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. The prices would be lower today for the latter two I suspect. So what do they pay on average?

AWS 230

AWS SaaS Pricing Acquisition 230

SaaStr

DECEMBER 30, 2022

Cliff Bockard, Senior Vice President of Revenue at DigitalOcean, joined us at SaaStr Scale to discuss how businesses can serve SMBs and still bring in large numbers of revenue. . SMBs usually prioritize simplicity, ease of use, transparent pricing, and support. DigitalOcean has done that and grown beyond $150M in revenue in Q3 2022.

Scale 182

Scale Scaling Revenue Enterprise 182

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

GC thinks about building out your Go-To-Market team in 3 ways: Short vs. long-term needs Product maturity Experimental vs. scale Short-term vs. long-term needs. Experimental vs. Scale. The last thing to consider when hiring on the GTM side is whether the role is more experimental or intended to help you scale.

Scale 241

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 241

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 31, 2023

The anticipation of a rate change drives fear of target acquisition valuations. In the last two years, M&A has totaled about $49b & it surges to above $60b driven by AI acquisitions. We also see more ARR-based web3 businesses achieving scale. The Fed cuts rates, which helps. M&A accelerates throughout the year.

AI Search 208

AI Search AI Scale Headcount 208

Neil Patel

NOVEMBER 9, 2020

Plus, the price tag on those more established businesses often run into the billions. 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. The solution?

Technical Review 144

Technical Review Payment Methods Acquisition Development Team Review 144

SaaSOptics

AUGUST 11, 2022

Raise, Sell, Merge, or Scale? So far this year, only 42 companies have priced IPO offerings. In this article, we’ll help you determine the next best step for your business and provide guidance on whether you should raise, sell, merge, or scale your SaaS. Option 3: Mergers and acquisitions. billion in 2020 to $55.9

Scale 97

Scale Scaling Technical Review Venture Capital 97

User Pilot

JULY 4, 2023

Read on to discover how to cross the chasm and scale your technology company. Implement a product-led growth strategy to allow early adopters a chance to test your product without making an investment. Getting the right positioning, messaging, key features, and pricing is vital before entering the mainstream market.

Scale 98

Scale Scaling Technical Review SaaS 98

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 29, 2022

Free user acquisition. Stage 3: Prove scalable quality user acquisition. It’s time to reduce the customer acquisition cost by experimenting with content marketing and virality. They invest development resources for non-technical people to quickly run and analyze these experiments. This adoption funnel goes through: .

Technical Review 223

Technical Review Technical Advisors Scale Compensation 223

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2022

Weave started off as a dental ERP and comms platform (including VoIP / phone), and then expanded beyond that as it scaled. It’s a tough outcome for a team that is working hard to scale well into the nine figures of ARR. A fairly standard SMB price point. But I thought I’d take a deeper look at one example, Weave.

SaaS Payments 220

SaaS Payments Scale Payment Methods Payments 220

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2022

She draws from personal experience scaling a global product company to $1B and shares common mistakes. The establishment of the enablement function is vital in scaling a business. You need a sales enablement team if your company has scaled to over $10 million ARR. Contract processes, packaging, and pricing might change.

Scale 202

Scale Sales Hiring Revenue Marketplace as a Service 202

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. Speak to other founders.

Acquisition 105

Acquisition Startup Technical Review Scale 105

Baremetrics

AUGUST 8, 2021

For most SaaS businesses, customer acquisition is one of the most challenging stages of growth. For most, the easiest ways to increase customer acquisition rates are to offer a freemium model or price your product on the lower end of the spectrum. Ensures You Attract the Right Customers When Should You Increase Your Pricing?

Pricing 111

Pricing SaaS Scale Churn 111

SaaStr

APRIL 25, 2019

If your price point is say $20k+ or higher, even just a couple of good leads can easily be ROI positive. It’s still a great investment. Invest in your long tail. Yes, we’d all love 100% viral acquisition. The post What are some things you can do early on to make scaling SaaS easier? Lots of them.

Scale 192

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling SaaS 192

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 5, 2024

They’ve shown they can hit escape velocity, at scale, with profitability. Competitors start telling prospects you’re competing on that “that company will screw you in the future because their VCs will force them to price gouge you so they can make money.” This list goes on. That’s super unique.

Cloud 161

Cloud Scale Pricing Revenue 161

SaaStr

JUNE 6, 2022

In 2019, they also acquired Quovo, a company that focused on investment accounts, to make it easier for consumers to manage their investments. When asked about the acquisition, Perret commented, “People asked if we had an acquisition strategy. Building the Platform, Scaling the Business, and Fostering Financial Inclusion.

Banking 219

Banking Scale Acquisition Interviewing 219

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2022

By moving from Freemium to “Contact Me” only (albeit with transparent pricing), sales went way, way up. Adobe shut off our Free edition almost immediately after our acquisition, as they didn’t really want to deal with all the noise it created. But it’s still a reminder of how far it can scale.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Engineering Acquisition 273

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 20, 2023

Announcements of several blockbuster acquisitions, most notably from Adobe acquiring Figma, which was the highest valuation multiple offered in an acquisition for any software company at scale. As it scaled, they realized they needed to layer in inorganic channels of growth while keeping an eye on efficiency.

Cloud 226

Cloud Payments Software Review Payment Solutions 226

User Pilot

OCTOBER 5, 2023

TL;DR The CAC payback period measures the time it takes for a company to recover the money invested in new customer acquisition. This metric helps SaaS companies choose the most effective customer acquisition channels , diagnose inefficiencies in customer retention strategies , and inform pricing decisions.

