SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2024

But now a second SaaS security leader has filed to IPO, Rubrik. They’re still transitioning from onprem / appliciance model to cloud, which makes some of the metrics a touch confusing. Is this the new bar to IPO in SaaS? Let’s great ready for just the second SaaS IPO since 2021! 500m+ ARR, with ~50% growth?

Scale 220

Scale Pricing Scaling Cloud 220

Cobloom

APRIL 14, 2020

With big-name SaaS companies like Slack and Evernote using the freemium pricing model to achieve rapid growth and attract an ever-expanding user base, it’s easy to think that freemium is the secret to success in the ultra-competitive SaaS space.

Pricing 59

Pricing SaaS 59

Inturact

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

Your SaaS pricing tells the story of your value, and should communicate that value in a way that actually attracts customers. Every SaaS founder worries if their pricing is right, and with good reason. Your SaaS pricing should justify your product and yet be affordable.

Pricing 57

Pricing SaaS Communication B2B 57

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

Many of the fundamental business models that were once engraved in the SaaS playbook are now changing thanks to a tougher macro environment and a maturing market. PST, Stephanie Opdam, Partner at Notion Capital, shares four business model changes that will allow SaaS companies to build resilience and staying power over time.

Business Model 238

Business Model SaaS Payments Payments Headcount 238

SaaS Metrics

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

Trying to find the proper balance of valuation and income is critical for your SaaS business.

Pricing 40

Pricing Strategy SaaS Metrics 40

SaaS Metrics

JULY 16, 2019

Introduction Businesses, whether small or big, choose SaaS over traditional software delivery methods mainly because of low initial costs and the flexibility SaaS model offers. Regardless of the pricing model you choose, you should be able to.

Pricing 45

Pricing Software Delivery Strategy SaaS 45

Incredo

JULY 31, 2019

SaaS (Software as a Service) has proven to be a very elastic, scalable and progressive industry. billion (the biggest share belongs to SaaS). Another research firm, Gartner Group says that SaaS industry remains the largest segment of the cloud market. According to IDC , cloud services market grew 28.6

SaaS 195

SaaS Pricing Cloud Revenue 195

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2023

In part one of this week’s Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) with SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin, he answered the community’s questions about whether all anyone cares about is AI anymore, investor appetites going into 2024, vertical SaaS, and thriving as a solo founder. The multiples fell off a cliff in 2022 for SaaS and remained crummy in 2023.

Scale 221

Scale Sales Hiring Customer Success AI 221

SaaStr

OCTOBER 18, 2023

So Domo is an interesting case study on SaaS entrepreneurship. Founder Josh James had one of the earliest $1B+ exits in SaaS when Adobe bought his first start-up, Omniture, for $1.8 After decades running SaaS companies, it was time for a break in 2022, and Josh eventually stepped down as CEO. Billion way back in 2008.

Entrepreneurship 231

Entrepreneurship Enterprise Pricing Churn 231

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2023

A SaaS Founder’s Guide to PR Why PR works, when it doesn’t, and what to expect. Customer success teams are critical for SaaS companies as they own the customer relationship from start to finish, managing up to 75% of revenue through renewals and upsells. Competition In SaaS Leads to A Lot of Things. Or they fail.

Sales Hiring 220

Sales Hiring Technical Advisors Compensation Outsourced Development 220

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 20, 2023

So Harry Stebbings was kind enough to have us back in the new group format on 20VC with 2 of the legends in seed investing, Eric Paley of Founder Collective and Mike Maples of Floodgate: While both aren’t pure SaaS investors, they’re both in the top 1% (!), In Today’s Episode on Is the Venture Model Broken? : ” New!!

Venture Capital 227

Venture Capital Investment Pricing Startup 227

Stax

APRIL 18, 2024

Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Software-as-a-Service Providers (SaaS) operate within the same market, thus creating a push-and-pull revenue dynamic. SaaS companies deliver software applications over the internet on a subscription basis, simplifying access and management for users. What are SaaS companies?

Outsourcing Services 88

Outsourcing Services SaaS Payments Payment Services Payment Methods 88

SaaStr

AUGUST 23, 2023

Dear SaaStr: How Do You Price a SaaS Product in a New B2B Market? The simplest answer is usually to copy the pricing from the closest public company or other break-out leader you can find that is vaguely similar. I guessed the pricing almost immediately. That everyone knows, and knows the price points of.

