Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 9, 2016

What are the attributes of the ideal SMB SaaS company, an entrepreneur asked me recently. I believe that the next wave of SaaS companies will be centered around workflows, Event Driven SaaS , and this extends to SMB SaaS. Acquisition. This is a combination of a product attribute and an acquisition attribute.

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SMB SaaS Acquisition Education 100

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2022

While these aren’t great metrics if Weave was enterprise, they are still solid for SMBs. Many SMB SaaS companies struggle to hit 100% NRR and 80% GRR. ” But it’s also a reminder how hard it is to combine services, hardware and software and make money from SMBs. #3. A fairly standard SMB price point.

SaaS Payments 240

SaaS Payments Scale Payment Methods Payments 240

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 1, 2023

119% NRR from SMBs Profitable, and only burned $15m net to date 130,000 total customers There’s not much to not love here! But the metrics, especially for an SMB-focused SaaS business, are breathtaking. 14 Month CAC CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is one of those metrics there are about 10,000 ways to calculate.

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Scale SMB Sales Hiring Interviewing 226

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 17, 2023

The Next Best in About 5 Years. 5 Interesting Learnings from Samsara At Almost $1 Billion in ARR Top Podcasts This Week: 1.

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Scale Management SMB AI 217

SaaStr

APRIL 24, 2022

BowtiedCocoon: Top SaaS SMB AEs have $125k OTEs. The Private Equity Math of 1+1=3 in SaaS Acquisitions. Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: 1. But The Best Ones Make $261k. Every Investor is Different. But Here Are 22 Reasons I Generally Say “No” 3.

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Sales Hiring Revenue Scale SMB 272

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.

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Scale Strategy Scaling Outbound Sales Team 231

SaaStr

JANUARY 4, 2023

They had a bit of dip in growth as they worked to integrate the mega-acquisition of Auth0 — but then went right back to growth. Okta is seeing higher SMB churn and more ROI scrutiny, but is also benefitting from some customers wanting to centralize on fewer core vendors. Even now, even in times of tighter scrutiny of budgets.

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Scale Headcount Sales Hiring SMB 281

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 16, 2013

At first glance, SMB SaaS companies, those who sell Software-as-a-Service to small to medium businesses, may seem like any other software company. Successful SMB SaaS companies have reinvented their businesses eschewing the expensive enterprise sales model in favor of end-user centric marketing, support and product development.

SMB 100

SMB Scale Startup SaaS 100

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2022

It still has very strong NRR for a still muchly SMB and mid-market product at 135%, with no decline since the same 135% at $400m in ARR. #2. SaaS leaders at scale often find their cost per acquisition goes up at scale, at they saturate the market, but Monday has gotten better and better here: #8. This slide below I found interesting.

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Headcount SMB Engineering Scaling 289

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 24, 2022

Where there’s a viral boost to acquisition. That’s Aaron Levie’s argument here: * Hire a great VP of Marketing with a strong SMB and growth background. PLG, or Product-Led Growth, can mean, so many things. Everyone would prefer a product where 50% or more of the leads come from the product itself. And by all means go build that.

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Sales Hiring Scale SMB Acquisition 227

SaaStr

DECEMBER 2, 2020

” as it now joins Salesforce in a 27B+ mega-acquisition. But Slack’s SMBs seem to have accelerated, too, since then. Slack’s remained 50/50 enterprise / SMB for 3 quarters, and close to it for 5. All 3 are holding relatively consistent enterprise/SMB ratios: 40% of revenue from outside U.S.

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SMB Enterprise Cloud Retention 245

SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2021

The average SMB SaaS company has $295k in revenue per employee, and $450k in the enterprise. Private Equity did 48+ $100m acquisitions in 2020. An argument the top SaaS companies figure out how to grow their TAM … almost forever. An important metric we don’t look at often enough. We’ve seeing it live.

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Investment SMB Acquisition Cloud 236

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

This may look like moving from a mid-market business to an SMB, and eventually to an enterprise. Mergers and acquisitions. As SaaS businesses expand, we are seeing more technology, business acquisitions, and inorganic growth. Achieving 10X growth results from the repeated execution of common SaaS growth strategies.

