48 SaaS Resources You Need to Know
I’ve been so inspired over the past couple of years by the growth of incredibly valuable content and resources for SaaS teams. There is solid thought leadership, and advice coming from seasoned SaaS professionals, and it’s a great time to learn from their successes, failures, and perspective.
Whether you’re new to the world of software as a service (SaaS), looking to expand your existing list of all things SaaS, or doing a little research, here are some of our favorite people, places and things from the great wide world of SaaS!
10 SaaS Thought Leaders on Twitter
Jason Lemkin, @jasonlk
Jason Lemkin is the founder of SaaStr, a partner at Storm Ventures and the co-founder of EchoSign. He frequently writes about VC, sales, and startups on SaaStr, and tweets every day! Even though he is a VC with a unicorn-level exit behind him, he shares very relatable advice that comes from his experience founding and investing in SaaS companies.
Mark Suster, @msuster
Mark Suster is a General Partner at Upfront Ventures. He is a 2x entrepreneur and he frequently shares his very practical and inspiring thoughts on startups and sales at Both Sides of the Table. I love how practical his advice tent is, and I always take away an interesting perspective from him.
Aaron Ross, @motoceo
Aaron Ross is the author of the best-selling and award-winning book Predictable Revenue (a must read for any SaaS sales leader), and the co-founder and CRO of PredictableRevenue.com. He knows what it takes to actually scale SaaS sales teams that perform.
David Skok, @BostonVC
Davis Skok is a serial entrepreneur turned VC Matrix Partners, and he’s the author of the awesome For Entrepreneurs’ blog. I am always surprised how practical and helpful his content is, written very much from the “founder” perspective.
Steli Efti, @Steli
Steli Efti is the co-founder and CEO of Close.io, an inside sales CRM for SMBs. Steli is an author, speaker and regularly writes shares his SaaS sales insights on The Close.io blog. His tweets are pretty great too.
Tomasz Tunguz, @ttunguz
Tomasz Tunguz is a partner at Redpoint Ventures. He writes blog posts about key questions facing startups including how to fundraise, startup benchmarks, management, and team building.
Lincoln Murphy, @lincolnmurphy
Lincoln Murphy is a customer success evangelist and SaaS customer acquisition marketer & growth hacker who runs a company called SixteenVentures. If you want to understand SaaS customer success, you need to follow Lincoln. He tells it like it is, and he knows his stuff.
Ben Murray, @BR_Murray
Ben Murray is THE SaaS CFO. He shares his passion for numbers, SaaS/subscription metrics, and forecasting and offers really helpful downloadable templates and worksheets on his site, The SaaS CFO.
Shiv Narayanan, @shivn71
Shiv is the CMO of Wild Apricot and shares his experiences and perspective on his popular blog and podcast, How to SaaS where he covers a wide range of practical topics. I love his “in-the-trenches” viewpoint.
Bryce Roberts, @bryce
So, if you want a VC who doesn’t sound like a VC, Bryce is your guy. He is a partner at OATV and he cares about novel things like profitability, sustainability, long-term viability, and capital efficiency. A man after my own heart. Want to be inspired? Check out Indie.vc too.
11 SaaS Blogs
SaaStr
No SaaS list would be complete without it. Being credited as “the world’s largest community for business software”, SaaStr proves they deserve the title by showing up every day and delivering quality content. This bottomless SaaS resource is a must for your daily reading.
The SaaS Report
As the name suggests, the SaaS Report leaves no stone unturned when it comes to reporting on everything going on in the SaaS world. It’s a paid subscription site, but it’s worth it.
In-depth interviews, updates on SaaS news and a wide range of articles all combined into one place?
Yes, please.
Chaotic Flow
Joel York is a SaaS sales and marketing executive. Anything but chaotic, his blog, Chaotic Flow is filled with data-driven and insightful blog posts on topics like SaaS metrics and sales models. Joel’s blog provides helpful advice for SaaS sales managers trying to quantify their performance in a time where teams are becoming more and more data-driven. The perfect voice of reason in the current (sometimes chaotic) state of the SaaS world.
OpenView Labs
Described as the value-add arm of OpenView Ventures, OpenView Labs consistently offers insightful content on nearly all aspects of the B2B software business. We love their wide-range of topics, from customer success, product-led growth and everything in between. We always learn something new here.