Pricing 189

Pricing B2B Scale SaaS 189

Chargebee

MAY 11, 2023

Three years since subscription pricing returned to the SaaS growth folklore, the world has changed. So has its pricing trends.

Pricing 52

Pricing SaaS Subscription Payment Features 52

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2023

One SaaS leader that’s accelerating again is Shopify. From a business model perspective, Shopify has in essence been a fintech and merchant product first and a SaaS product second for quite some time. Pricing Increases Really Boosted MRR. Like Most Other SaaS Leaders, Shopify Has Gotten a Lot More Efficient.

Payments 231

Payments Merchant Services Payment Solutions Revenue 231

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 22, 2024

Subscribe now ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) vs ERR (Experimental Runrate Revenue) ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) is one of the most popular SaaS (Non-GAAP) metrics. In it's truest form, ARR is used by pure SaaS business models to describe the aggregate annual value of the entire customer set. This analysis does two things.

AI 183

AI Revenue Cloud Technical Advisors 183

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

So I’ve been doing SaaS for a while, and the costs of doing business have just gone up. SaaS sales execs with even a little bit of experience at other SaaS companies are looking for higher and higher OTEs, often with lower effective attainment and high support costs. seems to have priced itself out of doing SMB SaaS sales.

SMB 261

SMB Scale Sales Hiring Sales 261

Andreessen Horowitz

MARCH 22, 2024

We’re in the very early days of genAI and until adoption curves and costs stabilize, there won’t be any tried-and-true pricing or packaging frameworks. We’ve also seen some companies use their genAI feature as an upsell lever to increase conversion to a higher pricing tier or cover part of the cost of serving genAI.

Generative AI 124

Generative AI AI B2B Pricing 124

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 16, 2022

Is charging by consumption (usage-based pricing) a superior model for a business? Often, the effort probably isn’t worth it, unless the company’s stated strategy is to differentiate on price structure. What should my unit of pricing be? The unit of pricing is the crux to unlocking that puzzle.

Pricing 262

Pricing Scale Banking Startup 262

Stax

FEBRUARY 28, 2024

Here’s an interesting stat: 70% of businesses consider subscription and membership models indispensable for future commercial growth and expansion. However, only 10% of them currently employ these models. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses need to constantly evolve their offerings to stay fresh and relevant.

Payments 88

Payments SaaS Payments Payment Services Merchant Services 88

Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 1, 2023

When it comes to foundation models, outside vendors like Anthropic, AI21 Labs, Cohere, Meta Llama, Stability as well as Amazon’s Titan models are all available on Bedrock. Amazon was clear in their beliefs that there won’t be “one model to rule them all” and instead users will embrace choice.

AWS 293

AWS Cloud AI Search Cost optimization & reporting 293

Subscription Flow

FEBRUARY 27, 2024

Subscription pricing with the help of automated billing software has transformed many industries and provided businesses with a dynamic way to generate revenue, especially in the SaaS space. Moreover, developing a profitable pricing strategy requires consistent model testing and compliance with international tax laws.

SaaS Payments 95

SaaS Payments Payment Services Payments Payment Solutions 95

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2023

Churn increase due to greater scrutiny of costs Contract values declining More stakeholders involved in decision-making Capchase combined the study with their data set of thousands of SaaS companies and looked at what the best companies do to overcome these hurdles. It could be price, product composition, or payment terms. The answer?

SaaS Payments 208

SaaS Payments Payment Services Payments Payment Features 208

SaaStr

DECEMBER 17, 2021

Pricing is one of the most challenging elements to get right for SaaS companies. How much should you charge, and what pricing model works best? In an era of empowered buyers, vendors should take care to remove obstacles from the pricing process or risk losing the customer to a competitor.

Pricing 197

Pricing Scale Retention AI 197

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 17, 2022

ML propels SaaS into a massive second wave that increases workers’ productivity measurably. Machine learning models predict code, synthesize images, author blog posts reducing composition time by a factor of 2 or 3. Users grow accustomed to this very quickly & ML becomes a requisite feature in most workflow SaaS.

