Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

Between 2014 and 2020, Zoom rapidly expanded its product portfolio, adding features like Zoom Rooms, Zoom Phone, and multiple add-on packages. Key Objective: Solidify market leadership by balancing competitive pricing with margin optimization.

Pricing 111

Pricing Scale SaaS Technical Review 111

Valuize Consulting

NOVEMBER 25, 2024

References: ansal, R, Kiku, D, Shaliastovich, I & Yaron, A 2014, ‘Volatility, the Macroeconomy, and Asset Prices’, The Journal of finance (New York) , vol. Hoberg, G, Phillips, G & Prabhala, N 2014, ‘Product Market Threats, Payouts, and Financial Flexibility’, The Journal of finance (New York) , vol.

Payment Services 52

Payment Services SaaS Payments Customer Success Payments 52

How To Buy Saas

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

HubSpot introduced its free CRM in 2014, lowering the barrier for small businesses to start managing contacts and pipelines without cost. Initially launched as a marketing software tool, HubSpot expanded over time into an all-in-one platform including marketing, sales, and service capabilities.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Marketplace as a Service 52

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

Previously, he founded TalentBin, a talent search engine and recruiting CRM that was acquired by Monster Worldwide in 2014. He currently leads Atrium, makers of sales performance management software to help organizations measure and improve sales performance.

Scale 111

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring AI Search 111

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2025

from Nov 2022 to Dec 2024 NVIDIA GPUs: 105,000x less energy per token (2014 vs. 2024) What cost dollars now costs pennies; what cost pennies now costs fractions of cents The Developer Revolution: This cost collapse democratized AI development. Token Costs Collapsed 99.7%

AI Search 252

AI Search AI CTO Hire ChatGPT 252

Chart Mogul

DECEMBER 18, 2024

ChartMogul turned 10 years old ChartMogul was incorporated on October 1st 2014, so the company I founded officially turned 10 this year! This milestone also places me in a fairly small minority within the tech industry someone who has had the exact same job title for more than a decade!

Technical Review 52

Technical Review Benchmarks Innovation Payment Features 52

Sales Hacker

JUNE 17, 2025

You can look at public literature in 2014, and we called out, we wanted to build a financial product. There’s more folks in the ecosystem. Architects forget about ’em for right now. So you know, Procore, we started selling to the general contractor. We [00:09:00] called out, we wanted to sell to owners.

AI 88

AI Technical Advisors Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 88

Sales Hacker

APRIL 1, 2025

Um, and then we could do segmentation and, the first two years, so for, uh, like 2014 to 16 was all those mechanics, all those foundational things. Um, so we started building our direct field force. And over those years, Scott, it, it grew and grew and grew.

Scale 63

Scale VP of Engineering Outsourcing Services Enterprise 63

Stax

JUNE 11, 2025

Since 2014, Stax has grown to process over $30 billion in payments and serve more than 30,000 businesses and software platforms across the U.S. From robust reporting to easily reconciled payments, Stax offers a full suite of adaptable tools and payment features to build the right solution at any scale, unlocking partner and customer success.

Payment Services 88

Payment Services Stax Merchant Services Payments 88

Sales Hacker

MAY 27, 2025

13, 2014, very sort of pivotal experience to be there. We’ve been lucky enough to work at some great companies like Salesforce in the early days. Tremendous talent pool, the tremendous learning process for us.Seeing Salesforce kind of go from that, you know, 2005 to, to the 2000, you know, I.

Technical Review 66

Technical Review AI Search AI Scale 66

Buffer Resources

DECEMBER 10, 2024

July 13: Embrace Your Geekness Day July 17: National Tattoo Day July 17: World Emoji Day Created in 2014, this day celebrates the growing role of emojis in digital communication. Emojis are universally understood and add personality and tone to your content. Ask: “What book had the biggest impact on your life?”

Social Media 114

Social Media Branding Education Entrepreneurship 114

Stax

OCTOBER 14, 2024

Around 2014, the Square Reader took off amongst small merchants trying to take credit card payments because the mobile card reader is free and it required no contract to use the processor or virtual terminal. Plus we’ve got a bunch of rave reviews for our customer support team on Trustpilot.

Payment Services 88

Payment Services Payment Methods Merchant Services Payment Solutions 88

Sales Hacker

MARCH 25, 2025

Ray Smith: Well, I’m not sure if it’s being consumed already, but you know, back when I was slinging my wares, selling software back in 2013, 2014 in San Francisco, the belief was it was all around being kind of short sighted on your numbers. Why agentic AI makes customer relationships and long-term value even more critical?

