Clouded Judgement

APRIL 19, 2024

Subscribe now Rubrik IPO Update This week Rubrik launched their IPO with an initial pricing range of $28 - $31 / share. The table below lays out a few stats at different share prices. I’ll update this table if / when they update the pricing range. Altimeter is an investment adviser registered with the U.S.

Cloud 141

Cloud Scale Payment Features Subscription 141

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 29, 2024

Given most software companies are not profitable, or not generating meaningful FCF, it’s the only metric to compare the entire industry against. I created this subset to show companies where FCF is a relevant valuation metric. This is for information purposes and should not be construed as an investment recommendation.

Cloud 278

Cloud Forecasting Payment Features Subscription 278

SaaStr

APRIL 19, 2024

He’s invested in startups as a VC since 2013 and has 10x his fund. Today that would be a dream, but in 2011, people didn’t understand the metrics around recurring revenue businesses, so investors weren’t sure it was a good business. As soon as you see a cluster in England, Chile, and Brazil, invest in and support it.

Engineering 221

Engineering Business Model Pricing Scaling 221

SaaStr

DECEMBER 17, 2021

Pricing is one of the most challenging elements to get right for SaaS companies. How much should you charge, and what pricing model works best? In an era of empowered buyers, vendors should take care to remove obstacles from the pricing process or risk losing the customer to a competitor.

Pricing 190

Pricing Scale Retention AI 190

Baremetrics

AUGUST 8, 2021

For most, the easiest ways to increase customer acquisition rates are to offer a freemium model or price your product on the lower end of the spectrum. However, to keep your business afloat, you’ll need to effect a SaaS price increase. Ensures You Attract the Right Customers When Should You Increase Your Pricing?

Pricing 111

Pricing SaaS Scale Churn 111

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 1, 2024

” I heard that a lot in 2021, and unfortunately not many call options hit… It’s hard to invest at 100x ARR and exit at 10x and make a return VCs aim for. Update on Q4 Earnings One metric I love tracking in net new ARR added in a quarter. I created this subset to show companies where FCF is a relevant valuation metric.

Cloud 311

Cloud AI Investment Metrics 311

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

Through these interactions, I’ve built up mental benchmarks for metrics on which I place extra emphasis. My hope is that this analysis can provide startup entrepreneurs with a framework for how to manage their businesses around SaaS metrics (e.g., This has all resulted in the median stock price declining 5% YTD.

Cloud 177

Cloud Software Azure AWS 177

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2019

To put the company’s stellar trajectory in context, I’ve plotted its metrics relative to two other incredible monitoring companies: NewRelic (NEWR) and AppDynamics (APPD). Here’s why: For every dollar of sales and marketing investment, DataDog generates $1.68 DataDog is playing across price points.

Metrics 189

Metrics Benchmarks Scale User Experience 189

ChurnZero

JUNE 9, 2023

8 metrics to position Customer Success as a profit center with finance While sentiment-based metrics like Net Promoter Score ® (NPS) and customer satisfaction are important, they don’t frame CS work from a financial perspective. To that end, here are the metrics you can use to get started. Did pricing go up too far?

Finance 98

Finance Metrics Customer Success Headcount 98

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

Going in to this earnings season I expected a big driver of stock price performance to be how 2024 full year estimates change pre / post earnings. Since the macro feels more “stabilized” it felt fair to assume “are numbers going up or down” to be the question most correlated with stock price performance.

Cloud 195

Cloud Pricing Startup Revenue 195

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

So one thing that has exploded in SaaS in the past decade is the role of Private Equity buying both public SaaS companies (to take them private, “fix” some metrics, and IPO or sell them again), and generally later-stage private SaaS companies. PE wants to invest in leaders, if not necessarily always #1 in a category.

AWS 231

AWS SaaS Pricing Acquisition 231

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 5, 2024

.” For startups, their valuation follows an arc from pure hype based valuations (all on potential) in the earliest days when you’re just a team and and idea, to pure fundamental based valuations in the public markets when you’re given a valuation multiple against a financial metric like revenue or free cash flow.

Cloud 161

Cloud Scale Pricing Revenue 161

Baremetrics

SEPTEMBER 26, 2021

There might not be an industry more addicted to its metrics than SaaS, and there is good reason for it. But how many SaaS financial metrics are you really tracking? Baremetrics gives you all the key metrics for your business, including MRR, ARR, LTV, total customers, and more. What are metrics? What are metrics?

