SaaStr

JANUARY 6, 2021

Q: I run a bootstrapped software company and our biggest customer (60% of our revenue) has offered on several occasions to invest in the company. Taking an investment from your largest customer certainly will complicate things. They may be worried you are an affiliate of the BigCo and not a practical acquisition target.

Investment 278

Investment Software Review Acquisition Pricing 278

SaaStr

APRIL 11, 2022

In other cases, getting to invest more heavily for a few years as private company can fuel faster growth, and a later IPO at a much higher price. The post The Private Equity Math of 1+1=3 in SaaS Acquisitions appeared first on SaaStr. Thomas Bravo is buying Sailpoint for $6.9B , at $540m run-rate, growing 31%. Well a lot of things.

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Acquisition SaaS Cloud B2B 240

SaaStr

JUNE 6, 2021

Q: After an acquisition, how long before severance packages are offered due to layoffs/downsizing? Layoffs and downsizing are less common in most tech acquisitions today. Having said that, even if they are less common, layoffs and other downsizing still happens all the time after acquisitions. But Here’s When They Happen.

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Acquisition Technical Review Headcount Finance 169

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 But PE has some interesting advantages for founders over an IPO or a tech acquisition: ad. in SaaS and enterprise deals.

Investment 248

Investment SaaS Acquisition Enterprise 248

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 3, 2020

The other day Coupa did its first $1B+ acquisition, of 18+ year old Llamsoft. There should be a lot more billion+ acquisitions in Cloud and SaaS, if only because there are more decacorns to buy them. It’s a bigger deal than a VC firm investing at $1B pre-money, in many ways. Adobe and Shopify are now worth $100B+.

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Acquisition SaaS Cloud Startup 255

IT World

APRIL 27, 2023

The acquisition is part of Bosch’s strategy to tap into the rising demand for chips globally, especially in the automotive and electronics sector.

Acquisition 77

Acquisition Automotive Investment Strategy 77

User Pilot

AUGUST 10, 2023

Are you trying to find your business’s average customer acquisition cost? And the customer acquisition cost (CAC) shows you how effective you’re with your sales and marketing efforts to acquire new customers. TL;DR Customer acquisition cost (CAC) measures the total sales and marketing expenses for acquiring new customers.

Acquisition 85

Acquisition Benchmarks Customer Lifetime Value B2B 85

SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2021

Battery Ventures’ data says while VC investment $$$ are on fire — they aren’t going into more startups. Private Equity did 48+ $100m acquisitions in 2020. The post Battery Ventures: VC Investments Are Way Up. A few top takeaways: #1. Instead, more dollars are going into the break-out leaders, not more deals.

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Investment SMB Acquisition Cloud 231

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2019

An acquisition can make or break your startup. Take IBM’s recent purchase of RedHat to accelerate hybrid cloud adoption, or Salesforce’s acquisition of Mulesoft to coordinate, unlock, and integrate customer data better than any competitor. You’re about to make millions off of the investment you wrote off years ago.

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Acquisition Technical Review Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 161

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

The software M&A (mergers and acquisitions) market saw its best year yet in 2020, and it’s on track to see another record year in 2021. VC-backed startups are buying other startups at the fastest pace in over a decade and North American startup investment totaled 155 billion this year so far. Thomas Smale, FE International.

Scale 96

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 96

Neil Patel

NOVEMBER 9, 2020

That’s an expensive mistake if you make the wrong investment. 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.

Technical Review 144

Technical Review Payment Methods Acquisition Development Team Review 144

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2024

What’s your most recent disclosed investment? What’s your sweet spot for investing — check size, stage, type of deal? 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.

Innovation 233

Innovation Wireless Acquisition Technology 233

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2024

Marketers should focus on the acquisition channels they’re best at, even if it’s not the perfect fit for the situation. Once a double-digit percentage of the core customer base has heard of the company, it’s time to invest in brand marketing. Building a Brand Building a brand is essential for long-term success.

