SaaStr

MAY 8, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: The Average SaaS Leader Grows 54% … At $1 Billion in ARR. Why NRR is Probably The Wrong Core Metric for Your Customer Success Team. Each week, we round up our most popular content so you can catch up on anything you may have missed.

Scale 221

Scale Engineering Payment Features Sales 221

SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2024

One metric I wanted to highlight. As we can see below, the averages also vary substantially by category. So Vendr has their latest SaaS Buyer Report out here. There’s plenty of good data in there and it’s worth a read. And look, average sales cycles are almost meaningless. Bigger deals take longer.

SaaS 256

SaaS Benchmarks B2B Metrics 256

Buffer Resources

AUGUST 7, 2023

years into my time at Buffer, I realized I was about to hit 100 articles written for the Buffer blog. Over time, as I grew comfortable with the social media space, I started to understand what would best move the needle for our core metric: page views. After randomly deciding to count how many articles I had written 1.5

Social Media 52

Social Media Systems Review Technical Review Software Review 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 11, 2023

Profitable and capital-efficient is back in fashion: (Still, I’d argue it should be worth much more with these metrics, especially given that it has $212m in cash on its balance sheet). Not enterprise-high NRR, but about what I’d expect from their ACV and category. 5 Interesting Learnings: #1. Just Quiet Compounding.

Scale 329

Scale Pricing Scaling Enterprise 329

User Pilot

APRIL 7, 2021

How important are your user engagement metrics? You need to focus on the right metrics. Some metrics will show if you are currently doing well, projected to do well soon, and if you’re correctly steering the wheel in the right direction long term. What Are User Engagement Metrics? What Are User Engagement Metrics?

Engagement 86

Engagement Metrics Scale Benchmarks 86

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 29, 2020

Top 10 Blog Posts from 2020. Top 4 Metrics Chief Customer Officers (CCOs) Must Know. With a dizzying number of SaaS metrics—from acquisition costs and account expansion to customer churn and satisfaction—all vying for headspace, CCOs must focus on the measurements that really matter. To find out who wins, check out the recap.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Review Software Review 98

SaaStr

AUGUST 22, 2021

Recently Bessemer Venture Partners did another great deep give on Cloud metrics at the Cloud 100. A few metrics really stood out to me this year: Their “Cloud 100” top private Cloud and SaaS companies are now worth on average a stunning $5.2B. Fintech is the biggest driver, pulling away from all other categories.

Cloud 308

Cloud Scale SaaS Acquisition 308

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2024

If there were one or two metrics or data points that Nick learned at Gainsight by sitting in on board meetings, what were they? PS – watch his recent deep dive on this and a bunch more SaaS metrics for 2024 in the Workshop he did with us.) But we have to remake the whole category from scratch. There’s a lot of nuance.

Sales Hiring 239

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale AI 239

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2023

Sacks believes there will be a co-pilot for every professional job category and also horizontal job functions like marketing and sales. A lot of categories are emerging, like sales enablement. You might see five or six categories here, but they’re all trying to get into each other’s business, and buyers only want one of them.

SaaS Payments 208

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions AI SaaS 208

Totango

JANUARY 3, 2024

With Totango, businesses can integrate data to get a 360° view of customer health, collaborate to manage their customer portfolio , engage with customers when and where it matters, monitor and improve the metrics that matter , and scale CS faster with the power of people + AI.

Software Review 111

Software Review Scale Customer Success Innovation 111

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

So one thing that has exploded in SaaS in the past decade is the role of Private Equity buying both public SaaS companies (to take them private, “fix” some metrics, and IPO or sell them again), and generally later-stage private SaaS companies. PE wants to invest in leaders, if not necessarily always #1 in a category.

AWS 239

AWS SaaS Pricing Acquisition 239

SaaSX

SEPTEMBER 16, 2019

Let’s face it: SaaS metrics are confusing! What metrics should you be tracking? These 5 articles will get you out of the SaaS metrics maze and on your way to success today! These 5 articles will get you out of the SaaS metrics maze and on your way to success today! SaaS Metrics for Product Managers.

Metrics 45

Metrics SaaS Sales Hiring Systems Review 45

SaaStr

MAY 29, 2019

We found our most popular speakers by speaker views and likes, session bookmarks and ratings weighing categories more heavily for overall rating than initial interest. About Claire Hughes Johnson… Sitting at number two on the list, Claire was the most steadily popular across all our metrics. Curious how we came up with this list?

