SaaStr

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

2 drivers stood out as notable: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Churn. In terms of Customer Acquisition Costs, “Rule of 40” Qualifiers spent 31% less to acquire a new customer. My first exposure to the “Rule of 40” was through Brad Feld in 2015. All within the same financial measurement period.

SaaS 272

SaaS Technical Review Benchmarks Azure 272

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 6, 2016

What is your SaaS startup worth in an acquisition? What is your SaaS startup worth in an acquisition? The chart above shows the median multiple across all software acquisitions. This figure takes into account all acquisitions, including old and slow growing software companies.

Acquisition 100

Acquisition Startup SaaS Benchmarks 100

SaaStr

APRIL 8, 2020

For a Really Big Tech Company, any acquisition of less than about $1b is somewhere between an experiment and a bet. In 2015, Microsoft wanted to help accelerate its SaaS / Cloud strategy and made a bunch of bets. Buying Wunderlist for $150m sure sounds like a lot to me and you. But the reality is, it’s 0.1% of Microsoft’s market cap.

Azure 288

Azure Cloud Acquisition Strategy 288

Tom Tunguz

JULY 9, 2014

See an updated version of this post: Trends in the Startup Acquisition Market in 2015. I was curious how the strength of the IPO market has impacted the acquisition market. To get a better sense of these trends, I’ve analyzed the Crunchbase acquisition data for US tech companies over the last 4.5

Acquisition 100

Acquisition Trends Startup Marketing 100

SaaStr

DECEMBER 6, 2022

So Slack is ending a bit of an era at $2B+ ARR, having been the fastest growing SaaS startup of its generation, rocketing to an incredible IPO, and then an epic acquisition by Salesforce in 2021 for $27 Billion! At the first SaaStr Annual ever in 2015, Stewart was kind enough to be our final speaker, sharing the stage with David Sacks.

Entrepreneurship 228

Entrepreneurship Travel SaaS Acquisition 228

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 29, 2015

Company Market Cap, $B (2015-04-29) Cash & Eq., $B. SAP is an outlier because of their Concur, SuccessFactors and Sybase acquisitions. in the past five years in acquisitions greater than $100M, tied with Dell and VMWare. Oracle would likely acquire the business in a cash & stock transaction. Microsoft 398 95. Oracle 211 44.

Acquisition 100

Acquisition Startup Enterprise SaaS 100

SaaStr

JULY 7, 2021

Box in 2015 was the first IPO from the SaaS 2.0 Where it Went: $1B acquisition by Vista in 2019. version of BigMachines) for $360m in 2015 to Salesforce ! The second SaaStr post ever, way back in late 2012, was “ Everybody Lies: SaaS Revenues in the Inc. No one had IPO’d, no one really knew. generation.

SaaS 272

SaaS Technical Review Scaling Software Review 272

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2022

Shopify took the company to IPO in 2015 and today has a market cap of about $40 billion. . It increases total enterprise value, lowers customer acquisition costs, and boosts net revenue retention. . billion, the biggest acquisition in Salesforce history. . Tip #2: Develop and execute an anchor tenant strategy. .

Payments 193

Payments Payment Methods Embedded Payments Scale 193

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 207

Scale Finance Sales Hiring Scaling 207

SaaStr

JULY 8, 2022

The Things Nobody Tells You About An $8B Acquisition with Ryan Smith from Qualtrics. #21. A real classic from the first SaaStr Annual in 2015! #24. State of the Cloud 2021 with Bessemer Venture Partners. #22. How the Best Outbound Sales Teams Are Managed with ServiceNow, Box, and Mark Roberge. #23.

VP of Engineering 242

VP of Engineering Scale Outbound Sales Team SMB 242

Chart Mogul

JULY 24, 2017

In this week's edition of Tips & Tricks, we take a look at one of many ways to make cohort analyses actionable, digging deeper into user acquisition. In this article, we will segment customers by quarter to see trends in acquisition and retention. How to compare customer cohorts by quarter. Why are they useful? What we learned.

Acquisition 45

Acquisition Retention Churn Trends 45

SaaStr

DECEMBER 2, 2020

” as it now joins Salesforce in a 27B+ mega-acquisition. Slack’s been a part of the SaaStr journey since the very first SaaStr Annual in 2015. And now Slack joins them, getting there faster than almost all of them. But this is the last time most likely that we’ll be able to check in on “Slack, Inc.”

