Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

Q4 earnings season for cloud businesses is now behind us. In this post, I’ll take a data-driven approach in evaluating the overall group’s performance, and highlight individual standouts along the way. Through these interactions, I’ve built up mental benchmarks for metrics on which I place extra emphasis.

Cloud 177

Cloud Software Azure AWS 177

Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 1, 2023

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now Amazon ReInvent This week Amazon had their annual AWS ReInvent conference. Couple takeaways for me: 2024 is shaping up to be the “prototype to production” year for AI. Time will tell if they can execute!

AWS 293

AWS Cloud AI Search Cost optimization & reporting 293

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 1, 2023

So we’re finally, almost back from the IPO Drout in SaaS. The last SaaS leader to IPO was HashiCorp back in Dec 2021. After that, the public markets began a precipitous decline — leading to an almost 2 year pause in SaaS IPO. But the metrics, especially for an SMB-focused SaaS business, are breathtaking.

Scale 216

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Interviewing 216

Payrix

APRIL 17, 2024

Adding Embedded Payments gives you an exciting opportunity to grow your business and solve real pain points for your customers. Your business objectives Before you begin your marketing campaign, it’s important to identify your business and marketing objectives.

Payments 130

Payments Embedded Payments Merchant Services SaaS Payments 130

SaaStr

MAY 28, 2021

75% self-service, 25% sales-driven. 75% self-service, 25% sales-driven. Vimeo has an interesting blend of self-service / freemium revenue and sales-driven larger deals. Vimeo has 110% NRR for its enterprise customers, but doesn’t break it out for the self-service business. 5 Interesting Learnings: #1.

Enterprise 263

Enterprise Scale B2B Metrics 263

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 14, 2023

The current public market environment might look like a great SaaS crash for many people. As things appear to slow, how do we get back to the fundamentals, find the things that are great about SaaS that are measurable, and help people see the value in your business? The fundamentals make your business attractive.

Metrics 201

Metrics SaaS Marketing SMB 201

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2023

As SaaS founders are looking to scale and raise funding, it can be confusing and stressful to navigate in the uncertain market of the past few years. Shulgan has been in the business for years, including his current role at OMERS. In the SaaS space, revenue growth was the king of metrics for many years, but that has changed.

Scale 214

Scale Scaling Software Review Operational efficiency. 214

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2023

So some SaaS and Cloud leaders have seen big impacts from the post-Covid hangover, but others have just kept accelerating. That’s about as good as it gets in SaaS and Cloud! Are we near or past the lows in SaaS and Cloud buying patterns? High NRR is magical, but NRR as a metric isn’t a GAAP metric.

Scale 174

Scale cloud efficiency Cloud Business Model 174

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2024

Is it the end of an era for customer success in SaaS? We just wrote up how some of the biggest changes of SaaS are now coming, specifically in Customer Success and Sales. Back in 2015, when didn’t have the data or NRR or GRR of 115 public SaaS companies. Some other key learnings included: The power of the SaaS model.

Sales Hiring 239

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale AI 239

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 4, 2024

The document contains a plethora of information on the company including a general overview, up to date financials, risk factors to the business, cap table highlights and much more. We believe that the future of cybersecurity is data security—if your data is secure, your business is resilient. Cyberattacks are inevitable.

Benchmarks 117

Benchmarks Data Cybersecurity Cloud 117

Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 21, 2023

Q3 earnings season for cloud businesses is now behind us. In this post, I’ll take a data-driven approach in evaluating the overall group’s performance, and highlight individual standouts along the way. Through these interactions, I’ve built up mental benchmarks for metrics on which I place extra emphasis.

