Edith Harbaugh

Learn directly from Edith Harbaugh, Co-founder and Executive Chair of LaunchDarkly, about the top 10 mistakes to avoid when scaling your SaaS company. Edith is an experienced startup executive and has firsthand insights into how to grow any SaaS business quickly and successfully. Don't miss this opportunity to get valuable guidance for scaling to 100 million in ARR! We'll cover how: *Everything is up & to the right if you zoom out Big changes every 6-18 months Revenue is it's own funding Hiring changes over time Value your time and get leverage A good Exec Recruiter is worth it Pricing - no right answer Creating category takes constant effort Refresh Values No playbook, just play pages Watch the video, including Q&A: https://youtu.be/5ccWUwinkJg ****** Shipping projects doesn't have to be a mess. Notion combines project management with your docs, knowledge base, and AI. So you can stop jumping between tools, and stop paying too much for them too. Get Notion Projects for free at Notion.com/SAASTR. Vention provides technology leaders with the top engineering talent they need to accelerate their roadmap, innovate faster and more efficiently, and ultimately catapult their operation to new heights. Vention developers sync with clients' in-house teams, helping them get to market 30 percent faster and saving them more than $600,000 on average. Looking for the edge to outpace your competition? Vention is your partner. Learn more at ventionteams.com. ***** Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software. Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976 Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/ Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

Edith Harbaugh

Co-Founder and Executive Chair

LaunchDarkly

The story goes something like this:   There's this marketing manager who is trying to time a launch. She asks the developer team when the service will be ready. The dev team says maybe a few months. Let's say three months from now in April. The marketing manager begins prepping for the release.   The dev team releases the services the following week.   It's not an uncommon occurrence.   Edith Harbaugh is the co-founder and CEO of LaunchDarkly, a company she launched in 2014 with John Kodumal to solve these problems with software releases that affect organizations worldwide. Today, LaunchDarkly has 4,000 customers and an annual return revenue rate of $100 million.   We interviewed Harbaugh for our Tech Founder Odyssey series on The New Stack Makers about her journey and LaunchDarkly's work. The interview starts with this question about the timing of dev releases and the relationship between developers and other constituencies, particularly the marketing organization.   LaunchDarkly is the number one feature management company, Harbaugh said. "Their mission is to provide services to launch software in a measured, controlled fashion. Harbaugh and Kodumal, CTO, founded the company on the premise that software development and releasing software is arduous.   "You wonder whether you're building the right thing," Harbaugh said, who has worked as both an engineer and a product manager. "Once you get it out to the market, it often is not quite right. And then you just run this huge risk of how do you fix things on the fly."   Feature flagging was a technique that a lot of software companies did. Harbaugh worked at Tripit, a travel service, where they used feature flags as did companies such as Atlassian, where Kodumal had developed software.   "So the kernel of LaunchDarkly, when we started in 2014, was to make this technique of feature flagging into a movement called feature management, to allow everybody to build better software faster, in a safer way."   LaunchDarkly allows companies to release features however granular an organization wants, allowing a developer to push a release into production in different pieces at different times, Harbaugh said. So, a marketing organization can send a release out even after the developer team has released it into production.   "So, for example, if, we were running a release, and we wanted somebody from The New Stack to see it first, the marketing person could turn it on just for you."   Harbaugh describes herself as a huge geek. But she also gets it in a rare way for geeks and non-geeks alike. She and Kodumal took a concept used effectively by develops, transforming it into a service that provides feature management for a broader customer base, like the marketer wanting to push releases out in a granular way for a launch on the East Coast that is pre-programmed with feature flags in advance from the company office the previous day in San Francisco.   The idea is novel, but like many intelligent, technical founders, Harbaugh's journey reflects her place today. She's a leader in the space, and a fun person to talk to, so we hope you enjoy this latest episode in our tech founder series from The New Stack Makers.

Edith Harbaugh

Co-Founder and Executive Chair

LaunchDarkly

Featuring 3 prominent Founders - from Calendly, Coda and LaunchDarkly - that have achieved scale, at "Founder Confidential" you will hear about the highs and lows of fundraising, working with a VC board, and real talk about what it really is like to be a true Founder. Moderator: Lloyed Lobo, Co-Founder, Boast.AI Panelists: Shishir Mehrotra, Cofounder and CEO, Coda Edith Harbaugh, Cofounder and CEO, LaunchDarkly David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO, SaaStr Blog post and video: https://www.saastr.com/founder-confidential-saas-fundraising-expensify-launchdarkly-coda-boast-saastr/ Sponsors: https://www.invoca.com/ https://stripe.com/ https://www.ontheclock.com/

Shishir Mehrotra

Founder and CEO

CodaSuperhumanGrammarly

Edith Harbaugh

Co-Founder and Executive Chair

LaunchDarkly

David Barrett

Founder & CEO

Expensify

Edith Harbaugh is the Founder & CEO @ LaunchDarkly, the startup that allows you to fearlessly and swiftly release software by separating feature rollout from code deployment. They have raised over $10m in funding from many previous guests of The Twenty Minute VC including Andy McLoughlin @ SoftTech, Josh Stein @ DFJ and the wonderful team at Bloomberg Beta. As for Edith, prior to LaunchDarkly, she was a Director of Product @ Tripit and Concur. Edith also holds two patents in deployment from her time in engineering at Vignette. In Today's Episode You Will Learn: How Edith made her way into the world of SaaS and came to found LaunchDarkly? Does Edith agree with Jason Lemkin that the hardest element is the 1-10 customer phase? How has Edith navigated this process with her differing companies? How does Edith look to structure her sales team to successfully close Fortune 500 deals? What is the fundamental difference in selling to enterprise rather than SMB? What can founders do to make NPS a more intelligent metric? How can NPS be analysed effectively to tell you more about the state of your business? What are the signs of a truly great sales person? How do they aid not only their company but the customer they are serving? What is their required knowledge base? 60 Second SaaStr What is Edith's fave SaaS resource? What does Edith know now that she wishes she had known before? Oakland Office: Why not SF? What are the benefits? 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 Edith Harbaugh

Edith Harbaugh

Co-Founder and Executive Chair

LaunchDarkly