Sales Hiring 247

Sales Hiring Startup Marketing Technical Review 247

Chart Mogul

AUGUST 20, 2020

4x entrepreneur Andrew Gazdecki shares how you can better prepare yourself for your startup's acquisition, and make the journey a rewarding one. The better prepared you are for an acquisition, the smoother it’ll go, leaving you financially, operationally, and psychologically stronger during negotiations. Know your numbers.

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Acquisition Startup Technical Review Scale 105

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 16, 2017

How much should a SaaS startup invest in sales and marketing at different stages of the business? Sales and marketing investment depends on many different factors including establishing product market fit, the business’s sales model (inside, field, freemium), and not least, cash balance and fundraising capacity.

Investment 274

Investment Startup Marketing SaaS 274

Baremetrics

AUGUST 1, 2021

So what works (and doesn’t work) as a SaaS acquisition strategy? In this article, you’ll learn 5 keys to building a purpose driven acquisition strategy for your SaaS and how to avoid common mistakes along the way. SaaS Customer Acquisition: Getting the basic right How to Build a Purpose-driven SaaS Customer Acquisition Strategy 1.

Acquisition 98

Acquisition Strategy SaaS Underperforming Technical Team 98

Totango

JUNE 15, 2022

All companies are going through the exercise of evaluating their investments, deciding what to cut and what to keep, what strategies to use, and simply, how to weather the storm. A business model dependent on new customer acquisition will struggle to thrive during an economic downturn as the cost of acquisition eats away at profits.

Customer Success 101

Customer Success Investment Acquisition Communication 101

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 23, 2018

Presumably, the company traded investments in growth for profitability to service the new debt. trailing twelve months, the third highest multiple for large software acquisitions. Last week, Adobe announced they acquired Marketo for $4.75B. The Marketo story highlights three important trends in SaaS. Adobe paid 14.8x

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Acquisition Trends Software Revenue 124

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2022

Let’s take a look at 3 B2B acquisitions from a few years back as an example. Let’s first start with the $35m acquisition of TokBox after 11 years and the $220m acquisition of SpringCM after 13 years. talking about “tuck-in” acquisitions that can attach to existing revenue streams.

Venture Capital 354

Venture Capital Acquisition AI Pricing 354

User Pilot

FEBRUARY 4, 2023

Growth analytics looks at all parts of the process of growth and chooses the metrics that surround product growth, including monthly recurring revenue (MRR), annual recurring revenue (ARR), cost per acquisition (CPA), conversion rates, revenue growth, and more. How a cohort table can plug your leaky bucket.

Acquisition 98

Acquisition Retention Churn Metrics 98

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

Sixteen Ventures

AUGUST 14, 2022

You want NRR to be over 100%, because that means – in theory – you could turn off new customer acquisition and the company wouldn’t just continue to generate revenue, but would actually grow. Why they’re investing in you. If you added more than you lost, you will have “retained” greater than 100%.

Customer Success 97

Customer Success Investment Sales Hiring Retention 97

SaaStr

MARCH 14, 2024

What’s your most recent disclosed investment? Native integrations are key to customer acquisition and retention in the SaaS space, but not what makes your product special so we believe these integrations should and will be built utilizing tools, not writing custom code. Check that out here. Why did you do the deal?

Scale 187

Scale B2B Investment Acquisition 187

User Pilot

AUGUST 6, 2023

A consistent omnichannel customer experience can improve satisfaction , build loyalty , drive acquisition, increase retention , boost LTV, and help you make data-driven decisions. User acquisition. Optimizing the omnichannel customer experience increases the odds of each touchpoint leading to a conversion. Higher retention.

Investment 88

Investment Banking Social Media Customer Lifetime Value 88

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

The software M&A (mergers and acquisitions) market saw its best year yet in 2020, and it’s on track to see another record year in 2021. VC-backed startups are buying other startups at the fastest pace in over a decade and North American startup investment totaled 155 billion this year so far. Thomas Smale, FE International.

