SaaStr

MAY 8, 2024

Let’s jump right into this set of community questions focused on SaaS metrics, growth, and efficiency. What metrics should we expect in this environment? These payback metrics are important for investing. Q: When it comes to GTM efficiency, what are the most important leading indicator metrics? Do zero-cost budgeting.

Metrics 269

Metrics Scale Sales Hiring SaaS 269

SaaStr

JUNE 11, 2025

Obsession with Metrics and Levers As you grow, you start thinking in terms of dashboards and metrics. You move from being the doer to the leader, managing teams and making high-level decisions. It’s about learning to trust others to execute while you focus on the bigger picture.

Startup 265

Startup Interviewing Scaling Metrics 265

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2024

They experimented with pricing and packaging until they figured out how to reduce the limits back down to one user without hurting any of their key metrics. The key theme of how these successful SaaS companies have scaled and adapted their pricing is the value exchange of pricing and what your success metric is.

Payments 281

Payments Pricing Scale Revenue 281

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2023

So over the past decade-and-a-half we’ve come up with a lot of yardsticks, metrics and rules for SaaS companies. E.g.,: CAC of < 12 months is Good-to-Great Paying sales reps 25%-30% of what they close is Good A burn ratio of 1 or less is Good These metrics do sort of work, if you have some capital to spend (i.e., They don’t.

SaaS Payments 275

SaaS Payments Metrics SMB Payments 275

SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2025

Weaponize Customer Success Align on specific metrics Build education systems Create community Drive organic growth 3. Turn Your Customers Into Your Marketing Engine The second breakthrough was making customer success the core growth engine.

Technical Review 260

Technical Review Payment Solutions Scale Payment Services 260

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

Let’s break down the real metrics from companies doing this right. But the data showed that behavioral triggers (like “2 hours after last app session”) consistently outperformed time zone optimization by 40-50% on engagement metrics. Quick Reality Check: 84% of customers now expect personalized experiences.

Scale 269

Scale SaaS B2B Scaling 269

SaaStr

APRIL 28, 2025

CAC Payback Period Predicts Success More Accurately Than Any Other Metric CAC payback period stands above all other SaaS metrics as the most holistic indicator of business health. Unlike isolated metrics like growth rate or gross margin, CAC payback simultaneously reflects market demand, go-to-market efficiency, and product quality.

Scale 259

Scale Transportation Scaling SMB 259

SaaStr

DECEMBER 17, 2024

All of which are epic companies with epic metrics. Some rough metrics for the last 4 SaaS IPOs — which again are epic ones: These are rough metrics. It’s 2021 but all over again, and different But in SaaS overall, the growth playbook hasn’t totally worked out on the last 4 SaaS IPOs.

SaaS 259

SaaS AI Pricing Metrics 259

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2025

So Lightspeed Venture Partners suryed 154 top venture-backed mostly B2B start-ups for their sales metrics. The full report is here. One analysis that was great was on the top reasons sales teams lost deals. Many will sound familiar.

B2B 280

B2B Metrics Sales 280

SaaStr

MAY 26, 2025

Develop New Performance Metrics : Traditional sales metrics don’t capture the effectiveness of this hybrid approach. CROs need metrics that reflect the overall team performance rather than separating human and AI contributions. Redefine Culture : Sales organizations have always been built around human dynamics.

Scale 233

Scale Sales Hiring AI Sales 233

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2024

The 90-Day Revenue Test While 30 days is enough to evaluate their hiring decisions, you should see clear revenue improvements within 90 days (or one full sales cycle).

Sales Hiring 297

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Headcount 297

SaaStr

MAY 10, 2025

Use metrics like product usage, NPS, and engagement to identify risks early. Focus on Net Retention Net retention is the ultimate metric for customer success. But in the earliest days, NRR is the simplest core metric for Customer Success. Track metrics like churn, NRR, time-to-value, and customer health scores.

Sales Hiring 229

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale Retention 229

SaaStr

JANUARY 8, 2025

The team lacked visibility into key metrics like average revenue per customer. At Checkr, it’s not a license-based model, and yet the team had no visibility in the usage-based equivalent metric of average revenue per user, which is average revenue per report that the customer is running.

