SaaStr
MAY 23, 2025
When SaaStr Fund made the first investment in RevenueCat back in 2018, nobody could have predicted that this “simple API for managing in-app subscriptions” would become the infrastructure powering 33% of all mobile subscription apps and reach a $500M valuation in 2025. And more importantly, revenue and user growth that is accelerating at scale.
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 26, 2025
Most startups play defense when discussing pricing with customers. They dance between asking for too little, leaving money on the table, and asking for too much, only to lose the customer’s interest. The very best companies lead their customers in that dance. They use pricing as an offensive tool to reinforce their product’s value and underscore the company’s core marketing message.
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Clouded Judgement
MARCH 28, 2025
Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now The New AI Risk Curve: Why AI Startups Grow Faster—and Fade Faster One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about recently (and having conversations with other investors about frequently) is the juxtaposition of: AI companies growing faster than companies from prior cycles AI companies will have more “false starts” than companies from prior cycl
The Daily Egg
MAY 19, 2025
Everyone complains about popups. But if you are trying to grow your business, who cares? Opt in popups work. The right offer, shown at the. The post How To Build a Convincing Opt In Popup That Gets Signups appeared first on The Daily Egg.
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When test coverage falls behind release velocity, quality suffers, and your team feels the consequences. This guide outlines when it makes sense to outsource quality assurance (QA), the risks to watch for, and how to scale testing without increasing headcount or slowing down engineering. You will learn how leading teams are leveraging external QA partners to expand coverage, enhance defect detection, and remain aligned with CI/CD timelines.
FastSpring
JANUARY 9, 2025
With changes to legislation in the EU and lawsuits in the U.S., the future of monetizing your game direct to consumer looks brighter than ever. That said, you might be wondering what strategies work within the confines of today’s rules and if it’s even possible to earn 50% or more of your game’s revenue through D2C. In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview gaming D2C and creator marketing expert Justin Sacks of Nexus about his thoughts on: What winning strategies AAA and A
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
SaaStr
JANUARY 8, 2025
So the overall “project management” space has seen widely disparate impacts from the SaaS partial downturn of 2022-2024. Asana, strong in B2B2B and selling to tech, was perhaps hit hardest, with growth slowing to 10%. Monday.com by contrast, selling mainly outside of tech, saw growth remain strong at 34%. It’s been a tale of two worlds.
SaaStr
JUNE 11, 2025
Dear SaaStr: How Does a Founder Mindset Change As You Go From Startup to Scaleup? The big changes I see: Moving (Over Time) From Hustler to Strategist. Though Stay a Hustler, Too 😉 In the early days, you’re in the trenches—selling, building, and doing whatever it takes to survive. But as you scale, you have to step back and focus on strategy. You move from being the doer to the leader, managing teams and making high-level decisions.
SaaStr
JANUARY 3, 2025
The success rate for executive hires at high-growth SaaS companies can be surprisingly low – you’re often lucky if 50-60% of your management team works out long-term. In a recent conversation between HubSpot Chairman and co-founder Brian Halligan and SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin, they shared their advice on what actually works when hiring VPs and building your SaaS executive team.
SaaStr
MAY 20, 2025
So in any interesting bit of convergent evolution, both Monday and HubSpot have now passed 250,000 customers. Both started SMB (Monday even more so), and Both have now gone more enterprise (Monday even more) But still with the vast majority of their customers SMB. Both have also evolved from different roots (marketing for HubSpot, team management for Monday) to now have CRMs as their core.
Speaker: Tamara Fingerlin, Developer Advocate
Apache Airflow® 3.0, the most anticipated Airflow release yet, officially launched this April. As the de facto standard for data orchestration, Airflow is trusted by over 77,000 organizations to power everything from advanced analytics to production AI and MLOps. With the 3.0 release, the top-requested features from the community were delivered, including a revamped UI for easier navigation, stronger security, and greater flexibility to run tasks anywhere at any time.
