Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 30, 2022

The below chart shows the difference in the top quartile multiple vs bottom quartile multiple going back to 2015 (ie how much bigger the top quartile multiple is than bottom quartile). Most public companies don’t report net new ARR, so I’m taking an implied ARR metric (quarterly subscription revenue x 4).

Cloud 130

Cloud Subscription Payment Features Pricing 130

Clouded Judgement

SEPTEMBER 1, 2023

The chart below shows the median NTM FCF margins of the software index going back to 2015. The reality is the vast vast majority of private investments will exit for <10x NTM revenue (most won’t exit, and those that do who get >10x will be the exceptional companies who are both growing quickly and profitably).

Software Review 183

Software Review Cloud Software Revenue 183

Clouded Judgement

NOVEMBER 3, 2023

But this median is close to as low as it’s gotten since 2015. Most public companies don’t report net new ARR, so I’m taking an implied ARR metric (quarterly subscription revenue x 4). Companies that do not disclose subscription rev have been left out of the analysis and are listed as NA.

Software Review 161

Software Review Cloud Software Azure 161

SaaStr

APRIL 28, 2019

You can see our fun video with Stewart Butterfield from SaaStr Annual 2015 where he said they’d never have a direct sales force. ” The Slack Fund is tiny. “As of January 31, 2019, Slack Fund has invested $10.1 ” The Slack Fund is tiny. “As of January 31, 2019, Slack Fund has invested $10.1

Scale 278

Scale Venture Capital SMB Enterprise 278

Neil Patel

NOVEMBER 4, 2020

When the Apple Watch first came out in 2015, there were 3,000 apps available for download. As an entrepreneur, Apple Watches can be an excellent investment, as there is a wide variety of Apple Watch apps designed with business in mind. With Invoice & Time Tracking, you can invoice customers and accept payments on the go.

Payment Solutions 145

Payment Solutions Payment Methods Social Media Business 145

Stax

NOVEMBER 6, 2023

Request Quote Upgrade Your Legacy Equipment for Mobile Payments The world’s foremost mobile phone manufacturers, Apple and Samsung started to foster the use of mobile payments as early as 2014 and 2015, respectively. When your employees are on board, it’s far easier to get your customers accustomed to the new payment options.

Payment Methods 88

Payment Methods Payment Services Mobile Payments Merchant Services 88

The Angel VC

APRIL 10, 2013

[Update 12/20/2013: I have extended the dashboard to include multiple pricing tiers and annual subscription plans. Update 01/17/2015: There's a new company called ChartMogul ( which we invested in ) which makes it easy to get a real-time dashboard similar to the template below. Check it out here.] Check it out!

Startup 239

Startup SaaS Subscription Payment Features 239

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 31, 2019

What was perhaps less predictable was the ensuing prevalence of the subscription-based business model. At a time when SaaS companies represent the vanguard of disruptive innovation, it’s not surprising that an armada of non-software companies are following suit by attempting to replicate the business model in a bid to attract investment.

Payment Solutions 259

Payment Solutions Payment Methods Software SaaS Payments 259

Clouded Judgement

AUGUST 25, 2023

The R^2 of the median software multiple and 10Y rate going back to 2015 is 0.35. Most public companies don’t report net new ARR, so I’m taking an implied ARR metric (quarterly subscription revenue x 4). Companies that do not disclose subscription rev have been left out of the analysis and are listed as NA.

Cloud 130

Cloud Government Banking Payment Services 130

Frontegg

MAY 27, 2021

Making the bottom-up shift: You are shifting from the top-down to a bottom-up mindset, which means more money and time to invest in R&D efforts. Best For: Subscription Management, Billing. Looking for a comprehensive end-to-end solution for your subscription management and billing requirements? 6 ChargeBee.

Payment Solutions 98

Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Payments Scale 98

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 20, 2017

The chart above shows the subscription revenue is roughly at $150 million and professional services revenue is about $35 million this year. In 2015, Mulesoft grew 91% and in 2016 the business grew 71%. in 2015 and a estimated sales efficiency of 0.63, which implies a payback period of 19 months, right on the average.

Metrics 100

Metrics Benchmarks Scale Finance 100

OPEXEngine

NOVEMBER 2, 2021

That’s when Adobe converted its Creative Suite to a cloud-based subscription service, widely considered a turning point for the sector. Shopify, when we invested, the top end of our outcomes table was a $400 million IPO, because that used to be a success. They’re $200 billion or so now [as a public company since 2015].

