SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2020

Q: What was the biggest acquisition failure or missed opportunity by a company? Still, Service Cloud is huge so in the end, Salesforce built an epic business here in the enterprise segment. The post What was the biggest acquisition failure or missed opportunity by a company? Zendesk is at $1b in ARR today. Didn’t work.

Acquisition 206

Acquisition Technical Review Scale Cloud 206

Tom Tunguz

JULY 15, 2019

published the Enterprise Tech 30 last week. It’s a coaches poll of the top enterprise startups broken into early, mid and growth stage. Open source remains a viable customer acquisition strategy despite the threat from the cloud vendors; Amazon in particular. We think of enterprise companies in three layers.

Enterprise 192

Enterprise Payments Payment Solutions SMB 192

Andreessen Horowitz

SEPTEMBER 25, 2023

Ali Ghodsi, CEO and cofounder of Databricks, and Ben Horowitz, cofounder of a16z, explain the data wars happening inside and outside enterprises and how they could impact the evolution of LLMs. [00:38] 00:38] Why is it so hard for enterprise to adopt AI? [03:08] But we haven’t seen anybody with any traction in enterprise.

AI 96

AI Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Generative AI 96

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2021

And 85% of all decisions are made in under six months, including 82% of buying decisions at enterprise organizations. Many marketing departments get too focused on customer acquisition but forget to market to the customers they already have. . So what’s powering this speedy conversion process? Invest heavily in retention marketing.

Software Review 222

Software Review SMB Enterprise Software 222

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 18, 2017

Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods is notable for many reasons. Third, the acquisition underscores the importance of physical retail even to the largest American ecommerce giant. Third, the acquisition underscores the importance of physical retail even to the largest American ecommerce giant.

Acquisition 188

Acquisition Automotive Banking Mobile 188

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 19, 2018

Salesforce is acquiring the business for an astounding 21x enterprise value to trailing twelve months revenue multiple - nearly 2x the next closest. Year of Acquisition. Enterprise Value. In the first three months of 2018, we’ve witnessed two multibillion dollar software acquisitions. Transaction. Price ($M).

Acquisition 179

Acquisition Marketing Enterprise Revenue 179

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 28, 2024

Security & data top the charts at on average 10x enterprise-value-to-forward-revenue, compared to 5x for the others. This dynamic will very likely cascade into the private markets as well with both acquisitions and financings in these categories priced at a premium. Anticipation of this growth propels multiples.

Software Review 251

Software Review Software Finance Acquisition 251

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 8, 2020

And the challenge is a lot harder in an enterprise context, where the buyer and the user aren’t necessarily one and the same person. Many businesses struggle to strike a balance between freemium’s light-touch customer engagement with the more involved enterprise sales process. Meeting the needs of an enterprise buyer.

Scale 205

Scale Sales Hiring Software Review Technical Review 205

Neil Patel

NOVEMBER 9, 2020

Micro startup acquisitions. But before we dive into that, we need to look into what micro startup acquisitions are and why you need to sit up and take notice. Micro Startup Acquisitions: What Are They, and Why Should I Care? Micro Startup Acquisition Trends. That’s an expensive mistake if you make the wrong investment.

Technical Review 144

Technical Review Payment Methods Acquisition Development Team Review 144

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 23, 2023

I’ve been tracking the growth rates of these companies and product lines for the last 18 months to develop a broad gauge of enterprise buying patterns after the downturn. At the time of acquisition, Github had about 25m users & projected to reach 100m in 2025. They’ve crossed the mark 2 years early.

AI Search 271

AI Search AI Cloud Azure 271

SaaSOptics

MAY 19, 2022

What Is Customer Acquisition? Customer Acquisition is the process of acquiring new customers in a business. For subscription-based SaaS businesses, your customer acquisition metrics indicate how effectively you acquire new users via sales, marketing, or a product-led approach like a free trial. More customers = more revenue.

Acquisition 59

Acquisition Scale Strategy Software Review 59

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 7, 2017

The startup acquisition market is off by roughly 35% year-over-year. If it does happen, and when acquirers do decide to pursue acquisitions, I suspect we will enter a very acquisitive environment for three reasons. This is even more staggering considering the multibillion-dollar acquisitions of the past few years.

