Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 4, 2019

How far along was the typical SaaS Series A in 2018? The median business was at $1.8M in ARR and growing at 250%. The chart below shows a representative sample of SaaS Series As’ ARR and projected ARR growth rate for 2018.

Benchmarks 231

Benchmarks Startup Data Analysis Finance 231

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 29, 2019

Slack has transformed the way we work. By replacing email with beautiful and simple internal chat, Slack has productized productivity. Founded as a gaming company called Tiny Speck in 2009, the company’s initial product, Glitch, didn’t catch on as expected.

Benchmarks 284

Benchmarks Metrics Revenue Retention 284

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 24, 2019

In the past few years, Zoom has become a verb: the act of video conferencing someone. Eight years ago, Eric Yuan, former VP Engineering at WebEx left to create a business with a better video conferencing product. He and his team authored a new codec, which is far more resilient than others.

Benchmarks 282

Benchmarks Metrics Acquisition Engineering 282

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2019

Recently, we’ve seen a series of product-driven companies building huge customer bases with tremendous account expansion and terrific sales efficiency. DataDog is no exception. DataDog provides a very popular IT monitoring solution that has grown from its founding in 2010 to a huge business.

Benchmarks 200

Benchmarks Metrics Revenue Investment 200

OpenView Labs

SEPTEMBER 16, 2019

The post 2019 Expansion SaaS Benchmarks Report appeared first on OpenView

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks 52

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 18, 2019

PagerDuty was founded in 2009 by 3 former Amazon engineers who were often on-call. To engineers, being on call means carrying a pager to respond to crises when software breaks or services go down. In the 10 years since that day, PagerDuty has built an exceptional business.

Benchmarks 222

Benchmarks Metrics Retention Engineering 222

InsightSquared

JULY 1, 2019

In this new and expanded 2019 benchmark study , we revisit today’s marketing automation platforms and dig deeper into the quality of reporting, nature of the insights, and the impacts these platforms continue to have across the B2B community.

Benchmarks 56

Benchmarks B2B Marketing Metrics 56

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 12, 2014

While we have quite a lot of data from our SaaS portfolio companies and from SaaS startups pitching to us (which I'll be happy to share, in aggregated form, in another post), I thought it would be good to increase our sample size by asking a larger number of SaaS startups to provide us with some key metrics: SaaS metrics benchmarking survey If you're a SaaS startup I'd love you to participate in the survey. benchmarks conversion saas kpis saas metrics

Benchmarks 116

Benchmarks Startup Churn Data 116

Chaotic Flow

NOVEMBER 11, 2014

As many of you may know, Trish Bertuzzi and the folks over at the Bridge Group publish a lot of great stuff on Inside Sales strategy and operations, including inside sales compensation benchmarks, lead development rep best practices, outbound selling strategies, and on an on.

Benchmarks 151

Benchmarks Compensation Sales Metrics 151

OpenView Labs

SEPTEMBER 18, 2019

Our 2019 Expansion SaaS Benchmarks are live! The post OpenView’s 2019 Expansion SaaS Benchmarks [Podcast] appeared first on OpenView This year we surveyed over 500 companies, ranging from pre-revenue to $150M+ ARR with nearly half of respondents coming from outside the U.S. On this episode, OV’s Kyle Poyar and Sean Fanning along with NetSuite’s Tom Kelly, share the findings and some advice for founders. Follow along here. ?. Prefer to listen on iTunes? Click here.

Benchmarks 40

Benchmarks Revenue 40

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 9, 2013

One number investors use to benchmark SaaS startups across sectors and industries is sales efficiency. Below are the sales efficiency benchmarks for the approximately 20 publicly traded SaaS companies calculated on an annual basis by years since founding.

Benchmarks 182

Benchmarks Startup Sales Subscription 182

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 7, 2019

To help out, we crunched the burn rate figures from OpenView’s 2019 Expansion SaaS Benchmarks study. Check out our new Data Explorer feature , which allows you to visualize your company’s peer benchmarks to see how you stack up. The post 2019 Benchmarks: Are You Burning Too Much Cash?