SMB 246

SMB Cloud Enterprise Retention 246

IT World

MARCH 10, 2022

Global mergers and acquisitions (M&As) last year surpassed pre-pandemic levels and nearly matched the previous record years of 2007 and 2015, according to professional services firm KPMG. The number of global mergers and acquisitions could climb higher this year than in 2021. This year, they're poised to climb higher.

Acquisition 70

Acquisition Business 70

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2022

This led to our first meet-ups in 2013 and 2014, the first SaaStr Annual in 2015 , the industry’s leading podcast in 2016, the first SaaS founder coworking space in 2017, and SaaStr Pro , the first learning management system for SaaS founders in 2018. 2015 The First SaaStr Annual: Escape Velocity. Here’s to the Next 10!

Scale 284

Scale Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO 284

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 29, 2015

In 2015, startups benefitted from a vibrant fund raising market. In 2016, I believe they will enjoy a very active acquisition environment. Salesforce also pursued a more measured acquisition pace, and dropped to fewer than 10 acquisitions in 2015 to date, less than half of last year.

Software 100

Software Acquisition Startup Investment 100

SaaStr

JULY 27, 2022

Founded in 2015, PayFit is a software company that empowers entrepreneurs and SMBs to digitize payroll and HR processes. But happy customers can not only expand your recurring revenue but also contribute to new conversions and acquisitions. . Boterri’s company Accel invested in PayFit in 2017 and again in 2021.

SMB 197

SMB Sales Hiring Scale B2C 197

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 1, 2016

Three billion dollar SaaS acquisitions were announced this week with Salesforce paying $2.9B Marketo’s estimated sales efficiency as of Q3 2015 is 0.35, meaning for every dollar of sales and marketing expense, the business generates thirty-five cents of gross profit - which is quite low. Perhaps that’s the rationale.

SaaS 103

SaaS Scale Acquisition Cloud 103

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 23, 2018

from 2015 to 2017, a compound annual growth rate of 35%. But Dropbox’s net income and free cash flow from operations margins are substantially higher, because of the self-serve customer acquisition dynamics. Dropbox has grown from 0 to 500 million users over that time period. Dropbox’s revenue grew from $604M to $1.1B

Scale 205

Scale Acquisition Cloud Revenue 205

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 8, 2016

On the contrary, burn would be absent from the 2015 list, replaced by unicorn. Starting in the end of 2015, Public companies have markedly shifted the way they manage their businesses pushing toward cash flow positive and net income positive. Growth Burn includes the marketing and sales costs of new customer acquisition.

Startup 100

Startup SaaS Acquisition Cloud 100

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

JUNE 20, 2016

In 2014, that figure fell to 1186 and in 2015, we count 481. Subverting those incumbents is going to require a meaningfully better product or substantially more effective customer acquisition channel. Seed round volumes in 2016 have halved compared to 2015, but increased in median size by 40%. Chat bots, too, are early.

Venture Capital 100

Venture Capital SaaS Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 100

Baremetrics

NOVEMBER 1, 2021

The intention of the acquisition is to integrate Baremetrics and Flightpath to bring you an end-to-end financial data tool. Announcing any kind of acquisition is exciting, but announcing our acquisition of Flightpath, a tool we literally use and rely on daily feels extra special. We listened. You can use Flightpath right now.

Finance 96

Finance Outsourced Development Sales Hiring Forecasting 96

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

JANUARY 9, 2016

According to a survey conducted by Pacific Crest Securities, in software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies that sell through field or inside sales teams, sales expenses account for the largest portion of customer acquisition costs (CAC).

Acquisition 113

Acquisition Compensation Education SaaS 113

Neil Patel

FEBRUARY 20, 2021

For example, cohorts in Google Analytics are grouped based on Acquisition Date , or the users’ first visit to your site. New acquisitions’ cohort type can be extremely helpful in giving context to data. By default, the main dashboard for this report will show a graph with your site’s Acquisition Date cohorts by User Retention.

