Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

You’ll need Cost of Revenue to calculate your Gross Margin, which in turn you need to calculate Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Payback Time and to understand your company’s unit economics in general. In QuickBooks, add “Marketing” account as a subaccount of Sales & Marketing.

Merchant Services 90

Merchant Services Startup DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

Chart Mogul

MARCH 2, 2021

How will the acquisition affect you, your co-founders, investors, and other stakeholders? Further reading: How to Prepare Your Startup for Acquisition. Are you part of the acquisition package? Beware, though, your buyer has a vested interest in what you do post-acquisition and might entice you to stay with favorable terms.

Startup 52

Startup Acquisition SaaS Scale 52

Andreessen Horowitz

APRIL 30, 2024

Then I went into banking, specifically investment banking in the early ’90s. What areas in both technology investing as well as distribution or sales do we really need a bolster to really take the company to the next level? It’s terrific to be with you today. So, I’ve really had 3 careers.

Payment Solutions 80

Payment Solutions Payments Payment Services SaaS Payments 80

Chart Mogul

MARCH 2, 2021

How will the acquisition affect you, your co-founders, investors, and other stakeholders? Further reading: How to Prepare Your Startup for Acquisition. Are you part of the acquisition package? Beware, though, your buyer has a vested interest in what you do post-acquisition and might entice you to stay with favorable terms.

Startup 52

Startup Acquisition SaaS Scale 52

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

At that point it becomes a lot harder because the next set of customer acquisition channels will likely be much more expensive. Ten years ago, there was nobody who SaaS founders could ask in order to learn how to do, for example, inbound marketing, low-touch sales or customer success. That’s my theory at least, it’s not scientifically proven.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

OPEXEngine

JUNE 29, 2020

Think of it this way: most SaaS companies have high customer acquisition costs, as you have to invest heavily in sales and marketing in order to realize high growth. This signals that the company is strong on both fronts (growth and margin), meaning that it might be an excellent investment opportunity.

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks SaaS Sales Hiring Scale 52

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

Here’s why: PLG is an end user-focused growth model that relies on the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion. Content marketing will drive user acquisition. Examples of SaaS companies that have adopted this pricing model: HubSpot, Zocdoc, Salesforce, and AWS.

Product Marketing 58

Product Marketing Trends Scale Marketing 58

OPEXEngine

JUNE 11, 2020

SaaS companies have to focus both on new customer acquisition as well as retaining and delighting customers throughout the customer relationship. The product is hosted by the vendor or a 3 rd party (like AWS). These investments by the vendor may fall into COGs (and affect gross margin) or into R&D or be allocated between the two.

SaaS Payments 52

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Subscription Payment Features 52

ProfitWell

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

Running your own server to handle your customer's valuable data requires a huge investment to match the same level of security and reliability that comes baked into services like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud. This means that growth can stagnate even with large acquisition numbers. AI Integrations.

SaaS Payments 66

SaaS Payments Trends Merchant Services Payments 66

ChurnZero

AUGUST 11, 2020

Customer retention, along with new customer acquisition, has been challenging for most companies when the pandemic hit. You and I both know how awful it feels to have someone disregard what we say and focus on their end goal instead. The second quarter of 2020 was chaotic. Get a 360-Degree View of Your Customers .

Retention 97

Retention Strategy Underperforming Technical Team Software Review 97

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 13, 2018

I saw we had the opportunity to do that in London and to do something that will be new for Facebook, in the same way that AWS was a new business model and product line for Amazon and a bet that paid off very well. We are going from having an enterprise business to having a mid-market business to investing in an SMB business.

Scale 151

Scale Marketplace as a Service Mobile Sales Hiring 151

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 11, 2021

As a founder, you can use this 84 cents to pay salaries, office rent, dividends, or invest in R&D. Offering free usage is par for the course as a SaaS customer acquisition strategy. For example, 84% GM means that for every dollar of product sold, a business keeps 84 cents.

