SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

25x’d Revenue and Crossed $100M ARR Apollo.io, an all-in-one go-to-market platform, underwent a significant transformation in its business model that led to remarkable growth. From Sales-Led to Product-Led: How Apollo.io

Scale 165

Scale Scaling Outsourced Development Sales 165

SaaStr

OCTOBER 23, 2024

From day one, they considered having a viable business model, so they didn’t wait to build it. When René’s dad had a payroll company, the rule of thumb was always one year’s worth of revenue, four quarters, because a customer lasted a year. Bill does six quarters because customers stay on the platform for more than a year.

SMB 312

SMB Payment Services Payments Payment Methods 312

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2024

That’s a reality, but it forces you to focus on business models where you always win. And that means that 99 percent of startups can’t even raise venture capital. Bootstrapping takes longer on average. 11 If you are offered a second check, how picky should you be?

Venture Capital 316

Venture Capital Software Review Investment Startup 316

SaaStr

OCTOBER 23, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: CB Insights: Yes, Venture is Down. But You’ll Probably Need 50 Million Active Users for Freemium to Actually Work as a Business Model. But Really, It Just Seems to Be Back To Where It Was Before The Covid Boom.

CTO 238

CTO Scale Business Model Retention 238

SaaStr

JANUARY 27, 2024

So with that, let’s dive into what’s new at WordPress: Is Blogging on the Decline? Matt shares that blogging did decline for a while, and it does seem to be all over social how folks are quitting blogging or vlogging these days. What people love about a blog is a person’s voice and their story.

Underperforming Technical Team 333

Underperforming Technical Team Social Media Government Payment Features 333

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2025

He’s known for his systems-thinking approach to company building and has helped scale multiple businesses from zero to public company status. This specific threshold serves as a critical signal that your business model has legs.

Scale 191

Scale Systems Review Scaling Leadership 191

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2024

The current business model for software companies involves spending a significant portion of revenue on sales, regardless of available tools and automation. Word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective channel for acquiring customers, followed by Google and the company blog.

Sales Hiring 306

Sales Hiring Startup Marketing Technical Review 306

SaaStr

MAY 25, 2022

The Sword: a product-led growth business. Every successful business you admire—Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, et al.—was was built on a solid, profitable business model. Its economic model needed to capture the entire market, which leads to the second piece of the Conan Economics puzzle. Nothing else matters.

Scale 311

Scale Marketplace as a Service Advertising Business Model 311

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

It’s a business model, an organizational framework, and ultimately, a path to building a more efficient, customer-centric company. It’s better to do a few things extraordinarily well than to do everything mediocrely.

Enterprise readiness 147

Enterprise readiness Enterprise compliance Acquisition 147

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 20, 2024

What do they think the key drivers of the business will be? Does the model even make sense? Do they really understand their business model? Of course any early-stage (or even late-stage) model is “wrong”. How are they thinking about hiring? How are they thinking about unit economics?

Investment 308

Investment Sales Hiring Business Model Sales 308

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2024

Dave decided to pivot his business model from solopreneurship to building a sellable asset, leading to the creation of Exit 5. Jason Lemkin shares his experience of hiring and investing in his business, which has revitalized his passion for work and brought him renewed purpose and excitement.

Sales Hiring 298

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Technical Review Scale 298

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 23, 2024

But while the brand and market penetration is strong, the business model is challenging. So Toast is one of the most iconic B2B leaders out there. We’ve all used Toast 10s or 100s of times by now. It still loses money on the hardware, and the payments side is fairly low margin (28% or less).

Scale 311

Scale Payment Solutions Payments Sales 311

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2024

Which is the bar to IPO today and for VCs to make enough money for their business model to work. But if you run that math out — that’s what it takes to compound to IPO in 10-12 years, to get to $200m ARR growing 50% or more. VCs need true unicorn exits — just to survive.

Social Media 315

Social Media Business Model B2B SaaS 315

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

If you own a SaaS or other digital product business such as a Slack plugin, Chrome extension, online publishing business, mobile app, or even a blog and youre looking to exit, you may have a lot of questions about how best to go about it. What got you into this particular business model? And I’ve done that.

Scale 120

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 120

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2024

Plus, three of the closing sessions will be open to the broader audience of Annual this year: Customer Success in Different Business Models with Slack, Mulesoft, and OpenAI : In this session , these three CS leaders will discuss how customer success strategies differ across various business models.

Benchmarks 299

Benchmarks Finance Business Model Forecasting 299

SaaStr

JULY 4, 2024

What’s wrong with our business model? Dear SaaStr: We Are Growing Too Fast to Handle the Workload, but We Can’t Afford to Hire New Employees. We’ve all been there. Almost all of us, at least.

Business Model 303

Business Model Engineering Scaling Branding 303

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2022

This is a good business model! Revenue per employee is the ultimate summary of how efficient a business model is. I’m guessing a bit here on actual ARR at the moment, but in any event, $350,000 in revenue per employee is pretty efficient. Most public SaaS companies aim to get above $250,000. 2,000 plug-ins.

Cloud 61

Cloud Business Model Engineering Acquisition 61

Predictable Revenue

OCTOBER 1, 2020

Deep dive into the mistake that turned into a business model that gets George McGehrin's clients to pay him to market to them, and building a model that is recession-proof. The post How George McGehrin gets his clients to pay HIM to market to them appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

Marketing 277

Marketing Business Model Revenue Business 277

Payrix

JANUARY 10, 2025

Check out this helpful blog: The essential elements of merchant underwriting for software companies. As David notes, the challenge lies in adapting to constantly evolving factors such as regulatory changes, new business models, and sophisticated fraud tactics. At the same time, you can’t be overly restrictive.