Revenue 290

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Compensation 290

SaaStr

MAY 1, 2025

Share your best metrics. Include your ARR, growth rate, customer count, churn rate, or any other metric that shows traction. Reference a tweet, blog post, or investment Ive made thats relevant to your pitch. Include your key metrics, team, market opportunity, and product vision. Dont bury the ledehook me right away.

Scale 153

Scale Startup Investment Scaling 153

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 19, 2024

NPS is A Great Core Metric. But I’d say 90% of SaaS companies I work with and have invested in don’t get these basics right for a long, long time. Not for real. More here: If Nothing Else – Segment Churn | SaaStr and I Was Wrong. SaaStr The post Dear SaaStr: Which Tactics Always Work to Drive Down Churn, and Drive Up Retention?

Churn 267

Churn Retention Scale Investment 267

SaaStr

JUNE 14, 2025

This isn’t just a statistic—it’s a fundamental shift that explains why your growth metrics don’t look like they did in 2019. When you’re operating in a market where nearly half of the addressable opportunity has already been captured, the easy wins are gone.

AI 252

AI Cloud Software Review Underperforming Technical Team 252

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

Balanced Metrics : While they track traditional SaaS metrics, they also measure customer success indicators specific to the construction industry. This isn’t just about features it’s about understanding where the construction industry is heading.

Construction 249

Construction Scale SaaS Travel 249

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2025

Despite all the sales enablement tools, CRM sophistication, and “sales productivity” solutions we’ve built over the past 20 years, we haven’t moved the needle on the two metrics that matter most: time with customers and account coverage. Because we’ve been fighting symptoms, not the disease. The result?

Scale 241

Scale AI Underperforming Technical Team Sales 241

SaaStr

DECEMBER 23, 2024

Look at your metrics objectively. Would you invest, yourself, based just looking at the communications and metrics? Re-read that email before you send it. Re-read that deck. Send them to other founders who have raised VC capital. If not, level them up.

Venture Capital 271

Venture Capital Investment AI Metrics 271

SaaStr

APRIL 29, 2025

Dear SaaStr: What Metrics Should I Be Using to Measure My Outbound Team? This is a key metric for outbound success. We are targeting $30k deals. North of 10% is a sign to really lean in on outbound. North of 10% is a sign to really lean in on outbound. It shows youve nailed your targeting and messaging.

Metrics 128

Metrics SMB Benchmarks Sales 128

SaaStr

JUNE 9, 2025

Quotas should be tied to metrics like pipeline coverage, opportunity-to-close rates, and historical data. You might also shift from focusing solely on revenue to incorporating metrics like logo acquisition or customer retention. As you scale, shift to quality metrics like closed-won revenue and opportunity-to-close percentages.

Scale 166

Scale B2B Benchmarks Sales 166

SaaStr

JANUARY 2, 2025

I knew what a good pitch was, and what good metrics were, and what VCs were interested in. And we were a pretty good duo pitching, my co-founder and me. Bear in mind, Id done a lot of VC pitching as a VP at start-ups before. I was new as a founder — but not new to fundraising.

Pricing 271

Pricing Metrics Marketing 271

SaaStr

AUGUST 28, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: 10 Things That Always Work in SaaS Marketing. The Metrics that Matter, Whether You Are Raising $1m or $100m | Index Ventures Partner Molly Alter. The Ultimate Guide for Hiring a Great VP of Sales. 2 Cold Emails I Funded For Millions.

Sales Hiring 315

Sales Hiring Scale Scaling Metrics 315

SaaStr

DECEMBER 24, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: 10+ Signs of a Mediocre Hire The Where, When, and How of AI with Theory Ventures, Open AI and More 15 Signs You Have a SaaS Metrics Problem (and How to Fix it) 4 Recent, Very Bad, Truly Terrible Customer Success Experiences.

Sales Hiring 277

Sales Hiring Scale AI Metrics 277

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2025

Per company metrics, Lovable hit $50 million in revenue in just six months, Cursor reported $100 million in revenue in its first year, and Gamma reached $50 million in revenue on less than $25 million raised. Some notable examples?