Scale 52

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 52

SaaStr

MARCH 29, 2024

So the other day a CEO reached out to me about advice on an acquisition. I’d actually invested in the #1 in the space, which today is at $200m+ ARR. So this CEO really wanted to buy a startup at around $10m ARR, that actually wasn’t remotely close to #1 in the space, and wasn’t growing anymore.

Pricing 230

Pricing Scale Startup Acquisition 230

Tom Tunguz

JULY 30, 2023

The acquisition is notable for two reasons. In buyouts, the acquirers invest some cash, but borrow 50-75% of the transaction value. This acquisition is a bet that the company can be run more efficiently. Earlier today, New Relic announced its sale to Francisco Partners & TPG for $6.5b.

Payment Services 226

Payment Services Sales Acquisition SaaS 226

OPEXEngine

APRIL 26, 2022

Well, capturing as much total available market (TAM) makes growing your business through customer acquisition necessary. What is Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)? Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is arguably one of the most important metrics for fast-growing B2B SaaS companies. So why even bother?

Acquisition 59

Acquisition B2B Benchmarks SaaS 59

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2023

And realistically, cut off any potential M&A acquisitions deals for even hundreds of millions of dollars. Well, there aren’t that many acquisitions in general in SaaS, no matter how it looks on TechCrunch. If your NRR is over 100%, that’s a kind of magic if you invest in it. What do I mean? Keep your customers happy.

Acquisition 289

Acquisition Startup Business Model SaaS 289

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 20, 2023

This means for every sales and marketing dollar invested the company purchases an additional 60 cents of gross profit in the next period. before the announcement of the acquisition a company traded at a 4.2x before the announcement of the acquisition a company traded at a 4.2x The net income margin of negative 7.6%

Trends 196

Trends Software Review Acquisition Pricing 196

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2024

Build trust, which is essential during an acquisition. In general, your valuation is a hard floor on a good acquisition price. You’d essentially be walking away from a $100M acquisition in that moment. Once you sign an LOI, you aren’t engaging in acquisition talks with anyone else, which means they have all the leverage.

Underperforming Technical Team 164

Underperforming Technical Team Data Development Team Review Technical Review 164

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 6, 2022

PLG companies R&D spend hasn’t produced new business at the same rate as a dollar invested in sales & marketing post-Covid. Some about the data: PLG companies R&D spend hasn’t produced new business at the same rate as a dollar invested in sales & marketing post-Covid.

Headcount 317

Headcount Market Research Acquisition Education 317

SaaStr

AUGUST 31, 2023

How I Took Our Team’s Sequencing From 2-3% Reply Rates to 18-26% with Katie Penner, Head of Sales Development Strategy & Enablement Sendoso How Sales Can Use PLG to Accelerate Customer Acquisition and Expansion with Abhyuday “Uday” Chakravarthi, Founder & CEO of Clinch, Ex-Head of Product, Growth #4.

Venture Capital 208

Venture Capital Acquisition AI Innovation 208

SaaStr

AUGUST 24, 2023

Your VCs may be hoping to make 50x-100x their investment, but they are expecting to make at least 3x. Had an investment with a quiet but big nine-figure exit this week The key? There aren’t as many $100m+ acquisitions as you might think. So a lot of founders and VC talk about “optionality”, and it’s an interesting topic.

Venture Capital 180

Venture Capital Acquisition Pricing Investment 180

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2022

Managers of paid acquisition, organic acquisition, and marketing operations/systems report to the head of demand generation. Hiring doers first means more immediate impact to the organization with less initial investment, perhaps betting the initial recruit grows into the management role. Who should be the first marketing hire

Startup 361

Startup Acquisition Product Marketing Scaling 361

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

PE wants to invest in leaders, if not necessarily always #1 in a category. The startup I invested in that were acquired by PE in the 2020-2021 Boom were acquired for 8x in one case, 12x in another, and 15x in a third. Products that are as close to an annuity as possible, that are amenable to efficiency gains. What did he find?

AWS 239

AWS SaaS Pricing Acquisition 239

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

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Acquisition Startup Banking Benchmarks 100