Payment Methods 220

Payment Methods Payment Solutions Payment Services Banking 220

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2023

Blosser explains the reasoning this way, “We added our second product at about $3M ARR, and I’ll tell you why we did this: We’re in this category where you have internal learning, that’s training your employees, and you have external learning, that’s training your customers and partners. Great Startups Create Their Own Categories.”

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SMB Marketing 192

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 29, 2023

Revenues have now crossed $500m in ARR, but growth is modest at 18% year-over-year and gross margins are inherently lower in the category at only 52%. DBNER decreased to 120% from 123%, a drop but still a strong metric. Still, it’s not all such great news. Fastly is also still losing money, albeit less. Let’s dig in.

Cloud 226

Cloud Enterprise Revenue Engineering 226

InsightSquared

APRIL 14, 2021

The key is identifying the sales metrics that matter most and getting ahead of pitfalls with actions like managing dashboards correctly. . 12 Sales Metrics Every Sales Leader Should Know. Here are some of the top sales metrics to track to stay ahead of the competition. Today, sales leaders are leveraging this metric in new ways.

Scale 62

Scale Metrics Sales Forecasting 62

Tom Tunguz

MAY 29, 2023

Let me share some examples : This weekend, I wanted to clean up some HTML image links in older blog posts & modernize them to markdown format. Early search engines, including Google, also required specialized inputs/prompts & suffered from lesser quality results in different categories. I typed this description into ChatGPT.

ChatGPT 181

ChatGPT AI Search Artificial Intelligence Data Analysis 181

ChurnZero

DECEMBER 28, 2018

This has been quite a year for the ChurnZero blog. We even got a shout out from HubSpot as a top blog you should be reading in 2018. As the year comes to a close, we thought we’d offer up a useful roundup of our ten most popular blog posts from the year. Customer Success Metrics that Matter.

Technical Review 49

Technical Review Artificial Intelligence Social Media Churn 49

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2022

Especially when some other crappy company just got funded last week with worse metrics. A lot of VCs are looking for structural reasons you can win and dominate your category. Some VCs get this and just want to back the potential winner in a category. Or their friends got 7 term sheets with good-but-not- as -good companies.

Scale 338

Scale Sales Recruiting Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 338

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

GRR will vary by segment and category. NRR is the NorthStar metric in SaaS, but we all agreed it can be gamed, to some extent. Most important metric to them is the % of paid base actively using the product. Yes, new customers and logos are key, but finding ways to add more value and sell to the base become what really matters.

SMB 176

SMB Scaling Metrics B2B 176

SaaStr

AUGUST 5, 2021

You’ll have to build a real model here: Many VCs and blog pieces will talk about a good metric being to spend about your first year ACV on Sales + Marketing. But here’s the thing where the blogs and such will confuse you: that’s an average. But even more so, the cheaper categories will help balance things out.

Scale 323

Scale Marketing B2C B2B 323

User Pilot

MARCH 17, 2024

Are you tracking SaaS metrics without knowing how to make the analytics process easier? Analytics dashboards are visualization tools that give you an overview of key metrics. It will give you a better understanding of the type of metrics to monitor in your dashboard and help you draw product growth insights from them.

Social Media 98

Social Media Data SaaS Scale 98

Buffer Resources

DECEMBER 5, 2023

Each week, we (the Content team) would receive overflowing inboxes filled with requests to post articles on the Buffer blog. In 2012, we regularly had writers like Matt Ragland share their unique perspectives on the blog. First, we repurposed our existing blog guidelines and style guide.

Scale 100

Scale Benchmarks Social Media Communication 100

SaaStr

JANUARY 6, 2021

On Category Creation. From the beginning, Airtable convinced themselves that they had a different category of product through the creation of a software creation platform that anyone can use. Lastly, as a platform business, he had to avoid the temptation to optimize visible, short-term metrics such as revenue.

Scale 192

Scale Software Review Scaling Sales Hiring 192

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 29, 2022

As consumer tech growth teams move through this adoption funnel, they evolve their north star metric. This evolution can be described in four stages—each stage with a goal measured by a specific metric. Cost per quality user is the north star metric here. PLG applies to many categories, but not all of them. Monetization.

