helm as Co-Founder & CEO and absolutely smashing it I might add. In the show Fred mentions his favourite reading material to be Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross’s new book From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth Companies Create Predictable Revenue and if you have not read that, that is a must and can be found here!

In Our Discussion with Fred You Will Learn:

• How did Fred come to found Rainforest QA? What was his origin story to YC?
• How did Fred look to establish the pricing model with Rainforest? Why does Fred believe most software companies undervalue their software?
• What are the challenges of going upstream? How does it affect product? Sales cycle?
• Does Fred agree with Mark Organ that in a new category, the company CEO must be the category CMO? How much of a role does content play in Rainforest QA’s education funnel for customers?
• Why does Fred believe you should spend the most time with your best people? Similarly, the least amount of time with your worst people?
• How has Fred gone about building out the sales team? What did Fred look for in sales reps and Heads of Sales?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here:

• Jason Lemkin
• Harry Stebbings
• Saastr
• Fred Stevens-Smith