SaaStr 054: Why You Should Hire A Product Leader From Day 1 & How To Navigate 12-18 Month Sales Cycles With Only 18 Months Runway

Chad Arimura is the Founder & CEO @ Iron.io, where he drives the team to build the world's best cloud infrastructure services. Now they do have some pretty sizeable clients including the likes of Google, Zenefits, Twitter, Whole Foods and they have the backing from the likes of Steve Anderson’s Baseline Ventures, Bain Capital, Matt Ocko from Data Collective and our friends at Sapphire Ventures just to name a few and Prior to co-founding Iron.io, Chad was CIO and founder of AllDorm Inc., a collegiate media and marketing company that provided fundraisers and viral marketing campaigns for clients such as Volkswagen, Domino's Pizza, and Visa. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Chad came to found Iron.io ? With a complex product like Iron, how much of a role does education play in the onboarding process for prospective new clients? To what extent does content marketing play the dominant marketing function for Iron both in terms of educating customers and converting potential customers? How does Chad view the balance of much larger ACV clients with long sales cycles compared to SME’s with smaller ticket sizes and shorter sales cycles? What are the challenges when selling to large corporates and CIO’s in the traditional corporates? 60 Second SaaStr What does Chad know now that he wish he had known at the beginning? What is Chad’s favourite reading material? How does Chad deal with stress as a Founder & CEO? 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 Chad Arimura This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cloud.substack.com