AI Search 69

AI Search AI Scale Software 69

OpenView Labs

JULY 30, 2019

For more insight on the topic, we suggest Brian Balfour’s post from back in 2014, where he explained growth as the “blending of marketing, product and engineering into one tight knit team.”. Despite the rise of these teams, there isn’t always clarity regarding what these teams do and how to hire for the role.

Scale 75

Scale Sales Hiring Onboarding Acquisition 75

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 12, 2021

Also, 2014 to 2016 saw a 57% reduction in multiples and of course after 2008. Cloud companies' fast growth multiplied by an appreciation in multiples has pushed valuations higher since 2014. Today, we’re in the midst of the fifth. But let’s look at the most recent five years. Correction Year.

SaaS 361

SaaS Cloud Enterprise Software 361

SaaStr

MAY 4, 2021

In 2014, when I invested in then up-and-comer Talkdesk , it had long since IPO’d and was struggling at a $200m market cap. Five9’s revenues were 60% enterprise at IPO in 2014, but now are 83% enterprise. And Five9 has grown from just 3 $1m ACV customers in 2014 to 91 today: #2. Five9 is particularly interesting.

Systems Review 345

Systems Review Technical Review Software Review Cloud 345

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 20, 2022

I set out to determine if fundraising seasonality had changed from this post I published in 2014 which suggested Q2 & Q4 were best for founders. The US software Series A market has become much less seasonal since that post in 2014. The answer is yes. I’ve plotted the data above & smoothed it to clarify the patterns.

Startup 310

Startup Software Data Marketing 310

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 4, 2023

This change in the exit market parallels a surge in acquihires in 2014 when corporate development departments began to acquire seed-stage companies for talent rather than waiting for Series A businesses. During the 2013-2014, median acquisition prices increased by 50% in less than a year, from $36m to $54m.

Startup 325

Startup Marketing Acquisition Technology 325

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 28, 2024

In 2014, 2016, 2020, 2021, these big mergers drove the figures into the tens of billions. Year Share Good Year 2012 18.4% - 2013 25.9% - 2014 65.5% Multi-billion dollar acquisitions, the blue bars, are the largest contributors to this swing. X 2015 20.1% - 2016 43.0% X 2019 23.4% - 2020 61.1% X 2021 43.8%

Acquisition 310

Acquisition Startup Venture Capital Software 310

SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2019

HubSpot is a great one that IPO’d way back in 2014 ?? HubSpot has gone global with a fury since 2014, driving from 22% international revenue to 40%. 5 Interesting Learnings from Slack at $700m in ARR. 5 Interesting Learnings from Zoom. As it IPOs. 5 Interesting Learnings from Bill.com’s IPO. With a $10k ACV. RingCentral ).

Outsourcing Services 363

Outsourcing Services Scale SMB Pricing 363

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 18, 2022

2014’s correction stalled and then reversed Series D round sizes for 2 years through the second correction in 2016. Three corrections in the last ten years have contracted multiples by 40% or more. These are marked in peachpuff orange rectangles above. The Series D mean round size is plotted in red.

Marketing 362

Marketing Startup Finance Technology 362

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 26, 2022

From 2003 to 2014, Constellation’s revenues compounded from $80m to more than $5b, an average of 25% annually. In 2014, Constellation grew revenues 40%, which today would place the company in the top quartile. But Constellation arrives at that growth in a very different way : they acquire to grow.

Software Review 289

Software Review Investment Software Acquisition 289

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 1, 2019

In 2014, I published a post called Do Startup Require Less Capital to Succeed than 10 Years Ago ? In 2014 we saw increasing efficiencies over time, which was very exciting because it reaffirmed the efficiency of SaaS go-to-market. It’s been five years and time to see how things have changed. The chart above updates that analysis.

Startup 279

Startup Software Review SaaS Acquisition 279

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2020

When I invested in Talkdesk in 2014, Five9 had a $150m market cap. That’s accelerated more Cloud leaders than it has harmed. It’s not just Zoom and Slack. Many other functions have quickly moved to the Cloud, e.g. call center like RingCentral and Five9. Today, six years later, it is $7 billion. Let that sink in a bit ??.

SaaS 364

SaaS Cloud Investment Marketing 364

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 7, 2019

The top left chart shows a $1M round had about 41% market share in 2010; that grew to about 54% in 2014; now it has fallen to 35%. Today, the first institutional round of capital is that $3-5M in 54% of cases, up from 39% in 2014. These numbers would be more extreme if benchmarked to 2014. But something changed.

