Clouded Judgement

APRIL 28, 2023

AWS (Amazon), Azure (Microsoft), and Google Cloud (Google) all reported this week. Then AWS appeared to add fuel to that hope before giving us a huge rug pull. After all, they had a lot of AI tailwinds, and benefited tremendously from consolidation (without a headwind of a larger base of smaller startups, like AWS).

Cloud 130

Cloud Azure AWS AI Search 130

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 22, 2022

They will manage their own servers to reduce the $3m annual AWS bill by 60%. For a hypothetical startup, a 60% reduction in infrastructure costs boosts sales efficiency by 11% & net income margin by at least 12%. Downtime implies a loss of revenue, which isn’t factored into the math above.

Sales Hiring 232

Sales Hiring Cloud AWS Sales 232

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Even If It’s Awful for Series A-E Rounds. Why VCs Love Founders That Respond to Email Almost Instantly 90%-95% of Salespeople Won’t Make It At Your Startup. SaaStr 628: Revenue Alignment: How to Pull Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Together with Divvy CRO Sterling Snow  2. Really, Really, Low.

Sales Recruiting 187

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AWS 187

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Here’s an overview of the series: Part 1: How to Categorize Expenses in a SaaS Startup v2.0 Cost of Revenue Let’s start with your Cost of Revenue. The gist of it is that Cost of Revenue includes costs that go into providing your Software as a Service. Use area charts for more detail.

Merchant Services 90

Merchant Services Startup DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

2: What Keeps Someone Motivated In The Startup World Jason has been successful, has had exits, has invested in great companies, and has built SaaStr into what it is, so what motivates him and other founders to keep going? You’ve got a billion in revenue per year at Box, and yes, some of it goes to hosting and storage.

Sales Hiring 225

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 225

SaaStr

MAY 6, 2022

Ultimately — revenue multiples. Revenue multiples are how much VCs, investors, and ultimately, an IPO and public markets will value each dollar of revenue. Revenue multiples don’t affect customers, or even revenue itself. That revenue multiples should rise from where they were in 2019.

SaaS 332

SaaS Azure Cloud AWS 332

SaaStr

AUGUST 4, 2022

And inflation is awful. And startups that had planned on a big up round this year are in many cases, really struggling. Exceeding expectations again, and importantly, also raising guidance in revenues for the full year. #3. . — Jason 2022 SaaStr Annual Sep 13-15 Lemkin (@jasonlk) August 3, 2022. Certainly, segments are.

Venture Capital 284

Venture Capital AWS Cloud Scale 284

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2020

The first place to start is to learn to sell your startup’s product well. To make a partnership successful, your startup will need to teach another sales team to sell your product. Marketplaces: AWS marketplace, Heroku marketplace, Salesforce marketplace. Here are my notes. Where to Start. But, there’s a tradeoff.

Scale 309

Scale AWS Consulting Sales Enablement 309

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 9, 2023

Expansion revenue is still declining (we see this in falling net retention rates), but gross retention remains strong. Revenue multiples are a shorthand valuation framework. Multiples shown below are calculated by taking the Enterprise Value (market cap + debt - cash) / NTM revenue. New customer growth seems to be picking up.

Trends 130

Trends Cloud Azure AWS 130

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 30, 2024

Amit Pande is CMO and EVP of Strategy at Aviso AI, a leading revenue intelligence platform. Previously, Amit led marketing efforts at startups like Tact AI (1st AI Assistant for Sales backed by AWS, Microsoft, and Salesforce), HP Inc (next-gen computing) and Spire AI (Human Capital SaaS).

AWS 81

AWS AI Advertising Finance 81

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

So for the audience, cloud giants are turbocharging startup sales, and the predominant reason for this is because they’re fundamentally changing IT budgets at the customers that we’re all selling to. And it’s one of the three large cloud vendors that we all know: Microsoft, AWS, and Google. Jabari Norton. Crowdstrike.

Scale 198

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 198

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

I’m an investor in maybe 30 SaaS startups. Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? Ultimately, almost everyone in B2B SaaS, down the road, ends up getting 80%+ of their leads through their brand, through word-of-mouth, through second-order revenue, etc. Some are barely burning any cash.

