SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Eran Zimman, monday.com’s co-founder and co-CEO, shares his secrets to scaling and growth in an unpredictable market. Serve customers a CRM or project management first, and as they scale and use it more, they’re exposed to more features. You don’t want to overwhelm SMB customers, and Monday made this a focus from day one.

Scale 164

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Banking 164

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Pricing Increases Really Boosted MRR. Shopify’s price increase was the biggest driver here, and that should show up in a good next twelve months of revenue growth. #3. Plus has taken off, but interestingly, SMBs have scaled just as quickly, meaning its percent of Shopify’s overall revenue hasn’t really budged.

Payments 240

Payments Merchant Services Payment Solutions Revenue 240

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

She was hired because they saw a bit of softening in new business growth, and she came to help diagnose what was going on and help scale the business. While it may seem smart when you have five or fewer salespeople to sell anything and everything between $3k and $100k, that won’t scale. Attune sellers for one or the other. The result?

Scale 226

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 226

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2022

And that challenge some of your assumptions on how to scale. This is trending to 50/50 now that Asana has crossed $400m in ARR, but still a reminder a self-serve motion combined with sales jumping on the bigger deals can scale very, very far. Toast’s SMB NRR is 114% today — but it took 4 full years just to get to 100%.

Scale 344

Scale SMB SaaS Scaling 344

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2023

Squarespace produces amazing websites for SMBs — we are a big customer at SaaStr. Self-serve products can and should be quite profitable at scale. Most of the website / presence growth came from price increases, which saw limited churn as a result. Churn was modest from their price increase, leading to material growth.

Scale 227

Scale SMB Churn Pricing 227

FastSpring

SEPTEMBER 16, 2022

But what about pricing? When FastSpring’s Chief Product Officer Kurt Smith worked with growth-stage to Fortune 100 companies at Accel-KKR, he consistently saw pricing as one of the most essential growth levers they employed to meet their next revenue goal. Why You Shouldn’t Trust How Your Competitor’s Price.

Pricing 118

Pricing Payment Solutions Payment Services SaaS Payments 118

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

These two departments are a SaaS company’s most important; without their alignment, there is no growth or scale. We are seeing more agile packaging and pricing methods, dynamic deals, ramp-up revenue, and consumption and usage. This may look like moving from a mid-market business to an SMB, and eventually to an enterprise.

Scale 199

Scale Finance Sales Hiring Scaling 199

SaaStr

MAY 10, 2023

HubSpot’s operating margins have scaled into the double-digits the past two quarters for the first time. Pricing is up a modest but material 6% on a constant currency basis, and 3% on an as-reported basis, from a year ago. #3. A reminder of just how important being multi-product is at scale. Including HubSpot. #4.

Scale 252

Scale SMB Headcount New CTO 252

SaaStr

AUGUST 24, 2022

SMB sales (most of Toast) is very tough to do without a highly efficient and effective sales force. Many SMB leaders have to get very, very good at outbound because of the limited deal sizes. As the brand scales, they get more of a boost from inbound. #5. 20% of new customers / locations come from referrals. . #4.

SaaS Payments 288

SaaS Payments Scale SMB Payment Solutions 288

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2020

With SaaS sales, annual price or monthly price that’s billed annually? It may be the most successful SMB-focused app of our current generation. No hiding the monthly option, no pricing confusion: In fact, 26% of Zoom’s customers still pay monthly, even at $1b+ in ARR: More here: 5 Interesting Learnings From Zoom.

Pricing 223

Pricing Payment Solutions Scale SaaS Payments 223

SaaStr

JULY 31, 2022

The Challenge with SMB SaaS: High Growth Can Only Mask High Churn For Just So Long. SMB SaaS has a lot going for it, but one big existential challenge — inherent churn. SaaStr 574: 5 Scale-Up Mistakes for Startups with Dave Kellogg. A great panel on just where marketing at scale in SaaS is today.

New CTO 245

New CTO CTO SMB Venture Capital 245

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2023

This means you can raise prices, add modules, and expand, increasing the average revenue per customer account (ARPA). They had SMB positioning with an unfavorable LTV to CAC ratio. The post How To Scale Your Go-to-Market Strategy at Every Stage with Cipio Partners Managing Partner Rolan Dennert (Video) appeared first on SaaStr.

