SaaStr

JANUARY 13, 2022

The late-stage VC firm Meritech put together its annual SaaS report here and it slices the data in a few interesting ways. The average SaaS company hits $225m ARR at IPO. This was about what I expected, but I hadn’t crunched the numbers myself. The average SaaS company is growing 55% at IPO (at that $225m ARR).

SMB 309

SMB SaaS Retention Scale 309

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What Are The Characteristics of a Good SaaS Product? A good SaaS product is one that after 18–24 months at least, propagates enough of its own leads to create a self-sustaining business. Add in a killer sales VP, a great VP of Demand Gen, an experienced VP of Customer Success … and then … magic happens.

SaaS 206

SaaS Product Marketing Customer Success Marketing 206

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What’s the Best Way to Get Ahead in SaaS Sales? Crush your number, live the life, take nice vacations, wear expensive suits, buy a cool condo. The #1 best rep in any segment of sales can make a lot of money in any SaaS company past $10m-$20m in ARR. Where The Magic Is. Live the high life. Is that you?

Sales Recruiting 255

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales SMB 255

SaaStr

MAY 30, 2022

Having high net revenue / dollar retention is the magic of SaaS. Above that, and you really get into magical compounding growth. With 150% NRR, you can “hide” just 20%-30% or so new customer growth and it will be hard to see that slow growth in new customers in the revenue growth numbers. I see this so often.

Retention 276

Retention Customer Success Churn Trends 276

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2020

A little while back we put together some of the top sales & marketing mistakes SaaS companies and founders make, especially in the early days. When 80%+ of the sales team feels like they are doing well, that’s when magic happens in a sales team. Yes, Box is SaaS. Hiring a B2C marketer for SaaS. They can’t.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Marketing 363

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

Different Pathways to CRO For Jane Kim, former CRO of CircleCl,, she used to work in finance before transitioning to SaaS. After switching to SaaS, she started as an SMB sales leader with no prior management or SMB sales experience. Anytime you have a lot of optimism around numbers and get taken by surprise.

Scale 250

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 250

SaaStr

OCTOBER 27, 2023

Catch up on part one here , where he deep dives into what he really thinks about AI, Sales and lead Gen for SaaS in 2024. Building and scaling a startup isn’t for the faint of heart and often comes with many ups and downs that SaaS veterans have experience in. If you don’t have connections, get the numbers. How do they succeed?

Sales Hiring 250

Sales Hiring Scale Venture Capital Generative AI 250

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 3, 2023

SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin and Partner at QED Investors Amias Gerety chat on the Fintech Beat podstream about all things SaaS, money, and what makes a great founder. What Makes SaaS So Great If you’re here on SaaStr reading this, you don’t need to be told why SaaS is so great. If you don’t look at the model, it’s magic.

Sales Hiring 235

Sales Hiring Headcount Finance Technical Review 235

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2024

Is it the end of an era for customer success in SaaS? We just wrote up how some of the biggest changes of SaaS are now coming, specifically in Customer Success and Sales. Back in 2015, when didn’t have the data or NRR or GRR of 115 public SaaS companies. The number one insight back then was to put a person on it.

Sales Hiring 255

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale AI 255

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

I was recently talking with several SaaS companies that crossed certain customer count milestones. And I began to wonder: just exactly how many customers does the average public SaaS company have? It’s a bit more than 1,500 for true enterprise SaaS companies ($100k+ ACV). This isn’t magic math.

SaaS 286

SaaS Cloud Enterprise Scale 286

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 30, 2022

Let’s all be clear, 2021 was insane: * SPACs worth billions with no revenue * Multiples magically tripled * Fintechs with 10% GMs worth same as 80% GMs * #5 in market got same premium as #1 * Growth stage seen as free money * Seed VCs bought in $3B-10B rounds vs sell. So as we’ve talked about before, these are Strange Days in SaaS.

Venture Capital 258

Venture Capital Innovation Acquisition Cloud 258

SaaStr

JUNE 29, 2021

in SaaS and enterprise deals. The number of deals is also way up, from 126 in all of 2019 to 105 just in 1H’21. Who’s writing these big checks in SaaS and enterprise? Now Private Equity isn’t some magic white night. They are looking for 3x+ returns when they buy out a SaaS company.

Investment 266

Investment SaaS Acquisition Enterprise 266

SaaStr

APRIL 21, 2023

Most SaaS companies don’t spend enough on marketing, and that’s a mistake best avoided. Most of these SaaS marketing strategies require little money, which is great for those lean, mean teams looking to get the most bang for their buck. As with webinars, blog posts, and everything else, this requires consistency.

