Building a SaaS Company with Operational Discipline: Betterworks CEO Kris Duggan (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting and what’s worth highlighting in your entrepreneurial journey from a lessons from the trenches point of view?

Kris Duggan: There are probably a million directions we could go. One thing I would say as being very important is to be very focused as a company. I think we decided to be very focused on one thing, which is doing one thing extremely well and be the best on the planet around goal setting. That means that we had to rethink the product from the ground up. We had to rethink engagement and the experience.

We defined the philosophy of the product first and then built the product that met that philosophy. We believe that we created the best product on the planet to do that workflow. We look at the HR space, and goals are a feature of virtually every HR product, and yet our company now can compete with any company because of how deep we’ve gone in this one area. Even though it’s a narrow process or a very specific process, every company does it. That has allowed us to get quite successful.

Number two would be we’ve built a very balanced business. I would say that we invest in all areas in a balanced way. Sales is extremely important. Marketing is important. Customer success is important. Engineering is important. I guess having that harmony across how the business operates and how you scale it is critical. As an example, we wouldn’t add sales people unless we knew what ratio that you need to grow sales and marketing in order to increase leads to feed sales. We know those formulas and we know exactly how to scale the business in a balanced way that allows us to make sure that the foundation of the business is very strong.

We’re about 80 people right now and we’re going to get to over a 100 this year. We’re going to get to over 180 next year. If you want to grow very fast and execute efficiently, people need to know what their expectations are, what they are working on, and their work alliance cross-functionally. Keep in mind the reason that we built this software is obviously to help other companies, but we are the number one customer of our own software. We take all of that stuff very seriously. I think we’re almost like a case study of our own product. That’s how we’ve been able to execute so quickly. We worship at the altar of operational excellence.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. Good luck with the next phase of your journey. I have a lot of respect for Emergence partners. I think they’re one of the first companies in the SaaS business to really understand SaaS and jump on the SaaS opportunities. From a partner point of view, you couldn’t have chosen better.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a SaaS Company with Operational Discipline: Betterworks CEO Kris Duggan
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