Benchmarks 60

Benchmarks Finance Forecasting Retention 60

OpenView Labs

SEPTEMBER 23, 2019

Benchmarks are the only check on whether or not a business is generating efficient growth. Benchmarks act as a swim lane for operating a business and allow operators to build a hyper-growth business that provide permission to believe. How Do I Know What My Benchmarks Are?

Benchmarks 56

Benchmarks Data Metrics Retention 56

OpenView Labs

SEPTEMBER 17, 2019

This week we released our third annual Expansion SaaS Benchmarks report. But benchmarks alone are not enough. We’ve got to make the leap from benchmarks to action. Here’s our advice on how to use the benchmark data to grow even faster in 2020.

Benchmarks 63

Benchmarks Onboarding Forecasting Sales 63

InsightSquared

MAY 7, 2019

For these reasons, accurately tracking key sales metrics and benchmarking your performance against peers and market leaders is critical to getting the most out of your sales resources. How many of your individual sales reps meet or beat the benchmark? Sales is the Growth Engine.

Metrics 274

Metrics Sales Benchmarks Headcount 274

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2019

Chetan Puttagunta , General Partner @ Benchmark: Why does Chetan believe we have seen a strong decline in the per seat pricing model? Welcome to Episode 211!

Pricing 163

Pricing Benchmarks Innovation Entertainment 163

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 24, 2016

In particular, I benchmarked the revenue, growth rates and round size characteristics of these businesses at their Series A. Benchmarking Exceptional Series A SaaS Companies from Tomasz Tunguz. At SaaStr 2016 and SaaS Office Hours in New York , I shared an analysis of the fastest growing SaaS companies over the last 3 years. I’ve embedded the slides here. These are the key bullet points from the deck about exceptional SaaS companies.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Investment Pricing Cloud 100

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

Benchmarking is a great tool, if you can get access to representative data. Pacific Crest and David Skok have released a fantastic survey benchmarking SaaS metrics for early and growth stage companies. Benchmarking is a great first order evaluation tool.

Benchmarks 131

Benchmarks Compensation Startup Churn 131

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 20, 2016

Numbers provide us a certain certainty. With their precision, they offer a sense of black and white, in or out. But, metrics alone aren’t enough. All the quantitative analysis in the world won’t lead me to the next great idea for startup. Those figures can’t create empathy, develop the right culture, or hire the right people.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Data Metrics Engineering 100

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

JULY 9, 2016

There are certainly plenty of surveys and published benchmarks on SaaS metrics that try to provide guidance. Use caution with rules of thumb But you should be careful not to take these SaaS benchmarks as gospel.

Benchmarks 130

Benchmarks Metrics Subscription Pricing 130

Brian Balfour

MARCH 21, 2017

Most growth communities, forums, and email lists will inevitably have that thread that goes: “Hey, what are the benchmarks everyone’s seeing for X?” The desire is further fueled by many companies releasing “benchmark reports.” Now, back to benchmarks.

Benchmarks 52

Benchmarks Business Model Metrics Data 52

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 2, 2017

Cloudera is the second of the Hadoop players to go public. Last week, the company filed their S-1 and revealed a massive business. Cloudera generated $261M in revenue, counts 500 clients and grows those accounts by 43% annually. 18% of their customers run Cloudera software in the cloud, a surprisingly large number. Hortonworks is Cloudera’s chief competitor. In the following charts, we’ll compare the two businesses.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Metrics Revenue Software 100

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 14, 2014

This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. Before diving into the benchmarks too deeply, I want to explain how different Veeva’s business is than most.

Benchmarks 127

Benchmarks Metrics Healthcare Revenue 127

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 20, 2017

Founded in 2006, Mulesoft is an 850 person company based in San Francisco that builds data integration tools. The company started originally as an open-source product and then focused on its paid offering. Today, the business generates nearly $200 million annually in revenue, and is growing at 70%. The business filed to go public last week , and the documents reveal a very impressive business operating at scale.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Metrics Retention Finance 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 1, 2017

Founded in 2008, AppDynamics is a leader in the application performance management space. AppDynamics technology helps engineers determine how software applications behave as users interact with them. Based in San Francisco, AppDynamics employs about 1200 people and has raised approximately $315M to date. The company filed their S-1 recently to take the company public.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Metrics Revenue Subscription 100