Scale 228

Scale Strategy Scaling Outbound Sales Team 228

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2024

They were the first to get to millions of users at scale and found that their key differentiators in selling to sellers were: Sales leaders and reps needed to see value quicker. It needed to be accessible and easy for end users, and for Apollo, that meant a hyperfocus on accessibility for SMBs. How do you do that? No, you don’t.

Scale 190

Scale Sales Hiring Pricing AI 190

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 6, 2023

If you’re selling software to SMB merchants and outside of tech like Shopify and Toast and Monday , things are pretty, pretty good, if in some ways still harder than before. On top of that, inflation and price increases are eating into overall IT budgets. So things are all over the place these days. With some big caveats.

Merchant Services 266

Merchant Services Azure Software AWS 266

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2022

Weave started off as a dental ERP and comms platform (including VoIP / phone), and then expanded beyond that as it scaled. It’s a tough outcome for a team that is working hard to scale well into the nine figures of ARR. While these aren’t great metrics if Weave was enterprise, they are still solid for SMBs.

SaaS Payments 239

SaaS Payments Scale Payment Methods Payments 239

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

They started via SMB and are now serving the Amazons of the world. A Lesson Learned: Don’t Undervalue Your Product A lesson learned from growing a company to $1B is spending more time thinking through pricing strategically and doing it sooner. The bigger you scale, the harder this can be.

Sales Hiring 199

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 199

SaaStr

AUGUST 27, 2022

Salesforce: “We’re finally seeing slowdown now in our commerce, media, telecom, and SMB segments”. While the stock price was hit along with everyone else, the business wasn’t. hitting almost $31 Billion in ARR and growing a still stunning 22% at this scale. But e-commerce, media / comms, and SMB are under pressure.

SMB 236

SMB Scale Cloud Trends 236

SaaStr

JUNE 29, 2022

It’s moved beyond its tiniest customers, of an ACV of < $1k, but other than that, it’s going upmarket without giving up its SMB roots. Even though Zendesk still has thousands and thousands of SMB customers. #2. Zendesk IPO’d as an SMB support solution. At $1B in ARR, Zendesk was growing 24%.

SMB 265

SMB Scale B2B Metrics 265

SaaStr

APRIL 10, 2023

Others may seek to corner the SMB market. Zendesk knew that they could risk selling to startups like any other SMB, so that was the problem they set out to solve. Nurture : Provide startup-specific resources to help them scale. Durham says, “We are judging ourselves in how we treat startups differently from an average SMB.

Startup 204

Startup Scale SMB Venture Capital 204

SaaStr

MARCH 25, 2021

Having said that, the average ACV here is $14,615 … so that’s at the high end of a traditional SMB spend, which probably accounts for the high NRR. BigCommerce, like many SaaS vendors at scale, is doing a better job at getting more revenue out of existing accounts than adding new ones. Not competing (directly) on price.

Outsourcing Services 218

Outsourcing Services Payments Merchant Services SaaS Payments 218

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 13, 2016

When an SMB SaaS startup is young with quickly growing revenues, more of the same works. A $1M ARR SaaS startup with an average selling price of $750 per year needs to add 1,333 each year on average to double. All this math assumes that the selling price remains the same. ARR 1 5 10 25 50 100. Xero, Wix, Zendesk are among them.

SMB 100

SMB Scale Startup Marketing 100

SaaStr

APRIL 19, 2023

One leader in SMB commerce is Lightspeed Commerce, founded way back in 2005. Driving up ARPU at scale key to growth with SMBs. It’s exciting to sell to SMBs, but one of the existential challenges at scale is the low deal sizes. That’s a material increase in pricing and ARPU.

Payment Solutions 238

Payment Solutions Point of Sale Payments SaaS Payments 238

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

GC thinks about building out your Go-To-Market team in 3 ways: Short vs. long-term needs Product maturity Experimental vs. scale Short-term vs. long-term needs. 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.

Scale 260

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 260

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 20, 2020

And it’s very hard to support them with any customer support or salespeople at that price point. Even products that used to be super-cheap, have raised prices to achieve scale. Like SurveyMonkey: So that’s what in the end, almost everyone does, at least at they scale. At $12 a year, how much can you spend on live support?

Scale 240

Scale SaaS SMB Pricing 240

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

Being very careful here is especially critical with SMB SaaS, where the ACVs are lower. Even today, most SaaS VCs would have trouble believing a $2k ACV product like Monday could truly scale. But scale it has. #4. Price raises can increase NRR, without adding value. Ultimately, at scale, everything is NRR.

