SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2025

The Hard Truth About SaaS Revenue Durability: Why 80% of Post-IPO Companies Don’t Compound in Value Bottom Line Up Front: The math on SaaS investing is … tough. Even “good” bets from 2021’s growth surge are stalling out because fast-growing revenue often doesn’t compound as expected at scale.

Revenue

SaaStr

JULY 23, 2025

Managing revenue operations (RevOps) in a SaaS company is all about aligning sales, marketing, and customer success to drive growth efficiently. Build a single source of truth for all revenue-related metrics—pipeline, churn, CAC, LTV, NRR, etc. Focus on Net Revenue Retention (NRR) NRR is the most important metric in SaaS.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

MARCH 23, 2025

Dear SaaStr: What “Quotas” Should My VP of Customer Success and VP of Product Have? 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). Without them, youre flying blind.

VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud)

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 30, 2024

They know they’ll need an ever-expanding team to hit compound revenue targets—2 reps, then 4, then 8, then 16, and eventually 64 or more. 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

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2024

A rough yardstick is that most enterprise-focused SaaS companies tend to get about 8%-10% of their revenues from professional services. A few data points: At $800m ARR, Qualtrics was still getting 25% of revenue from professional services. At $500m ARR, OneStream gets about 8% of its revenue from professional services.

Investment

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2025

So we’ve been proponents of customer success at SaaStr since the earliest days, since our first SaaStr posts in 2012. Especially the power of it leading to second order revenue, from upgrades to referrals to word of mouth and more: CLTV Isn’t The Whole Story. Don’t Shortchange Second-Order Revenue.

Onboarding

SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2025

Here’s what it really took for Attentive to go from $0 to $500M ARR in just 7 years, sending over 32B text messages and generating $20B+ in revenue for their 8,000+ customers. Everyone knew mobile commerce was exploding (from 15% in 2014 to 75% in 2024), but reaching customers on mobile was broken.

Technical Review

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. Customer Success. The Second Most Important SaaS Hire? But the results?

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2025

Are they the right people for the next stage of growth Customer Success : What’s the churn rate? What’s net revenue retention (NRR)? Are customers expanding, or are you losing them after the first year? Processes : Are there anyrepeatable sales and customer success processes in place, or is everything ad hoc?

Scale

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2025

When Anthropic hit a reported $4 billion in annual revenue at the end of 1H’25, it marked more than just another AI milestone. API-First Revenue Model Unlike the subscription-heavy models of traditional SaaS, 70-75% of Anthropic’s revenue comes from API calls through pay-per-token pricing. Here’s how they did it: 1.

B2B

SaaStr

JULY 11, 2025

Customer Concentration Risk: Founders often worry about having too much revenue tied to a single customer. If one customer makes up 50%+ of your revenue, you’re at extreme risk. Keep that customer happy but aggressively find others like them. Here are some of the big ones I’ve seen repeatedly: 1.

Scale

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

Meet Wyatt Jenkins: From Construction Sites to Chief Product Officer If you want to understand how vertical SaaS companies scale to $1B+ in revenue while staying true to their customers, there’s no better person to learn from than Wyatt Jenkins, Chief Product Officer at Procore Technologies.

Construction

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2025

It tells them how much of your revenue base you’re retaining, excluding any upsells or expansions. Here’s the best-practice way to calculate it: Start with your Beginning ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) : This is the ARR from your existing customers at the start of the period you’re measuring. moved to a lower-tier plan).

Retention

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

They prioritize revenue growth, market share and profit maximization differently. Maximization (Revenue Growth) - maximize revenue growth in the short term. Many mid-market software companies price with the goal of revenue maximization, negotiating for the highest possible price in each sale.

SaaS Payments

SaaStr

JUNE 24, 2025

37% of AI-Native vs 30% Traditional SaaS Use Hybrid Pricing (50/50 Revenue Split) The Pricing Evolution: The pure SaaS subscription model is becoming less common, especially among AI-native companies. The largest companies derive nearly 30% of their revenue from partnerships—almost double the rate of early-stage companies.

Scale

SaaStr

JUNE 6, 2025

So Jamin Ball of Altimeter has a great summary of the cumulative revenue growth of all public SaaS companies … and it’s not a great story: Aggregate net new ARR added in Q1 from the software universe isn't looking good! The companies that thrive will be those that can grow their existing customer relationships.

Cloud

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2025

Churn and Expansion : For existing customers, analyze churn rates, upsell/cross-sell performance, and NRR (Net Revenue Retention). Alignment Across Teams : Ensure alignment between sales, marketing, and customer success. Are customer success teams equipped to drive renewals and expansions?

Technical Review

SaaStr

JUNE 25, 2025

Company Snapshot: Founded : January 2014 (11 years) Current ARR : $1.09B+ (Q1 FY2025) Growth Rate : 39% YoY ARR growth, 47% revenue growth NPS Score : 80 (exceptionally high for enterprise software) Net Revenue Retention : 133% (as of Jan 2024) Customers : 2,246 customers with $100K+ ARR contracts IPO : April 2024 on NYSE (RBRK) at $5.6B

Cybersecurity

SaaStr

MAY 3, 2025

Having said that, if you have a steady stream of leads and customers, you really can’t hire a great VP of Demand Gen / Growth too early. Customer Success and Support : You can hire 1-2 individual contributors to handle onboarding and support, but its still very hands-on. More on that here.