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Scale Finance Sales Hiring Scaling 203

SaaStr

DECEMBER 17, 2020

#1: “Mastering the Art and Science of Product-Led Growth with Gainsight” Over 20,000 tuned into this session on what Gainsight has learned here, on the heels of its $1B+ acquisition by Vista. #2: 3: “Soc 2 Demystified: The Key to Closing Enterprise Deals with Vanta.”

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Scale Scaling SMB Acquisition 171

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

They had been building toward an SMB audience, so hiring 50 people in sales against a product that wasn’t ready for a specific audience would’ve been a mistake. So when you think about acquisition, retention, and expansion, they all revolve around the product capabilities in a PLG motion. Next, think about product maturity.

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Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 260

Andreessen Horowitz

AUGUST 9, 2022

As I reflect upon my experience building Bond Street (an SMB lending startup we sold to Goldman Sachs in 2017), one of the biggest challenges we faced was in scaling customer acquisition.

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Scale Software SMB Business 102

SaaStr

AUGUST 6, 2022

And some of its most successful product expansion has come from acquisitions. HubSpot has stayed mostly SMB focused, but has over time evolved from a simple tool to the marketing and sales hub for many of its customers marketing efforts. Evernote started off as a simple note-taking and clipping app … and sort of stayed there.

Scale 278

Scale SMB Mobile Acquisition 278

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2022

Performance Marketing: Performance marketing focuses on driving volume and velocity through owned and paid ‘always on’ programs for net new leads acquisition for self serve, SMB, and enterprise accounts horizontally. . Scale your alliance and solution partner marketing portfolio to amplify net new acquisition. .

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Scale Revenue Scaling Marketing 242

SaaStr

JULY 8, 2022

Half of Gorgias’ almost 10,000 SMB customers come from partners. The Things Nobody Tells You About An $8B Acquisition with Ryan Smith from Qualtrics. #21. A classic SaaStr Annual session here that has resonated 58,400 times. #4. How Leveraging Partnerships Can 2x Your Growth with Gorgias CEO Romain Lapeyre.

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VP of Engineering Scale Outbound Sales Team SMB 237

Nimble - Sales

DECEMBER 17, 2020

Omnichannel sales are the new norm, which is still a bit confusing for SMB and big corporations alike. Those who master it do better in customer acquisition, retention, converting sales, and boosting loyalty. So much gain from adopting what’s to be the next standard anyway, – sooner rather than later.

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SMB Sales Acquisition Retention 126

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2020

Those of us who’ve been around a while think of New Relic as a freemium and almost SMB tool, but today 77% of their revenue comes from accounts greater than $100k. If New Relic had even 120% NRR, it’s growth rate with the exact same rate of new customer acquisition would be 137% instead.

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Scale Outsourced Development SMB Cloud 301

Sales Hacker

APRIL 15, 2019

He also gives us a framework for how to move upmarket, and the requirements for taking a company from the SMB space all the way to the enterprise. Strategies for moving upmarket, and how to transition from SMB to enterprise. We have account executives, who are purely new business acquisition. What You’ll Learn.

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SMB Enterprise Scale VP of Engineering 58

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2021

Zendesk’s Sharon Prosser, VP Worldwide SMB Sales & XDR, and Astha Malik, VP GTM Strategy, Planning, and Enablement share some guiding principles about how their company has grown and enriched many markets. The X-Factors.

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Scale Scaling Sales Hiring SMB 194

SaaStr

AUGUST 30, 2023

They have privacy, security, vendor transitions, and acquisition support. You can filter your search by industry, whether you’re SMB, mid-market, or Enterprise, etc. On sites like G2, it makes sense that the number one slot is a safe bet. They’ve been in the game for a while, so the product works. Let’s look at an example.

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AI Search AI ChatGPT Software Review 200

Tom Tunguz

JULY 15, 2019

Open source remains a viable customer acquisition strategy despite the threat from the cloud vendors; Amazon in particular. Last, I bucketed the companies into price segments: SMB, Mid-Market and Enterprise, based on my estimates of their ACVs. But this data suggests the distribution will be markedly different in a few years.