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! Down nearly 30% YoY from Q1 last year pic.twitter.com/9MLyLe3XXf — Jamin Ball (@jaminball) June 5, 2025 Bottom Line Up Front : The aggregate cloud software market just delivered its worst quarterly performance in years, with net new ARR additions plummeting
SaaStr
JANUARY 5, 2025
So does being a solo founder … work in SaaS? We’ve dug into this topic several times at SaaStr. Of the post ~40 SaaS IPOs, only 5 or so had solo co-founders. So let’s call that 10%-12% or so. Still, they are some good ones: Zoom, Scaler, New Relic, Elastic, etc. More on that here : At the Top SaaS Companies, Founder-CEOs Own ~15% at IPO.
SaaStr
JANUARY 12, 2025
So when Microsoft paid $26 Billion to buy LinkedIn, it seemed like they were getting a pretty good deal. Fast forward to today, it looks like a great one. LinkedIn is at $17 Billion in ARR, still growing 10%, and its whole division is wildly profitable with 50%+ operating margins! There may be better M&A deals in the history of B2B. But there cant be too many better ones.
SaaStr
FEBRUARY 3, 2025
50 cents of compute for 500 dollars of value — Sam Altman (@sama) February 3, 2025 So just how much will AI remake classic B2B software? We are still learning. On the one hand, new AI-first entrants are rocketing to $10m ARR in a year. On the other hand, the classic leaders in SaaS have rebounded from 2024 lows both in terms of growth and market caps.
Speaker: Alex Salazar, CEO & Co-Founder @ Arcade | Nate Barbettini, Founding Engineer @ Arcade | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO @ Aggregage
There’s a lot of noise surrounding the ability of AI agents to connect to your tools, systems and data. But building an AI application into a reliable, secure workflow agent isn’t as simple as plugging in an API. As an engineering leader, it can be challenging to make sense of this evolving landscape, but agent tooling provides such high value that it’s critical we figure out how to move forward.
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.
SaaStr
JANUARY 6, 2025
So some folks are going to disagree with me on this post, but I’m close to 100% right on it, and it will save you a ton of pain and time and money. Never hire someone who describes themselves as a “Strategist” unless that’s what you really, really want. Especially today. So many folks want to be strategists, do audits of what you do, and give you ideas.
SaaStr
MARCH 7, 2025
A topic I find founders get a bit or often a lot wrong is … When To Hire Your First CFO. We’ve got a guest post below from OnlyCFO on this very topic! If I had to summarize all my learnings, it’s that you can’t really hire a full-time head of finance too early, but many of us go to hire a “CFO” around $10m-$30m ARR, when we really need a VP/SVP of Finance.
SaaStr
JANUARY 8, 2025
In the latest episode of our SaaStr CRO Confidential podcast, host Sam Blond sat down with Lindsey Scrase, COO of Checkr (and former CRO), to discuss her tactics for driving growth at the background screening unicorn. Having joined Checkr from Google in 2022, Lindsay shared valuable insights about identifying and executing on major opportunities for improvement within an already mature go-to-market organization.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.
SaaStr
MARCH 1, 2025
So there’s an uncomfortable truth that VCs don’t discuss outloud that often, but everyone has sort of accepted. Everyone resisted in 2022 and into 2023, but by 2024 they began to capitulate. That a lot of unicorns that hit $1B+ valuations in 2020-2021 … probably aren’t really unicorns anymore. How many? Over 60% haven’t raised funding since 2021 and likely never achieved the scale to do so, or have seen growth slow: Per Carta, a , : 374 of the original 616 pool ha
SaaStr
JANUARY 10, 2025
At SaaStr Annual’s AI Summit , we gathered an all-star panel of product leaders who have built some of the most widely-used AI features in production today. The speakers included Mario Rodriguez, Chief Product Officer at GitHub at GitHub, Diego Zaks, VP of Design at Ramp, Dane Knecht, SVP of Emerging Technologies at Cloudflare, and Vincent van der Meulen, Design Engineer at Figma, and Dani Grant, CEO at Jam.dev.
