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You’ve landed pilots, the product works, and funding is on the horizon. Now comes the hardest part: Who do you hire next?
The greatest moment of uncertainty for early-stage companies often happens right when things start working. Founders suddenly have to answer difficult questions about scaling their team structure, hiring priorities, and go-to-market strategy.
In a recent conversation between SaaS growth expert Michael Bertoni and founder Shaun Laker, these exact challenges came into focus. Their discussion explored how founders should think about organizational structure and building teams as they transition from a small founding group into a scalable company.
Here is the blueprint for navigating early-stage growth and hiring the right leaders.
Most startups begin with a small, product-focused team where founders juggle multiple roles—from product and operations to sales, marketing, and customer success.
Shaun’s situation perfectly illustrates this critical inflection point. He is currently operating with:
With the product working and funding imminent, the question shifts from what to build to who to hire and how to structure the team to scale.
To answer that question, Bertoni utilizes a talent modeling framework. The most important takeaway is that "talent" extends far beyond traditional full-time employees.
In a modern startup, talent includes anyone influencing the company's growth: employees, advisors, investors, partners, contractors, agencies, and even AI tools. For example, an agency shapes your brand, advisors guide partnerships, and AI tools actively augment decision-making and productivity. In AI-first companies, human and machine contributors must form a combined, highly efficient talent ecosystem.
When evaluating candidates, founders must prioritize four non-negotiable characteristics:
While the earliest stages of a SaaS company revolve around product development and the founder's responsibilities, growth requires a shift. Founders must understand future organizational verticals—such as the CTO, CRO, CMO, and Chief Customer Officer—to identify leadership gaps as they scale.
As traction builds, your next critical hires must focus on scaling the business through sales and customer success.
For B2B startups selling to enterprises, dedicated revenue leadership becomes essential quickly. Enterprise sales involve long cycles and complex stakeholder groups, meaning founders cannot scale deals alone forever. Founders often hire young, high-potential operators as Growth Leads who can eventually evolve into the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) role.
In enterprise SaaS, Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are vital for driving long-term growth. Operating on a land-and-expand strategy, CSMs manage relationships, ensure smooth implementations, and secure renewals. Because of this ongoing relationship management, customer success often generates more revenue than net-new sales.
To close enterprise deals, your team must align the product's value proposition with three distinct decision-makers:
When communicating value to these stakeholders, the strongest SaaS solutions prove three things: they reduce costs, increase productivity, and directly generate more revenue. Many startups focus on cutting expenses but fail to highlight the direct revenue impact, which is the most compelling point.
To speed up market expansion, startups should leverage strategic partnerships and customer proof. Collaborating with large technology integrators like Globant, EPAM, and Cognizant allows a startup to tap into massive, pre-existing enterprise networks without building relationships from scratch. Furthermore, utilizing customer testimonials and references dramatically increases trust and creates a powerful feedback loop for new buyers.
Fundraising and scaling both require selling a bold, long-term vision. Investors want companies that dominate an initial niche to build momentum, but possess the vision to scale into a massive, long-term opportunity.
Scaling a SaaS startup isn't just about the software; it requires a disciplined go-to-market execution and an intentional talent strategy. If you are an early-stage founder ready to transition from a small team to a global company, stop relying on job boards. Partner with a premier SaaS recruiting firm and SaaS executive search partner to capture the top 1% of talent.
Michael C. Bertoni is the Founder and CEO of SaaS Talent and a long-time builder in the SaaS and tech ecosystem.
For more than 25 years he has worked alongside founders, executives and leadership teams to help SaaS companies scale revenue through better talent and better organizational design.
His work spans go-to-market strategy, sales, business development, talent architecture and AI-first organizational alignment.
Michael is known for challenging traditional hiring models and helping SaaS leaders rethink how companies are built in a modern AI-driven world.