SaaStr

JULY 7, 2021

Where it Went: $1B acquisition by Vista in 2019. in 2011 GAAP revenue. Where it Went: Now valued at $1.5B and a called Nextroll. Really more Adtech than SaaS. #8 in 2011 GAAP revenue. A great outcome, but perhaps not as huge as you might expect given its torrid growth. #72 72 Rocketlawyer. in 2011 GAAP revenue. 2987 Bullhorn. HR is hard.

SaaS 287

SaaS Technical Review Software Review Scaling 287

SaaStr

MAY 8, 2019

Dug Song founded Duo Security in 2019 and grew the company as CEO until it’s acquisition in October of 2018. He went on to serve as CEO of Avatar Technologies and Pacific Data before joining Rational Software as President and COO until its acquisition by IBM. The Ann Arbor, Michigan based company was acquired for $2.35B in cash.

CTO Coach 30

CTO Coach New CTO CTO Web Development 30

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2019

Join Qualtrics Co-Founder and CEO alongside SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin as Ryan reflects on the survey software maker’s acquisition by SAP this year. Ryan Smith: The backstory here is we turned down an acquisition offer for $500 million in 2012. So an $8 billion acquisition is equivalent to how big of an IPO?

Acquisition 162

Acquisition Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 162

Hitenism

JANUARY 6, 2017

It was 2008, and I was having a classic founder moment. Back in 2008, “content marketing” wasn’t a thing. We founded KISSmetrics in 2008.). It was 2008! Twitter in 2008 was pretty limited. CAC (customer acquisition cost) was low. I had no idea what I was doing. But at least I was doing! Content-focused.

Startup 182

Startup Marketing Content Marketing Engagement 182

SaaStock

JANUARY 30, 2019

One of those was 2008/2009 when 5 funds were started. To help out founders on the way, Astella Investimentos’ mentors provide guidance in the most crucial areas, such as customer acquisition, product development, and company training, as well as creating a roadmap for scalability and all stages of business development. Founded: 2008.

Venture Capital 155

Venture Capital SaaS Healthcare Finance 155

Tom Tunguz

MAY 18, 2015

Both companies eventually offered talent acquisition, performance management, and learning tools for human resources teams. Both of these business weathered the dot com crash in 2001 and the financial meltdown in 2008. In the late 1990s, two of the dominant talent management platforms were founded. But they started in different places.

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting Scale Software Acquisition 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 2, 2015

Because the bottoms up processes tend to rely on seemingly less expensive customer acquisition techniques like content marketing and in-product up-sell initially, this founder suggested, quite reasonably I thought, that bottoms up companies are more efficient. For example, New Relic’s first two rounds were $3.4M New Relic 216.

Startup 113

Startup Venture Capital Mobile Acquisition 113

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 20, 2013

In 2008, when I first started in venture, a$500k seed was sizable. Every major technology company has a talent acquisition strategy based on M&A. Acquisitions by FB, GOOG, YHOO, EBAY and others provide a landing place for struggling seed companies looking for strategic options and a non-zero return for investors.

Marketing 100

Marketing Acquisition Trends Investment 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 7, 2015

In 2008, the average recruiting team spent about $20,000 per year with LinkedIn, a figure that has reached $35,000 in 2013, achieving a growth rate of 16% per year. To acquire customers, LinkedIn employs two customer acquisition mechanisms: an online acquisition team and a field sales team.

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting Benchmarks Metrics SaaS 100

Payrix

JANUARY 28, 2025

Mergers, acquisitions, and IPOs : With the resurgence of M&A activity and an opening IPO market, software companies can explore opportunities for consolidation and value creation. This shift presents opportunities for innovative companies to leverage changes for growth.

Payments 130

Payments Payment Solutions Merchant Services Payment Methods 130

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2016

To sustain these growth rates, startups like these require lots of cash because of the customer acquisition payback period, and the more tenuous ones need capital to prove the business model actually works at scale. In 2008, the Fed Funds Rate sat at 5%. First, the Fed will continue to raise interest rates that are at historic lows.

Startup 100

Startup Metrics Transportation Marketplace as a Service 100

SaaStr

DECEMBER 17, 2019

Zach : And so as we were having this conversation, we did, of course, raise a little bit more money in that round in order to enable the acquisition. People ask if we had an acquisition strategy, we definitely don’t. We have a product strategy and a company strategy and it happens that this acquisition was a fantastic fit there.