Sales Hiring

ChurnZero

MAY 23, 2025

If youve come up in your career through sales, you’re used to living in a world defined by revenue metrics. If youve reached the pinnacle of becoming a chief revenue officer (CRO), you know how to tell a growth story that makes sense to the board and to the market. 1: Net revenue retention (NRR): your valuation growth engine.

Customer Success

SaaStr

DECEMBER 25, 2024

Today, the most efficient public SaaS company is probably Doximity, at about $700,000 in revenue per employee. or so at the very latest, youll need to start hiring dedicated customer success professionals. I know many are talking about AI fueling 1 person, $1B start-ups. I hope that happens. But maybe not so much in SaaS.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

JUNE 29, 2025

👉 10 Things Deel Did to Get from $1M to $100M ARR in 20 Months Deel recently announced it had crossed $1 billion in ARR, joining the exclusive club of B2B companies that have reached true unicorn revenue status. Scaled Sales Without Revenue Operations (And Paid Dearly) The Explosion : From 2 AEs to 50 AEs in one year.

Payment Services

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2025

Key points about SaaStr Annual : Focus on SaaS: Primarily focused on all aspects of SaaS business including sales, marketing, product development, and customer success. Large Audience: Considered the biggest SaaS conference with a large number of attendees from leading SaaS companies, startups, and venture capital firms.

Software

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2025

This means 50% of their total compensation is a base salary, and the other 50% is variable, tied to hitting specific revenue or ARR targets. Variable Compensation (50% of OTE) : This is tied to performance, usually based on achieving the company’s ARR or revenue goals. For example, if the OTE is $300K, the base salary would be $150K.

Sales Hiring

SaaStr

JULY 11, 2025

Treat All Customers Like Gold, Regardless of Revenue Don’t segment customer success based on how much customers pay. Canva focuses on helping customers solve problems and move through their journey, knowing that value creation leads to revenue growth. 5 Unexpected Learnings 1.

Scale

SaaStr

JULY 17, 2025

What the revenue trajectories of Snowflake, Shopify, Okta, and Twilio tell us about the new normal in B2B and SaaS. When VCs would literally walk away from any SaaS company not doubling revenue year-over-year? Scale Kills Velocity When Snowflake was doing 124% growth, they had $265M in revenue. revenue scale. The lesson?

B2B

SaaStr

JUNE 22, 2025

Learning #3: The NRR Superpower – This One Metric Can Transform Your Entire Business Here’s a stat that should make every SaaS executive stop what they’re doing: Companies with the highest Net Revenue Retention report median growth that is 83% higher than the population median.

B2B

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 26, 2024

This is a guest article by Swati Garg , founder and CEO, Melo Associates , and Lindsay Lynch , senior recruitment consultant, Melo Associates , a recruitment firm focused on customer success hiring for SaaS and tech companies nationwide. For example, “Enterprise Customer Success Manager”.

Technical Review

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2025

B2B Startups Spend 15% of Revenue on Sales and 10% on Marketing, Per SaaS Capital #4. The Top 10 Customer Success Metrics Investors Care About in 2025 with Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta #4. How to Build a World-Class Customer Success Org: Lessons from Notion’s CRO and GitHub’s VP of CS #5. Top Posts: #1.

Scale

Tom Tunguz

MAY 29, 2025

Monte Carlo, a data & AI observability pioneer, moved from traditional annual contracts to a daily revenue model. These were the three most important takeaways for me from the conversation: Monte Carlo customers were used to buying usage-based rather than contract-based & the alignment was an important & critical evolution.

Revenue

SaaStr

JUNE 14, 2025

For example, “If our churn rate exceeds 10%, we’ll invest in a dedicated customer success team to improve retention.” Tie Projections to Funding Needs Your revenue projections should align with your funding ask. Acknowledge potential challenges—like longer sales cycles or higher churn—and explain how you’ll address them.

Scale

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2025

4 Unexpected Learnings from Dave’s Scaling Journey The $30M Revenue Threshold : Companies that can reach $30M in revenue have typically found sufficient product-market fit to scale to $100M. When Dave was building HashiCorp in the early days, they were obsessively focused on discovering what customers were responding to.

Scale

SaaStr

AUGUST 3, 2025

Even a small increase in win rates can have a massive impact on revenue. Leverage Customer Success Stories : Use case studies and testimonials from your happiest customers to build credibility and trust. Marketing, product, and customer success all need to be aligned to support the sales team.

Leadership

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2025

5 Of The Best Ways to Retain Your Customers In SaaS in The Earlier Days … And After 4. Deploy a Customer Success Blitz Your Customer Success team needs to go into overdrive. Start doing 30-60-90 day check-ins with every customer, especially the ones at risk. Can you add a team or enterprise edition?

Scale