DevOps as a Service 52

DevOps as a Service SaaS Outsourced Development Subscription 52

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 7, 2015

Today, more than 82% of revenues are subscription dollars. At roughly 2800 customers as of November 2015 and $583M in trailing twelve months’ revenue, Ultimate Software generates about $210k in average revenue per customer, which implies reveune skews toward the enterprise part of the market.

Software 100

Software Marketing Forecasting Enterprise 100

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 6, 2015

Withthe two venture backed IPOs though August 1, 2015, the trend shows no signs of abatement. Third, the private market investors are willing to invest in high-growth startups despite the greater losses sustained during most rapid growth. In 1998, the median IPO-bound startup reported $11.8M In 2014, a startup needed $54M.

Startup 100

Startup Acquisition Trends Enterprise 100

OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 1, 2022

According to Gartner , the SaaS industry has grown from $35 billion in 2015 to $145 billion in 2021. As your business expands across geographies and market segments, you must also contend with multiple pricing models and handle subscription accounting and revenue recognition complexities as SaaS finance leaders.

SaaS Payments 52

SaaS Payments Payment Services Payment Solutions SaaS 52

Chart Mogul

JUNE 10, 2018

We launched ChartMogul in 2014 to help our customers answer a simple question: How do I track and grow my subscription business? ChartMogul’s homepage circa 2015. So have our customers, and so has the subscription industry at large. The businesses that are winning in today’s hypercompetitive world are investing in their brand.

Growth Hacking 60

Growth Hacking Branding Subscription Payment Features 60

OPEXEngine

JUNE 25, 2020

By early 2020, investment in the SaaS industry was at record highs and expected to hit even higher peaks. 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. What a difference a few months makes!

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks SaaS Airlines Travel 52

ChurnZero

APRIL 23, 2019

The latest investment round will be used to support all of ChurnZero’s efforts. The team will invest in growing the Customer Success ecosystem, accelerate and deepen product development in the award-winning ChurnZero platform, and support customer facing teams in delivering the best Customer Success and Support among their peers.

Venture Capital 40

Venture Capital Scale Churn Customer Success 40

ProfitWell

MARCH 12, 2020

And Rent the Runway adds a new membership option to amp up its presence in the subscription clothing space. Listen wherever you get podcasts: Your top subscription news. We’ve had our eyes on Rent the Runway on the show before , as one of the more popular clothing subscriptions out there. So what does the data actually say?

SaaS Payments 52

SaaS Payments Payment Services Payments Venture Capital 52

ProfitWell

JANUARY 31, 2019

Stripe Soars Payment technology company Stripe has raised an additional $100 million from investors as they move closer to a possible initial public offering in the next few years. The funding comes from Tiger Global, which had already invested $245 million back in September. Gag orders on the company increased even faster.

Payment Methods 45

Payment Methods Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Entertainment 45

Valuize Consulting

AUGUST 18, 2020

Since 2015, the customer success (CS) domain has achieved a 176.54% year-over-year growth of CSM positions globally ( Gainsight, 2019 ), which comes predominantly from the software & IT industry. 3) Invest in the right customer success technology for your organization. 4) Unify your customer success and sales teams.

Customer Success 40

Customer Success Strategy Software Scale 40

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 16, 2020

Because I think everyone talks about platforms but to actually do it properly – and it sounds like you guys are really invested in it – it is a big investment. Now we see that this has become a huge trend across SaaS” Andrey: One of the biggest examples of this for us was moving from personal subscription to a team subscription.

Consulting 249

Consulting Marketplace as a Service Scale Development 249

The Angel VC

NOVEMBER 29, 2013

Therefore you’ll have to focus on the relationship between your CLTV and your CACs (customer acquisition costs), your CLTV/CAC ratio, which measures the ROI on your sales and marketing investments. If I had to choose I’d pick this one, since CLTV is always an estimate which can be more or less accurate. Lemkin and Tomasz Tunguz.

Scale 190

Scale Startup SaaS Customer Lifetime Value 190

ProfitWell

NOVEMBER 1, 2019

Keeping your customers as long as possible is the key to running a sustainable subscription business. David Cancel, founder and CEO of Drift, shared a simple solution in his talk at SaaSFest 2015 : design your internal metrics for every department to incentivize customer retention. Twice as valuable , to be precise.

Retention 56

Retention Strategy Underperforming Technical Team SaaS 56

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2019

I remember talking to Belgium investors at the time and everybody said, look, enterprise software is dead, there’s no opportunity through investment. Felix : It was a lot easier to invest to convince customers and investors and so we actually, I mean more of a European way of scaling a company. It can order subscription.