Scale 52

Scale Payment Methods Payment Services Systems Review 52

Casey Accidental

DECEMBER 11, 2023

To continue its growth, instead of investing in new product value, Eventbrite kept grafting new growth loops onto this core loop to acquire more event creators and drive more ticket sales per event, creating a much more complicated growth model that looks like the below. This is what I realized when I joined Eventbrite.

Payments 113

Payments Scale Payment Solutions Technical Review 113

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2021

It’s a brutal, awful slog in the start. I would say, it’s always good to call out just how awful it is to be a founder, to be an entrepreneur, because that is a unique perspective that you bring to the board room that no one else shares. The angel investors are people who invest their own money. David : Here we go.

Underperforming Technical Team 242

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring AWS Business Model 242

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 235

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 235

SaaStr

MAY 14, 2019

Tables have turned because I first met Mikkel when just after I was working for previous fund index, he had just invested. Mikkel : Well again, the public cloud, AWS, was the dominant leader. The acquisition of Base and now the launch of your new CRM platform, Sunshine. So I am here, I guess, about 7 years after we first met.

Cloud 192

Cloud Sales Recruiting Scale AWS 192

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

We’ve all seen AWS and what they’ve done with their platform. One of the early co-investments with my prior firm in Bessemer was in Shopify. If you look at companies like Cornerstone OnDemand, which we invested in a long time ago, it took them some time to get to 100 million of ARR. It is staggering.

Sales Hiring 162

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 162

Chart Mogul

DECEMBER 6, 2023

Capital will return to SaaS markets, and M&A activity will accelerate Yoram Wijngaarde , CEO and Founder of Dealroom “VC investment into SaaS companies could start growing again in 2024. SaaS investment will close at around $100B this year, a four year low, and down from $264B in 2021.

AI Search 52

AI Search SaaS Generative AI ChatGPT 52

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

As investors, we keep a close eye on customer acquisition cost (CAC) payback. We use it as an indicator that a company has the right fundamentals in place to effectively ramp up customer acquisition. AWS and other infrastructure providers have been using UBP for nearly a decade.

Headcount 73

Headcount SaaS Compensation Acquisition 73

SaaStr

APRIL 24, 2020

John joined Adobe through the company’s acquisition of Omniture in 2009, where he served as executive vice president of marketing, driving all marketing efforts to strategically advance the industry’s largest standalone web analytics business. John Mellor: So, it evolved into the acquisition roadmap. billion in annual revenue.

Scale 221

Scale Leadership Strategy Technology 221

Sales Hacker

JUNE 1, 2020

This is part of a phenomenon called Product Led Growth (PLG) , an end-user growth model that relies on the product itself to be the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion. Sounds an awful lot like Sales. No hassle and no credit card required. That includes nearly 20 publicly traded companies. doesn’t it?

Sales Hiring 76

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 76

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

If you have a very complicated product–for example you sell AWS or you sell Snowflake–those are infrastructure products. You need to invest at least a year or even two years. You engage the marketing team and you do a lot of acquisition and people are coming. The other dimension you need to think about is the product complexity.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

Outseta

JANUARY 20, 2020

In this post I’m going to share the most important lessons about growing a SaaS business that I learned at Buildium—collectively, these things had an awful lot to do with the company being valued so highly. At this point Buildium raised $2M from K1 Capital , investing the money primarily in marketing and hiring.

SaaS Payments 145

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Methods Payment Services 145

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

I would love to say, “Oh, I wrote this software, and I put two servers on AWS, and put a credit card form up, and the money just kept flowing in.” It’s like, “We could work on acquisition costs,” which we did. It reduces the friction, and the acquisition time, and all that stuff.

Part-Time VPE 233

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 233

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 24, 2019

It’s less expensive than it’s ever been in terms of actually getting a product to market, whether it’s leveraging platforms like Salesforce or GCP or AWS or Heroku. John: You guys have made a lot of investments or bets on early stage companies. There are plenty of companies that actually have that initial success.

