SaaStr

MAY 27, 2025

collectively, only about 160 companies meet basic IPO readiness criteria (>$100M revenue, >15% growth, >-25% EBITDA margin). Why It Matters : The report shows that VC investment has been highly correlated to rates, but in a moderate interest rate environment, rates will likely play a smaller role similar to 2017-2019.

Outsourcing Services 169

Outsourcing Services Venture Capital Outsourced Development Data 169

SaaStr

MAY 6, 2022

Ultimately — revenue multiples. Revenue multiples are how much VCs, investors, and ultimately, an IPO and public markets will value each dollar of revenue. Revenue multiples don’t affect customers, or even revenue itself. pic.twitter.com/JNnzizB82v. — Byron Deeter (@bdeeter) May 5, 2022.

SaaS 348

SaaS Azure Cloud AWS 348

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 28, 2018

The problem with this train of thought: you’re missing out on revenue. At Intercom, we have learned that investing in real-time support, with response times under 5 minutes, can actually turn customer support into a revenue driver. We believe that this approach is counterproductive to a businesses’ revenue objectives.

Revenue 213

Revenue Customer Support Onboarding Operational efficiency. 213

SaaStr

JANUARY 4, 2022

. $500k+ deals make up half their revenue, and $1m deals 37%. $500k+ deals made up 41% of Braze’s revenue in 2021 and 2020, and $1m+ deals grew to 37% of their revenue, up from 25%. Still, Braze isn’t overly concentrated, with no customer being over 5% of their revenue. 40% of Revenue from Outside U.S.

New CTO 69

New CTO CTO Software Review B2B 69

SaaStr

APRIL 18, 2021

It means it’s really, really hard to get revenues going. You close a customer for $120 in annualized revenue, you only get to recognize $10 of that a month. Tons of work, tiny revenues to start. Get the revenues going, even if they are small. 120% NRR: Your revenue doubles in 5 years even with no new customers.

SaaS 329

SaaS Travel Churn Revenue 329

SaaStr

JULY 4, 2022

One of the crowd favorites has been Mark Roberge, all the way back to 2017. 2017: How the Best Outbound Sales Teams Are Managed. Mark first joined us in a terrific panel session on how the top outbound teams are managed, 2018: Sales Mistakes that Can Kill Your SaaS Business How to Avoid Them. Ok, now a look back!

Outbound Sales Team 273

Outbound Sales Team Scale Scaling SaaS 273

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

By prioritizing sales & marketing, the company successfully lengthened runway to increase revenue, which eased the subsequent fundraising. Actually, the opposite is true: software companies spend more on R&D (research & development) & less on Sales & Marketing (S&M) as a percent of revenue today than six years ago.

Software 301

Software Trends Revenue Startup 301

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2022

Certainly, public SaaS revenue multiples are way down, and that’s impacted many things, including making VC fundraising substantially harder than in the go-go days of 2021. Salesforce Growth: 2023 $31.8B (guidance) 2022 $26.5B 2021 $21.25B 2020 $17.1B 2014 $4.1B. Thank you Ohana! pic.twitter.com/CMhrBXgHSF.

Sales Hiring 346

Sales Hiring Cloud Acquisition Enterprise 346

SaaStr

MAY 28, 2021

But over time, it’s added a large enterprise and B2B component for marketers and others to track, manage and market videos that we’ll spend a bunch of time digging in on, as it’s the fastest-growing segment, growing from little-to-none in 2017 to 25% of revenue today. 50% of revenue outside the U.S.

Enterprise 322

Enterprise Scale B2B Metrics 322

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2021

Revenue grew nicely at first from $1m to $3.5m 2017: $30m rev. Customer count growing 33%, revenue growing 65% — the “Golden Ratio” for future growth. Fast, but revenue grew much faster (65%). That means both halves of the revenue engine are humming. ARR uses to mean true recurring revenues.

Outsourcing Services 362

Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Payment Features Cloud 362

SaaStr

JULY 7, 2021

The second SaaStr post ever, way back in late 2012, was “ Everybody Lies: SaaS Revenues in the Inc. Let’s take a look back at where HubSpot, Upwork, and others were in 2011 GAAP revenue — and where they are today. Learnings for this year, for 2011 GAAP revenue (Inc. in 2011 GAAP revenue. generation.

SaaS 284

SaaS Technical Review Software Review Scaling 284

SaaStr

APRIL 10, 2020

(Note: I wrote a version of this in 2017 when times were good. Your second-order revenue engine still needs to work. Even if sales cycles have slowed down. Make sure that the $2m or $5m or $20m you ended the year with at least renews as a cohort, even if for not as much revenue as you’d planned. In the media.