Technical Review 233

Technical Review Technical Advisors Scale Compensation 233

SaaStr

MARCH 2, 2022

Category creation takes persistence and patience. It is vital to understand why you are launching a category creation initiative. Disrupting existing categories can be difficult, so you need to be intentional with your strategy. Do not try to create a category because it’s trendy. Do not be afraid to pivot.

Outsourcing Services 196

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development Marketing 196

Neil Patel

JANUARY 25, 2021

The search function parses attributes, categories, tags, and titles to match them with each searched term. After query matching occurs, the search engine determines listing rank by aggregating eight definitive score features : Quality of Listing Score: This metric establishes how well a listing converts. 10 Tips for Etsy SEO.

Payment Methods 135

Payment Methods AI Search Artificial Intelligence Social Media 135

OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 9, 2021

And with more popularity comes more confusion, especially over what metrics are most important to drive the best results. Which takes us back to our first point: Measuring the right metrics at the right time is more critical than ever because the margin for error is so slim when it comes to building a successful B2B Saas company.

Metrics 52

Metrics SaaS Payment Features Customer Lifetime Value 52

OPEXEngine

DECEMBER 17, 2019

In the many years I’ve worked with SaaS companies, I continue to observe a surprising lack of standardization of SaaS metrics and performance reporting. My experience reinforces the fact that SaaS business model variants and approaches to measuring performance via metrics are still very much undefined. The Value of Benchmarking.

Benchmarks 40

Benchmarks Metrics Headcount SaaS 40

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

Higher than he imagined in terms of the founder quality bar and, the stage of the business, and growth and efficiency metrics. As a founder, that high bar means you have to meet with more investors because of those flavors, even more so if you’re not in a hot category. Each VC has a different “flavor.” Performance — this is objective.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 246

Neil Patel

APRIL 28, 2021

This is done through four main categories: Marketing: For Shopify users in need of a more defined audience , streamlined campaigns, or optimized content, Shopify Marketers can offer their services to help Shopify users increase their reach and employ better marketing strategies. What Is the Shopify Partner Program? Lead Conversion Rate.

Merchant Services 110

Merchant Services Payment Methods Payments Payment Services 110

SaaStr

MAY 2, 2021

But at least measure them by these 3 metrics, not just one. Now here’s something you might not know: Field Marketing is the largest category of marketing spend. Yes, it is more effort than buying Adwords or writing a blog post, and it might seem more efficient to just do a low-engagement digital event. The largest.

Cloud 277

Cloud Marketing Enterprise Pricing 277

SaaStr

DECEMBER 17, 2019

But the top new pieces of content in 2019 were: Top Blog Posts. Our most-read post on the topic was on Zoom’s metrics, perhaps not a surprise. About 70% of SaaS Unicorns Are New Versions of Existing Categories of Software. How many of us are creating new categories, vs. rebooting existing ones? Take a look.

Scale 132

Scale SMB Cloud Acquisition 132

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2022

Awareness : In the early days, we met developers where they lived: blogs, social media, GitHub, et cetera. Furthermore, a transition to the cloud can open up an entirely new world of metrics, like memory and CPU consumption, which you never had before. But what steps do they take to reach escape velocity?

Cloud 185

Cloud Venture Capital Social Media Technology 185

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 9, 2022

We use a specific R&D outcomes metrics template to help us think through and articulate the results we’re aiming for. In it, we frame the customer benefits we want to see along with any metrics, targets, and supporting rationale we have. Read other blog posts in the series here. We review outcomes and share our learnings.

Metrics 152

Metrics Acquisition Revenue Churn 152

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 12, 2021

You can segment your trial customers based on different categories and easily monitor the customers with the highest conversion potential. Check our own Baremetrics free trial here and start keeping track of your trial metrics. Use Baremetrics to monitor your business metrics. Contrary to blog posts, gated content is locked.

Payment Methods 98

Payment Methods SaaS Payments Payment Services Sales Hiring 98

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2021

I bet the freemium metrics appeared good, with positive growth and solid conversion rates. Hmmmm … well, to me, that’s not a bad place to be once a space, a category, gets to $100m+. But more often, SaaS categories with significant complexity in workflows and features end up in natural oligopolies. Not usually.

Scale 238

Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 238