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Enterprise Payments Payment Solutions SMB 192

SaaStr

APRIL 6, 2019

But the most relevant lesson for most of us is how much more capital efficiency SaaS business are with even partial viral customer acquisition. It can be tempting to let the SMB side of the business go as you scale. SaaS business often have a low viral coefficient, if they have one at all. And a material boost to growth.

SMB 236

SMB Acquisition Scaling Engineering 236

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2023

CAC stands for Customer Acquisition Costs and measures how much it costs to buy a new customer. That works for a hyper-SMB model. No one gets in right in sales and marketing, but if you can put a little more budget into growth vs. new acquisition, magic can happen. You can read more about real-world ARR examples here.

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Metrics SaaS Sales Hiring Finance 195

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 9, 2023

Very healthy new business (new customer) acquisition. Coming out of earning season I’m slightly more optimistic about a back half acceleration (August or later) than I was coming in. The Good Mongo: Very Positive - Is The Bottom Behind Them? They guided to 26-27% growth in Azure in Q2 (with 1% coming from AI).

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Trends Cloud Azure AWS 130

SaaStr

MARCH 17, 2021

For example, while things weren’t all roses after our acquisition, that same team that was killing it at $1m a month in MRR was far better at $2m and $3m MRR than they were at $1m. Because the sales cycles are so much faster with SMBs, you just learn faster. They almost always came up through SMB / corporate sales.

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Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale SMB 289

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 22, 2024

For SaaS businesses that target smaller SMB customer segments, gross retention is typically in the mid to low 80’s with net expansion in the ~105% range. 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.

AI 183

AI Revenue Cloud Technical Advisors 183

OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 27, 2020

Imagine that you have just signed an LOI for the acquisition of your company. Over the past 24 months, due to some high-profile acquisition disasters, it has become critical — and standard. The cost per hack of an SMB company is minimal and the number of SMB cyber events is growing by 10% year over year.

Systems Review 69

Systems Review Technical Review Cybersecurity SaaS 69

FastSpring

DECEMBER 7, 2023

“This is everyday for me, so I love talking about it,” says Carl Hargreaves about mergers and acquisitions. As the Director of Corporate Development & Strategic Partnerships at WP Engine , Carl has worked on many acquisitions and partnerships, including brands like Flywheel, Perfect Dashboard, Block Lab, and recently, Delicious Brains.

Software Review 136

Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review Branding 136

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

Scaling Enterprise vs. Mid-Market Sales: Key Takeaways from Calendly It’s a common blueprint to start with SMB and mid-market accounts as your ideal customers. So, they made some changes to the product, made acquisitions, changed pricing, packaging, messaging, and positioning alongside improvements in the sales organization.

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Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 228

SaaStr

DECEMBER 17, 2019

Zoom is growing faster with SMB customers than anyone else before. The Things Nobody Tells You About an $8B Acquisition with Ryan Smith from Qualtrics. Ryan did a lot of press and PR after the acquisition, but we dug into the founder journey in some pretty unique ways. 5 Interesting Learnings from Zoom as It IPOs.

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Scale SMB Cloud Acquisition 133

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2019

Enterprise deals are nothing like SMB deals, most especially over the long term. Even post-acquisition. Force your team to launch at least one “Surprise and Delight” feature each quarter than every customer can at least appreciate, even if they don’t use it immediately. At least for Decades.

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Scale Churn Construction SMB 347

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 9, 2021

Bill.com has become an SMB powerhouse, with 120,000+ customers and a stunning $25B+ market cap. But the accountant channel is high volume, SMB play. There are 6m SMBs that buy SaaS software. There are 6m customers out there just in SMB. A good acquisition expands the TAM. That’s the magic in SMB SaaS.

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SaaS Payments Payments Payment Services Scale 56

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2014

HubSpot is the second fastest SMB SaaS company to IPO yet, achieving the mark within 8 years. Most other SMB companies, defined for this analysis as having an ARPC of less than $15,000, took at least one more year to go public. Impressively, HubSpot has been able to record much faster revenue growth than other SMB SaaS companies.

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Benchmarks SMB Metrics SaaS 108