Metrics 95

Metrics SaaS Payments SaaS Customer Lifetime Value 95

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2023

In part two we head into IPO waters, how to incorporate AI into your products, the best way to drive employee performance, pricing models, and much more. Q: As you scale, how metrics-oriented should the company be? ARR asks Jason how he sees the best companies steering into metrics and KPIs to drive performance at a leadership level.

Scale 213

Scale Sales Hiring Customer Success AI 213

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2024

To me, this is just the impressive metric of all. ACV Basically Flat at $11,365 This is likely a “macro” impact as well in part — as well as the fact that HubSpot continues to invest in its smaller starter customers. Despite raising prices and selling more products, HubSpot ACV is basically flat at $11,365.

Scale 224

Scale Cloud Pricing Scaling 224

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 18, 2019

Let’s first look at one of the key SaaS metrics: the dollar attention. Sales efficiency is a measure of the marginal gross profit generated by a dollar invested in sales and marketing. In terms of price point, PagerDuty is right around the $10,000 revenue per customer per year. The average customer is worth about $10,000.

Metrics 192

Metrics Benchmarks Software Review Engineering 192

OPEXEngine

JUNE 2, 2021

Smart pricing enabled process management software provider Cherwell to get the most from its subscribers while new businesses languished. ” Key metrics. . ” Key metrics. ” His calculations helped him make the case for maintaining full-value pricing during the downturn. ” Process efficiency. .’

Metrics 52

Metrics Pricing Airlines Sales Hiring 52

OpenView Labs

APRIL 8, 2021

The response since the usage-based pricing playbook has far exceeded my expectations. My TechCrunch byline went semi-viral, Bessemer named usage-based pricing part of the “ new normal ” for SaaS go-to-market strategy, and Alex Wilhelm said it’s “ one theme that’s come up time and again ” in public company earnings calls.

Pricing 97

Pricing Scale Payment Features Subscription 97

Sixteen Ventures

AUGUST 14, 2022

The people in charge of your company – the Executives, Board, and Investors – want to improve a metric called NRR (Net Revenue Retention or NDR, Net Dollar Retention, if you prefer) for one very simple reason: it plays a direct role in the value of the company. Thus the premium placed on NRR as a valuation metric.

Customer Success 97

Customer Success Investment Sales Hiring Retention 97

Clouded Judgement

JANUARY 26, 2024

Net new ARR is something I track very closely for all of the private companies I work with, and it’s also an important metric to look at in public companies. ServiceNow has been investing, innovating and preparing for this wave for years, which is why we're catching it so early. The Gen AI investments are coming.

Cloud 161

Cloud Marketplace as a Service AI Payment Features 161

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 15, 2024

It’s started to level off, but still remains elevated Quarterly Reports Summary Top 10 EV / NTM Revenue Multiples Top 10 Weekly Share Price Movement Update on Multiples SaaS businesses are generally valued on a multiple of their revenue - in most cases the projected revenue for the next 12 months. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Cloud 161

Cloud Software Review Payment Features Subscription 161

Blulogix

FEBRUARY 17, 2024

The Art of Flexibility: How to Master Dynamic Pricing Models in Subscription Billing By BluLogix Team Adapting to the Pulse of the Market for Maximized Revenue In today’s rapidly evolving digital marketplace, static pricing models are becoming a relic of the past.

Payment Features 52

Payment Features Subscription Pricing Marketplace as a Service 52

Tom Tunguz

MAY 23, 2021

While not as hyperbolic an inflation rate as copper or lumber, the price trajectory of early stage cloud startups does result from a similar supply demand/imbalance. 3 of the years saw declining prices. Perhaps these prices are tied to blockbuster IPO markets. Investment processes last a few days. 2012: Facebook.

Software Review 363

Software Review Venture Capital Cloud Pricing 363

Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 22, 2023

Wrapping all of this up, it appears that the market is either “pricing in” forward estimates coming up in 2024, or a big drop in rates (or both). Given most software companies are not profitable, or not generating meaningful FCF, it’s the only metric to compare the entire industry against.

Cloud 177

Cloud Payment Features Subscription Metrics 177

ChurnZero

JULY 8, 2022

It was clear that, barring any wildly outlandish figures, customer retention wasn’t a dealbreaker in their decision to invest. Cut to 2022, and the idea that a SaaS company could secure venture funding without investors digging deep into retention metrics seems comical, if not reckless. Invest in customer success.

