September 29th marked the end of my decade-long journey at SalesScreen which I've decided to leave to start on a new project.

I have joined the company as part of the founding team back in April 2013 and helped to grow it from a small bootstrapped consultancy shop to a funded SaaS product company with 40+ employees and over $7M+ ARR. This has been hands down, the most rewarding experience in my professional life to date. In an attempt to process what closing such a rich chapter means, I have decided to put in writing some of the learnings this adventure taught me.
You can also find the Part 1: Hiring. 

These opinions are my own.

Pick your tools of trade with care

I love Business Software and I cannot recount how many softwares we’ve used during my decade at SalesScreen. While new tools is a treat for people like me, I came to realize that a software stack can get out of hand pretty quickly: loads of features start overlapping, recurring costs spiral upward, and your teammates begin to feel overwhelmed by all these tools, not knowing which to use, for what purpose and how to use it properly. But it doesn’t stop there: security audits (GDPR, ISO27001, SOC2, …) and access control get exponentially more difficult to manage, negotiating renewals with your suppliers soon becomes a full time job and the switching cost of changing to a new one increases with the number of one-to-one integrations across your stack.

Don’t jump on to the next shinny object in SaaS land. Invest time to build your own procurement process, zero-in on your actual needs and use every opportunity you have to simplify your stack, consolidate products and reduce costs and complexity.

Nobody buys a hammer with nothing to nail. The same applies in business. We’ve tried so many times to leverage a tool to get us to start doing something (Demandbase for ABM, Pardot for Marketing Automation, Jiminny for Sales Enablement, …) and it failed every single time. What works? Starting first to do something and being scrappy about it. Finding a more robust tool helping to improve the process later.

No matter how much work you put into simplifying your tech stack, chances are that it will never get smaller than a dozen tools. That’s a dozen places to look at when searching for information. Pick your source(s) of truth. It might sound simple, but it gets complicated in practice so let me try to illustrate how we did it at SalesScreen.

Wonder why some areas are missing? Busted. As I said, it gets complicated in practice and some part of the business were still in the work at the end of my tenure. But the end goal still remained: one source of truth for everything, as few sources of truth as possible.

In you are working in a SaaS business, a subscription management system should be at the top of your shopping list. Implementing this early provides structure around the possible deal structures you can offer to your prospects, makes invoicing automation a lot easier to implement and reduces drastically the cost of gathering subscription metrics. When picking your subscription management tool, integrability with your accounting system should be one of your top requirement.

You cannot improve what you do not measure, and if I’ve learnt anything from a decade at a SaaS company is that the earlier you start measuring, you better off you are. If you are a SaaS business, there is no lack of resources out there listing the most important KPIs to measure over time. How to actually measure these KPIs accurately and systematically both at a granular and aggregated levels can prove to be challenging. So similarly to what Engineering & Product teams call Security by design, adopting a Measuring by design approach is key. By this I mean accounting for the following items when assessing or implementing virtually any operational or strategical change you make:

Building your “data room” is a must and while it’s never too late to start, it sure is easier the sooner you start.

To be continued…