Scaling SaaS -- from SaaStr
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
SaaStr 086: Why You Have To Focus On A Tiny Market & How to Sell That Market To VCs with Auren Hoffman, Founder @ Safegraph & LiveRamp
1×
0:00
Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -21:38
-21:38

SaaStr 086: Why You Have To Focus On A Tiny Market & How to Sell That Market To VCs with Auren Hoffman, Founder @ Safegraph & LiveRamp

Auren Hoffman is best known for being the former CEO and Founder @ LiveRamp, the leading data onboarder that was acquired by Acxiom for $310m. Today’s talk focuses on the 5 core lessons Auren took from that incredible journey with LiveRamp. Auren was also an angel investor and board member at BrightRoll, prior to it’s $610m acquisition by Yahoo. Today, he is the CEO at SafeGraph, the startup that is unlocking the world’s most powerful data so that machines and humans can answer some of society’s toughest questions.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

  • What is Auren’s thesis towards hiring all round athletes as opposed to position players? When do it make sense to do either? What stage of the company is right for which persona?

  • What are the two different types of sales personas? At what type of company should you hire a relationship driven sales team and then what type of company for a product driven sales team?

  • Why does Auren believe you should target a very small niche of the market? What are the benefits of such focus? How can you sell such a small market to VCs?

  • How does Auren perceive the future of enterprise software? How has the rise of bottoms up sales affected the SaaS environment? How many more SaaS companies and buyers of SaaS are there today, compared to 10 years ago?

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

Auren Hoffman

Algolia the robust search API that allows developers to integrate lightning fast, typo-tolerant search into their SaaS product. Out of the box, Algolia offers developers a powerful platform for building great search experiences. By owning the entire stack from engine to server, Algolia free up development teams to focus on adding intuitive search that delights users. This is perfect for existing search teams looking to spend less time on maintenance and infrastructure management and more time on user experience. For small SaaS teams, Algolia is a great investment on top of your existing stack that requires no specialist engineers. And you can learn more about how Algolia helps SaaS Scale Search and get started on their 14-day Free Trial at Algolia.com/SaaStrPodcast

Scaling SaaS -- from SaaStr
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
The Official SaaStr Podcast is the latest and greatest from the world of SaaStr, interviewing the most prominent operators and investors to discover their tips, tactics and strategies to attain success in the fiercely competitive world of SaaS. On the side of the operators, we center around getting from $0 to $100m ARR faster, what it takes to scale successfully and what are the core elements of hiring. As for the investors, we learn what metrics they hone in on when examining SaaS business, what type of metrics excites them and what they look for in SaaS founders.