Technical Review 98

Technical Review Software Review Retention Metrics 98

Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 1, 2023

.” Quarterly Reports Summary Top 10 EV / NTM Revenue Multiples Top 10 Weekly Share Price Movement Update on Multiples SaaS businesses are generally valued on a multiple of their revenue - in most cases the projected revenue for the next 12 months. I created this subset to show companies where FCF is a relevant valuation metric.

AWS 293

AWS Cloud AI Search Cost optimization & reporting 293

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 12, 2024

Top 10 EV / NTM Revenue Multiples Top 10 Weekly Share Price Movement Update on Multiples SaaS businesses are generally valued on a multiple of their revenue - in most cases the projected revenue for the next 12 months. I created this subset to show companies where FCF is a relevant valuation metric. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Cloud 141

Cloud Payment Features Subscription Revenue 141

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 12, 2022

I’ve had the privilege to invest one way or another in about 35 SaaS companies, both as a VC and as angel. They understand why they got “No”s in the early, pre-traction days, and even, in the early-ish days when they had a handful of customers but wasn’t really taking off yet (my favorite time to invest).

Scale 336

Scale Sales Recruiting Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 336

OpenView Labs

JANUARY 13, 2022

Welcome to the third edition of the Pricing Transformations series. Pricing Transformations in 2020. Pricing Transformations in 2021. Pricing models must be adaptable – 4/5 on this. We took off a point as there are still too few people who understand pricing models well enough to make them adaptable.

Pricing 82

Pricing Payment Services SaaS Payments Payment Solutions 82

Clouded Judgement

JANUARY 19, 2024

The answer is they may, but just at a different price / valuation. It starts with understanding what type of profile is attractive to public market investors, and I hope the weekly data I share helps give folks an understanding for what these types of metrics are. For many companies, this can be viewed as somewhat of a free expense.

Cloud 177

Cloud Scale Compensation Metrics 177

Clouded Judgement

JANUARY 12, 2024

There are also many late stage companies who will never get back to the valuation they raised at in 2021 (when thinking about an exit, not just the price a venture firm is willing to pay in a round…). I hope this post provides a bit of a cautionary tale of raising a mega round ahead of your metrics.

Cloud 284

Cloud Venture Capital Acquisition Metrics 284

OPEXEngine

MAY 18, 2021

In this blog, we are looking at the business metrics that can be measured quantitatively and providing a few insights on how investors analyze them. We’ve talked to dozens of our SaaS customers, as well as investors to learn more about what is happening with these key metrics. SaaS Metric #1 – Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).

SaaS Payments 98

SaaS Payments Metrics Payments Payment Services 98

Baremetrics

NOVEMBER 2, 2021

To get the most out of the time and money invested into their apps, Shopify App Developers need to track the core metrics of their industry. What is a business metric? Why you need to track business metrics for Shopify App Developers 10 business metrics for Shopify App Developers 1. What is a business metric?

Payment Solutions 98

Payment Solutions Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team Metrics 98

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 22, 2024

Subscribe now ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) vs ERR (Experimental Runrate Revenue) ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) is one of the most popular SaaS (Non-GAAP) metrics. However, it’s also one of the most loosely used metrics, and is frequently misused. I created this subset to show companies where FCF is a relevant valuation metric.

AI 183

AI Revenue Cloud Technical Advisors 183

User Pilot

MARCH 16, 2023

Looking for an in-depth review of UserGuiding pricing so you can understand whether it’s the right choice for you? Finding a product that not only suits your business needs but also delivers value at the right price can be daunting. UserGuiding’s pricing plans. UserGuiding’s dashboard. How much does UserGuiding cost?

Pricing 98

Pricing Software Review Technical Review Onboarding 98

Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 29, 2023

vs 5.2x) Top 10 Weekly Share Price Movement Update on Multiples SaaS businesses are generally valued on a multiple of their revenue - in most cases the projected revenue for the next 12 months. Given most software companies are not profitable, or not generating meaningful FCF, it’s the only metric to compare the entire industry against.

Cloud 189

Cloud Software Review Payment Features Subscription 189

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 29, 2022

As consumer tech growth teams move through this adoption funnel, they evolve their north star metric. This evolution can be described in four stages—each stage with a goal measured by a specific metric. Cost per quality user is the north star metric here. Pricing by design creates friction. Pricing after the “aha!”

Technical Review 224

Technical Review Technical Advisors Scale Compensation 224