Clouded Judgement

MARCH 28, 2025

Fast forward to the launch of AWS and the public cloud. Given most software companies are not profitable, or not generating meaningful FCF, it’s the only metric to compare the entire industry against. I created this subset to show companies where FCF is a relevant valuation metric. So why try and compete now?

Cloud 299

Cloud AI Scale Scaling 299

Clouded Judgement

JULY 18, 2025

There are so many similar stories coming out of AWS ReInvent every year. It was ~4 years after AWS was launched and the public cloud started to take off. Given most software companies are not profitable, or not generating meaningful FCF, it’s the only metric to compare the entire industry against.

Cloud 144

Cloud AWS ChatGPT AI 144

Clouded Judgement

OCTOBER 11, 2024

The hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP) are always some of the first companies to report earnings during earnings season (coming up in 2 weeks), and there’s always a read through for consumption names (meaning people believe there’s a correlation). I created this subset to show companies where FCF is a relevant valuation metric.

Cloud 167

Cloud Cost optimization & reporting GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Review 167

How To Buy Saas

MAY 29, 2025

In one retail example, a CEO might use an AI tool to draft a summary of key performance metrics or ask a virtual assistant to highlight emerging market trends. AWS explains that intelligent automation (IA) is the process of using artificial intelligence (AI) to make self-improving software automation.

Artificial Intelligence 59

Artificial Intelligence Payment Services Payments SaaS Payments 59

How To Buy Saas

JUNE 18, 2025

This fuels a robust ecosystem of AI chips (Nvidia, AMD), cloud AI services (AWS Sagemaker, Azure AI, Google Cloud AI), and SaaS integration (Salesforce Einstein, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Adobe Firefly). AWS Trainium2 & Ultracluster supercomputer details unveiled; embeds 64 Trainium chips, used by Anthropic + Apple trials.

AI 69

AI Scale Technical Review Software Review 69

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

They each have some of the largest cloud businesses in the world in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud respectively. Given most software companies are not profitable, or not generating meaningful FCF, it’s the only metric to compare the entire industry against. Overall, there was weakness across the board.

Systems Review 144

Systems Review Cloud AI Artificial Intelligence 144

Teamgate

JUNE 11, 2025

By combining logs, metrics, and traces, Middleware offers actionable insights into API performance. Developers can set business-critical metrics and receive immediate alerts whenever an API call fails. Real-Time Monitoring and Alerts Uptrace delivers unified real-time monitoring by integrating traces, metrics, and logs.

Scale 52

Scale Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Payments 52

How To Buy Saas

MAY 21, 2025

Other features include customizable hiring workflows , integrated video interviews , assessment tools , and deep analytics for hiring metrics. It also offers features to support Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) , such as anonymous applications to reduce bias and tools to track diversity metrics.

Systems Review 52

Systems Review Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Technical Review 52

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2025

4 Learnings on Snowflake’s Future Direction The CFO Test is Coming: As Snowflake bills become the “second largest after AWS” for many enterprises, the pressure to prove ROI intensifies dramatically. “We want to build features, not fix problems.”

AI 269

AI DevOps as a Service Scale Outsourced Development 269

Full Session

DECEMBER 30, 2024

Integrations PostHog works well with Kafka, Slack, AWS, Google Cloud, GitHub, Tableau, and Looker. PostHogs ability to host data on your servers offers greater privacy control than VWOs cloud-based model. This setup benefits companies with strict data privacy requirements or those who want more control over their data.

Payment Methods 52

Payment Methods Payment Solutions Payments SaaS Payments 52

User Pilot

MAY 27, 2025

Track mobile app engagement metrics with Userpilot. Once segmented, compare app performance metrics like engagement, retention, or feature usage across groups. That means each group uses your app differently, so looking at generalized metrics alone can hide important patterns. Why track in-app user behavior?

Mobile 96

Mobile Retention Payment Features Onboarding 96

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 7, 2025

With a background that includes leadership roles at AWS, Microsoft, and Lenovo, Fred brings a wealth of experience in building high-performing teams and driving revenue growth. And I know you’ve had some great experience, particularly while you were at AWS, running different partner sales, channel sales. They cannot resell.

