SaaStr 194: ARR Is A Lagging Not A Leading Indicator, The Metrics You Need to Focus On, The Secret To Success In Selling To Developers, Why You Should Delay The Buildout of Customer Success Teams & How Small Numbers In SaaS Can Deceive You with Steve Newm

Steve Newman is the Founder & CEO @ Scalyr, the startup that helps your devops team solve more problems in less time with log monitoring and analysis in seconds. Steve has raised over $27.5m in funding with Scalyr from many friends of the show including Susa Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Shasta and GV. As for Steve, prior to Scalyr, he was the Founder of Writely which was acquired by Google to become the little known, Google Docs. Before that he founded 2 prior startups, Ann Arbour Softworks (acq by Ashton-Tate) and BitCraft (acquired by Macromedia). If that was not enough, Steve also sat on the Technical Advisory Board at Box for over 3 years.   

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Steve made his way into the world of startups and SaaS over 30 years ago? What is the founding story with Scalyr and what was that a-ha moment?
• Why does Steve believe that you should involve customers very early in the process of developing your narrative? Where does Steve see most startups go wrong when it comes to messaging? How does one structure the feedback mechanism? How does one determine between feedback you integrate and feedback you do not?
• Why does Steve believe that you should not focus too much on numbers in the early days? What makes them deceiving at this stage? If not numbers, what should early stage founders be focusing on and measuring? Why does Steve believe that ARR is not the leading metric? What metrics should early stage SaaS founders really be prioritising?
• How does Steve respond to PG’s “to scale, you have to do unscalable things”? What challenges and nuance does Steve present that founders must be wary of? How does Steve’s thinking here affect his view towards customisation? Why does manual input not put a cap on scalability? What are the parameters for manual involvement to be scalable?   

Steve’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What does Steve know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
2. Who does Steve believe is crushing it in the world of SaaS today?
3. The hardest element about the move from tech co-founder to CEO?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr