Building Foundations of a SaaS Team: Your 1st Year

Starting a SaaS business is exciting, creative, and often unpredictable. In the early days, founders are pulled into every corner of the business — product, sales, support, finance, operations. But one thing determines whether the company moves forward smoothly or stalls early: the first five hires.

Your first year should focus on one thing only:
validating your product and generating early revenue.
And to do that, you don’t need a big team. You need the right one.

1. Lead Developer / Head of Engineering

This person is the technical backbone of the business. They build your MVP, keep it stable, and make early architectural decisions that either support future growth or limit it. The right engineering lead gives your product its shape, its reliability, and its long-term potential.

2. Product Manager (or the Founder in this role)

Someone must decide what gets built, in what order, and why. Early-stage SaaS companies move fast, and without someone controlling the flow of customer insight and feature prioritisation, teams risk building the wrong things. Many founders fill this role to begin with, and later bring in a dedicated PM as complexity increases.

3. Sales Lead / Business Development Manager

Revenue validates your idea. Your first sales hire builds the pipeline, leads demos, nurtures relationships, and closes the first 10–20 deals. They also test your messaging, your pricing, and your sales cycle — giving you the clues you need to create a repeatable process.

4. Customer Success Manager

Retention is the engine of SaaS. Without it, the business becomes a revolving door. A strong CSM ensures customers adopt the product, see value early, and stay long enough to renew.

This isn’t a support function. Think of it as a strategic capability.

To bring this point home, I invited my friend and former colleague Emma McRedmond, a global leader in Customer Success who built the CS function at Pole Star Space Applications from scratch. Here’s what she had to say:

“When I built global CS teams from scratch, the biggest differentiator was embedding Customer Success as the voice of the customer in every decision. That alignment fuels sustainable growth and ensures your product not only lands but expands. Get that right early and you build trust, loyalty and revenue all at the same time.”

Emma’s Non-Negotiable Top Tips for Implementing CS from the Ground Up:
• Secure strong executive buy-in from day one and keep reinforcing it
• Make Customer Success a standing topic in strategy conversations, town halls and board meetings
• Build a team that is proactive, strategic and focused on growth and outcomes
• Listen to your customers and act on what they say. Most importantly, unused feedback is a fast track to churn

Her guidance says it all: Customer Success is a growth driver, not a cost centre.

5. Finance & Operations (Fractional)

Even lean teams need structure. Billing, contracts, cashflow, and the daily running of the business need a steady, reliable hand. A fractional or outsourced ops lead is often ideal — giving you control and clarity without the cost of a full-time role.

Year 1 Goal: Simplicity Over Scale

Every early hire should answer one of two questions:

• Does this help us build a better product?

• Does this help us acquire or retain more customers?

If the answer is no, it can wait.

Your first team shapes everything that follows: culture, clarity, pace, and long-term success. Build it intentionally, and the next phase of scaling becomes far more achievable.