SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

From 2010 until 2015, the SaaS world was becoming more complex with the introduction of static bundles and recurring revenue as an addition to the annual/monthly subscription model. Mergers and acquisitions. As SaaS businesses expand, we are seeing more technology, business acquisitions, and inorganic growth. Era 2, SaaS 2.0:

Scale 185

Scale Finance Sales Hiring Scaling 185

SaaStr

APRIL 25, 2019

Thanks so much everyone for joining us for our fireside chat today, disrupting the desk phone: how and why we made a $50 million acquisition. Jessica Lin : So we’ll chat more about analogy, really milk that, and again, you’ll hear, especially throughout this session why this is not really a story about just one acquisition.

Acquisition 146

Acquisition Technical Review Systems Review AI 146

Clouded Judgement

NOVEMBER 3, 2023

This growth adjusted premium also comes at a time when the 10Y is nearly double what it was from 2010 to 2020. Namely, two large customers caused a huge issue (New Relic account growing very slowly post their acquisition, and a gaming company going back on prem - which I’m guessing means going to self managed Kafka?).

Software Review 161

Software Review Cloud Software Azure 161

Casey Accidental

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

Most companies have a primary acquisition loop that drives this scalable growth, and unfortunately, there aren’t that many acquisition loops that really scale. And you start being able to acquire more of them in a scalable way i.e. an acquisition loop. In fact, they complain more, because they like the product enough to care.

Payments 62

Payments Scale Payment Methods Underperforming Technical Team 62

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 4, 2015

Year 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014. Or it could be caused by a delay in the announcement of these acquisitions. Q2 2010, Q2 2011 and Q2 2012 all saw similar drops before the levels rebounded. In 2010, the median was in the $3-4M range. Acquihires 59 64 67 68 61. 2014 saw a modest drop to 61.

Startup 108

Startup Trends Marketing Technical Review 108

SaaStr

JUNE 5, 2020

With the Salesforce IPO in 2004, we saw the first sign that institutional investors were comfortable with a standard set of SaaS metrics: Churn, sales efficiency , ARPU, LTV, customer acquisition cost , and so on. . It’s hard to imagine a world where analysis didn’t understand recurring, subscription based revenue for technology products.

Venture Capital 214

Venture Capital Technical Review SaaS Scale 214

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 8, 2020

She was Trello ’s very first sales hire in 2010, built the company’s sales and account management teams, and was instrumental in scaling its business from 5 million to 25 million users within two years. But if anyone knows how to walk this tightrope and make it to the other side, it’s Kristen Habacht.

Scale 205

Scale Sales Hiring Software Review Technical Review 205

Chart Mogul

DECEMBER 4, 2020

When Stripe was launched in 2010, dealing with payments online wasn’t a straightforward matter. As I outlined in the beginning, handling payments wasn’t easy in 2010, even for developers. The obsessive focus on customer experience is not just a powerful acquisition engine, but also a great tool for promotion.

Payment Methods 105

Payment Methods Payment Services Payments Payment Solutions 105

OpenView Labs

JANUARY 30, 2019

Jim previously served as President and CEO of Netezza where he drove the nearly $2B acquisition of Netezza by IBM in 2010. Jim Baum is currently a Venture Partner at OpenView and serves on multiple boards including Logz.io, Applitools, project44 and DataStax.

Innovation 56

Innovation Acquisition Startup Software 56

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 10, 2015

For example, Workday charted the biggest GP figure in this data set of 189% in 2010 when the business grew from revenue by 252% and recorded net income of -57%. In fact, it ought to be as high as possible. Larger values imply the business is growing quickly and/or generating lots of profit. Everything else will take care of itself.

Data 121

Data Metrics Acquisition Churn 121

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 14, 2014

Looking at the gross dollars invested in engineering, the 2014 cohort spends much more than the 2010, 2006 and 2002 cohorts, setting aside one outlier year in the 2006 cohort. I’m not sure, but the trend is real on a percentage basis as well as on a dollars basis. There seems to be a bumpy, but persistent decline. 1998 34 11.

Engineering 100

Engineering Investment Sales SaaS 100

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 13, 2022

ZoomInfo’s acquisition by DiscoverOrg [07:40]. We help companies do digital customer acquisition and customer expansion inside of their install base via our collection of applications, so pretty straightforward. We’ve been around since 2010, founded by Henry Schuck, who’s still our CEO. Show Agenda and Timestamps.