Software Review 261

Software Review Technical Review Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 261

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 10, 2022

Both companies employ a usage-based pricing model: pay for what you use. The fastest growing public SaaS company last year charted 1.1x Both startups provide database software to developers to build applications. Both have grown very fast. In fact, their revenue trajectories through 2020 are nearly identical. That’s 16.6x

Startup 335

Startup Pricing Revenue Software 335

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2021

Says Bialecki: “In the SaaS world, [companies] were defining customer success…as they went along. Pricing & Selling Strategy. When it came to pricing, Klaviyo decided to pursue a value-based model instead of a cost-based model. This allows you to price at a premium. . They spotted an opportunity.

Scale 296

Scale Marketing Pricing Consulting 296

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2023

1000000000000.00% in SaaS. At least, those of us who haven’t done software sales before, and have a low-ish price point and run an all in-bound model. You can also try with a fully-self serve model. Dear SaaStr: Do Salespeople on Commission Really Sell More Than Salary-only Salespeople? Commissioned salespeople sell more.

Scale 218

Scale Revenue Sales Pricing 218

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 28, 2021

Should you price your SaaS per seat or per use? The first thing to state is that massive companies have been built using both pricing structures: Salesforce and Adobe bill per seat while Snowflake and Twilio charge per use. When to use per seat pricing. Would they switch if the pricing weren’t predictable?

Pricing 270

Pricing Strategy Startup Scale 270

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 29, 2022

B2B SaaS investors, founders, and growth teams skip ahead to monetization and expansion early and focus disproportionately on them. Founders are worried about ruining the PLG model with a GTM motion. Your company accidentally changes from a product-led growth model to a sales-led one. . Pricing by design creates friction.

Technical Review 233

Technical Review Technical Advisors Scale Compensation 233

User Pilot

OCTOBER 24, 2023

When it comes to product-led growth , SaaS companies need to get everything details right. From the messaging, positioning, and pricing models, every little detail needs to be perfect for product-led growth to take off. Usage-based pricing could use tiers, units, volumes, or impact as its basis for subscription cost.

Pricing 99

Pricing Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Payments 99

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2020

New consumption pricing model has increased revenue 15% where rolled out. Done right, this sort of anti-SaaS pricing model can lead to significantly more revenue. On a related note, most of Shopify’s revenue in no longer SaaS revenue either, but variable revenue tied to commerce sales.

Scale 291

Scale Outsourced Development SMB Cloud 291

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2023

In SaaS, growth investments generally will all be at at least $20m ARR, or $40m ARR, or more. What’s hard is that pricing and predicting is even more important than early-stage investing. 2-/ A lot of your investments can IPO and do great and still barely do 1x your investment price. And growing nicely. But all good ones.

Venture Capital 190

Venture Capital Investment Cloud Pricing 190

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

These two departments are a SaaS company’s most important; without their alignment, there is no growth or scale. Prakash Raina, Co-Founder of Subskribe, and Leslie Hui, VP of Accounting Operations and Finance Transformation at Okta, break down the secrets to unifying SaaS teams, processes, and systems. The evolution of SaaS business.

Scale 191

Scale Finance Sales Hiring Scaling 191

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2021

Relative to any other sector, the SaaS industry is uniquely transparent. In my opinion, the most informative and useful SaaS content “speaks for itself” and is well suited for future reference. This 20-20-20 data is amazingly useful to that Self-Taught Founder building out their GTM operating model.

Scale 297

Scale Cloud Forecasting Pricing 297

Clouded Judgement

NOVEMBER 10, 2023

Model providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc as companies start building out AI). When they started using large language models from OpenAI, the gross margin on the same product went to -100%! At the end of the day, these large language models are quite expensive! And this “product” had a ~50% gross margin.

Cloud 183

Cloud Artificial Intelligence AI GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 183

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2023

Learn about the most important SaaS metrics for founders in 2023 with the CEOs of the most metric-oriented company, monday.com, and the founder of SaaStr. For a quick recap on SaaS metrics: What is ARR in SaaS? How Is CAC Calculated In SaaS? In the early days of SaaS, efficiency mattered because there was no capital.

Metrics 184

Metrics SaaS Sales Hiring Finance 184