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. Wyatt’s journey is uniquely suited to leading product at a construction technology company.
SaaStr
JANUARY 11, 2025
"Software engineers working in AI earned 48% more than the average software engineer at the company, according to a payroll spreadsheet shared with BI." [link] — Jason SaaStr 2025 is May 13-15 Lemkin (@jasonlk) January 11, 2025 So a newer issue that is discussed a lot at start-up board meetings and investor meetings is AI Engineer comp.
Speaker: Michael Veatch, Senior Director, Implementations & Ella Aguirre, Director of Solution Consulting
Embedding payments can be a transformative step for software companies looking to enhance their platform capabilities, boost customer satisfaction, and drive long-term growth. However, the success of payments hinges on a single thing: implementation. Drawing on real-world insights and experiences, payments implementation experts Michael Veatch and Ella Aguirre will explore actionable strategies that can lead to a transparent, friction-free launch and mitigate potential challenges like technical
SaaStr
JANUARY 2, 2025
SaaStr Annual 2025 ticket sales in December: 181% of 2024 SaaStr Annual 2025 ticket sales overall so far: 156% of 2024 We'll see where we end up, but … SaaS is Back!! pic.twitter.com/5vlHiRmeCz — Jason SaaStr 2025 is May 13-15 Lemkin (@jasonlk) January 2, 2025 So one of our themes (and memes) is that SaaStr is Back. It’s a new SaaS, a different SaaS, and AI-fueled SaaS, but it’s back.
SaaStr
JUNE 7, 2025
New spending data from Ramp reveals a possible trend: end user AI adoption may be hitting its first growth slow down. The AI adoption party might be slowing down—at least temporarily. Fresh data from Ramp’s AI Index suggests that the meteoric rise in business AI spending might be showing signs of deceleration, raising questions about whether we’re witnessing market maturation or beginning to hit a potential adoption ceiling: The numbers tell a nuanced story.
SaaStr
JUNE 15, 2025
Dear SaaStr: How Do I Hire a Great First 1-2 Sales Reps? Hiring your first AE (Account Executive) is a pivotal moment for your startup. It’s not just about finding someone who can sell—it’s about finding someone who can sell your product in the messy, unstructured environment of an early-stage company. "Never, ever hire a VP of Sales until you have 2 individual sales reps really closing.
SaaStr
JUNE 16, 2025
Databricks Just Became the Fastest-Growing Infrastructure Company of All Time. TL;DR: Databricks hit a $3.7B revenue run-rate this quarter with 50% YoY growth, making them the fastest-growing infrastructure company in the public software universe. But the real story isn’t just the growth—it’s how they’re redefining the entire category.
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SaaStr
JUNE 13, 2025
I see it happening everywhere. Board meetings where someone inevitably asks, “Don’t we need a VP of AI?” I saw a term sheet the other day where a leading VC firm reserved $1m of the round … for hiring a “VP of AI” Leadership teams scrambling to post job descriptions for “Head of Artificial Intelligence.” Recruiters cold-calling anyone with “machine learning” on their LinkedIn.
SaaStr
JANUARY 9, 2025
Dear SaaStr: What Are Some Successful SaaS Leaders Without Sales Teams? Many that are self-serve and SMB-focused can start off without a sales team … for a while. But almost none stay without a sales team … forever. Yes, Atlassian since well past its IPO had almost no direct sales team. But it had and has a very large channel that sells its product into the enterprise, and a lot of internal resources that support the channel.
SaaStr
APRIL 28, 2025
Kiren Sekar, Chief Strategy Officer and founding team member at Samsara, came to SaaStr Annual to do one of our best deep dives even on going multi-product. Samsara was intentionally multi-product from the earliest days, and they carefully planned out scaling 5+ products to $100M+ ARR. And come see so many more great convos like this at 2025 SaaStr Annual + AI Summit on May 13-15 in SF Bay , including the CEOs and CXOs at vertical SaaS leaders ServiceTitan, Clio, MangoMint, Owner and so many mor
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