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 27, 2014

Following this week’s post Benchmarking HubSpot’s S-1, Josh and Nikos raised an interesting question on Twitter. What are the right ways to benchmark SaaS companies from their early days through IPO? I have always used years-since-founding as the time axis to compare companies, because if I were a founder, that’s how I might think about benchmarks. Bucketing by ACV for revenue growth won’t shed much more insight into benchmarks than the raw median.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Startup Data Revenue 100

Tom Tunguz

JULY 29, 2015

Founded in 1998, Netsuite is worth about $7.7B, making it the sixth largest SaaS compay behind Salesforce, LinkedIn, Workday, ServiceNow and Splunk. Netsuite began developing ERP (enterprise resource planning) tools to help companies manage their finances, expenses and supply chain. Over time, Netsuite has added a few more product lines including ECommerce platform, CRM, business intelligence and a professional services management product.

Benchmarks 109

Benchmarks Metrics Revenue Finance 109

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 15, 2014

In the past, we have benchmarked the revenue per employee of large publicly traded SaaS companies and determined that the average is about $200k of revenue per person. In the chart above, Business Objects, a business intelligence company, sets the benchmark. But, that analysis examined revenue per employee that only one point in time. As Jesse Hulsing pointed out to me, examining this figure over five years reveals quite a bit about the health of the business.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Metrics Revenue Scaling 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 26, 2015

This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. Salesforce went public more than 10 years ago. This harbinger of subscription, internet delivered software created one of the most exciting waves in software and the single most valuable SaaS company today, worth $37B as of this writing.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Metrics Revenue Investment 100

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 29, 2014

This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. The company has grown faster than the median SaaS business in our benchmark data set, recording a 176% CAGR over this three year period compared. MobileIron spent the most of any company in the benchmark set as a percentage of revenue in year 4 at 166% of revenue.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Metrics Revenue Mobile 100

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 9, 2015

Founded in 2002, the Australian software maker Atlassian is an exceptional company in many regards. But foremost, Atlassian is one of the best examples of flywheel SaaS companies yet. Atlassian counts 1600 employees and sells five products JIRA (bug tracking software), Confluence (project management), HipChat (internal chat/collaboration), BitBucket (code repository) and JIRA Service Desk (help desk software.

Benchmarks 101

Benchmarks Metrics Venture Capital Revenue 101

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2015

This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. Last, much of Xero’s data from the very earliest days of the company are public, meaning Xero can serve as a great benchmark for other startups.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Metrics SMB Revenue 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 7, 2015

This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. Since LinkedIn’s IPO in 2012, the company has grown its market cap by 6x and as of this writing is worth about $27.5B. Second to Salesforce, LinkedIn is the second largest SaaS company in the world. Unlike most SaaS companies which are B2B, LinkedIn is a B2C2B company.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Metrics Acquisition Subscription 100

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 16, 2013

One way of measuring the efficiency of a company’s revenue model is to benchmark revenue per employee. Rather it’s a helpful as broad benchmark of the general efficiency of a business and a place to start analyzing employee productivity if a business deviates too much from the comparables Google and Facebook, the two most efficient companies, generate $1M per revenue per employee per year.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Revenue Metrics Engineering 100

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 21, 2014

This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. The company went public in 2013 and we’ll use data from their S-1 through 2013 to benchmark the business.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Metrics Data Analysis Revenue 100

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 12, 2014

This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. Today, we’ll explore one of the enterprise behemoths, both in market cap and average revenue per customer: WorkDay. WorkDay envisions being the place of record for all Human Resources data for companies with more than 5,000 employees.

Benchmarks 101

Benchmarks Metrics Deferred Revenue Venture Capital 101

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 8, 2015

Worth $11.5B, ServiceNow is the third public SaaS company, after Salesforce and LinkedIn. Based in San Diego, ServiceNow employs roughly 3000 people, and sells a system of record for IT operations teams to manage IT assets, facilities, and human resources. ServiceNow’s software allows clients to develop custom applications for their own needs, often with the help of the company’s professional services team.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Metrics Revenue Churn 100