Acquisition 117

Acquisition Marketing SaaS Finance 117

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2024

The team, led by Deepinder Singh Dhingra, has deep enterprise SaaS experience and truly understands their customer’s needs. I find that often, in SaaS, it’s easy to get excited after a few customer acquisitions, and teams will too quickly pivot into investing capital into demand gen, sales, and marketing. Why did you do the deal?

Innovation 224

Innovation Wireless Acquisition Technology 224

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

Closing an enterprise sale in a niche market follows the same sales funnel as any other deal, but a bit more fine tuned. It represents the culmination of ‘art’ and process, where the enterprise sales process is modified to better reflect the client’s unique and specific needs. What Is Enterprise Level Sales? Enterprise sales.

Scale 95

Scale Enterprise Marketing Sales 95

Intello

FEBRUARY 22, 2021

NYSE: SAIL), the leader in identity security for the cloud enterprise, today announced the completion of its acquisition of Intello , an early-stage SaaS management company that helps organizations discover, manage, and secure SaaS applications. AUSTIN, February 22, 2021 – SailPoint Technologies Holdings, Inc.

Acquisition 52

Acquisition Government Cloud Enterprise 52

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 14, 2023

Atlassian’s acquisition of Loom is also the first unicorn sale in about the same time frame. 5% When Loom raised its final round in mid-2021, the 75th percentile forward enterprise value to revenue multiple (EV/NTM Rev) for publicly traded software companies mounted to 21.2x. Klaviyo was the first half for IPO in at least a year.

Acquisition 221

Acquisition Pricing Enterprise Startup 221

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2024

60% of Its Pro and Enterprise Customers Use 2 or More HubSpot Products HubSpot has stopped breaking down its revenue per product, but going multi-product is the key to their growth at scale, with their Sales / CRM product the #1 driver of growth. Now 60% of their Pro and Enterprise customers use 2 or more products. #7.

Scale 224

Scale Cloud Pricing Scaling 224

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2024

In today’s world, there’s a clear shift in what founders, boards, and investors are all after — scalable, low-CAC (customer-acquisition cost) growth strategies. Sales-assisted, product-led growth strategies that close Enterprise leads. The data above shows it’s a customer acquisition cost on average of $1.05

Scale 208

Scale Sales Hiring Strategy Marketing 208

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 6, 2016

What is your SaaS startup worth in an acquisition? To answer that question, we can analyze the data set of all software companies acquired over the last six years and benchmark them by enterprise value-to-revenue multiples. What is your SaaS startup worth in an acquisition?

Acquisition 100

Acquisition Startup SaaS Benchmarks 100

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

A few examples: Mailchimp was bootstrapped to $1,000,000,000 in ARR Qualtrics was bootstrapped to a $6B acquisition Atlassian was bootstrapped all the way to … today $30B+ Veeva is very enterprise but only spent ~$3m in true venture capital. Sometimes, enterprise is more cost-efficient if you have a great sales motion.

Scale 206

Scale Venture Capital Startup Marketing 206

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2023

You’ll probably have a smaller lifetime customer value and customer budget for acquisition. Find The Balance Between CAC And LTV The achievable lifetime value defines your customer acquisition cost target. Every company is different and will have varying solutions, customer acquisition costs, and lifetime value.

Scale 214

Scale Strategy Scaling Outbound Sales Team 214

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 12, 2016

The acquisition frenzy continues in SaaS. In the 2016 acquisition market, the median acquisition multiple is 7.8x In the 2016 acquisition market, the median acquisition multiple is 7.8x The LinkedIn acquisition in particular is a strategic move by Microsoft. billion, which prices the business at 8.1x

Acquisition 100

Acquisition Startup Banking Benchmarks 100

Chart Mogul

APRIL 15, 2021

Keeping your pace of growth while going through an acquisition is difficult. Kaspars’ first enterprise was an agency creating websites for customers in the UK. Acquisition by Sage. We asked Kaspars to tell us the story of how ChartMogul helps his team grow SageHR pre- and post-acquisition. What is Sage HR?

Acquisition 83

Acquisition Data Scale Banking 83

Totango

APRIL 30, 2021

Comparing the cost of customer retention versus customer acquisition underscores why retaining clients is so important. Calculating the Cost of Customer Acquisition. To calculate your average CAC, total up all the marketing and sales costs that go into your acquisition efforts for a given period. The result is your average CAC.

Acquisition 63

Acquisition Retention Social Media Advertising 63

SaaStr

APRIL 25, 2019

Thanks so much everyone for joining us for our fireside chat today, disrupting the desk phone: how and why we made a $50 million acquisition. Jessica Lin : So we’ll chat more about analogy, really milk that, and again, you’ll hear, especially throughout this session why this is not really a story about just one acquisition.

