The Angel VC

MARCH 23, 2016

Almost exactly four years ago I published a financial plan template for SaaS startups based on a model that I had created for Zendesk a few years earlier. The original v1 model was a very simple plan for early-stage SaaS startups with a low-touch sales model.

SaaS Payments 217

SaaS Payments Headcount SaaS Payment Methods 217

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2024

Now, in 2024, we’re in the age of efficiencies, and we’re rethinking whether we should put more people on it or tolerate more churn and issues because we want to be cash flow positive. Of course, this can go too far sometimes if you push the customer and sales team, and customers don’t get value, they’ll churn.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale AI 246

The Angel VC

MARCH 22, 2012

It's a simple plan for an early-stage SaaS startup with a low-touch sales model – a company which markets a SaaS solution via its website, offers a 30 day free trial, gets most of its trial users organically and through online marketing and converts them into paying customer with very little human interaction.

Startup 189

Startup SaaS Payments Payment Methods Payment Solutions 189

Tom Tunguz

MAY 14, 2014

Customer success (CS) within SaaS startups is a relatively new idea. In addition to mitigating churn, CS teams increase account revenue, which in many SaaS companies, can grow to be multiples of the first year’s customer value. Gainsight Pulse Presentation by Tom Tunguz. This can be a long process.

Customer Success 100

Customer Success Startup Headcount Compensation 100

The Angel VC

JUNE 25, 2015

For most SaaS startups, the VP of Sales (along with the VP of Marketing) is one of the most crucial hires they need to make. If you want to grow roughly in line with the T2D3 formula , which most venture-funded SaaS startups should shoot for, you need to hire a lot of sales people in year 3. Input your monthly net MRR churn rate (i.e.

Sales Hiring 185

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 185

ChurnZero

MAY 17, 2022

The company plans on doubling its headcount in 2022. ChurnZero’s momentum comes on the heels of multiple industry accolades in Q1 2022, including a place on Forbes’s America’s Best Startup Employers 2022 list, the TrustRadius 2022 Most Loved award, and G2’s 2022 Best Software Award.

Marketplace as a Service 98

Marketplace as a Service Technical Review Headcount Software Review 98

Kellblog

NOVEMBER 23, 2022

I’ve been CEO of two startups and on the board of about ten. Churn ARR is the sum of ARR lost due to shrinking customers (aka, downsell) and lost customers. Ending ARR is starting ARR + new ARR – churn ARR. It’s + churn ARR if you assign a negative sign to churn, which I usually do.) YoY growth in churn ARR.

Technical Review 115

Technical Review Software Review Forecasting Churn 115

SaaStr

OCTOBER 18, 2019

I still see most startups way behind on their 2020 planning, and most importantly, hiring, at this point in the year. The real magic from a Wall Street perspective isn’t that Salesforce is “SaaS” and much of, say, Oracle still mostly isn’t … it’s that Salesforce’s revenue, with net negative churn, completely recurs every year.

Sales Hiring 182

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Revenue 182

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 1, 2019

As part of this shift, tech companies have had to rethink their existing Professional Services offering, and startups entering the space for the first time have to decide if they want to offer Professional Services at all. This survey also indicates that Professional Services can lead to more enterprise deals and lower churn.

Customer Success 40

Customer Success Startup SaaS Sales Hiring 40

Point Nine Land

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

Now as I’m sure you’ve already experienced, the problem is that for startups, that’s a b?i?g Perhaps customer growth will exceed expectations, but you’ll have a larger percentage of less happy customers, so you’ll have more churn down the road. g gigantic “if”. The chance that you’ll hit all of your targets is tiny.

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring Headcount Startup Churn 59

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 29, 2022

There were also a number of customers who turned us into shelfware or essentially churned. Like many early-stage Customer Success teams, I was working with limited resources and did not have any headcount to hire new talent. As a small team with a startup mentality, we were building the car while driving it.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Sales Recruiting Technical Review Compensation 98

ChurnZero

MAY 17, 2022

The company plans on doubling its headcount in 2022. ChurnZero’s momentum comes on the heels of multiple industry accolades in Q1 2022, including a place on Forbes’s America’s Best Startup Employers 2022 list, the TrustRadius 2022 Most Loved award, and G2’s 2022 Best Software Award.