SaaS Payments 105

SaaS Payments Customer Lifetime Value Payment Solutions Acquisition 105

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

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2020

But New Relic has continued to scale, crossing $650,000,000 in ARR (or so) and a $4B market cap. Slow growth means a low multiple. If New Relic had even 120% NRR, it’s growth rate with the exact same rate of new customer acquisition would be 137% instead. It’s the secret to scaling effectively.

Scale 281

Scale Outsourced Development SMB Cloud 281

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2023

In part two we head into IPO waters, how to incorporate AI into your products, the best way to drive employee performance, pricing models, and much more. Q: How do you stand out in terms of customer acquisition against large competitors who aren’t incorporating AI? Q: As you scale, how metrics-oriented should the company be?

Scale 211

Scale Sales Hiring Customer Success AI 211

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 22, 2024

And once a customer has paid back the initial acquisitions costs to acquire it, all future streams of revenue can loosely be described as a cash flow annuity. But this is changing - many categories are becoming commoditized leading to massive pricing pressure. Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S.

AI 183

AI Revenue Cloud Technical Advisors 183

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2023

This thought is usually accompanied by a vague statement like “this person isn’t scaling.” Mistake: Not scaling based upon leading indicators We’ve had 3 periods in history where we scaled up way too fast: Early on, when we thought the enterprise opportunity for Gainsight’s Customer Success product was huge after closing *1* enterprise deal!

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Scaling Customer Success 246

SaaStr

MARCH 11, 2023

It’s a good rationalization when you’ve invested in a good company that just was way, way overvalued at the peak, or for whatever reason, in the last round. Every top VC has several of these unicorns and pre-microns in their portfolios that are doing fine, but aren’t worth a fraction of their last round price.

Banking 225

Banking Startup Acquisition Pricing 225

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

This has all resulted in the median stock price declining 5% YTD. As a public company with significant scale, it’s hard to grow quickly if you have to rely solely on new customers for that growth. Change in Share Price At the end of the day what investors care about is what happened to the stock after earnings were reported.

Cloud 169

Cloud Software Azure AWS 169

SaaStr

JULY 27, 2022

Boterri’s company Accel invested in PayFit in 2017 and again in 2021. You need volume, not top expertise or the high salary price tag that comes with enterprise AEs. . Secret 4: Be Transparent About Pricing and Keep It Simple. . On the contrary, simple pricing attracts more self-serve business. .

SMB 175

SMB Sales Hiring Scale B2C 175

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. Speak to other founders.

Acquisition 52

Acquisition Startup Technical Review Scale 52

Casey Accidental

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

Most companies have a primary acquisition loop that drives this scalable growth, and unfortunately, there aren’t that many acquisition loops that really scale. Even when they scale, they eventually asymptote, and companies need to find new ways to grow. What they stop doing is leaving.

Payments 62

Payments Scale Payment Methods Underperforming Technical Team 62

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 22, 2020

Enter usage-based pricing. In this guide, we’ll take a deep dive into usage-based pricing, how it works and who it’s for. What is usage-based pricing? What are the advantages of usage-based pricing? What are the advantages of usage-based pricing? What are the downsides of usage-based pricing?

SaaS Payments 80

SaaS Payments Pricing Scale Payment Services 80

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Call me when it scales.” At that point it becomes a lot harder because the next set of customer acquisition channels will likely be much more expensive. About two years ago, Josh Hannah of Matrix Partners wrote an excellent article titled “That's a nice little $40M eCommerce company you have there. It’ll depend on who you ask.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

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. Before that, I was at a company called Grasswire, and in both of those companies we had to acquire customers for about 1/10th the price of our competitors. Thank you so much.

Acquisition 135

Acquisition Software Review Payment Methods Marketplace as a Service 135

SaaStr

JANUARY 22, 2021

A product-led growth strategy relies on the product itself as the primary vehicle for customer acquisition, conversion, retention, and expansion. Pricing strategy based on pay-as-you-go has grown popular. The return on marketing investment is much faster. Product-Led Growth: The Disruptive GTM Strategy.

Scale 253

Scale New CTO CTO Acquisition 253

SaaStr

APRIL 24, 2019

Alexandr Wang is the Founder & CEO @ Scale, the startup providing high quality training and validation data for AI applications. To date, Alexandr has raised over $23m with Scale from some of the best in the business including Index, Accel, Y Combinator, Dropbox’s Drew Houston, Justin Kan, Thumbtack’s Jonathan Swanson and more.

Scale 124

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Customer Success 124

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

So how can you leverage that product’s success to obtain the valuation and funding you need to scale? I’m talking about product-led growth as an investment strategy, but really my background is 10 years of operating experience in the product-led growth world. Now I’m investing in that. And, wonderful products.

Investment 100

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 100

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 17, 2023

While the allure of customer acquisition can pull a founder’s attention, it’s equally important to dedicate resources to fighting churn and expanding revenue from existing customers. Remember, this is not a one-time exercise –– it requires continuous investment and attention. Something missing? Friction in usage?

Retention 192

Retention Revenue Startup Sales Hiring 192

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

User Pilot

OCTOBER 26, 2023

Product-led growth uses the product as the primary driver of customer acquisition and retention, with minimal reliance on traditional sales and marketing. SaaS companies enhance customer acquisition and retention through personalized onboarding and in-app guidance. This reduces the customer acquisition and support costs dramatically.

Acquisition 105

Acquisition Scale Onboarding Marketplace as a Service 105