Well SaaStronauts that’s another year in the books, which means it’s time for the Stay SaaSy Year In Review.
The Numbers
Our audience grew by about 30% this year. What is more valuable to us is the number of really impressive companies and people represented. It’s a joy and an honor to see the domains come into our subscribe list, a who’s who across the SaaS ecosystem.
To everyone who has subscribed - thank you for your readership.
To everyone who has written in - we deeply appreciate your feedback.
Top Posts
Sometimes the dopamine of a good post wears off, and I start to wonder if our content is resonating anymore. Several times this year, this happened, and I looked back a couple of months to see a post that got a lot of good traction. In aggregate, all those 2-month-apart resonators created a nice handful of high traction posts for the year.
Our top posts were essentially an even split of SaaSy PM and SaaSy EM posts. They span topics ranging from core management techniques to networking and beyond. Without further adieu:
- Fixing Broken Teams is all about inheriting a seemingly hopelessly broken team. It’s grueling but doable.
- Advice That I Can’t Get Out of My Head is a collection of some of the most memorable and applicable advice we’ve ever heard.
- Managing High Performers is about managing high performers, instead of just hoping they’re nice to you.
- Executive Presence Part 2 is a continuation of the incredibly popular Executive Presence, adding even more bits of useful advice for how to build your presence.
- Networking for People Who Don’t Network is a SaaSy PM piece about networking. He’s good at it. Check it out.
- Problem-Driven Development is a simple guide to prioritizing engineering initiatives.
Top Tweets
We tweeted a lot this year. We shared shower thoughts and deep reflections, crude jokes and serious analyses. We got in a couple scuffles but tried to remain civil. We poked and prodded and nudged the zeitgeist where we saw it. These are our best tweets of the year.
I fucking love how unreasonably optimistic people with early startup experience are. There’s a brick wall, no problem, I’ll go through it!
— staysaasy (@staysaasy) July 2, 2024
And I fucking loathe how easily people who don’t have that experience claim they are helpless. I have to talk to someone I don’t know, nooo!
Do I really miss working at a startup, or do I miss being 25 and working with my friends all day?
— staysaasy (@staysaasy) June 4, 2024
Startups are hard but you sure do learn a lot. I regularly see CEOs of companies at $1-2m ARR who are noticeably more poised and *wise* than directors / VPs of companies at scale - even ones with 10x larger teams than the startup CEO's entire company.
— staysaasy (@staysaasy) April 9, 2024
Some people are salivating at the idea of software engineers being replaced by robots. Y’all forget like half of SWEs are just hardcore smart people that went to where the money is. If robots come for our jobs, we’re coming for yours.
— staysaasy (@staysaasy) February 16, 2024
Also, AI could only replace good developers…
At over 1k people in any org, even if you do everything perfectly, you’ll have at least one person that thinks you’re a scumbag just for being an executive, and will assume nearly everything you do is nefarious. The sooner you become at peace with this reality the better.
— staysaasy (@staysaasy) January 20, 2024
It’s hard to convey to people who have never worked at an early startup that if you don’t work hard your competitors will eat you alive.
— staysaasy (@staysaasy) September 18, 2024
Not like a little bit.
There are startup competitors that would slit your throat for $10 of revenue in the most boring industry you could imagine. So no, we’re not going to do summer Fridays.
Tech companies in 2018: we’ll fly you in for an interview, put you up in a hotel, take you out to dinner, pay for your full service move across country, signing bonus of $20k, catered lunch every day, and a partridge and a pear tree.
— staysaasy (@staysaasy) July 27, 2024
Tech companies in 2024: congratulations on…
There's a beautiful thing happening in your comments where she called out VC/PE for being mansplainers, and they're now in your replies mansplaining.
— staysaasy (@staysaasy) July 10, 2024
(they have good points but it's still funny)
Musings
Software is at an interesting place right now. AI is eating the world (right?). Companies are expected to be more efficient than the previous era. 2025 is supposed to be a big year for M&A.
Through all of this, we find ourselves at Stay SaaSy headquarters with more conviction than ever that good management is critical. The times are as dynamic as they’ve ever been, and good management is decisive, sure-footed, reactive without being over-reactive, stable without being in stasis. The winners of this phase of software will be a small group of extremely performant and lucky mega-companies (the next centicorns), followed by a very sturdy cohort of extremely well managed companies.
So we wish you a Happy New Year and a great start to 2025. Please keep reading and please keep writing us. Tell us what you want to read about, tell us what we got right, tell us what we got wrong. Stay SaaSy friends!