Sales Hiring 177

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Government 177

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 11, 2020

According to Crunchbase data, 95,000+ companies have received funding (globally) from 2015-present, totaling $1.3+ Venture capitalists invest in startups because they believe in the founder(s) and their vision. That means a majority of their investments are write-offs. trillion worth of funding. Only about 1% reach that honor.

Outsourcing Services 78

Outsourcing Services Scale Startup Outsourced Development 78

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 18, 2020

He even managed to help pivot the company from a programmatic transactional revenue model to a subscription model over the course of, not just the last three months during COVID, but over the course of the last few years. Sam Jacobs: Is it a subscription service? Is it recurring revenue, or is it delivered in a different way?

Subscription 107

Subscription Payment Features Scale Underperforming Technical Team 107

Chart Mogul

JUNE 29, 2018

This means that owning a category is in most cases a requirement for the level of growth and investment multiples that venture capital demands. A few key opportunities for differentiation: Branding (see Why B2B is finally investing in brand ). 🚀 SaaS Roundup #115: The end of the subscription era? Oh how far we’ve come.

Venture Capital 70

Venture Capital Scale Cloud Branding 70

SaaStock

MARCH 20, 2019

Founded: 2015. ProfitWell provides industry standard subscription financial metrics that uncover pockets of hidden revenue through unmatched subscription intelligence. ProfitWell is used by over five thousand subscription companies every day, including Meetup, HubSpot, and Teamwork.com. Founded: 2015. ProfitWell.

SaaS Payments 271

SaaS Payments Merchant Services Payment Solutions Payments 271

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 26, 2017

Over the last seven years, software startup investing has changed quite a bit. In 2010, classic SaaS was booming, the benefits of a subscription model were finally becoming clear to the public markets and the mass-market. Which of these markets are growing the fastest for investment dollars?

Startup 214

Startup Software Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 214

User Pilot

JANUARY 12, 2024

In this example, the bar chart compares the number of standard, free, and enterprise invoices created over the last 7 days. A horizontal bar chart comparing invoice creations on Userpilot. Tracking campaign performance metrics such as clicks, conversions, and impressions to visualize their impact on investments.

Data 105

Data Scale Payment Features Trends 105

SaaStr

MAY 29, 2021

Announcer : Want to know who has sold over a billion dollars in subscription products? However, I think our philosophy is to find the investor who will like to invest in me, not just in our business. If that happens and if your investors, they invest not in you, in your business, guess what? How to find the right investors.

VP of Engineering 303

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Banking Engineering 303

SmartKarrot

JANUARY 15, 2021

The rule plays with two aspects of SaaS or subscription businesses-. Most of these companies invest well in research and development. In 2015, venture capitalists began to popularize the Rule of 40 as a health check for SaaS companies. The metric allows for an adjustment between short term profitability and growth investments.

SaaS 10

SaaS Benchmarks User Experience Metrics 10

SaaStock

MARCH 20, 2019

Founded: 2015. ProfitWell provides industry standard subscription financial metrics that uncover pockets of hidden revenue through unmatched subscription intelligence. ProfitWell is used by over five thousand subscription companies every day, including Meetup, HubSpot, and Teamwork.com. Founded: 2015. ProfitWell.

SaaS Payments 100

SaaS Payments Merchant Services Payment Solutions Payments 100

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 1, 2019

The new SaaS model is subscription revenue-driven, which begs the question: what is a conversion today? It’s not just SaaS; subscriptions are taking over. And that’s not even the only one from Japan; there’s actually at least 18 different Japan subscription boxes. ” And that’s probably the biggest shift.

Retention 223

Retention Onboarding Subscription Payment Features 223

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 4, 2019

SaaS, or software as a service, is a delivery model in which a centrally hosted software is licensed to customers via a subscription plan. Recurring payments. Recurring payments take the form of monthly recurring revenue, otherwise known as MRR. What is the SaaS business model.

Business Model 54

Business Model SaaS Payments Payment Methods Payments 54

Hitenism

JANUARY 16, 2017

Optimizely CEO Dan Siroker wrote in this Quora post : “This was a journey we committed to back in August 2015 to put us on a path to sustained growth and profitability without additional venture capital. In 2016, venture capital investment in SaaS is up to $7B, from $1.5B To put it bluntly, we’ve had it easy in SaaS.

Scale 147

Scale Venture Capital SaaS Headcount 147