Scale 78

Scale Sales Hiring Acquisition Leadership 78

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 24, 2014

This efficiency is driven by lower cost-of-customer acquisition because of better acquisition channels and lower infrastructure costs. VC seed round sizes have continued to grow by about 10% each year since 2010 and the number of MegaSeeds, i.e., those seeds greater than $2M, has grown by 5x in 3 years.

Marketing 100

Marketing Venture Capital Acquisition Startup 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 4, 2015

The typical SaaS company going public in the last three years has a 77% smaller average revenue per customer than companies in 2010 – 2011. The chart above plots the median Average Revenue per Customer by Year of IPO for the 50 SaaS companies that have gone public in the past five years.

Pricing 100

Pricing SaaS B2C Education 100

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 30, 2012

In 2010, Gaia Online started a user acquisition campaign to grow their user base. To simplify the on boarding process, they launched the Big Red Button home page below. Conversion rates from the home page spiked. Simple user experiences, like this big red button, are effective because users understand what is expected of them.

Acquisition 101

Acquisition User Experience Pricing 101

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 27, 2015

in the largest ever SaaS acquisition , and it is one of the very few SaaS companies ever to achieve both positive revenue and cash flow break-even. In the Cloud Era, the economies of scale powered the company to achieve all time gross margin highs in 2010 of about 72%. That company is Concur, the travel and expense business.

SaaS 108

SaaS Cloud Travel Business Model 108

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

MAY 7, 2013

A blog showing the latest post from 2010 is worse than no blog at all. We recently developed a customer acquisition plan for a client selling to fitness clubs. Blogs take time and resources (Believe me on this, folks. Even monthly deadlines come up quickly!) If you can't make the commitment, don't do it.

Marketing 124

Marketing Social Media SaaS Entertainment 124

Chart Mogul

DECEMBER 4, 2020

When Stripe was launched in 2010, dealing with payments online wasn’t a straightforward matter. As I outlined in the beginning, handling payments wasn’t easy in 2010, even for developers. The obsessive focus on customer experience is not just a powerful acquisition engine, but also a great tool for promotion.

Payment Methods 52

Payment Methods Payment Services Payments Payment Solutions 52

OpenView Labs

MAY 1, 2019

Similarly, Sean Ellis , who coined the term “Growth Hacker” in 2010, suggests that “Growth is not just a concern of sales and marketing, but of product, engineering and support too. They are incentivized to improve KPIs that align with awareness and acquisition such as number of visitors, leads, MQLs, etc.

Sales Hiring 56

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS Payments Growth Hacking 56

A Smart Bear

JANUARY 4, 2018

We’ve come a long way from switching this blog to WordPress in 2009, my systematic vetting of the business idea in 2009 (after needing it myself due to the success of this blog crashing my dedicated server every time I got on Hackernews), the “ coming soon ” pre-launch in April 2010, our Series A 3-minute pitch in 2011, our incredible CEO Heather Brunner (..)

Engineering 70

Engineering Investment Revenue Technical Review 70

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2015

Xero Income Statement 2007 2008 2009 2010 211 2012 2013 2014. Xero’s efficiency is driven by its customer acquisition strategy, winning accountants and encouraging them to migrate all their business from a competitor to Xero. Growth 109% 265% 206% 123% 107% 88%. Gross Profit -0.8 -2.0 in gropss profit next year.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Metrics SMB Outsourced Development 100

OPEXEngine

MAY 19, 2020

A higher cost of capital will put pressure on capital spending, so if companies want to invest in technology, growth opportunities or acquisitions, the time is now. They cut R&D across the board, scaled back on sales and marketing activities, laid off valuable talent and ruled out acquisitions. Downturns upend the playing field.

Scale 59

Scale Strategy Technical Review Acquisition 59

Casey Accidental

APRIL 23, 2018

Andrew Chen’s Law of Shitty Clickthroughs states that all acquisition channels have a shelf life and decay over time. Perhaps a more elegant way of explaining this is that since organic search exists to serve user needs, not advertiser needs, it was a more sustainable acquisition channel, precisely because it was not built to be a channel.

Strategy 70

Strategy Engineering Travel Acquisition 70

OpenView Labs

JANUARY 19, 2022

Product-led growth (PLG) is an end-user-focused growth model that relies on the product as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion. Imagine what you’d search for in 2010 to find Slack. How could they have scaled keyword advertising? Convert: Where users exchange money for the value your product provides .