Enterprise 166

Enterprise AI Startup Benchmarks 166

SaaStr

JUNE 9, 2025

from IPO price Key Learning : Enterprise financial software with strong integration capabilities can command solid premiums in the CFO-focused market The 5 Critical Metrics Every B2B Leader Should Track for IPO Readiness Based on analyzing these successful (and not-so-successful) public companies, here are the metrics that matter most: 1.

B2B 180

B2B Marketing Scale Benchmarks 180

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2025

Time-to-value is your most critical early metric. Time-to-value plummeted Expansion revenue became almost automatic Sales cycles got more honest and efficient The 5 Things We Learned About Customer Success at $100M+ ARR Sales actually exaggerates. Shocking, I know. But a great CS team keeps promises realistic and achievable.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Churn 246

SaaStr

MAY 28, 2025

NPS or CSAT scores), consider tying a small bonus to these metrics. Avoid overly complex formulas or metrics that require a finance degree to decipher. This keeps the focus on retention while rewarding growth. Customer Satisfaction Bonuses : If youre tracking customer satisfaction (e.g.,

Scale 189

Scale Management Churn Finance 189

Buffer Resources

JULY 18, 2024

It tells you exactly how fast it takes to load the site according to different metrics and suggests areas for improvement. If you have access to a paid Ahrefs account, you’ll also be able to see important keyword metrics like search volume, CPC, and keyword difficulty within the SERPs.

Technical Review 121

Technical Review Software Review Mobile Engineering 121

SaaStr

APRIL 6, 2025

Celebrations are shifting from contract signatures to consumption metrics – Their team is evolving beyond celebrating closed deals to automated alerts for customer usage milestones, fundamentally changing what success looks like. “Too many metrics meant no clear priorities.”

Scale 192

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Outsourced Development 192

SaaStr

OCTOBER 13, 2024

5 Metrics that Matter When Raising Your SaaS Series A and Series B with Christoph Janz of Point 9 The post The Top SaaStr Content of the Week: CEO Klaviyo, CRO Slice, CRO Rippling, HyperFunctional SaaS, and So Much More!! The Secrets to Selling and Scaling in Vertical SaaS with Slice’s CRO #4.

Scale 289

Scale SaaS Scaling Customer Success 289

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2023

F — Flywheels U — Users E — Experiments L — Learnings In this article, we’ll talk about: The importance of understanding user decisions behind every metric you want to move and how to inspire those decisions. You want blog posts that are interactive and valuable to people. What makes a good North Star metric?

Scale 270

Scale Scaling AI Search Social Media 270

SaaStr

MAY 4, 2025

The Top 10 Customer Success Metrics Investors Care About in 2025 with Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta #5. The Future of AI in B2B SaaS: Insights from Synthesia and Theory Ventures. #3. Why Im Scared to Buy New SaaS Apps Now with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin #4.

AI 263

AI Venture Capital Sales B2B 263

SaaStr

JUNE 16, 2025

Each time Claude, GPT, or another system generates content or analysis for me, I need to: Evaluate its accuracy Adjust the framing Integrate it with other workstreams Apply business context the AI doesn’t possess This work—what I call “AI output management”—isn’t captured in our efficiency metrics.

Technical Advisors 184

Technical Advisors AI Technical Review Systems Review 184

SaaStr

APRIL 16, 2024

Via word-of-mouth, via referrals, via blog posts, via folks taking them with you to new jobs, etc. So when you are out of ideas to grow, move your primary focus to growing your CSAT (customer satisfaction) and NPS (Net Promoter Score) metrics up substantially. Even if other metrics seem OK. The #1 source of new customers?

Startup 304

Startup B2B Metrics Product Marketing 304

SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2025

For a VP of Customer Success (VPCS), their “quota” or ownership should revolve around two key metrics: Net Revenue Retention (NRR) and Gross Retention Rate (GRR). NRR is the North Star metric for customer successit measures how much revenue youre retaining and expanding from your existing customer base.

VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) 154

VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) Customer Success Churn Retention 154

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2025

Rep Performance : Dive into individual and team performance metrics. Metrics like time spent in each stage and reasons for lost deals can provide clarity. AI can reduce forecasting errors by 20-50%, so if youre still relying on guesswork, its time to upgrade your approach. Identify top performers and those who need coaching.

Technical Review 176

Technical Review Sales Forecasting AI 176