Acquisition 146

Acquisition Technical Review Systems Review AI 146

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 12, 2023

Both these companies also focus on enterprise accounts - in contrast to Bill.com at the bottom, which targets small businesses. Salesforce barely budged, perhaps an indicator of how labor-intensive the business is or how much the revenue growth has been through acquisition (Slack, Mulesoft, & Tableau).

Software Review 268

Software Review Trends Revenue Software 268

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 16, 2021

Tokens are the paid customer acquisition channel of web3. By analyzing how web3 companies invest tokens, we can calculate the cost of customer acquisition (CAC) for a crypto company. Typical enterprise software companies spend approximately 7-15% of their enterprise value on customer acquisition. Percentile.

Venture Capital 238

Venture Capital Blockchain Acquisition Benchmarks 238

Chaotic Flow

JULY 21, 2015

SaaS customer acquisition should focus on maximizing available market penetration, not increasing available market size, and to do that you have to have a very clear picture of your target SaaS customers. Bad prospects waste precious sales cycles and marketing dollars, driving up your customer acquisition costs. Let them see it.

Acquisition 133

Acquisition Scale SaaS Pricing 133

User Pilot

APRIL 8, 2024

Product-led growth is a well-known bottom-up approach that relies on the product for customer acquisition and revenue expansion. This approach is becoming increasingly popular, even for the enterprise client. In the long run, they might also play a role in new customer acquisition.

Strategy 100

Strategy Business SaaS Customer Lifetime Value 100

ProfitWell

MAY 21, 2019

What is customer acquisition? Customer acquisition is the process of gaining new customers. Customer acquisition is one of the most popular growth levers for SaaS businesses because it is the most literal way to grow your customer base. Acquisition for a SaaS company means signing up new, paying customers.

Acquisition 70

Acquisition Retention Churn Pricing 70

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 29, 2015

Looking at the market caps and the balance sheets of the major enterprise acquirers, Microsoft could certainly acquire Salesforce outright in cash. In the past ten years, Salesforce has been the second most active acquirer of next-generation enterprise companies at greater than $100M, tied with IBM and second to Oracle.

Acquisition 100

Acquisition Startup Enterprise SaaS 100

Kellblog

FEBRUARY 18, 2020

Enterprise SaaS and retailers have more in common than you might think. Now, let’s think about enterprise software. Enterprise software vendors drive growth in two ways: They hire new salesreps They increase productivity of existing salesreps. Let’s think about retailers for a minute.

Sales Hiring 94

Sales Hiring Enterprise Metrics Sales 94

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 18, 2020

Most high-growth software investors value public companies on enterprise value to forward revenue multiple. But investors in private companies use a different metric, enterprise value to forward annual recurring revenue (ARR).The The chart above shows the median enterprise value to forward ARR value since 2016.

Software Review 363

Software Review Finance Enterprise Acquisition 363

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2022

And Salesforce noted it’s slowing down hiring, and taking a break from bigger acquisitions, for now. But so far, times are still very good in SaaS, and especially enterprise SaaS. I don’t do a lot of predictions, but I very strongly believe enterprise software companies are going to do really well over the next 18/24 mos….

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Acquisition Cloud Enterprise 300

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

What should you look for in an Enterprise rep vs. a Mid-Market rep? So, Calendly decided to invest in going Enterprise. But going Enterprise is so much more than just hiring Enterprise salespeople. In the early days of exploring Enterprise, getting an Enterprise company to commit to investing in you is half the battle.

Scale 209

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 209

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 3, 2019

There’s a little bit of work to do still, but you know, tonight the title of my talk is how to make user acquisition practically free. So you go to youtube.com, you don’t think, you click, and you’re there, but I don’t think this just applies to enterprise companies either. Thank you so much.

Acquisition 135

Acquisition Software Review Payment Methods Marketplace as a Service 135

SaaStr

JUNE 29, 2021

Protocol and Pitchbook partnered to do a comparison to see what’s happening in Private Equity and enterprise deals so far in 2021, and the data is a bit jaw-dropping: Just in 1H’21, PE invested $20.4B in SaaS and enterprise deals. Who’s writing these big checks in SaaS and enterprise?

Investment 240

Investment SaaS Acquisition Enterprise 240