Scale 72

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Marketing 72

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

Big Bet #1: Cast Your Net Wide — Bet On Inbound While Going Global Freshworks was founded in October 2010 in Chennai, India. Big Bet #2: Find Tomorrow’s Great Anglers — Hire Talent With A Learning Mindset In 2010 and 2011, San Francisco was the place for SaaS talent. It helped them get funding in the first round.

Sales Hiring 217

Sales Hiring Scale SMB AI 217

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 21, 2014

Since at least 2010, Tableau has been run profitably. In each of the years we have data on the business, the company never exceeded $8M in net income, and this is likely because the company plows all the potential profits back into customer acquisition and upsell.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks SaaS Payments Metrics Scale 100

OpenView Labs

MARCH 24, 2020

Growth is an input into the Rule of 40, Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue is the key metric in the 5 Cs and Customer Acquisition metrics frontline the Pirate framework. Think monitoring customer acquisition costs (CAC), LTV: CAC and the magic number. Related: What is product led growth? Why do we love PLG?

Metrics 43

Metrics Scale SaaS Sales Hiring 43

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

MARCH 18, 2010

I attended the IDC Directions 2010 conference a few weeks ago. In the relentless effort to grind down customer acquisition costs, SaaS providers should certainly scrutinize their marketing collateral budget. I listen for two kinds of things at these conclaves: big, industry trends and small, but useful, practices.

Marketing 100

Marketing Outsourced Development Cloud Trends 100

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

At GitHub, I was in the last 18 months coming into acquisition, which is a nightmare, but I was one of 5 people running the company. billion acquisition more so than GitHub. Its product drives the acquisition, retention and expansion. billion acquisition based on sharing. And, wonderful products. But it worked.

Investment 100

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 100

Neil Patel

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

If you’re running a restaurant, for example, you may want to pay attention to your customer acquisition costs, repeat visits, customer retention, and the offers that brought customers back. In 2018, Google rolled out 3,200 changes to its search algorithm, up from just 400 changes in 2010. Up-to-date education and training.

Technical Review 128

Technical Review Sales Hiring Software Review Mobile 128

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2019

So, I’ve had success at running surveys and getting customer feedback in various places including at LinkedIn where when I was there in 2010, we started something called global recruiting trends and to this day they still run that type of research although the format as you would expect has shifted over the years. The fifth thing here.

Sales Recruiting 159

Sales Recruiting Scale Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 159

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

How does Krish think your customer acquisition and GTM strategy has to change with the movement from SMB to enterprise? Billion story from its launch in 2008 to its 2018 acquisition by Recruit Holdings. Billion acquisition is just one milestone in the early innings of the company’s story. Does it have to be in person?

Scale 125

Scale SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Payment Services 125

ChurnZero

JANUARY 10, 2020

Lisa will be responsible for Forcepoint’s customer capabilities, overall customer experience from acquisition to retention, as well as sustainable growth of the global portfolio. Prior to Zuora, Tom was Vice President and GM at Convio, playing a key role in the company’s 2010 IPO.

VP of Engineering 52

VP of Engineering Customer Success Scale Cybersecurity 52

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

As for Sam, prior to Loom, Sam spent over 4 years at Salesforce following their acquisition of Quip, a startup Salesforce acquired for $750M where Sam was also the 1st sales leader. But I got an introduction from a former colleague to Salesforce, and that was about a decade ago in 2010. That’s a whole different story.

Scale 168

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 168

FastSpring

JUNE 19, 2019

The ad-supported service is a subsidy program that offsets the costs of new subscriber acquisition. We’re taking twice as many photos as we were in 2013, and image sharing on Instagram since 2010 has spiked. “Our freemium model accounts for ~60% of our gross added premium subscribers,” Spotify CFO Barry McCarthy said.

Payment Methods 69

Payment Methods Trends Payments Payment Services 69

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). & Customer acquisition. Customer acquisition is basically how much do you spend in terms of sales people, sales team, and in terms of marketing to acquire a new customer. But also generally pretty high CAC, customer acquisition costs. Or maybe ARR, depending on your model. Transcript.

SaaS Payments 223

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 223

Tom Tunguz

MAY 24, 2020

However, California startups’ share of acquisitions has declined meaningfully from 30% to 19%. And it indeed has contracted by about 30% per year since 2010, while M&A has tripled. That figure hasn’t changed despite the massive increases in total venture funding from about $10B to $100B in that time frame.

Venture Capital 261

Venture Capital Entrepreneurship Startup Acquisition 261