Marketing 247

Marketing Benchmarks Trends Startup 247

The Daily Egg

FEBRUARY 8, 2021

The company initially launched back in 2012 but didn’t officially acquire its first customers until two years later, in 2014. Monday.com has become one of the most popular project management solutions available. Today, 115,000+ organizations worldwide rely on Monday.com.

Management 284

Management 284

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2022

2014 $4.1B. It’s not slowing down Salesforce, Snowflake, or almost any other SaaS or Cloud leader. Salesforce Growth: 2023 $31.8B (guidance) 2022 $26.5B 2021 $21.25B 2020 $17.1B Thank you Ohana! pic.twitter.com/CMhrBXgHSF. — Marc Benioff (@Benioff) May 31, 2022. We may be headed for a big downturn, we’ll see.

Sales Hiring 347

Sales Hiring Acquisition Cloud Enterprise 347

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 4, 2019

First, the science of building SaaS companies is better understood today than in 2014. To be fair, 22% of companies raised at $0 in ARR. But the average MRR has increased substantially from the last time I analyzed the data. note I’m switching from median to average here). That’s quite a growth rate.

Benchmarks 261

Benchmarks Startup SaaS Data Analysis 261

SaaStr

AUGUST 27, 2021

In 2014, it had 6 employees. Folks want to start startups because they have a chance to look like this: The true definition of a tech startup is probably one that if it truly achieves product-market fit, can scale almost infinitely. The above example is of my third venture investment, Talkdesk. Today, it has 2,000 employees and is worth $10B.

Startup 293

Startup Scaling Investment Product Marketing 293

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 5, 2021

Over time, rates decline and then in the 2012-2014 era, they begin to surge upward culminating 6-8 years later at the top-left of the chart and $200b+ invested. The y-axis tracks enture capital investment by year and the year of the data point resides in the reddish circle. Do you remember this shape from high school math?

Venture Capital 364

Venture Capital Marketing Government Investment 364

Tom Tunguz

MAY 23, 2021

2014: Alibaba. If we plot the annual growth rates for the 75th percentile Series A, we observe the expansion in valuations occurs in fits and starts. 3 of the 11 years recorded 40%+ growth. 3 of the years saw declining prices. Perhaps these prices are tied to blockbuster IPO markets. 2012: Facebook.

Software Review 364

Software Review Venture Capital Cloud Pricing 364

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 1, 2020

It includes a basket of all the next-generation software companies since 2014.* Let’s double-click on the impact of last week on the valuation environment. This is our familiar forward multiples chart. You will see that multiples are still meaningfully above the median of 6X which is the thin blue line.

Software 327

Software Travel Startup Technology 327

SaaStr

MAY 19, 2021

Pretty incredible for a product that just launched in 2014. And that’s with direct and indirect competition from Asana, Atlassian, Clickup, Wrike, Smartsheet, Notion and so many others. 5 Interesting Learnings: #1. 121% NRR from 10+ seat customers, 107% overall, ~85% from smallest customers.

Scale 361

Scale SMB Government Enterprise 361

SaaStr

JULY 21, 2024

Which is that we have literally 100x more quality content than 2011-2014. Organic Search remains our #1 source of SaaStr readers for 13 years straight: But, I can also tell you what our data says. Our content page ranks remain high. And we’ve actually increased our output.

Data 301

Data Social Media Content Marketing Engineering 301

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 14, 2022

During the dotcom crash in 2001, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and the SaaS corrections in 2014, 2016, and 2018, Lee was either COO/CFO or CFO at Twilio, SAY Media, and Ofoto. Lee Kirkpatrick is no stranger to downturns.

Management 270

Management Finance Payment Features Subscription 270

SaaStr

OCTOBER 21, 2021

VC in Algolia back in 2014, and it’s now a $2B+ search API giant. CEO of Algolia, Bernadette Nixon. First up was a walk-and-talk with one of my favorite CEOs, Bernadette Nixon of Aloglia. I was lucky enough to be the first U.S. Casey did a deep dive on the future of APIs and more here: 2. Jeff Yoshimura, CMO at Synk.

Scaling 284

Scaling SaaS Marketing 284

SaaStr

APRIL 18, 2021

2014 $4.1B. Salesforce Growth: 2021 $20.8B Guidance 2020 $17.1B Thank you Ohana! — Marc Benioff (@Benioff) August 25, 2020. If you haven’t done a SaaS start-up before, it’s different. The reasons are many, but I think they can almost all be summed up in one key factor: SaaS compounds.

SaaS 329

SaaS Travel Churn Revenue 329