SMB 184

SMB Scaling Metrics B2B 184

SaaStr

JUNE 8, 2022

ARR, Zoom was an SMB powerhouse, with Enterprise growing. SMB is now saturated at $4B ARR and not growing, but Enterprise is picking up the slack and growing faster than ever. Enterprise NRR is now 123%, but than means SMB is now well under 100%. ARR … which it did in just 1 year (!!)

SMB 277

SMB Enterprise Engineering Scale 277

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

Leveling Up PLG to Accelerate SMB Customers, Including More Attention to Onboarding I love seeing this, it can seem hard to invest heavily in small customers, but if you don’t especially invest in onboarding, that’s a big shame. But a 3% price boost likely materially helped. #7.

SMB 248

SMB AI Onboarding Cloud 248

SaaStr

MAY 26, 2019

Price Increases Do Work at Scale. SurveyMonkey increased prices, which resulted in a big chunk of growth. At 16% growth, that’s about half of it from pricing increases. self-service customers, at some point, you can potentially have the entire world as customers and mature out in SMB. A few learnings: 1.

Scale 234

Scale SaaS Payments Payments Payment Services 234

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2021

#12 SaaStr 196: Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson on How The Best Leaders Inspire with Confidence and Stability, The Key To Successful Decision-Making & How To Hire Quality Teams At Scale. #11 11 SaaStr 309: David Skok on The 9 Stage Model To Get A B2B Company To Get Repeatable, Scalable & Profitable Growth. #10

Scale 201

Scale Sales Hiring SMB Benchmarks 201

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2020

But New Relic has continued to scale, crossing $650,000,000 in ARR (or so) and a $4B market cap. Those of us who’ve been around a while think of New Relic as a freemium and almost SMB tool, but today 77% of their revenue comes from accounts greater than $100k. It’s the secret to scaling effectively.

Scale 300

Scale Outsourced Development SMB Cloud 300

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Housing prices apparently are falling in the Bay Area. What we learned from ’08-’09 in SaaS: First, SMB churn went through the roof — as SMBs went under much more quickly and often. As soon as the economy went south, SMBs started to simply go bankrupt and/or shut down. Slack is mortal. functioned.

SaaS Payments 276

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale SMB 276

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2022

But … we’re seeing those very low prices bring out the Private Equity firms. Vista acquired Marketo for what seemed like a head-scratching price of $1.79 And a few years after that, it’s at the time smaller, scrappier, SMB competitor called HubSpot … grew into the $15B+ giant we all know and use today.

SaaS 251

SaaS SMB Pricing Marketing 251

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

Wrong / painful economic terms, even if price itself is OK. I’m basically an SMB these days. Thanks for reading Scaling SaaS — from SaaStr! I don’t like annual contracts, and I especially don’t like being railroaded into enterprise-type contracts — multi-year with no outs. Especially if they don’t carefully train the reps.

Sales Hiring 195

Sales Hiring Scale Sales SMB 195

SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2019

Many see this price point as not scaleable. But Hubspot, Zoom and others have challenged the idea that freemium can’t scale well past $1b in ARR. We might call them SMEs (vs SMBs). 140%+ for Slack, Zoom and Pagerduty’s SMB customers), they do have to work harder. With a $10k ACV. So can you.

Outsourcing Services 320

Outsourcing Services Scale SMB Pricing 320

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 24, 2021

80% SMB, 20% Enterprise. While Upwork has made inrounds into the enterprise, it remains squarely an SMB product. Upwork charges from 5%-20% of the service price (less the more you make through the platform), averaging out to 12%. So don’t settle for less. This makes the 100% NRR especially impressive in the space.

Marketplace as a Service 263

Marketplace as a Service SMB Cloud Enterprise 263

SaaStr

OCTOBER 20, 2022

One thing that is clear is that public SaaS and Cloud stock prices are way down. Note this doesn’t include SMB spend, it’s enterprise focused): In a slightly more dated survey, Gartner found in July 69% of CFOs plan to increase their digital spending in 2023. So are we in some sort of downturn — or aren’t we?

Forecasting 241

Forecasting Artificial Intelligence Software Business 241

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

This episode is an excerpt from a session at SaaStr Scale. So I think just opening your aperture when you’re thinking about marketplace, not assuming it’s just a small commercial SMB market sales. And I think some folks sort of asked, “Did you have to change your product to get on the marketplace or your pricing?”

Scale 199

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 199