Merchant Services 130

Merchant Services Payment Services Payment Solutions Payments 130

SaaStr

APRIL 19, 2024

You Need A Business Model with Economies of Scale As you’re trying to reverse engineer whether your business model makes sense, you have to look at your business model. Certain business models have economies of scale, and some don’t. So, what does it take to get to a $100M outcome?

Engineering 305

Engineering Business Model Pricing Scaling 305

Subscription Flow

OCTOBER 10, 2024

In this blog, we will explore why companies migrate to a new billing system, the pain points of billing system migration, the best practices to overcome these obstructions, and SubscriptionFlow’s tailored solutions that guarantee your business a seamless transition. Our platform, SubscriptionFlow, is a billing system migration expert.

Payment Solutions 105

Payment Solutions Payment Services Systems Review SaaS Payments 105

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2022

This is the secret sauce to Atlassian’s business model. And come join Atlassian’s CRO LIVE at 2022 SaaStr Annual on Sep 13-15 sharing how they scale their unique business model! 8,800 employees, so an impressive ~$350,000 in revenue per employee. And its doubling down on being hybrid and distributed. #4.

Scale 289

Scale Headcount Cloud Forecasting 289

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2021

. #2 Category-defining products require new business models. Businesses often build something powerful but don’t create the proper value package, and it fails in the market. When you’re bringing an innovative product to fruition, it requires a business model that’s built for it specifically.

Scale 253

Scale Scaling Business Model Company Culture 253

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

The bar has risen significantly from the “growth at all costs” mindset of 2021-2022. Final Thoughts The AI space is well-funded but still maturing.

Technical Review 194

Technical Review Artificial Intelligence AI Marketplace as a Service 194

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2023

Underrated: How great of a business model SaaS is. You can literally do almost nothing but make your customers happy and usually you will still grow. Underestimated: Just how expensive the incremental customer gets beyond your core, highest velocity ICP. 1,000+ Unicorns bloomed, hundreds of them in SaaS.

Acquisition 342

Acquisition Startup Business Model SaaS 342

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2021

An open core business model empowers customers and fosters brand loyalty. At GitLab, we run on an open core business model. We have a dollar-based gross retention rate of 97% and it’s in part because of our open core model. Clearly and publicly state your business practices.

Innovation 246

Innovation Business Model Banking Scale 246

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

Strategic finance can be thought of as a project management function for your company’s underlying business model or a BizOps team that operates within a more financial lens. Strategic Finance optimizes a company’s underlying business model to create long-term value by increasing revenue and decreasing costs.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2024

Historically, the business model has been to sell radio ads, and the people running the ads are typically local businesses. The problem is that when a BDR called these businesses, the person on the other end didn’t have the budget or know-how to create an effective ad.

Cloud 173

Cloud AI Artificial Intelligence Healthcare 173

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 21, 2019

I had started SaaScribe, a blog about SaaS, nine months earlier as a way to feed my interest in SaaS and understand it. I blogged and produced what would become the first ever SaaS podcast, the SaaS Revolution Show. Max’s personal mission is to promote the SaaS business model to Ukrainian and Finish ecosystems.

Scale 50

Scale SaaS Interviewing Product Marketing 50

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 15, 2022

This flexible mindset creates just the right conditions for embracing evolving business models and new metrics. A general understanding of the SaaS business model grew as the SaaS sector matured. as a common language to analyze a cloud business.

Metrics 277

Metrics Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Technical Review 277

SaaStr

JANUARY 19, 2023

For example, there are certain technology platforms that are not compatible with others so that can be a nonstarter. It’s worth investigating whether the company has deeply penetrated an aspirational market and whether or not it has a business model compatible with your own. Visit the SAP.iO

Technical Review 264

Technical Review Startup Scale Software Review 264

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2025

If youre not thinking about how to integrate AI into your product and business model and make it truly 10x better, youre already behind. And how they think. Your AI needs to be at least this good. AI is forcing every SaaS company to level up. But for those who embrace it, the opportunities are massive.

AI 147

AI Trends SaaS AWS 147

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2022

If you want to optimize your growth for the long term, consider developing specific priorities in the areas of your business model, customer experience, and employee experience. Business model. This approach gets to the heart of the subscription-based business model. Make their life better.”.

Underperforming Technical Team 49

Underperforming Technical Team Business Scale Business Model 49

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2024

Bad operational model / misunderstanding the burn rate. Often, you can sort of intuit the business model up to $1m or $2m or so in ARR. If you don’t model it properly (and often for the first time) — your burn can creep up on you, no matter how carefully you think you are managing expenses. And stymie all of them.

Scaling 306

Scaling Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Market Segmentation 306

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2021

Together, they are one of the most critical topics in recurring revenue business models. There’s a lot to talk about in customer success about churn, and about upsells.

Business Model 347

Business Model Customer Success Churn Software 347

SaaStr

JUNE 5, 2020

Salesforce’s IPO is also seen as a test of a new business model that could shake up the software industry. The company is the poster child for subscription-based software, a model that’s gaining popularity among corporate buyers. This CNET article captures the uncertainty well: . Don’t VC’s Want This Dealflow?

Venture Capital 299

Venture Capital Technical Review SaaS Scale 299

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 6, 2022

While not fun, it’s embedded into the business model of investing. So we’re at the time of the year where I experience the Worst Part of Investing, multiple times. What’s that, you might ask? Losing money? It happens. A rough quarter or two at a key investment? While some never have a rough quarter, most do. You expect a few.

Investment 297

Investment Business Model Business 297