Outsourcing Services 117

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development AWS 117

User Pilot

MARCH 5, 2025

It lets you track key engagement metrics like feature adoption, interaction with in-app guides, and product engagement scores, all within customizable dashboards. Its hosted in AWS and SOC 2 Type 2 compliant. Dashboard widgets: This feature is a vital part of Pendos analytics tools.

Software Review 52

Software Review Engagement Software Scale 52

User Pilot

APRIL 2, 2025

Key capabilities include segmentation, which allows you to group users based on behavior, demographics, or custom properties; custom analytics dashboards, which visualize the metrics that matter most to your team; and screen-level analytics, which show exactly how users interact with each part of your app.

Mobile 66

Mobile Underperforming Technical Team Onboarding AWS 66

Crafty CTO

JUNE 18, 2025

Building Agents at Cloud-Scale Speaker: Antje Barth ( AWS ) – Session video As with Microsoft’s keynote featuring Asha Sharma, this session with AWS’s Antje Barth set off my “oh no, vendor flogging ahead” warning lights. AWS Strands Agents (SA).

Engineering 52

Engineering AI Search AI Payment Solutions 52

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 4, 2024

“AWS’ AI business is a multibillion-dollar revenue run rate business that continues to grow at a triple-digit year-over-year percentage and is growing more than 3x faster at this stage of its evolution as AWS itself grew, and we felt like AWS grew pretty quickly.” GCP 23 35 52.2% Azure 26 33 26.9%

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 225

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Azure AWS Cloud 225

Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 1, 2023

Subscribe now Amazon ReInvent This week Amazon had their annual AWS ReInvent conference. ” AWS fully embracing the breadth over depth approach. Looking at the mid to long term, we feel very optimistic about the outlook for strong AWS growth. I created this subset to show companies where FCF is a relevant valuation metric.

AWS 299

AWS Cloud AI Search Cost optimization & reporting 299

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 13, 2021

For this reason, we chose to run exclusively on AWS and wherever possible, we make use of battle-tested AWS services, be it RDS Aurora for our relational databases, the Simple Queue Service (SQS) for our async workers or ElastiCache for our caching layer. SSM executes the commands using an on-instance daemon agent called AWS SSM Agent.

AWS 249

AWS Cloud Software Review Systems Review 249

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Check out this 2018 Europa session with Guillaume Princen, Head of France and Southern Europe @ Stripe, where he talks about the metrics you need to be focused on in your startup. If you don’t have the time to watch the whole session, here are the main metrics you should be mindful of. MRR, obviously. We talked about churn.

SaaS Payments 247

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 247

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 18, 2023

And realistically, most won’t have the metrics to pull off another round. Shopify , Datadog, Crowdstrike , Google Cloud-Azure-AWS, Snowflake , etc. Something that’s both not surprising but also pretty impactful: 57% of venture-backed startups will have to go “back to market” in 2024 to raise more capital.

Startup 357

Startup Venture Capital Azure AWS 357

SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

Recently I was catching up with a good friend who used to be CEO of an enterprise-y SaaS social networking company — and the usage and engagement numbers of his business were just awful. So the buyer really doesn’t even have any success metrics going into the first renewal.

AWS 337

AWS Churn Enterprise Engagement 337

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

Through these interactions, I’ve built up mental benchmarks for metrics on which I place extra emphasis. My hope is that this analysis can provide startup entrepreneurs with a framework for how to manage their businesses around SaaS metrics (e.g., This metric is more self-explanatory, so I won’t go into detail.

Cloud 318

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 25, 2022

We work exclusively with AWS as our cloud services provider and currently provide data hosting offerings in three different global regions – US, EU, and Australia – each architected across multiple availability zones for high availability. Our tooling allows for high availability.

Scaling 252

Scaling AWS Software Review Technical Review 252

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

Culture Structure You want a culture of checking results and having metrics to evaluate those results from the LLM or a more traditional model. You want a culture that focuses on your metrics and evaluating what’s important to you. Whatever the metric is, you have to translate that into a concrete metric.

