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 260

Benchmarks Metrics Revenue Retention 260

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

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Benchmarks Startup Churn Data 116

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 215

Benchmarks Startup Data Analysis Finance 215

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 49

Benchmarks B2B Metrics SMB 49

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.

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Benchmarks Compensation Sales Cloud 153

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 253

Benchmarks Metrics Acquisition Retention 253

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 170

Benchmarks Metrics Retention Engineering 170

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.

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Metrics Sales Benchmarks Headcount 223

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!

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Pricing Benchmarks Innovation Entertainment 155

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.

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Benchmarks Investment Pricing Cloud 100

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.

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Benchmarks Data Metrics Engineering 100

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.

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Benchmarks Subscription Startup Metrics 133

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 130

Benchmarks Compensation Churn Startup 130

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 Cloud 100

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.

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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.

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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.

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Benchmarks Data Revenue Startup 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.

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Benchmarks Metrics Healthcare Revenue 111

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.

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Benchmarks Revenue Metrics 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.

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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.

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Benchmarks Metrics Revenue Mobile 100

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

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 15, 2017

The post From Strategy to Execution: 6 Sales Content Benchmarks Every Business Needs appeared first on Sales Hacker. DocSend Marquee Partner Sales Research Courses

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Benchmarks Strategy Business Sales 42

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.

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Benchmarks Metrics Venture Capital 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

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.

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Benchmarks Metrics Revenue Finance 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.

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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.

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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 100

Benchmarks Deferred Revenue Metrics Venture Capital 100

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

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2014

The HubSpot journey to a public company provides a terrific set of benchmarks for other SMB SaaS companies. One of the best ways I’ve found to understand SaaS companies is to pore through their public filings. A few months ago, I analyzed Box’s S-1.

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Benchmarks SMB Metrics Revenue 100

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 2, 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. Zendesk is a 700 person company that builds customer support software. Zendesk went public earlier this year. It’s a remarkable business primarily because the founders and the team have built an incredibly efficient customer acquisition funnel.

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Benchmarks Metrics Compensation Revenue 100

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 1, 2015

How much should your startup budget for its employee stock option pool? One way of answering this question is a blanket addition per year, say a 2% renewal. Another way is to look at the cash based cost of the stock based compensation. We’re going to examine the second one today by looking at the basket of 50+ SaaS companies. The chart above shows the average stock-based compensation (SBC) per employee by years since founding across the basket of publicly traded SaaS companies.

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Tom Tunguz

MARCH 24, 2014

With the Box S-1 in hand, I can now benchmark Box’s business against other publics, and in particular, SaaS companies nine years after founding. Yesterday, Box filed for its IPO and released its S-1. I enjoy going through S-1s because quite a bit about a private company is revealed and though only a subset of information is released, the S-1 discloses some very important details about the business operations.

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Benchmarks Metrics SMB Revenue 100

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 18, 2014

Consumer companies on the whole tend to grow faster and do so will less spending on sales and marketing, and research and development than SaaS companies. The chart above shows the revenue growth rates of 60 or so recent consumer and enterprise IPOs by years since founding. Enterprise/SaaS companies in the sample achieved very small revenue in their second year and grew consistently through year 8, at which point there’s a decline.

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Benchmarks Enterprise Trends Mobile 100

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 10, 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. Box is a 1000+ person company providing collaboration and document sharing software. We had previously analyzed the business when the company filed their first S-1. Yesterday, the company filed an updated version of their S-1.

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Benchmarks Metrics Revenue Investment 100

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 16, 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. New Relic is San Francisco based, 534 person company providing tools for engineers to understand how well their code is performing. The company operates in the Application Performance Management category, which New Relic calls Software Analytics.

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Benchmarks Churn Metrics Revenue 100

ProfitWell

APRIL 17, 2019

software pricing SaaS Metrics profitwell SaaS benchmarks willingness to pay profitwell reportRyan Buckley , CEO of MightySignal , has been thinking a lot about pricing lately. Today, he asks us a fascinating question about pricing in the software space: Is all software going to $0?

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Software Benchmarks Cloud Retention 100

ProfitWell

APRIL 10, 2019

freemium SaaS Metrics free trial profitwell cac retention SaaS benchmarks willingness to pay profitwell report nps marketingOn this episode of the ProfitWell Report, David Bj örk , Co-Founder and CEO of Webforum , wants to know the possibility of every company going freemium in the future.

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B2C Benchmarks Acquisition Subscription 98

ProfitWell

MARCH 20, 2019

Growth SaaS Metrics profitwell ARR arpu saas arpu saas growth SaaS benchmarks profitwell report remote teams remote locationOn this episode of the ProfitWell Report, Shamilee Ilango , CEO of Surfboard Digital , has an interesting question about remote teams: how do they impact growth?

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Trends Benchmarks Company Culture Subscription 97

ProfitWell

FEBRUARY 20, 2019

SaaS Metrics profitwell SaaS benchmarks profitwell report onboarding on boarding willingness to pay retention net retention functional

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Retention Onboarding B2C Benchmarks 100

ProfitWell

JANUARY 29, 2019

SaaS Metrics profitwell SaaS benchmarks profitwell report churn Wistia annual monthly plan arpu plansOn this episode of the ProfitWell Report, Brendan Schwartz , Co-Founder and CTO at Wistia , wants to know what proportion of paid plans should be annual versus monthly.

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Churn Data Subscription Benchmarks 102

ProfitWell

FEBRUARY 6, 2019

SaaS Metrics profitwell SaaS benchmarks profitwell report work life balance health founder hobby all inOn this episode of the ProfitWell Report, Max Faingezicht , Chief Technology Officer at ThriveHive , is curious to know how work-life balance impacts company growth.

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Benchmarks Pricing Technology Data 97