Outsourcing Services 202

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development Marketing 202

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 6, 2023

We’ve seen this also with MongoDB, ZoomInfo, Zoom, and many — though not all — Cloud and SaaS leaders. Not Much More Efficient — Yet Unlike most other Cloud and SaaS leaders , HashiCorp didn’t get radically more efficient the past 12-15 months. Things may not be easy going forward.

Cloud 246

Cloud Scale Subscription Payment Features 246

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2021

There are two great SaaS companies I’m working with right now. Both have roughly the same number of employees (roughly 50). What are the differences between these 2 seemingly similar SaaS startups selling to SMBs? The average public SaaS company has a 25 month CAC payback. Don’t trust a raw CAC number.

Scale 292

Scale Churn Metrics Startup 292

SaaStr

AUGUST 31, 2022

Not a huge change from $500m in ARR, but another reminder of how global SaaS and Cloud are were regulations and others don’t restrict usage. #4. Still, with such strong demand, any lengthened sales cycles didn’t show up in the epic numbers and growth rate. #5. With 151, 000 customers but just 1,749 of them pay $100k+.

Scale 274

Scale Cloud Revenue Scaling 274

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2022

We’ve been doing the 5 Interesting Learnings at SaaStr for quite a while, looking at many of the public SaaS leaders and pulling out the top learnings for founders and SaaS execs. And it’s the true magic in scaling SMB SaaS. So no, a “low” conversion number isn’t necessarily bad.

Scale 343

Scale SMB SaaS Scaling 343

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 15, 2022

Metrics are the key to evaluating success and setting goals, but not every SaaS business should orient itself around the same one-size-fits-all numbers. The Evolution of Language For SaaS Business. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that SaaS metrics gained respect and popularity in the industry. Magic Number =1.0x +.

Metrics 221

Metrics Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Technical Review 221

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

At SaaStr Miami, former Founder’s Fund Partner and CRO of Brex Sam Blond — host of the SaaStr CRO Confidential Podcast — sat down with SaaStr CEO and founder Jason Lemkin for a fireside chat about finding success as a SaaS company in 2024. People need to be scrappy, creative, and accountable to numbers that make sense for the business.

Sales Hiring 266

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 266

SaaStr

JANUARY 31, 2023

So Zoom and Shopify are the latest SaaS leaders to do price increases — albeit very differently. So in some ways, a very different approach from Zoom: While Shopify’s growth remains relatively strong and in fact accelerated in the back half of last year, the SaaS side of its business has slowed. First up is Zoom.

Pricing 252

Pricing Merchant Services Payment Solutions Payments 252

SaaStr

MAY 18, 2022

RingCentral is a very interesting case study in SaaS of starting very SMB, way in the early days of SaaS in 1999, keeping at it … and then tilting upmarket to going much more enterprise post-IPO. That’s good to see, but they still haven’t hit the magic number of 20% or so that SaaS companies look to hit at scale.

SMB 269

SMB Enterprise Scaling Revenue 269

SaaStr

MARCH 4, 2022

At the 2022 SaaStr Miami Super Meet-up the other day, Salesloft CEO Kyle Porter pointed out an interesting statistic from the recent Vista SaaS CEO conference: Public SaaS companies that are hyper sales efficient haven’t been hit nearly as hard, if at all, compared to those that are less efficient. Salesforce).

Scale 213

Scale Sales Acquisition SaaS 213

SaaStr

DECEMBER 10, 2020

I hear again and again from SaaS founders growing to $5m, $10m ARR or even more that they don’t need a certain VP — with the exception of a VP of Sales. Basically, in SaaS, everyone “gets” that they need a VP of Sales. But if you have, you’ll see that magic just happens after Initial Traction.

Sales Hiring 355

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 355

SaaStr

OCTOBER 15, 2022

Let’s all be clear, 2021 was insane: * SPACs worth billions with no revenue * Multiples magically tripled * Fintechs with 10% GMs worth same as 80% GMs * #5 in market got same premium as #1 * Growth stage seen as free money * Seed VCs bought in $3B-10B rounds vs sell. A consistent number of deals, with a consistent amount of capital.

Startup 249

Startup Cloud Growth Marketing SaaS 249

SaaStr

JUNE 22, 2022

A $6B valuation today sure seems cheap with those numbers, and the ones below. Most especially, it’s executing with an enviable SaaS Golden Ratio. High NRR plus high new customer count is the magic formula for years and years of high growth. Because almost everything is going so very, very well for HashiCorp.