Sales Hiring 350

Sales Hiring Startup Investment Revenue 350

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 13, 2022

Series A dollars provided the business 17 months’ of runway at constant burn assuming no revenue. Today, the public markets value companies like it’s 2017. In 2021, employment costs per capital increased to roughly $200k. At 28 employees, a $16m Series A fueled the company for 35 months. But we’re no longer in 2021.

Headcount 325

Headcount Venture Capital Finance Startup 325

SaaStr

APRIL 28, 2019

Only 8% of Slack’s revenue last year was from direct conversion from Free to Paid — and that’s down from 10% the year before. Today, Slack has 575+ customers paying more than $100k a year, which important now accounts for 40%+ of its revenue. That’s way, way up from just 22% of revenue from $100k+ deals in 2017.

Scale 279

Scale Venture Capital SMB Enterprise 279

SaaStr

DECEMBER 8, 2020

Today, just 2 years after that, Hubspot in a very similar space (just more SMB) and with very similar revenue, is worth $18B. First product doesn’t work, no revenue for 3 years. Worth $2B by 2017. And revenue has grown to $1B+ ARR for all the winners. That’s 18x. Shopify: Founded 2006. 2015 IPO at $1.27B.

SaaS 283

SaaS SMB Cloud Revenue 283

SaaStr

APRIL 29, 2021

Shopify’s first quarter revenue: Q1 2021: $989 million Q1 2020: $470 million Q1 2019: $321 million Q1 2018: $214 million Q1 2017: $127 million Q1 2016: $73 million Q1 2015: $37 million Q1 2014: $19 million Q1 2013: $9 million. Shopify doesn’t call its non-software revenue “MRR” A small but interesting note.

Merchant Services 309

Merchant Services Payment Methods SaaS Payments Payments 309

SaaStr

JUNE 9, 2021

CEO Peter Gassner is truly of the most impressive founders I’ve personally met and you can take a look at our deep dive from SaaStr Annual 2017 here not long after they’d IPO’d: One of many remarkable things about Veeva: it burned about $3m on the way to IPO. Revenue has accelerated in 2021 — even at $2B in ARR.

Scale 301

Scale Cloud Enterprise Scaling 301

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2024

The Rebrand That Changed Everything 2017’s pivot from dapulse to monday.com wasn’t just a name change. Product-Led Growth Before It Was Cool While others were building massive sales teams, Zinman pushed for a product that would sell itself. The result? ARR growth?

Scale 250

Scale SaaS Company Culture Leadership 250

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2022

Free Cash Flow up from 3% of revenue at $400m in ARR to 10% at $550m in ARR. From $11m in annual revenue in 2017 to $500m+ in 2022. 50k+ customers are 26% of revenue today, and 10+ seat deals are 76%. Still, a quarter of their revenue is still from smaller customers. And a few other interesting learnings: #6.

Headcount 318

Headcount SMB Engineering Scaling 318

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 21, 2024

Different accounting rules govern revenue & cost recognition. In 2017, the industry migrated from ASC 605 to ASC 606, which are financial arcana as esoteric as it reads. If that argument is correct, then the average gross margin of a software company in the public domain would fall from 72% to 47%. Quite a stark difference.

Software 296

Software Business Construction Government 296

SaaStr

OCTOBER 14, 2021

First $100k customer in 2017. GitLab’s SaaS revenues are still just 20% of their revenues, although that’s up from 9% in 2020. GitLab China is a new independent company formed in 2021, both SaaS and self-managed, available only in China, Hong Kong and Macau. We may see this more often. #4. Then 20 by 2018.

Outsourced Development 67

Outsourced Development Software Development Innovation Cloud 67

Tom Tunguz

MAY 4, 2017

Five months into 2017 nine venture-backed technology companies have gone public compared to 14 in 2016. Snap grew revenues by nearly 6x annually. The IPO market in 2017 seems to be very healthy and is on pace to be twice as active as last year. The other seven have demonstrated the broad public investor demand for new offerings.

Marketing 100

Marketing B2C B2B Pricing 100

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 29, 2016

Bookings, MRR, Revenue. For as long as SaaS companies have existed, we’ve used one way of counting revenue, called GAAP. Starting in 2017, revenue recognition for SaaS companies will change, and SaaS startups will have more flexibility in the way they record revenue than in the past. I am not an accountant.

SaaS 100

SaaS Consulting Benchmarks Startup 100

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2020

They had revenue their first month after launch. His learning: follow your customers. The Slack story is incredible, but most of us need to focus on getting to revenue very early. Finally, the session we did with Jeff at the 2017 SaaStr Annual right after Twilio’s IPO was incredible. But the customers started coming.