Payments 214

Payments SaaS Payments Banking Underperforming Technical Team 214

SaaStr

JUNE 16, 2020

And he also has the, I don’t know, benefit or dubious distinction, but lived through this before in 2008 and 2009. Adnan Chaudhry: One of the guiding principles that helped me personally, I was here as Matt mentioned, I was here at Salesforce in 2008, 2009. Tableau is an acquisition that Salesforce made a year ago or so.

Sales Hiring 213

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS Payments Payment Services 213

Neil Patel

MARCH 17, 2020

For example, even though we saw big dips in the number of people searching for things like flights or hotels, we didn’t see a drastic drop in CPC but we did see a big increase in cost per acquisition.

Marketing 145

Marketing Travel Entrepreneurship Government 145

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2015

Xero Income Statement 2007 2008 2009 2010 211 2012 2013 2014. Xero’s efficiency is driven by its customer acquisition strategy, winning accountants and encouraging them to migrate all their business from a competitor to Xero. Growth 109% 265% 206% 123% 107% 88%. Gross Profit -0.8 -2.0 in gropss profit next year.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Metrics SMB Outsourced Development 100

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 7, 2018

However, in a SaaS model , the customer acquisition team can grow revenue to $1M in year 1. To keep growing at the same growth rate requires a significant investment in the acquisition efforts as depicted in figure 2. In particular, post-2008 when a SaaS solution with its OPEX offering stood out from the conventional CAPEX solutions.

Scale 101

Scale Growth Hacking Scaling Sales Hiring 101

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

From that point on, we built a product and we launched it in February of 2008 out of a back of a coffee shop with one employee. So we launched the company in February of 2008. We launched the company in 2008. I wanted to find technology that could replace that. We might have stumbled onto something here.

Scale 187

Scale SMB VP of Engineering Leadership 187

OpenView Labs

APRIL 16, 2020

Those who went through the 2001 and 2008 economic downturns emerged with valuable lessons on navigating a crisis—not to mention a heck of a lot of resilience. Tom: I was at Macromedia at the time, and we were right in the middle of the largest acquisition we’d ever done. Can you walk me through what that was like?

Leadership 70

Leadership Business Model Healthcare Travel 70

Casey Accidental

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

Most companies have a primary acquisition loop that drives this scalable growth, and unfortunately, there aren’t that many acquisition loops that really scale. And you start being able to acquire more of them in a scalable way i.e. an acquisition loop. In fact, they complain more, because they like the product enough to care.

Payments 63

Payments Scale Payment Methods Underperforming Technical Team 63

Baremetrics

AUGUST 18, 2021

And so, they began building relationships with potential acquirers long before the company was anything worthy of acquisition. They get an out-of-the-blue acquisition offer for $200M. Fast-forward a few years. They’ve grown to the #2 game in their space.

Acquisition 91

Acquisition Investment Scaling Churn 91

ProfitWell

AUGUST 19, 2019

And while a strong freemium acquisition strategy netted them 225M users, they’re not taking advantage of that base at all. Relying heavily on freemium acquisition instead of product development early on leaves Evernote with a ton of unengaged and unhappy users. How freemium acquisition can go wrong over time. The Tradeoffs.

Acquisition 76

Acquisition Scale Social Media Branding 76

Neil Patel

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

After making a series of company acquisitions, Google started its desktop web mapping service in 2005. in September 2008, the Google maps mobile app was launched on Android. Google Maps actually started as a C++ program at Where 2 Technologies.

Payment Methods 126

Payment Methods Branding Payments Merchant Services 126

OPEXEngine

OCTOBER 17, 2019

In the following chart for SaaS companies in 2008, you can see average COR as a percentage of Revenue at 40.4%, and average Gross Margins at 59.6%. The main drivers of the cost reductions are: Hosting expense, the primary component of COR, has become more competitive, with extensive use of AWS and other hosting and network services.

Scale 40

Scale SaaS AWS Revenue 40

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 24, 2019

We had already achieved the mission, so after 2008 we backed off the pedal, so to speak. We actually started early on with our acquisition of RelateIQ, which became SalesforceIQ, which has since been sunset in terms of our product because the AI strides we made within the core platform element are now pervasive across our products.