Marketplace as a Service 52

Marketplace as a Service Technical Review Headcount Software Review 52

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2018

What makes things tricky is, first, the uncertainty of how your CACs will develop at increasing scale and of how your churn rate will develop over time. As I wrote here , trying to forecast what happens to your CACs if you 10x your sales and marketing spend is very difficult. The second issue is the timing of some of the major expenses.

Sales Recruiting 106

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 106

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 16, 2018

How to Scale without Scaling Headcount. To ensure you success function scales without scaling your headcount, make sure everyone in the company is bought into the success mindset. From Zero to 100: How to Scale Customer Support and Customer Success at Your Startup. Segmentation – Don’t Just Set it and Forget It.

Customer Success 49

Customer Success Scale Headcount Sales Hiring 49

SaaSX

FEBRUARY 28, 2021

For many startup software companies (and their founders), an early capital-efficient approach to growth can make a huge difference in the long run. Today, I have a more nuanced perspective of capital efficiency and how it can be important to a startup’s growth path. It doesn’t really apply to startups. Churn Rate.

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Software Review Software Payments 52

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 21, 2018

Whether you’re at an early-stage startup that’s just made its first sales hires, or part of a fast-moving sales team in a large organization, the key to success often comes down to efficiency. But I couldn’t raise the money for the startup; this was 2009, right after the recession.

Sales Hiring 183

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 183

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 11, 2019

You might say it’s one of the strongest advantages a startup has. So often, when we think about investing in a support team, sometimes the conversation becomes about getting the headcount higher, higher, higher. But where else can you be investing outside of headcount to maintain that customer centricity? Michael: For sure.

Scale 188

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 188

OpenView Labs

MARCH 10, 2019

Over this time, our headcount has grown by over 10x, and our revenue has grown by over 60x. Through our churn survey we found that a lot of our churn isn’t actually due to customers being unhappy, but rather from people successfully completing a project and not knowing what to do next. North Star metric.

Scale 69

Scale Customer Success Scaling Sales Hiring 69

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2023

People loved Zoom and didn’t churn. Then everyone in the world was on Zoom selling flowers and yoga and things meant to be sold in person, so churn peaked at 3.6%, which isn’t terrible for SMB, but was higher than none. This is more of a look at startups. Monday will probably add 25% headcount this year.

Sales Hiring 240

Sales Hiring SaaS Headcount Compensation 240

Point Nine Land

DECEMBER 12, 2018

What makes things tricky is, first, the uncertainty of how your CACs will develop at increasing scale and of how your churn rate will develop over time. As I wrote here , trying to forecast what happens to your CACs if you 10x your sales and marketing spend is very difficult. The second issue is the timing of some of the major expenses.

Sales Recruiting 61

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 61

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

Today we’re focusing on actionable insights you can use to drive down churn with customer success in today’s new era of SaaS efficiency. The Head of CS has become an amorphous reporting structure in SaaS at many scaleups and startups because no one wants to own customer success. What’s the next deal?

Customer Success 234

Customer Success Sales Hiring Scale AI 234

Unbounce

MARCH 30, 2023

Businesses—and not just the ones running tech startups out of Silicon Valley—are hungry for a piece of that AI pie. Peter is churning out PPC campaigns and landing pages that see an average conversion rate of 35%. Some marketers are already using AI to create more customized campaigns. AI offers tons of benefits to marketers.

AI Search 52

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Marketing 52

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 3, 2021

” And in Intercom and elsewhere, we’ve been thinking about what that actually means for startups, for seed-stage companies, all the way through to mid and late-stage companies. Let’s just take, as a target case, a PM or a manager of PMs in a startup who’s being told, “Hey, let’s go and accelerate.”

Strategy 228

Strategy Software Review Development Team Review Sales Recruiting 228

Chart Mogul

AUGUST 15, 2019

Revenue-based financing is quickly becoming a popular way for startups to raise funds without sacrificing equity. MRR (scale and growth rates) Revenue quality: ARPU , LTV , Quick Ratio Cohort metrics : cohort sizes, cohort multiple — an indicator of growth Retention / churn metrics. This is how it works. Customer / revenue metrics.

Finance 85

Finance Payments Revenue Payment Solutions 85

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2023

So you’ve nailed your pitch for startups and are looking to hook your first mid-market customer. Some define it by headcount, typically around 200-2000 employees, and others by revenue, generally $10M to $1B annual recurring revenue. In rapidly growing companies, the headcount can go from 500-3000 in a matter of months.

