SaaStr

MAY 16, 2025

Should We Cut and Marketing To The Bone? Look don’t throw money away on sales & marketing. If you are doing intiatives in marketing and they are bringing in zero customers, just stop those things. But more often, sales and marketing is closing some deals, just not enough.

Marketing 156

Marketing Scale Churn Content Marketing 156

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2024

SaaStr ) And once you have at least a little revenue ($1m-$2m ARR or so), net revenue retention / churn. NRR and churn aren’t necessarily statistical significant before Year 2-3 and before $1m-$2m in ARR). Churn is important, but in the early days, just drive it down. Probably, measured as NPS (more here: I Was Wrong.

Metrics 283

Metrics Venture Capital SaaS Churn 283

SaaStr

JULY 26, 2022

But beyond all the other Pros and Cons of SMB vs enterprise, there’s one looming issue with SMB SaaS: Churn. Endemic churn. The type of churn you almost can’t do anything about. Net net, most true SMB SaaS products often churn on the order of 3% per month almost no matter what you do. And measuring it.

SMB 363

SMB Churn Payment Services SaaS 363

Kellblog

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

Increasingly, you’ll hear the term “business outcomes” popping up in software marketing. Leaving too much to the mind of the reader by omitting advantages and benefits is — not to put too fine a point on it — the cardinal sin of marketing. Look, this is a tricky marketing problem. It’s not great.

Marketing 144

Marketing Business Finance Sales Hiring 144

SaaStr

JUNE 14, 2025

Here’s how to approach it: Show the Big Picture, But Back It Up Investors want to see your ambition—how you’re going to dominate your market or create a category. Use a Bottom-Up Approach for Projections Startups often get into trouble by pitching top-down projections, like “If we capture 1% of a $10B market, we’ll hit $100M ARR.”

Scale 227

Scale Sales Hiring Benchmarks Churn 227

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2025

Workato’s SVP of Embedded Sales and Director of Solutions Marketing joined us at SaaStr Annual to talk about how to nurture customers — a great topic in general, but especially for embedded sales and APIs that can take a while to scale. Marketing + CS alignment is worth 10x more than you think. Customer Success.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Churn 246

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2025

Marketing : Likely no VP of Marketing yet either — unless. You might bring on a growth hacker to help with demand gen, but youre still figuring out product-market fit. I Hired My VP of Marketing at $20k MRR. 5M ARR : Start layering in Sales Ops, Enablement, and more specialized marketing roles.

Sales Hiring 237

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Scale 237

SaaStr

JANUARY 4, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What Do You Do With Churned Customers? You put them into a Get Them Back bucket and re-market to them with a dedicated program. 1, Put them in a dedicated marketing bucket for Reacquisition. Seasoned VPs of Marketing often have done this before. The post Dear SaaStr: What Do You Do With Churned Customers?

Churn 274

Churn Marketing Data Sales 274

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2025

Basic questions like “What’s our churn rate?” After launching out of Y Combinator in 2018, RevenueCat quickly hit product-market fit. Market Expansion: The mobile subscription market exploded during COVID. ” or “What’s the lifetime value of subscribers?” The Bottom Line From a $1.5M

Payments 279

Payments Payment Solutions Underperforming Technical Team Payment Methods 279

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2025

If you try to save cash by offering below-market comp, youll end up with mediocre reps who cost you more in lost deals than you save in salary. Failing to Align Sales with Marketing and Product : Enterprise sales requires tight alignment across teams. If these teams arent working together, deals will stall, and churn will rise.

Outsourcing Services 188

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Scale Enterprise 188

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

So lately I’ve listened to a few calls from churned customers from portfolio companies. If you’re growing, generally, you’re focused on a market or market segment that’s also growing. If you’re growing, generally, you’re focused on a market or market segment that’s also growing. Not shrinking.

Churn 276

Churn Market Segmentation Cloud AI 276

Stax

MARCH 16, 2025

The average churn rate for the software industry as a whole is 14%. Thats actually one of the lowest churn rates across all industries. That said, industry experts agree that your SaaS companys goal churn should be below 2%. TL;DR The average software industry churn rate is 14%, but SaaS companies should aim for under 2%.