Cloud 177

Cloud Software Benchmarks Retention 177

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2024

Go-to-market (GTM) design and efficiency are sometimes overlooked, but they’re a critical driver of any SaaS business. Previously in SaaS, it was widely seen that anything > 1 was healthy if you were venture-backed, and anything > 1.5 is was seen as perhaps too capital-efficient. If you were well-funded, 0.7

VP of Engineering 213

VP of Engineering Scale Marketing Benchmarks 213

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 9, 2023

Very healthy new business (new customer) acquisition. Their consumption is driven by usage of applications built on top of Mongo. Usage on Snowflake is driven by queries run on Snowflake Azure: Neutral Tone With Strength in AI Overall I’d characterize Azure’s quarter as a net positive. Overall similar to Datadog.

Trends 130

Trends Cloud Azure AWS 130

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2022

I’ve had the privilege to invest one way or another in about 35 SaaS companies, both as a VC and as angel. But then, once they get to say $1m+ ARR, growing 15%, 16, 20% a month — why isn’t every VC they meet offering a term sheet? Especially when some other crappy company just got funded last week with worse metrics.

Scale 338

Scale Sales Recruiting Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 338

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2024

If you’ve been an operator in the SaaS industry for a long time, you’ve probably considered starting your own company. His day-to-day role as a first-time founder involves a lot of work around creating and building the MVP product and filtering out all of the noise in this SaaS ecosystem. This has changed 100% as a founder.

Headcount 196

Headcount Scaling Finance Engineering 196

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2021

There are two great SaaS companies I’m working with right now. Both have a sales-driven process, selling to SMBs. What are the differences between these 2 seemingly similar SaaS startups selling to SMBs? What are the differences between these 2 seemingly similar SaaS startups selling to SMBs? How can that be?

Scale 279

Scale Churn Metrics Startup 279

User Pilot

APRIL 3, 2024

Data-driven decision-making in product-led innovation uses data to guide product development , ensuring decisions enhance customer success. Product-led growth business suits products that meet unique market needs, have a quick value realization for users, and fit a freemium model. Are you being innovative in your product?

Innovation 91

Innovation Payments Strategy Payment Solutions 91

Clouded Judgement

SEPTEMBER 12, 2023

Q2 earnings season for cloud businesses is now behind us. In this post, I’ll take a data-driven approach in evaluating the overall group’s performance, and highlight individual standouts along the way. Through these interactions, I’ve built up mental benchmarks for metrics on which I place extra emphasis.

Cloud 169

Cloud Software Benchmarks Retention 169

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. SaaS companies’ success is largely dependent on their use of subscription billing.

SaaS Payments 95

SaaS Payments Payment Services Payments Payment Solutions 95

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 14, 2023

Moving from a traditional SaaS to a pure consumption model was a challenging but fun transition for MongoDB. What Is A “Consumption” Business In the old days of software, you had a company like Oracle that popularized the perpetual license where customers own the software and vendors own the market. It didn’t work.

Compensation 164

Compensation Sales Azure AWS 164

SaaStr

DECEMBER 8, 2022

For many of us, simply selling to line of business owners isn’t enough anymore today. If at almost $2B in ARR, and a market-dominating brand, HubSpot has to still do RFPs … even when selling to medium-sized businesses … well get used to it. NRR is Metric #1. HubSpot has to sell to more stakeholders now.

Scale 227

Scale SMB Scaling Customer Success 227

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. Breaking down a consumer tech growth team. Free user acquisition.

Technical Review 233

Technical Review Technical Advisors Scale Compensation 233

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2021

Xero is a very interesting SaaS case study with (x) the majority of its revenue outside the U.S., and (y) a complex sales process with sales reps selling to very small businesses not paying all that much. It’s material but less than 10% of their overall revenue and is barely growing faster (17%) than the overall business (15%).

Customer Lifetime Value 213

Customer Lifetime Value SMB Churn Scale 213

SaaStr

APRIL 10, 2023

B2B SaaS companies often aim to land large enterprise clients that can bring with them long relationships and large deals. However, what many businesses may overlook is the startup segment. Often, startups are lumped in with small businesses, yet this approach fails to recognize what motivates and attracts these early-stage companies.

