SaaStr

NOVEMBER 22, 2020

Measure leading indicators and not lagging indicators like churn. All of this will help create value and return on investment capital. SMB to Enterprise, decide which you want to start with and toward which you want to move. There is a deliberate focus on market differentiation vs. market relevance as it relates to investment.

Scale 307

Scale Scaling Technical Review Systems Review 307

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

They had been building toward an SMB audience, so hiring 50 people in sales against a product that wasn’t ready for a specific audience would’ve been a mistake. So when’s the right time to invest more in sales and marketing when we’re all trying to become radically efficient ? Next, think about product maturity.

Scale 242

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 242

Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 21, 2023

This matters a lot more when stock prices are going down, and management teams often grant additional shares to make employees whole (thus increasing dilution even more) Net Revenue Retention High net revenue retention is the fourth aspect of a successful quarter, and one of my favorite metrics to evaluate in private SaaS companies.

Cloud 177

Cloud Software Benchmarks Retention 177

Clouded Judgement

SEPTEMBER 12, 2023

Extra pressures around optimizations still exist, however gross churn levels have stabilized, and commentary on earnings calls suggest conversations around new bookings are starting to pick up. For businesses selling predominantly to SMB customers, these benchmarks are all slightly lower given the higher-churn nature of SMBs.

Cloud 169

Cloud Software Benchmarks Retention 169

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2023

Then the Boom happened, and everyone could justify insane investments, and it warped everything. That works for a hyper-SMB model. The One Metric Only Founders Can Own — Customer Centricity Folks have been under pressure, and a lot of shenanigans and borderline unethical price increases and behaviors are happening. The takeaway?

Metrics 178

Metrics SaaS Sales Hiring Finance 178

OPEXEngine

MAY 18, 2021

SaaS metrics are viewed differently at different stages of growth and for different sales models, primarily whether a company is selling into an SMB or enterprise marketplace. Contracted expansion revenue i.e. add-ons or upgrades that affect the annual subscription price of the customer should be included. . Usage Fee-Based ARR.

SaaS Payments 98

SaaS Payments Metrics Payments Payment Services 98

ChurnZero

JUNE 2, 2021

Now we’re seeing numerous companies price 8 to 12, so it’s definitely jumped up a little bit. A [Rob]: That’s more of a question for the earlier stage investing in the public market. Price earnings doesn’t work. Is the bar across the same for a SMB-focused company versus an enterprise-focused company?

Benchmarks 98

Benchmarks B2B SMB SaaS 98

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 12, 2023

This matters a lot more when stock prices are going down, and management teams often grant additional shares to make employees whole (thus increasing dilution even more) Net Revenue Retention High net revenue retention is the fourth aspect of a successful quarter, and one of my favorite metrics to evaluate in private SaaS companies.

Cloud 161

Cloud Software Benchmarks Retention 161

SaaStr

AUGUST 30, 2023

Many investment banker pitches say that everyone is number one at something. You might not be DocuSign, but for SMBs in France in retail, you are number one. You can filter your search by industry, whether you’re SMB, mid-market, or Enterprise, etc. They have privacy, security, vendor transitions, and acquisition support.

AI Search 182

AI Search AI ChatGPT Software Review 182

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2022

You just close more, and churn less, and upsell more, when you show up. Another top mistake SMB folks make trying to sell enterprise. 5M in ARR b/c we were too small a co and compliance dept blocked renewal (shoulda raised price I guess…) ” — Jared Hansen, CEO Thrilling Foods. ” — Vinish Garg.

CTO Hire 259

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 259

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 20, 2023

The market is clearly pricing in lower rates + reacceleration of growth. It is calculated by taking the annual recurring revenue of a cohort of customers from 1 year ago, and comparing it to the current annual recurring revenue of that same set of customers (even if you experienced churn).

Cloud 161

Cloud Software Benchmarks Scale 161

Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 20, 2022

This matters a lot more when stock prices are going down, and management teams often grant additional shares to make employees whole (thus increasing dilution even more) Net Revenue Retention High net revenue retention is the fourth aspect of a successful quarter, and one of my favorite metrics to evaluate in private SaaS companies.