Payment Solutions 88

Payment Solutions Software Review Churn SaaS Payments 88

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

For 90% of startups, if you’re struggling right now … sure blame the market. But it’s not that, if your market is huge. Note: I don’t want to hear seed companies complain about ‘the market.’ Because you’ve barely penetrated a huge market. market share from Shopify, Zendesk, Salesforce, etc.

Marketing 357

Marketing Startup Cloud Churn 357

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2024

Akshay Sharma, Head of Pricing and Monetization at Miro explained: “As you change the green side, your product, your features, go to market, your marketing, budget discounts, you have to change the pricing side appropriately so that you can achieve the goals you want.” ” So, How Should You Price?

Payments 284

Payments Pricing Scale Revenue 284

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2025

Your customer success team should be experimenting with AI-powered sentiment analysis and churn prediction. ” and VPs of Marketing are experimenting with AI-generated content, individual contributors get the message that AI fluency is part of their job, not someone else’s. The same applies to AI today.

Sales Hiring 242

Sales Hiring Artificial Intelligence AI Sales Recruiting 242

Clouded Judgement

NOVEMBER 18, 2024

We go to market with our platform in three ways: Core, Pro and FinTech products. ” Market Opportunity From the S-1: “In the United States and Canada alone, end customers spend approximately $1.5 Today, we serve trades and markets that represent approximately $650 billion of the total $1.5

Benchmarks 302

Benchmarks Payments Payment Services SaaS Payments 302

SaaStr

JUNE 14, 2025

The 40% Tipping Point : With 40% of workloads now in the cloud, SaaS has hit market maturity. The easy growth is over—companies like Zoom exemplify this with saturated markets and nowhere left to expand rapidly. Despite a $150B labor market vs. $15B software market, actual expansion is only 2-3x, not the theoretical 10x.

AI 245

AI Cloud Software Review Underperforming Technical Team 245

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

Speaker Bio Jason Lyman leads marketing at Customer.io, where he’s helped scale the platform to power over 35 billion customer interactions for 7,000+ high-growth companies. Before Customer.io, Jason built and scaled marketing teams at several B2B SaaS companies, with a focus on customer engagement and revenue operations.

Scale 271

Scale SaaS B2B Scaling 271

SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2024

Of Marketing. Worst case, they still use it and are happy, and churn less. At least take market share. Go Hire That Missing VP! OK, this has been on our New Years list since inception, but its as true as ever. The best way to get out of a hole is to hire a great VP. A great VP of Sales. Of Product. Whats your #1 VP hole?

Sales Hiring 279

Sales Hiring SaaS Venture Capital Healthcare 279

SaaStr

DECEMBER 4, 2023

With the turbulence in the market in 2023, sales cycles have only been getting longer and a lot more complicated. At this year’s SaaStr Annual , CEO and co-founder of Capchase Miguel Fernandez and Director of Marketing Rose Johnson share five tips for getting sales right in any market. to find out what was going on.

SaaS Payments 282

SaaS Payments Payment Services Payments Payment Features 282

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2025

Churn and Expansion : For existing customers, analyze churn rates, upsell/cross-sell performance, and NRR (Net Revenue Retention). AI can help predict churn and identify expansion opportunities. Alignment Across Teams : Ensure alignment between sales, marketing, and customer success. If so, why?

Technical Review 179

Technical Review Sales Forecasting AI 179

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2022

And I’m going to suggest two that will worry you a lot as you scale — Churn and Sales Cycle — you should track, but not obsess over, until you are well, well past initial traction, that first $1m-$2m ARR. >> Let’s Start with Churn. Absolutely, getting your churn trending downward is important.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Scale Churn Metrics 274

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

Procore exemplifies this approach in the construction industry a massive market representing 13% of global GDP. The Power of Authentic Founder-Market Fit The most successful vertical SaaS companies are often built by founders solving problems they’ve personally experienced.