Acquisition 145

Acquisition Mobile Retention Metrics 145

Tom Tunguz

JULY 28, 2016

The more than $600B in cash on the balance sheets of large public tech companies combined with a recent pricing correction in SaaS companies presaged a flurry of acquisition activity. First, 15 of the 22 US software acquisitions worth more than $0.5B But it hasn’t unfolded as expected in three different ways.

Payment Solutions 100

Payment Solutions Payments SaaS Acquisition 100

Clouded Judgement

NOVEMBER 3, 2023

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?). But this median is close to as low as it’s gotten since 2015. The broader story here is more important.

Software Review 161

Software Review Cloud Software Azure 161

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 4, 2015

After writing about the Seed Market in 2015 , I wondered whether I could find some data to support Sam Altman’s observation that acquihires have fallen in frequency over the past year by 66-75%. Or it could be caused by a delay in the announcement of these acquisitions. This drop could be an actual decrease.

Startup 108

Startup Trends Marketing Technical Review 108

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 28, 2017

Starting in the beginning of 2015 however there is been a marked compression. Cisco paid the largest forward multiple of any acquisition earlier this year when they bought AppDynamics. There were lots of outliers, marked as little points in the box plot above. And the whiskers extended at least to 15x.

SaaS 100

SaaS Acquisition Trends Retention 100

The Angel VC

APRIL 30, 2015

5) An overview of your customer acquisition channels. That is, a breakdown of your website visitors, leads and customers by source and data about your customer acquisition costs. Try to add some data points or estimates on the scalability of your customer acquisition channels. What do you think?

Software Review 186

Software Review Outsourced Development Acquisition SMB 186

OPEXEngine

JUNE 23, 2021

The CAC Payback Period, also known as Months to Recover Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), measures the number of months of subscription revenue it takes to recover the costs to acquire one customer. Measuring Customer Acquisition Efficiency. I would say that both are good metrics; each gives you slightly different information.

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks Acquisition SMB Subscription 52

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 27, 2020

Customer acquisition costs are rising , churn is every company’s poison pill, and the competition is relentless. in neuroscience and a background as a quantitative analyst on post-crash Wall Street, Carl has been identifying the major trends in the subscription economy and predicting what’s to come ever since he joined the company in 2015.

Scale 211

Scale Payments Subscription Payment Features 211

User Pilot

APRIL 10, 2023

The benefits of the freemium model include lower customer acquisition costs and access to vast amounts of customer data. Freemium strategy vs free trial strategy Both freemium and free trial models are popular customer acquisition strategies in product-led companies. What if users want access to premium features and unlimited usage?

Strategy 97

Strategy SaaS Onboarding Marketplace as a Service 97

Unbounce

AUGUST 13, 2019

We marketers know that acquisition is a whole lot easier when you create compelling content that gets people interested in your product. Lower the brand’s cost-per-acquisition through their Facebook and Google ads. Taylor joined Later near the end of 2015. For SaaS marketers, volume is the name of the game.

SaaS 111

SaaS Acquisition Content Marketing Benchmarks 111

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 6, 2015

Withthe two venture backed IPOs though August 1, 2015, the trend shows no signs of abatement. First, the acquisition channels startups use to acquire customers address many more potential customers and enable far more cost effective marketing than twenty years ago. In 1998, the median IPO-bound startup reported $11.8M

Startup 100

Startup Acquisition Trends Enterprise 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2016

2015 is the end of an era, the era of startup growth at any cost. To sustain these growth rates, startups like these require lots of cash because of the customer acquisition payback period, and the more tenuous ones need capital to prove the business model actually works at scale. ” will be “What are your unit economics?”

Startup 100

Startup Metrics Marketplace as a Service Transportation 100

User Pilot

DECEMBER 13, 2023

According to Jaime Levy, the author of the 2015 bestseller UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products That People Want , a robust UX strategy should be based on 4 main principles. For example, your goal may be to optimize the signup process to enable more users to access the product in less time and boost new user acquisition.

Strategy 104

Strategy Underperforming Technical Team User Experience SaaS 104

OPEXEngine

JUNE 25, 2020

We compared benchmarks for smaller and larger private SaaS companies coming into 2020, against the same metrics five years ago in our 2015 benchmarking and focused the comparison on cash flow. Median net cash from operations had been reduced 5X times since 2015 for smaller SaaS companies.

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks SaaS Airlines Travel 52