Scale 280

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 280

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

Innovative startups. The first army are innovative startups. Understand the potential consequences of outsourcing to young startups. Young startups go out of business regularly and their security and reliability is often worse than more mature companies. Best in class Late-stage Startups (e.g. Mid-stage startups.

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 3, 2014

Startups benefit from a booming public market for three reasons. The chart above shows the relationship between beating earnings and Enterprise Value to Trailing-Twelve Month Revenue Multiple (EV/TTM Rev). And the recent increase in multiples implies there is no deflationary pressure on startup valuations from the public markets.

Startup 100

Startup Trends AWS Marketing 100

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

That you absolutely, positively, have to only hire “Rockstars” in your startups. What I do know, is if you leave this position vacant for even a month — you’re putting Second Order Revenue at risk. But not making the hire at all is pretty awful, too. The very best of the best. It’s true.

Sales Hiring 272

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 272

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 31, 2023

The majority of COGS (revenue less COGS = gross profit) fall in hosting costs (ie AWS), and some customer support. If they don’t want to pay double the price, then Notion has a decision to make - do they sell the Notion AI SKU at a price that dilutes gross margins if it ends up generating more revenue? Top 5 Median: 11.4x

Cloud 130

Cloud Sales Hiring AI Headcount 130

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2023

Tech companies realized that this cloud thing might be for real, but the word on the street was that AWS was too hard and complex for customers to realize its benefits. It took one year and a million dollars to create, but product traction, conversion, and revenue were low. That’s when OpDemand was born. Look at video games.

Sales Hiring 130

Sales Hiring Development AWS Engineering 130

Stax

APRIL 18, 2024

Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Software-as-a-Service Providers (SaaS) operate within the same market, thus creating a push-and-pull revenue dynamic. How companies price and distribute their solutions affects everything from revenue streams and customer interaction to product development and delivery methods.

Outsourcing Services 88

Outsourcing Services SaaS Payments Payment Services Payment Methods 88

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

In it he argues that an eCommerce business with $10 to $20 million in revenues is not that hard to build and also not very valuable. So if you start an online shop, offer products at a loss, get listed on some of the biggest comparison shopping sites and do some affiliate marketing, you can easily get to tens of millions in revenue.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 17, 2014

The concept of negative churn is a bit amorphous so let’s illustrate the impact on a startup. The chart above plots the revenue growth of a hypothetical SaaS company for a year. This startup acquires 100 customers per month, each paying $1 per month to use the product. Total Revenue in December 919 1592.

Churn 103

Churn AWS Startup Revenue 103

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 25, 2013

This is as true for their books business as their infrastructure business, AWS. Many acquirers will pursue attractive larger, revenue generating startups with an aim to keep running the business as is (without changing the economics of the business).

Acquisition 100

Acquisition Pricing AWS Startup 100

OpenView Labs

JANUARY 29, 2020

Not satisfied with reaching $1 billion in annual revenue, Atlassian furthered its commitment to product led growth by jumping on the freemium bandwagon. Is freemium an effective lead generation, conversion, and revenue driving strategy for your recurring revenue-based business? Is Freemium The Right Business Model?

Pricing 82

Pricing Payments SaaS Payments Payment Solutions 82

Blulogix

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

Scalability Startups and enterprises alike can scale their technology usage in alignment with their specific needs. Here are some notable examples: Cloud Computing Major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offer pay-as-you-go pricing, enabling businesses to access computing resources based on their actual usage.

Technology 52

Technology Pricing Payment Features Subscription 52

ChurnZero

MARCH 31, 2022

Following the webinar, we invited Dave to give his rapid-fire takes on tracking the retention of auto-renew customers, calculating customer lifetime value as a startup, comping CSMs on expansion, determining the importance of measuring time to value, and much more. tech ops, AWS, technical support). A: Yes, strongly.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Metrics Technical Review Scale 98

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Before I joined the venture capital industry many years ago, I was a software developer, and I worked for a startup around the 2000 time period. Retail was mentioned twice, that’s it, and AWS was mentioned 78 times, so it’s probably not surprising that they’re doing this. I think it’s a really staggering stat.