CTO Hire 355

CTO Hire New CTO CTO Airlines 355

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 23, 2018

90% of revenue originates through self serve channels - an astounding figure for company that generated more than $1B in revenue last year. Dropbox’s revenue grew from $604M to $1.1B from 2015 to 2017, a compound annual growth rate of 35%. Revenue Growth. MC/2017 Rev Multiple. Gross Margin. Market Cap.

Scale 214

Scale Cloud Acquisition Revenue 214

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2021

growth-adjusted revenue multiples. And BVP’s very helpful inclusion of growth adjusted revenue multiples in their deck supports that: At first glance – with a 180% increase in this metric since 2017 – it would be yet another reinforcement of the “investors are nuts” talking point.

Cloud 284

Cloud Mobile Innovation Metrics 284

SaaStr

MAY 22, 2023

Each year from 2017-2021 was easier than the prior year. Revenue multiples for public SaaS companies in 2023 IMHO are still too low. Now we have a whole generation of SaaS employees and execs who have only seen SaaS. Get Easier Every Year. 2022 was harder, but it took a while to see it wasn’t transitory.

SaaS 314

SaaS Churn Sales Software 314

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 23, 2022

International Revenue up to 34%, from 29% in 2019. A third of their revenue in now outside the U.S. #4. Messaging now just half their revenue. We talked with CEO Jeff Lawson below way back in 2017 about how to go multi-product. We talked with CEO Jeff Lawson below way back in 2017 about how to go multi-product.

Scale 279

Scale Cloud Scaling Acquisition 279

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2023

$5k+ customers are now 73% of revenue — up from 62% in 2021. Still, it’s impressive that even at $600m+ ARR, 27% of their revenue still comes from customers that pay less than $5k … That’s a long tail that truly has gone the distance. #4. 39% of Revenue Outside U.S., 39% of Revenue Outside U.S.,

SMB 305

SMB Outsourced Development Enterprise Scale 305

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2024

And another great deep dive with Eric on the First $100,000,000 in revenues here: And the latest on Zoom at $4.3 Billion in revenue here: 5 Interesting Learnings from Zoom at $4.7 This dedication to user experience helped shape Zoom into a more user-friendly platform than its competitors.

VP of Engineering 261

VP of Engineering Software Engineering Company Culture Engineering 261

SaaStr

OCTOBER 22, 2023

Last week we had a great one with Robby Allen, Chief Revenue Officer at AgentSync, check it out here. In 2017, he was named by LinkedIn as one of the top 5 CMOs in the world to follow for thought-leadership in the digital marketing domain. I always learn a lot from these — they are in essence a best practices list from each leader.

AI Search 284

AI Search Consulting Leadership AI 284

Clouded Judgement

AUGUST 16, 2024

One of the clearest examples of how lopsided the services-to-software dynamic can be is from Mulesoft’s S1 filing in 2017. The incremental market cap created by this shift could be enormous, as more revenue is reclassified into higher-multiple software categories rather than lower-multiple services categories. Bucketed by Growth.

Outsourcing Services 276

Outsourcing Services Cloud Software Outsourced Development 276

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. Revenue leaders were able to network once again. Now a staple!)

Scale 307

Scale Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO 307

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2024

You have to be scrappy at this stage, and Braze was trying to find product market fit with no product, no revenue, and no customers. This was around 2017, and CS became simpler and focused on post-sales, retention, and reduced churn. This revenue chart is 2017-2021 before Braze IPO’d.

Scale 291

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Startup 291

SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2023

Up until say 2017–2018 or so, in SaaS, there was a rough rule: a relatively small amount of secondary liquidity ($1m-$2m) would be offered by growth investors in top VC rounds once a startup crossed $10m ARR or so. They bootstrapped themselves to tens of millions in profitable revenue, and then sold a big chunk of founder secondary.

Startup 58

Startup Investment SaaS Revenue 58

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2021

Revenue growth accelerated from 32% to 41% * And new customer growth accelerated to a crazy 45% YoY * All while keeping ACVs constant at ~10k. Hubspot didn't just grow an incredible 41% in Q1'21 to $1.1B It accelerated. They did it the hard way, with SMBs. — Jason BeKind Lemkin (@jasonlk) May 6, 2021. Seize the day. 2014 $4.1B.

Cloud 301

Cloud Scaling SaaS Revenue 301

SaaStr

MAY 12, 2019

GAAP revenue in Q1 ’19) because it’s in a space filled with strong competitors. It’s an almost 100% enterprise play — they have 227 customers spending over $100k a year, comprising 84% of their revenues. Revenue doesn’t all have to be recurring, folks. 130%+ revenue retention. The lesson?

Outsourced Development 259

Outsourced Development AWS Retention Enterprise 259