Scale 151

Scale Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence AI 151

OpenView Labs

APRIL 24, 2019

But in fact, our customer acquisition cost goes up. Perfect example from a startup I’ve been keeping in touch with: As a founder, that’s an awful lot of work for 1 hire, especially when you need to hire more! Why not slow down a bit and invest all that time, money, and energy into a more intentional approach? Absolutely.

Sales Recruiting 64

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 64

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2022

What’s their acquisition channel? Jason Lemkin: The highest stage of venture is crossover, crossover funds, TCV is one of an early one, but even mutual funds that invest in unicorns. All that money went from public to private because, holy crap, Sequoia invested at Zoom at a billion. What’s their NRR?

Sales Hiring 204

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling 204

OpenView Labs

DECEMBER 15, 2020

Cloud marketplaces like AWS Marketplace, Azure Marketplace and Google Cloud Platform Marketplace are digital storefronts where companies can list their offerings for software buyers to find, purchase and provision software. . Tackle’s survey found that 70% of sellers are ready to invest more in marketplaces as a go-to-market strategy.

Marketplace as a Service 52

Marketplace as a Service Cloud Scale B2B 52

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

There’s customer acquisition, and then, there’s your existing customers. We can save companies $100,000 on their AWS bill. Everybody wants to save $100,000 on their AWS bill right now. In Brex, the AWS credits and it’s getting additional rebate by moving your card spends over. Jason Lemkin: Got it.

Merchant Services 188

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 188

Baremetrics

FEBRUARY 19, 2018

You’ll need this section to calculate your company’s Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) , which, along with Customer Lifetime Value is one of the most important SaaS metrics in determining if you’re running a sustainable business. Sales & Marketing. Next, we set up your Sales & Marketing (S&M) costs.

Startup 81

Startup DevOps as a Service Customer Lifetime Value SaaS 81

OpenView Labs

JUNE 25, 2019

Collectively, these expenses are referred to as Customer Acquisition Costs, or CAC for short. A high figure is a signal you’re spending too much on customer acquisition, a low number the opposite. Conversely, if your CAC payback is six months but you churn most of your customers by month three, you’ll never recoup acquisition costs.

Scale 40

Scale Development Team Review Software Review Benchmarks 40

SaaStr

JUNE 25, 2019

Now, I have some background with luck because in between some long stints with other companies, seven years at Eventbrite and 15 years at Ticketmaster before, I spent five years of my life playing poker for a living and learned an awful lot about luck and positive outcomes as well. First off, in 2013 we made our first acquisition.

Engineering 134

Engineering Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale 134

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 10, 2020

The acquisition process [21:55]. And really, when I actually lived in Austin in early 2019, and everybody was talking about the TrendKite acquisition and about the impact that you all made even before you and I met. The acquisition process [21:55]. But really interestingly, Cision had made a bunch of acquisitions prior to this.

VP of Engineering 75

VP of Engineering Scale Development Team Review Technical Review 75

Unbounce

JULY 30, 2019

November and December are all about volume, so every dollar you can save when it comes to your cost-per-acquisition can have a significant impact on your bottom line. A mystery box takes an awful lot of the pressure off visitors looking for a meaningful gift. Or maybe you’re selling something that’s a big investment.

Scale 111

Scale Branding Underperforming Technical Team AWS 111

SmartKarrot

JANUARY 18, 2022

India has seen exponential growth in SaaS investments in the last decade. Instead of marketing, Zoho invests in R&D and customer service. The company offers a data analytics platform based on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Clouds, and Microsoft Azure. Zoho is committed to offering outstanding customer service.

SaaS Payments 11

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Methods Payments 11

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2019

In this session, Anna and Sameer will highlight SendGrid’s journey from growth stage through acquisition and why focusing on people and culture is mission critical to success as a company goes through the scaling process. I’m Sameer Dholakia, CEO of now Twilio SendGrid as of Friday after our completed acquisition.

Scale 142

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 142

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 7, 2021

Invest in your development internally and externally. Find a company that will allow you to be your best professional self and also invest in your personal life – it doesn’t have to be one at the expense of the other! Invest in your cross-functional partners. Invest in a coach. Build allies and ask for help. Hang Black.

Scale 130

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 130