AI Search 287

AI Search AI Scale Artificial Intelligence 287

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

So one thing that has exploded in SaaS in the past decade is the role of Private Equity buying both public SaaS companies (to take them private, “fix” some metrics, and IPO or sell them again), and generally later-stage private SaaS companies. You might be worth less ? is interesting to see.

AWS 318

AWS SaaS Pricing Acquisition 318

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Datadog, ZoomInfo, Atlassian, AWS: Epic Growth — But Some Real Headwinds For The First Time. Live: SaaStr Workshop Wednesday with Battery Ventures on SaaS Metrics. 5 Interesting Learnings from Duolingo at $360,000,000 in ARR.

Sales Recruiting 291

Sales Recruiting AWS Compensation Enterprise 291

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

Growing Almost 50% as Approaches $2B in ARR The exact growth rate is based on an The Information report from a few weeks ago, and it seems about right looking at their published metrics. That’s awfully impressive. Importantly, growth has accelerated this year.

AWS 307

AWS B2C Scaling AI 307

Tom Tunguz

JULY 8, 2020

This modern architecture for data analysis, operational metrics, and machine learning enables companies to process data in new ways. The conference features talks from practitioners and open-source leaders from the ecosystem from Netflix, Microsoft, Expedia, AWS, and Preset.

Data Analysis 258

Data Analysis Cloud Data Scaling 258

Chargify

AUGUST 17, 2020

However, with the introduction of Events-Based Billing by Chargify, this event-based billing model is now available to small and medium-sized businesses, giving them the ability to offer the same pricing models and bill customers just as precisely as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or the popular voice and messaging platform Twilio.

AWS 98

AWS Payment Services SaaS Payments Payments 98

SaaStr

MAY 19, 2019

This is a critical metric. Gross margins have grown to best-of-breed at 83%, after a migration to AWS and more automation in customer support. Aim for that at least in your SMB segment if you can, and if you can provide at least as much value as Xero. Customer Lifetime Value is 81 months, from SMB That’s impressive.

SMB 270

SMB Customer Lifetime Value AWS Churn 270

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2021

Commoditization From AWS & Google Cloud. In addition, the SaaS metrics dramatically improved, including increased growth rate, faster pipeline velocity, shorter sales cycle length, and higher gross margin. No matter what VP of Sales they hired, sales consistently failed to meet their quota. Competition in the market rose sharply.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Data AWS Leadership 307

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

For example, Google and AWS are already ZoomInfo customers, but only certain sub-segments within those businesses – not the entire org. The Takeaway — While 2024 should be a bit more predictable, the most important metrics ZoomInfo is focusing on now are utilization and engagement.

New CTO 312

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 312

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

And it’s one of the three large cloud vendors that we all know: Microsoft, AWS, and Google. AWS’s marketplace has seen 1.5 But also it’s allowed us to get much closer to our provider, I mean, we host and run 100% on AWS, but pull data from everywhere. It was pretty easy to drive that from our side.

Scale 259

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 259

SaaStr

APRIL 3, 2021

There’s a metric the very top founders track quitely, but ruthlessly, that I find other founders either don’t track, or sort of hide from. DigitalOcean is growing more slowly than its mega competitors Azure, AWS, etc. That’s % of marketshare. And importantly, if it’s growing, or shrinking. Why does it matter?

Azure 239

Azure Headcount AWS Education 239

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2021

Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Global Vice President for AWS Storage will deliver one of the keynotes. Data modelling companies create single definitions of metrics for consistency across organizations. This time, the conference will build on the foundation from last year’s event. Data engines query the data rapidly, inexpensively.

VP of Engineering 203

VP of Engineering Cloud Data AWS 203

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Now, let’s take this idea and apply it to the world of marketing metrics. Knowing that people are incentivized by what they’re rewarded for, marketing metrics boil down to alignment. If revenue is the North Star metric, everything you do should drive towards that. They are a vanity metric. Our unanimous pick?

Metrics 121

Metrics Revenue Scale Marketing 121

Clouded Judgement

MAY 3, 2024

We now have results from the three hypersclaers (AWS / Azure / GCP). The most notable change in tone was Andy Jassy talking about AWS. Given most software companies are not profitable, or not generating meaningful FCF, it’s the only metric to compare the entire industry against.

Cost optimization & reporting 190

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Software Azure 190