Startup 197

Startup Scale SMB Venture Capital 197

SaaStr

JULY 7, 2022

Incredibly, ZoomInfo has scaled to IPO with an entirely sales-driven motion. He breaks down how GTM efficiency drives their ability to scale with sales-driven motion and other insights you can apply to scale your SaaS business. Your CFO is a business partner who helps you understand the rhythms of your business.”.

Scale 212

Scale Sales Hiring Interviewing Engineering 212

User Pilot

MARCH 31, 2023

Analytics vs metrics – how do they differ from each other? Though both are important, analytics and metrics have distinct meanings and purposes in your data analytics process. In this article, we will go through analytics and metrics, their examples, and how you can analyze metrics to drive growth for your SaaS business.

Metrics 94

Metrics Customer Lifetime Value Data Analysis Engagement 94

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 90

Social Media Data SaaS Scale 90

User Pilot

FEBRUARY 29, 2024

User behavior analytics helps you understand how users engage with your SaaS. Read on to learn: Behavior metrics to track. Create data-driven product strategies. Metrics to track when conducting behavior analytics: User activation rate. Select the relevant metrics for tracking user behavior. Reduce customer churn.

SaaS 93

SaaS User Experience Churn Retention 93

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

FastSpring

APRIL 18, 2024

For many SaaS and software companies, international sales are a key part of their growth trajectories. But with international growth comes a long list of international business concerns about how to appeal to potential customers in new countries. In this article, we focus specifically on price localization: What price localization is.

Payment Methods 78

Payment Methods Payments SaaS Payments Merchant Services 78

User Pilot

MARCH 14, 2024

Looking for customer analytics use cases that can significantly improve your SaaS? This article lists key use cases for SaaS and explains how to implement them to unlock customer satisfaction and product growth. Key metrics you should be measuring. Metrics for tracking customer interaction analytics: Customer satisfaction score.

Customer Lifetime Value 98

Customer Lifetime Value SaaS Underperforming Technical Team Retention 98

User Pilot

DECEMBER 8, 2023

TL;DR Product experimentation is a systematic and data-driven approach, where you consistently design and run experiments that help you make better product decisions. TL;DR Product experimentation is a systematic and data-driven approach, where you consistently design and run experiments that help you make better product decisions.

Management 101

Management User Experience Onboarding Metrics 101

SaaS Metrics

DECEMBER 6, 2023

In today’s digital age, the SaaS (software as a service) industry is booming, driven by rapid technological advancements and evolving business needs. Understanding the fundamentals of SaaS marketing is crucial to thriving in this competitive landscape.

Growth Marketing 52

Growth Marketing Marketing SaaS Technology 52

User Pilot

MARCH 18, 2024

In SaaS, a new user activation dashboard can become a massive product analytics tool to understand and optimize the user journey. Let’s explore how a new user activation dashboard works, look at the key metrics you need to include in it, and see how it can help you unlock ways to retain more customers. What is user activation?

Metrics 94

Metrics Trends Onboarding Acquisition 94

Subscription Flow

JANUARY 5, 2024

While the importance of SaaS B2B metrics has already been covered to death, what has not been covered in as much detail is the whisking out of important B2B SaaS product metrics from the unimportant ones. Read more: The Most Important Metrics to Secure SaaS Funding in 2024 What are B2B SaaS product metrics?

B2B 52

B2B Metrics SaaS Benchmarks 52

User Pilot

OCTOBER 16, 2023

Although both help you make data-driven decisions, product analytics focuses on product improvement. Book a demo to learn how it can help your business. It tracks customer experience data to enable product managers to improve the product experience, user engagement, and other business outcomes. What is product analytics?

Product Marketing 98

Product Marketing Data Marketing Acquisition 98

Buffer Resources

APRIL 8, 2024

  I admittedly started experimenting with X ads for my marketing consulting business somewhat out of desperation after a series of unfortunate events locked me out of my Facebook account. But, I quickly realized how much untapped potential this platform offered for me and other small business owners.

Social Media 107

Social Media Advertising Education Branding 107