Scale 250

Scale Cloud Scaling Revenue 250

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

So there’s a sort of org chart you’ll probably end up with at least twice as you start scaling in SaaS: The “Headless” Sales Org. If you’re lucky, if your first VP of Sales doesn’t work out, someone under them magically rises to the top as your new Head of Sales. What’s that? Without a VP of Sales, recruiting stalls. No one owns it.

Sales Hiring 205

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 205

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2021

There are some real mysteries in SaaS. Beat the Q4 number. The ones that truly not only understand the product and the pitch — and not even just how to deliver incredible value during the sales process — but the magic of how to connect that value to a signed contract. Not really. Lol agreed. This just makes sense.

Sales 308

Sales Revenue Software SaaS 308

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2023

It’s one of the few still commanding a premium multiple in today’s world, and still growing at tremendous rates: Snowflake is also a barometer of everything in SaaS and Cloud, because a significant amount of its revenue is consumption-based, at least in part. We see a very similar story at other cloud and SaaS leaders, too. #5.

Headcount 198

Headcount Scale Sales Hiring AWS 198

SaaStr

AUGUST 3, 2023

Not just the headline numbers. At least: First, ask what percent of folks hit their OTE Second, ask what the average actual attainment is Third, if you are going to leave for more money, make sure it’s really going to be the case in reality Fourth, remember, outside of 2021, there is no easy money in SaaS sales.

Sales 208

Sales SaaS 208

SaaStr

MAY 8, 2021

I felt like when I was a SaaS CEO and had to go profitable, they helped saved my rear. A multi-year pre-paid contract can be even more magical, and give you months of extra cash in a start-up. But getting paid in a simple ACH or credit card payment each month can be magical. This is still true. So for sure, do that.

SaaS Payments 273

SaaS Payments Payment Services Scale Payments 273

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

Hundreds of thousands of experts are telling you how to succeed in SaaS. SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin shares the 10 worst pieces of SaaS advice, excuses, and mistakes founders make, and what to do instead That often compounds. PLG aren’t magic letters that fix a broken business model. You can always afford it. #4

Part-Time VPE 180

Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 180

SaaStr

DECEMBER 9, 2020

These days, it can really feel like the Old Bag of Sales Tricks is starting to just not work anymore: With maybe 500x the SaaS vendors of 10 years ago, there’s so much noise. One thing has not changed in SaaS in the last 10 years: Everyone spends 1-10 hours a day in email. And do it right, and email is magical.

Sales Hiring 356

Sales Hiring Outbound Sales Team AWS Engineering 356

SaaStr

MAY 12, 2021

While it’s easy to make a spreadsheet of how NRR compounds, a lot of companies fudge the numbers a bit. Elastic getting more SaaS. It does seem as if 10,000-20,000 is sort of a magic number for many SaaS companies getting to $1B ARR, from Hubspot to Okta and more. 130% NRR yields 3.2x The answer?

Cloud 200

Cloud Enterprise SaaS Development 200

SaaStr

OCTOBER 1, 2020

Q: In SaaS B2B, how do you handle the situation where an enterprise customer wants to buy an unlimited use, site license? I have no magic answer but let me throw out some thoughts: Don’t sweat it too much in Years 1 and 2 as long as it’s real cash, paid upfront, in the door. Sounds great in the early days.

Sales Hiring 279

Sales Hiring B2B Enterprise Sales 279

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 15, 2020

Like magic. But to Go Big, almost everyone in SaaS at least eventually adds a sales team. It’s the law of large numbers. The lure of freemium (like The Force) is strong. No headaches. Customers try and buy all on their own. No salespeople. Well, that can work. For a while. Yes, Twilio started off as self-service.

Scale 341

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 341

SaaStr

JUNE 5, 2022

This isn’t an epic insight, but I did the poll because I find so many SaaS founders underestimate how many reps you have to hire. Do this, and magic happens. Most of you get a significant number of customers from your partners. QBRs aren’t always magic, but you have to try. At least. #23. and North America.

Sales Hiring 222

Sales Hiring Interviewing Revenue Sales 222

SaaStr

MAY 21, 2020

It took me a little while to see activation rates as literally one of the 3-4 most important metrics in SaaS, but it probably is. I started to track activation rates at a lot of start-ups I work with, and I saw numbers that shocked me. The best way to grow your revenue in SaaS is to keep the revenue you do have.

Churn 284

Churn B2C Metrics B2B 284