Cloud 130

Cloud Software Review Software Benchmarks 130

ChurnZero

MARCH 18, 2022

Q: Should you be worried if your annual logo churn is between 25% to 30%?*. Their report shares the results from a survey of private SaaS companies which KBCM Technology Group’s software investment banking team conducted in June and July 2021. Then, you can stop counting them as churn. That’s an alarming level churn.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Metrics SaaS Banking 98

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2014

HubSpot’s target customer base are SMBs and with this price point, it’s possible to support a profitable inside sales model if the team is very efficient. HubSpot is the second fastest SMB SaaS company to IPO yet, achieving the mark within 8 years. Only WIX, CTCT and RNG had smaller figures of $86, $265 and $352.

Benchmarks 108

Benchmarks SMB Metrics SaaS 108

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

It was around that time about 12 years ago that Jeff Bezos launched AWS, and some of you may remember that, when he did this, Wall Street analysts were looking at him and saying, “Why would you take what’s already a very unprofitable business and drive it further into the red by investing in this AWS initiative?”

Cloud 100

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 100

CustomerSuccessBox

MAY 8, 2022

Customers typically think of tech as cutting-edge, therefore they assume it must come with a large price tag. Furthermore, the typical SMB spends 6.9% Correlate Price and Value. In addition, most customer accounts suffer some level of staff and end-user churn. of its revenue on IT, compared to 4.1

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Scale Systems Review Software Review 52

SaaStr

MAY 8, 2020

What specific and deliberate things can startups do not just to prevent churn but also to increase usage and upsell? If we dive in a bit, what specific and deliberate things can start-ups do, not just to avoid churn, but also on the upside, to expand the usage and upsell? How should sales teams and CS respond to requests for discounts?

Sales Recruiting 171

Sales Recruiting Technical Review Sales Hiring Outsourced Development 171

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2020

“Churn” is a term we all use in SaaS as a core metric, but its roots, as near as I remember and can tell, come from our B2C colleagues. Folks churn out of their Verizon plan, their Netflix subscription, etc. And sometimes they’ll churn even just for a modestly better deal. the dynamics are similar.

Churn 362

Churn Sales Hiring Systems Review B2C 362

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

How does Krish think about purely serving the SMB market? How does he think about the mortality rate of SMBs? How does Krish think your customer acquisition and GTM strategy has to change with the movement from SMB to enterprise? How do you think about customers scaling out of that bracket and churn as a result?

Scale 125

Scale SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting Payment Services 125

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2019

Why is it so crucial to invest in enablement in the early days? I think that’s where if you look at, we are very proud of our churn rate, being in market now for two years with 0% churn. It’s not an SMB where you’re getting volumes of 100 a day. How should this enablement be structured? Number one.

SaaS Payments 130

SaaS Payments Cloud Technical Review Scale 130

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

Then we went on to build another company called SteelBrick, another SaaS configure price quoting solution. And companies in general, are also right now, investing more in software and digital. And you can see here across the board, companies, SaaS companies are expected increased churn. It’s most severe in the SMB world.

Software Review 174

Software Review Scale Technical Review SaaS 174

OPEXEngine

NOVEMBER 17, 2020

If you are an early-stage or growth SaaS company, most likely all your sales and marketing expenses are invested in acquiring new customers. After that point, the company becomes a new subscription, a new customer (and the previous contract was churn). As a SaaS company scales, your CAC components will change.

Systems Review 52

Systems Review Technical Review Payment Features Scale 52

ChurnZero

JANUARY 4, 2019

Firstly- Happy New Year Churn Fighters! Customer apathy and disillusionment will be the hairiest churn monsters to beat in 2019.” – Brooke Goodbary, Customer Success Consultant, www.Brooke.land. In 2019, you’ll see more companies use bots to streamline and automate their Customer Success as access improves and price decreases.”

Customer Success 73

Customer Success SaaS Payments Payment Services Payment Solutions 73

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2019

As for Tom, he joined Redpoint in 2008 and has since led investments in Kustomer, Looker, Expensify, and Gremlin all prior guests on the show, I hasten to add. How does this differ when comparing enterprise to SMB? How does this differ when comparing SMB to enterprise? What were the commonalities of leading indicators of churn?

