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cleiton caldini
Highlights
"The best ideas often start in niche communities or research labs, then get picked up by products or communities with progressively less niche interests and incrementally wider distribution until, if we’re lucky, they reach billions of people."
From this amazing article by Linus Lee
My first time at SaasTr 💙🚀 These are my key takeaways from the talks founders should hear
AI is the possibility multiplier - Adobe CSO Scott Belsky
Creativity is no longer constrained by segments of skills. Creation has been this box where you get in through knowing drawing, sculpting, editing or graphics, and AI lowers the time cost of entering this box and raises the box’s ceiling of possibilities for creativity. For any creative, it allows for quicker iterations for finding their vision during the creative process. That makes final products and experiences better, since we can explore more possibilities.
VCs are not the only resource, your customers are - Monday Founder Eran Zinman
LTV, CAC, ARR, and every other metric is NOT CASH. Nobody measures cash but cash is always king. When Monday started they were religious to see cash returns, going as far as to measure the time from when cash left the bank to when it went back into the company. So when they had 5 million in the bank, they spent 25 million in performance marketing, just by not keeping spending if there was no return. They tracked every penny and that’s how they stayed profitable.
You can measure product through CS - Wyeth Goodenough and Sylvie Woolf (from SF Customer Success Meetup)
Early stage startups are about keeping and making every customer successful, so you can give away free services and don’t care about margins. But as you go on to the expansion stages, margins shouldn’t be very negative. It shows the product hasn’t matured and that’s gonna eat on your valuation, so move away from retention and find more scalable metrics for CS. And the thing is great CS teams can mask poor product market fit. That’s ok in the beginning, but when you’re talking about a series C company that’s not sustainable or repeatable - once you pull CS away you can see the churn. Find a balance for product continuing against technical debt and not being so difficult to understand that a CS person has to grab every customer by the hand.
From founder to CEO - Amplitude CEO Spenser Skates
People get the switch from early stage founder to large org executive wrong - it’s about getting the right talent to do things rather than actually trying to run initiatives yourself. Don’t coach people up, don’t focus on creating processes and systems to make things clear, the easiest thing you can do is trust on them and then evaluate. That’s your main job.
What you need in a PM - Grammarly CPO Noam Lovinsky
Someone asked Noam how senior should the first product management hire be. If there is product market fit, you need a quick learner on the ground talking to customers and experimenting. For pre-PMF, you’re searching for a very faint signal in a lot of noise. So do it yourself. Make sure that there’s zero layers of indirection between founder and customer to find that signal.