Construction 251

Construction Scale SaaS Travel 251

SaaStr

DECEMBER 10, 2020

That they can get away without no one in the role, or a just a junior person in marketing, in product, in success, in biz dev, etc. “Why Do I Need a VP of Marketing? ” Another one I see a lot is, let’s start with a Director of Marketing. 95/100, only a VP can really own the whole thing in marketing.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Scale 363

SaaStr

JUNE 14, 2025

Despite having spent almost no direct dollars on marketing, they reached 360,000 paying customers at an average ACV of $276—compared to enterprise darlings like Wiz who hit $100M with 260 customers at $384K each. They achieved this with $0 invested in marketing and just 131 employees. The kicker? Build for sharing from day one.

ChatGPT 217

ChatGPT AI Search AI Growth Hacking 217

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2023

Dear SaaStr: How Does a SaaS Startup Break Out in a Crowded Market? Find one segment of the market to win in. Most SaaS markets are crowded today. They might give up on SMBs, or freemium, or higher churn segments. A bit more here: 5 Ways to Enter a Crowded Market. But you might be able to do well there.

Startup 298

Startup Marketing Healthcare SaaS 298

SaaStr

MAY 10, 2025

It combines renewals, churn, and upsells. From product to sales to marketing, every department should be aligned around making customers successful. Track metrics like churn, NRR, time-to-value, and customer health scores. The goal is to act before customers even realize theyre unhappy 2 3.

Sales Hiring 232

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale Retention 232

SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2025

A strong GRR (80-90%) ensures your base is solid, and youre not just masking churn with upsells. This isnt just about NPS scores, its about creating pound-the-table advocates who will vouch for your product in the market. VPP Quotas : Product adoption, feature stickiness, churn reduction, and roadmap execution.

VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) 156

VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) Customer Success Churn Retention 156

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2024

While this title is SMB-oriented, the advice applies to Mid-Market and Enterprise, too. Early churn was a massive drag on efficiency. They needed to get their hands on early churn. This led to fairly unsustainable levels of churn of early churn. Nail down one small niche of a market before you hit the gas to scale.

Scale 301

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Sales 301

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2025

ARR (already doubling the old “best in class” annual benchmark) Median : $700K ARR Bottom quartile : $500K ARR The top performers are starting to pull away significantly, suggesting they’ve cracked something fundamental about product-market fit that others haven’t. By month 6: Top quartile : $2.0M

Enterprise 169

Enterprise AI Startup Benchmarks 169

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2025

Referrals are Chime’s largest acquisition driver since 2022 , helping bring sales & marketing spend down to 26% of revenue in Q1 2025, from 42% in 2022. The 2021 fintech hype is mostly overpublic markets now reward fundamentals. And a good comp for Ramp, Brex, and others. 5 Interesting Leanings: #1.

Outsourcing Services 198

Outsourcing Services Scale Banking Customer Lifetime Value 198

SaaStr

APRIL 24, 2022

SaaStr 545: Marketing to Developers: Why Happy is Our Hack with DigitalOcean CMO Carly Brantz and SaaStr GM & SVP, Marketing Amelia Ibarra. Revenue Marketing: Build for Scale with Podium’s SVP, Revenue Marketing Jess Weimer. Learnings from Innovating in Underserved Markets with Samsara CPO Kiren Sekar.

Sales Hiring 293

Sales Hiring Revenue Scale SMB 293

Buffer Resources

JANUARY 7, 2025

Artificial intelligence is transforming digital marketing by empowering us to do our best work. The right AI marketing tools will help you automate repetitive tasks, make data-driven decisions, and unblock your creativity. The shift to AI-powered marketing has been dramatic.

AI Search 119

AI Search AI Social Media Marketing 119

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2025

If youre selling to SMBs, churn can be a killerfix it now. The key is to reignite growth where possiblewhether through expanding your TAM, improving your go-to-market strategy, or doubling down on upsells. Operational Focus At 35% growth, you need to optimize every dollar spent. Double down on upsells and cross-sells to improve NRR.

Sales Hiring 195

Sales Hiring B2B Churn Retention 195