SaaStr

JUNE 14, 2025

Why 40% Cloud Adoption Marks the End of Easy Growth. And why the AI budget war is just getting started Top 5 Takeaways 1. 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. 2. AI is Eating SaaS Budgets : Companies like Cursor are generating massive revenue by replacing traditional SaaS workflows entirely.

AI 234

AI Cloud Software Review Underperforming Technical Team 234

SaaStr

JUNE 14, 2025

Dear SaaStr: How Do You Balance Optimism with Realism When Pitching VCs? Successful startups balance optimism with realism by presenting a compelling vision while grounding their projections in credible, data-backed assumptions. Bear in mind, most VCs — not all, but most — have pretty good B.S. detectors. They will cut you some slack, but if you start saying things that just don’t tie to the numbers or reality, they won’t fund you.

Scale 203

Scale Sales Hiring Benchmarks Churn 203

SaaStr

JUNE 14, 2025

This chart from Altimeter Capital tells one of the most dramatic stories in software history. Google took 15 years to reach 1.2 trillion annual searches. That catapulted it into the $2 Trillion leader it is today. ChatGPT? It hit 1 billion searches per day in under a year : Let’s put this in perspective: ChatGPT compressed what took Google over a decade into roughly 300 days.

ChatGPT 194

ChatGPT AI Search AI Growth Hacking 194