Scale 192

Scale Enterprise Scaling SMB 192

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 1, 2020

The key open question is whether the affiliation rule will admit venture-backed startups. Historically, startups haven’t been able to access SBA programs because of this affiliation rule. The rule says that all employees of affiliated companies must be considered headcount. Some are seeing significant churn.

Headcount 276

Headcount Payment Services Government Innovation 276

SaaStr

JUNE 10, 2020

But one thing I know through pattern recognition, there’s a lot of similarities across startups and companies as they go through the different stages. We’re going through layoffs and furloughs, recession planning and for me as the CMO, facing really massive cuts to marketing budgets and headcount. Our workforce is remote.

Travel 171

Travel Marketing Scale Outsourcing Services 171

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 22, 2021

As a Customer Success leader, do you get anxious at the thought of asking your CFO or CEO for additional headcount? Using these models, you too can learn how to go toe-to-toe with your Finance team by presenting trade-offs to get the headcount you need. How to Build a Customer Success Budget for Headcount. Churn Plan.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Sales Hiring Headcount Benchmarks 98

Chart Mogul

AUGUST 15, 2019

Revenue-based financing is quickly becoming a popular way for startups to raise funds without sacrificing equity. MRR (scale and growth rates) Revenue quality: ARPU , LTV , Quick Ratio Cohort metrics : cohort sizes, cohort multiple — an indicator of growth Retention / churn metrics. This is how it works. Customer / revenue metrics.

Finance 52

Finance Payments Revenue Payment Solutions 52

Baremetrics

AUGUST 29, 2021

Let’s say your ICP is a web developer running a startup on the East Coast. Using Sales Navigator’s search engine, you can filter results by plugging in various titles, locations, industries, company headcounts, and so on, to come as close as you can to your ICPs. To prospect for startups, Crunchbase Pro 's database is the place to go.

Scale 97

Scale Startup Sales Hiring Sales 97

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 20, 2022

Not too long ago, when Intercom turned 10 , we dedicated an entire episode to speed , or why startups should always strive to keep momentum as they scale. We’re either increasing upsell or decreasing churn or increasing the attractiveness of the project or whatever. People know that the work can have an impact.

Underperforming Technical Team 249

Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Sales Hiring Scale 249

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

Fast growers retain and expand new customers, resulting in net negative churn. Low churn shows the product is sticky, hard to replace, and truly generating value for customers. This should include both customers that show leading signs of potential churn (i.e. These metrics are an indicator of product-market fit. The takeaway.

Headcount 73

Headcount SaaS Compensation Acquisition 73

SaaStr

JULY 24, 2023

Folks pulled usage down as much as they could to save money, although logo churn remained low. Yet leaders like MongoDB are growing quicker than startups, and it’s usually the opposite. They kept the headcount kind of flat. Even with MongoDB’s epic growth, 2022 saw a big slowdown in usage growth. They went from -40% to +5%.

Revenue 202

Revenue Scale Sales Hiring Cloud 202

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

Along the way, we’ve interviewed trailblazers, business leaders, makers and doers to share their experience and insights on all things startup strategy, product management, design, marketing, customer experience, and much, much more. Slack has obviously raised a lot of money, so we weren’t hampered by budgets as long as the ROI was there.

Outsourcing Services 215

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 30, 2022

Every startup I talk to shares the same core problem: “ Last year was great, this year is not, we need to grow faster, any ideas Des?” Meanwhile, there were more and more new startups being formed, who had more money than ever before. Churn: high/low, reasons: price/product/intent etc. Why talk about reacceleration?

Engineering 151

Engineering Scale Business Sales Hiring 151

FastSpring

JANUARY 31, 2023

These additional features can satisfy the needs of some early-stage startup companies, however, most companies end up needing more robust options. You’ll be able to manage all aspects of the payment lifecycle from your FastSpring dashboard without adding extra software or headcount. Monitor user engagement and churn.

Payment Services 136

Payment Services Payment Methods Merchant Services Payment Features 136

Hitenism

JANUARY 16, 2017

In 2014, Mixpanel’s Series B pitch deck spelled out the company’s expansion plans over the next two years: 3x sales headcount and rapidly race towards distribution. Double headcount every 6-9 months. Soon after, fellow high-growth SaaS startup Optimizely had layoffs, too. It’s not so easy anymore.

Scale 147

Scale Venture Capital SaaS Headcount 147