For Entrepreneurs
Serial entrepreneur David Skok is also a venture capitalist at Matrix Partners.
His blog ‘For Entrepreneurs’ is exactly that, featuring in-depth analytical blog posts covering the many ins and outs of building SaaS sales and marketing processes. Worth a weekly visit!
Both Sides of the Table
This blog offers the unique experiences and opinions of Mark Suster, an entrepreneur with a big exit (really big) a now General Partner at Upfront Ventures.
Mark understands entrepreneurship, SaaS, and sales from multiple angles and shares his knowledge on all subjects beautifully. He’s sometimes in your face, but always relevant and timely.
NicoleElizabethDemere.com
A consultant who loves SaaS, she publishes great content helpful for startup founders.
Predictable Revenue
Yes, he appears on this list twice. He’s that good! Aaron Ross’ Predictable Revenue has become a widely-known and respected source of information for SaaS sales leaders. Sales and sales management insights from the man who introduced the cold calling 2.0 strategy?
Can’t go wrong there.
Tomasz Tunguz
Known best as a partner at Redpoint Ventures, Tomasz Tunguz shows his thorough data-driven approach to explaining and analyzing sales concepts on his blog.
In many of his posts he shares deep financial analysis of specific SaaS companies and industry trends. But he also shares useful benchmarking data and commentary as well.
Founder’s Journey from BareMetrics
The name says it all. These are founder stories, lessons, and perspectives.
ProfitWell
This blog is on fire right now. Interesting analysis, research, and interviews. And their content on pricing is not to be missed. A must read for SaaS entrepreneurs.
8 SaaS Podcasts
The SaaS Revolution Show
The SaaS Revolution is hosted by Alex Theuma, founder of Europe’s biggest SaaS conference, SaaStock.
Known for his wide range of knowledge surrounding the subject of SaaS, Alex is joined by a variety of guests from all fields of SaaS throughout 60+ episodes of this very entertaining and informative podcast.
Inside Intercom
Hosted by the very people who make Intercom the great company that it is, this 30-minute podcast discusses topics ranging from product management and marketing to start-ups and design.
The Official SaaStr Podcast
Harry Stebbings and Jason Lemkin work in tandem to make this podcast something truly special and educational!
I like short podcasts, so I appreciate it very much. Coming in at just 25 minutes per episode, this podcast is well worth checking out.
SaaS Open Mic
Ed Shelley discusses a wide variety of topics with extra attention centered on growing a SaaS business with some great guests from some of the world’s leading SaaS companies.
The Growth Hub Podcast
Hosted by Growth Hub’s Edward Ford, this 35-minute SaaS podcast is a great addition to your daily SaaS listening.
SaaS Insider
Shira Abel from Hunter & Bard hosts this terrific podcast centered around SaaS business, marketing, and sales.
A16z Podcast
In addition to tons of great interviews with top SaaS VCs, this podcast centers around everything from high-level business trends to SaaS mergers — all through the eyes of Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Topics aren’t exclusive to SaaS, but they have great perspective and they cover a lot of important topics.
The Startup Chat
Last but certainly not least comes The Startup Chat, a podcast from widely-respected SaaS experts Steli Efti and Hiten Shah.
This show offers two episodes a week on Tuesdays and Fridays and already has over 340 episodes available and waiting for your listening pleasure!
Even though it’s more startup and less SaaS, most of the topics apply and it’s chock full of good stuff to listen to. Definitely deserves a spot on any list of great SaaS podcasts.
8 SaaS Conferences
Business of Software Conference
Every October, The Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center in Boston, Massachusetts, hosts the Business of Software conference.
For the past 12 years, this conference has featured highly respected SaaS speakers like Bob Moesta of the Re-Wired Group, Drift’s David Cancel, and many more!
SaaS North
For SaaS enthusiasts in the great white north (or those looking to make the trek), Ottawa’s Shaw Center hosts Canada’s only SaaS conference centered around company scaling.
SaaS North is traditionally held on the last week of November and is always sure to offer fantastic networking and educational opportunities.
Silicon Y’all
Georgia is home to the yearly SaaS conference with the SasSiest name.
Though referred to as a SaaS conference for broad-strokes purposes, Silicon Y’all is a truly unique and special event that exists outside of traditional SaaS conference expectations.
This conference is really an intimate event for business leaders to come together to share their experiences and learn from each other. Registration is limited to 50 CEOs and 10 of the top tech private equity groups, and the wait list to get in is very long.