Cloud 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

Frontegg

OCTOBER 14, 2020

Before AWS, engineering teams had to scale their own infrastructure. Spanning early-stage startups and hyper-growth unicorns, Frontegg is already integrated within the production environment of numerous customers and is looking to expand its North American customer base in the upcoming quarters.

DevOps as a Service 52

DevOps as a Service K8S orchestration (Kubernetes) Innovation New CTO 52

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

If revenue is the North Star metric, everything you do should drive towards that. There are still marketing teams that don’t own a revenue number, which is crazy. in order to keep a seat at the revenue table.” in order to keep a seat at the revenue table.” Meaning, revenue is a team sport. Have a great weekend!

Metrics 95

Metrics Revenue Scale Marketing 95

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 14, 2019

It’s allowed me to practice sales in a way that leads to favorable outcomes for all parties – purchases that solve real business problems and drive sustainable revenue for the company. Products like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the rise of engineering talent globally have reduced the barrier of entry for software startups in recent years.

Software Review 162

Software Review AWS Social Media Machine Learning 162

OpenView Labs

DECEMBER 13, 2019

Over 500 software companies participated, from pre-revenue to $150M+ ARR publicly traded SaaS companies. It’s a Rough Time to Be a Startup – Here’s What You Can Do About It. This begs the question: how much room is left for emerging startups? See all of our insights here. SaaS is now ubiquitous. Can’t we do better than NPS?

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring Benchmarks AWS Scale 52

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2019

292: Manny Medina is the Founder & CEO @ Outreach, the market leading sales engagement platform that turns your team into a revenue driving machine. And so with that, I’m excited to welcome Manny Medina, founder and CEO at Outreach, the market leading sales engagement platform that turns your team into a revenue driving machine.

Scale 141

Scale Sales Hiring Construction Education 141

ProfitWell

APRIL 15, 2019

When you read about these crazy-successful companies with insane revenue streams (like 700k/mo for ConvertKit), it's easy to forget that real people are behind it all. Triplebyte , a startup that helps recruit tech talent, raises $35 million to further their mission of disrupting Silicon Valley. What's the story? In headlines.

Sales Recruiting 45

Sales Recruiting Entertainment Sales Hiring Subscription 45

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

In a fascinating workshop session, Miao shares his thoughts on how finance teams can contribute to company strategy and grow revenue. This function can be outsourced in the early days of a startup, but it is usually brought in-house after Series B. Growth Strategy Identify and implement new growth opportunities and revenue streams.

Scale 172

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 172

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

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 11, 2021

Now, for each segment, isolate its revenue and COGS. If revenue hides all sins, gross margin reveals them via segmentation. “If revenue hides all sins, gross margin reveals them via segmentation. Related read: Freemium vs. Free Trial: How to Know Which One to Pick for Your SaaS Startup.

Scale 52

Scale Payment Methods Payment Services Systems Review 52

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2024

Enterprise SaaS has a much higher average revenue per paying account, while consumer is around a $0.35 Churn is much higher on consumer subscriptions, but you have higher expansion revenue. If you’re in consumer, how can you go upmarket and get a small cohort of users paying more, churning less, and expanding revenue?

Subscription 261

Subscription Payment Features B2B Mobile 261

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 13, 2018

But as the college-dorm-room startup matures, there’s a fascinating twist to be found in the way it applies its new mission to Workplace, a B2B startup within the (former) startup. You really have to think of Workplace as a SaaS startup within Facebook. I highly recommend Predictable Revenue from Aaron Ross.

Scale 151

Scale Marketplace as a Service Mobile Sales Hiring 151

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

Thought I wanted to be an engineer, quickly realized I actually prefer the customer facing side of the startup world. I’m sure all of you that are startup founders love your companies and your products, but I have so much love for all of them. Enterprise value per revenue is 10X. So, was about number 20 at Twilio.

Investment 100

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 100