Scale 151

Scale Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Technical Review 151

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 5, 2018

By the time I was 30 years old, I was working at Oracle (via startup acquisition) helping them build the #1 performing SaaS sales team in my region. I joined the ranks of Prime Point Media in 2006 selling national accounts, and by 2008 I had built the entire Midwest territory. Have you ever wondered how to become a VP of Sales?

Sales Hiring 92

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 92

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 21, 2019

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast , we talk to Bill Binch , Chief Revenue Officer for Pendo and a former sales executive at Marketo who, over close to 10 years, helped guide the company through multiple phases of growth including both an IPO and an acquisition. .

Scale 18

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scaling 18

Mucker Capital

MAY 6, 2020

Even in the best economic environment, startups face countless challenges, whether related to hiring, pricing, sales or customer acquisition and retention. But there is something you can control: the way you build your business. Others take a very different path, opting instead to raise and burn through vast amounts of capital.

Startup 52

Startup Scale Venture Capital Sales Hiring 52

User Pilot

MAY 19, 2021

Product led-growth is a marketing strategy that involves using your product as the main driver of lead & profit acquisition. Hubspot, one of the leading content marketing platforms, pioneered webinars all the way back in 2008. This also fosters trust from their community members, making it more likely to purchase their products.

B2B 119

B2B Marketing SaaS Social Media 119

SaaStr

DECEMBER 31, 2019

So I think, let’s see, if I look at Salesforce One was a project that started, I guess it was around 2008-ish, I think. Shanee : Because if your issue is acquisition of new users, that’s the thing you need to figure out. Is it the acquisition of the users? Ciara : Craig. Craig : Yeah. Understand what your issue is.

Enterprise 162

Enterprise Underperforming Technical Team Scale B2B 162

ChurnZero

JUNE 19, 2020

They didn’t really exist in mass during 2008 and 2009, so we’ve never really seen it. They may have great customer acquisition cost (CAC), but it’s brutal. It’s important in a lot of different ways. This is also the first time SaaS companies have ever been tested in a down market.

SaaS Payments 72

SaaS Payments Retention Metrics Payment Solutions 72

Sales Hacker

APRIL 1, 2025

So if I’m selling it to you and your biggest focus is new customer acquisition. Our positioning, our solution better address new customer acquisition or else you won’t get that wallet share. Scott Barker: totally.

Scale 64

Scale VP of Engineering Outsourcing Services Enterprise 64

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 7, 2019

Renaud Visage: What was okay in 2008 is not okay anymore today, because you have great platforms like Stripe, that have set the bar very high as to what kind of experience you should have when you’re a developer trying to integrate, and you have to at least offer something that’s in the vein of what’s available out there.

Payments 173

Payments Merchant Services Payment Solutions Payment Services 173

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 9, 2019

Anthony Kennada: I started out of college as a tech recruiter, which, in 2008, was probably one of the worst jobs you could have; getting people jobs in a recession was not great. Sam Jacobs: Let’s go back to the beginning of your journey. Tell us how you got started in marketing, or even in sales.

Sales Recruiting 59

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring B2C 59

Point Nine Land

OCTOBER 22, 2019

This wasn’t the only problem Clio was facing in terms of user acquisition. There was only one problem: this was at the end of 2008. They were also finally able to perform experiments with customer acquisition. And again, we kind of got laughed out of the room.” Now they needed money to start hiring people.

Technical Review 40

Technical Review Scale Sales Hiring Business 40

ChurnZero

AUGUST 4, 2023

The customers company merges or gets acquired Merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions bring a lot of uncertainty. For example, a pandemic (COVID-19) or an abrupt financial crisis (financial crisis of 2008-2009). Staffing, brands, budgets and tools all get scrutinizedand are all subject to change.

Churn 52

Churn Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Outsourced Development 52

OpenView Labs

OCTOBER 17, 2019

Instead, we invested in our product in ways that would drive growth and revenue through increased acquisition and upselling additional services to existing customers. We decided to only raise money if we actually needed it, and it turned out we didn’t need any beyond that first round.

Sales Recruiting 45

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors 45

SmartKarrot

APRIL 13, 2020

This is increasing the spending as more and more features are being offered, through acquisitions or expansion. The ‘haven for programmers’ – GitHub has been providing its services through a SaaS model since 2008. Cisco’s growth is often referred to as the ‘growth by acquisition’. Engineering. IntelliJ IDEA.

SaaS Payments 19

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services Sales Recruiting 19