make_it_sure

I know there are companies that are highly productive with AI including ours. However, AI skeptics ask for real studies and all of them available now show no real gains.

Many won't care unless you show them an actual study.

So my question is, are there any actual studies about the companies that actually make it work with AI?

I'm not an active user, I visit HN 2-3 times per day, check frontpage, check comments and usually leave without commenting.

I have the impression lately that comments are starting to get similar to 4chan or some subreddits echo-chambers, usually pushing to extreme left style.

Latest insults to Openclaw founder made me post this question and wondering if you feel the same?

Hey,

Hope you all had a good year and a better one will come next.

We launched 5 years ago and we kept the business bootstrapped and small, more like a lifestlyle business with 10 employees.

We have a high profit rate and we're ready to scale to the next level. However, our growth rate is stalling due to churn catching up and new solid competitors entering the space.

Any books or learning materials tailored for SaaS in this situation: scaling a product in an increasingly competitive market where growth staled.

Thank you and happy new year!

delete

We're a 10 persons bootstrapped SaaS company, we reached 2 million ARR and we want to scale to 10 mil ARR without outside investments.

What books or other learning materials do you recommend for a founder at this stage?

The main challenges are hiring, marketing and sales (I'm a tech founder) and I don't have much knowledge in this space besides some hiring experience.

We also don't have a clear structure of the company, we don't have many processes and I think to scale up I need to put more time on management part of the business.

Would love any insights from founders or top level employees that were in a similar situation.

Thanks

Whenever we get a client with around 100+ head count, they ask to fill their own security assessment. It takes a lot of time as it has sometimes 100+ questions.

We can't also deny them, but we're getting tired. We're too small to hire someone for this and as a founder, my time can surely be used better somewhere else.

How do small startups handle this without getting SOC2?

We are a startup with just a few people and the hardest position of all is tech support, from filling it to retention. The requirement is that you need to be a mid-developer at least but also do support all day.

We're having a super hard time finding someone that wants to do this even when paying over the mid-dev rate.

Developers hate support or any kind of prolonged client interaction, support guys don't have technical experience. Besides that, it takes 2 months minimum of training for a tech support position to get remotely productive, it actually starts at 3-4 month mark.

After all the time the team spends on training them and they start to actually deliver something, we're seeing them fleeing away to a full dev job on some other place.

We just spent months on interview and training and they leave exactly when they start to become helpful. Since we're a very small company of 7, this affects us a lot.

I'm very frustrated about this. Do you guys have any idea on how to handle this?