Scale 112

Scale SMB Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 112

SaaStr

OCTOBER 29, 2019

Naomi Pilosof Ionita | Investing Partner @ Menlo Ventures. We’re going to talk about matching price to value, and I’m going to share some lessons from my time as both an operator and an investor. This is a mobile solution for SMB’s to send an invoice and get paid. The next camp, we price it artificially low.

Payments 100

Payments Pricing Compensation SaaS Payments 100

ChurnZero

AUGUST 24, 2018

Because you certainly are going to want to make sure that your subscription product is priced so your customers can adopt to it. Q: At what annual churn percentage should you stop and re-think the product fit? I’ve seen a lot of churn rates in my days. So, understanding what’s driving that churn.

Finance 61

Finance Customer Success Scale Customer Lifetime Value 61

CustomerSuccessBox

FEBRUARY 28, 2022

With this model for some reason people churn out and that’s when businesses are more likely to see a net retention rate in SaaSthat is less than 100%. They have a net negative churn rate of 143%. Enterprise is stable whereas SMB’s are skyrocketing in Shopify. So, the pricing increase strategy still works as they scale.

Retention 52

Retention SaaS Payments Payments Payment Methods 52

ChurnZero

JANUARY 4, 2019

Firstly- Happy New Year Churn Fighters! Customer apathy and disillusionment will be the hairiest churn monsters to beat in 2019.” – Brooke Goodbary, Customer Success Consultant, www.Brooke.land. In 2019, you’ll see more companies use bots to streamline and automate their Customer Success as access improves and price decreases.”

Customer Success 49

Customer Success SaaS Payments Payment Services Payment Solutions 49

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2022

You would take three to four years to deploy it for new investments, not follow-ons but new investments. And they’ve probably cut the amount they want to invest in the next 12 months by half to 66% because of the math. They’ve cut the amount they want to invest. So you’d raise $100 million fund.

Scale 179

Scale SaaS Payments Scaling SaaS 179

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 11, 2019

Those three together really comprise the entirety of the front office for the SMB. You should spread those kinds of cuts more evenly and try to then invest in your customers, so you can come out of that downturn a little bit better. Why customer service is worth the investment. Source: HubSpot Research. Michael: For sure.

Scale 188

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 188

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2019

And the other job was to be an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. And I was talking to my dad, and he said, “I don’t think you’re an investment banker, Leyla,” which was good advice. I think for me one of the biggest realizations for me, we were a mid market company, right, we grew up in SMB.

Scale 129

Scale VP of Engineering Mobile Scaling 129

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

The other thing that dropped our odds of success was the fact that we were focused on small business, on the SMB market, and everyone we talked to, literally everyone. Do not…,” and the reason is no one hardly ever has succeeded in building a big business in SMB. ” “Yep, we need a price.”

Part-Time VPE 204

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 204

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

Maria : Yeah, I think, coming from a marketing side and thinking about that as a marketer, marketing is all about investments. There’s none of the brands that you’ve seen get to an IPO or continue on to a Fortune 500 company that is not making some significant investments there. Aaron : And they just have to do it.

Sales Hiring 201

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 201

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2019

We invest from the very earliest stages to the latest stages of software and consumer companies and we’re based in California. And they were broken down roughly a third, a third, a third by targeting the SMB, the mid-market, and the enterprise. Redpoint is a venture firm that’s been around for about 20 years.

Scale 195

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Payment Services 195

Point Nine Land

JANUARY 17, 2019

After several years of price inflation in most assets, many investors are expecting a recession in the near term. Bold Prediction : Every European Series A VC firm will have at least one investment in manufacturing by the end of 2019. Rodrigo Martinez Partner Millennials will rise to power!

Technical Review 40

Technical Review Marketplace as a Service Software Review Venture Capital 40

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2019

To date, Amit has raised $68m in funding for Gong from the likes of Norwest, Battery Ventures, Cisco Investments, and Wing Venture Capital, just to name a few. What does Amit think about the differing variable price mechanisms that one can choose? What does Amit advise founders should charge in the early days?

Outsourced Development 130

Outsourced Development Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale 130

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2019

Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr, the world’s largest SaaS community and leading early-stage SaaS fund with investments in Automile, TalkDesk, Algolia and more. What can founders do to their pricing model to extract as much value from each customer? How do the very best businesses structure their pricing for value extraction? *

Outsourcing Services 113

Outsourcing Services Scale Sales Hiring SMB 113