Growth Hackers Conference
Though the 2018 Growth Hackers Conference took place this past February, this annual SaaS conference never disappoints.
With last year’s speakers including the VP of Facebook & Uber, the Former Head of Growth at Slack, and many others — 2019’s conference is sure to be worth attending.
SaaStock
Europe’s biggest SaaS conference, Dublin, Ireland is home to this annual conference.
You’ll find SaaStock on any good list of software conferences due to its wide range of speakers, subject matter and strong sense of healthy enthusiasm surrounding the event.
Also held in October (known more and more as SaaStober, due to the rise in SaaS conferences occurring every year), this 3-day conference hosts over 3,000 attendees, 100+ exhibitors and offers upwards of 40 hours of content each year.
What could be better than that?
Recurring Revenue Conference
Presented by Sutton Capital Partners, Recurring Revenue is the only conference in Southern California to focus exclusively on the Subscription Economy.
Each year 600 business leaders attend and share their expertise on the various subjects involved with Subscription Economy and SaaS as a whole!
SaaS Monster
Credited as “the world’s leading SaaS conference”, SaaS Monster has connected more than 5,000 CIOs and CTOs, buyers, and sellers, experts and investors, startups and established companies…and the list goes on and on.
This conference is the real deal, and well worth attending.
36|86 Entrepreneurship Festival
Of course, we are biased, since this is our town. Held each year in downtown Nashville as one leg of a three-part festival that also includes health and music, this unique event brings together entrepreneurs and investors for two-days of in-depth sessions and panels. We recently attended and were so happy to find tons of SaaS programming and great speakers. We know there are other regional SaaS events and we want to hear about them!
3 SaaS Newsletters
SaaScribe
SaaScribe? We see what they did there…
This newsletter is a community-driven SaaS newsletter where the content comes not from SaaS companies or VCs, but from everyday people who work in and are passionate about SaaS business.
Topics like sales and marketing are always included, while not overlooking some of the more in-depth aspects of SaaS like new strategy and customer success. SaaScribe’s newsletter contains a diverse collection of articles with unique perspectives and a large variety of writing styles.
SaaScribe today! Uh-oh, now we’re doing it too…
Hiten’s SaaS Weekly
This is “a weekly email of useful links for people interested in SaaS businesses.” written by the co-founder of analytics company KISSmetrics himself. You can’t go wrong there!
ChartMogul’s SaaS Roundup
The Chart Mogul Roundup is just that — a great roundup of the aspects of SaaS that many other similar newsletters and blogs miss.
A brand new newsletter is sent out to subscribers every Friday containing top-rated pieces of content for the week, gathered from all over the internet. A worthy addition to your newsletters.
1 SaaS Benchmark Site Not to Miss
Open Startups from Bare Metrics
So much SaaS company performance data is secret, and when you are running your own company you just crave benchmarks and metrics. Enter Open Startups from Bare Metrics, where brave companies share their metrics with the world. MRR, Net revenue, ARPU, LTV, you name it…it’s all here for the world to see.
7 SaaS resources from Married2Growth
Of course, I can’t make a list of SaaS resources without including our own.
- Podcast: The Married2Growth podcast is hosted by me (Anna) and Justin Talerico. This isn’t your traditional podcast. We use it to deliver audio versions of our articles, for those who like to listen rather than read.
- Blog: If you are reading this, you are already here!
- Newsletter: We send our subscribers this week’s articles and videos, every Sunday morning. Like clockwork. If only we could figure out how to deliver coffee to go with it! You can subscribe from any page of the site…like, below this article, actually.
- Twitter: We are always on Twitter, so if that’s your thing, follow along with us over there!
- Slideshare: Just one more way to get access to our content, we take our most popular articles and slice them up for easy consumption on SlideShare.
- Tools: Some of the most useful stuff we do is provide tools like calculators for LTV, CAC and Magic Number. Plus sales assessments, marketing scorecards and much more. Check it out!
- Videos: Also for those who prefer to watch rather than read, we create short video summaries of our most popular content.
Alright, that’s enough SaaS for today! Thanks for checking out this list, I hope you found a new resource or two.
Did I leave any of your favorite SaaS people, places or things out of this roundup? Let me know in the comments!
A version of this was originally published at married2growth.com on September 6, 2018.
