SaaStr

MARCH 13, 2020

Folks in SaaS that were CEOs and execs in ’08-’09 have seen some of this before. 2020 is not the same as 2009. But it might end up being pretty similar in SaaS. At least, those of us who were CEOs in 2009 sort of know what to do at an operating level. We will do a webinar ourselves on this next week.

Sales Hiring 321

Sales Hiring Forecasting Enterprise Metrics 321

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Even when the global economy literally melted down, and >froze< in 2009 — the buyers in SaaS still came. Especially when the leaders in SaaS are growing faster than ever. Some are much more impacted post-Covid, like Shopify and Zoom. But even there, the growth is real. Churn went way up, for sure. ARR last quarter.

Marketing 357

Marketing Startup Cloud Churn 357

SaaStr

DECEMBER 9, 2020

These days, it can really feel like the Old Bag of Sales Tricks is starting to just not work anymore: With maybe 500x the SaaS vendors of 10 years ago, there’s so much noise. One thing has not changed in SaaS in the last 10 years: Everyone spends 1-10 hours a day in email. . — Ben Chestnut (@benchestnut) November 12, 2020.

Sales Hiring 356

Sales Hiring Outbound Sales Team AWS Engineering 356

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2023

So what if I told you there is a SaaS company you likely have never really heard of unless you are in adtech / advertising, doing $2 Billion in ARR, with a $28 Billion market cap even today, that’s insanely profitable and yet still growing 32%? It’s SaaS. Yes, this company exists. It’s called The Trade Desk.

Scale 319

Scale Advertising Scaling Revenue 319

SaaStr

JANUARY 17, 2023

Ever Salesforce itself is having a rough time , much rougher than most public SaaS companies. I sold a sales tool in 2008-2009 when the global economy was in total meltdown, and I’ll tell you, we sure didn’t stop selling. To give up a bit? I say No. In fact, I always say No.

Sales Hiring 275

Sales Hiring Sales Startup Investment 275

The Angel VC

JULY 17, 2015

When you look at the landing pages (or homepages or marketing sites, however you want to call them) of today's SaaS companies, they usually look quite beautiful. Join me as I go back in time and take a look at how SaaS landing pages looked like some years ago. The SaaS Stone Age Fast-backward about 16 years.

SaaS 188

SaaS Software Review B2B Trends 188

SaaStr

MAY 26, 2019

SurveyMonkey is one of the Old School SaaS companies that has followed an interesting path. It stayed small until 2009 when the founders were bought out by a private equity firm. This is strong for SMBs, but at the low end of public SaaS companies overall. Founded back in 1999 (like Salesforce) in the Web 1.0

Scale 273

Scale SaaS Payments Payments Payment Services 273

SaaStock

MARCH 1, 2019

As we first looked at bringing our leading SaaS conference to Asia and considered what help we could offer, we thought about localization and know-how about legal and cultural differences as some of the critical success factors. SaaS Investments: Goodera, and others. SaaS Investments: Ezetap, and others. Founded: 2001.

SaaS Payments 190

SaaS Payments Venture Capital Payment Services Telecommunications 190

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 13, 2019

When we announced a few weeks ago that we would be bringing our leading SaaS conference to Asia, and running it in Hong Kong, many locals thanked us for choosing the city. Horangi provides cyber security solutions based on SaaS. Anchanto is one of the top SaaS businesses that are boosting e-commerce growth in Southeast Asia.

SaaS Payments 225

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Merchant Services Payment Methods 225

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 14, 2018

Considering that most investors are pretty obsessed focused on finding companies that follow the legendary T2D3 growth path (directionally confirmed by the responses to our SaaS napkin survey earlier this year), you might expect that your chances are low. In total, the list contains 70 SaaS companies. Here are my findings: 1.)

SaaS 174

SaaS Revenue Subscription Payment Features 174

SaaStr

AUGUST 6, 2021

They bring together their respective strengths to drive remarkable product-led growth for PagerDuty, the incident response SaaS that’s been invaluable to tech teams since 2009. In the SaaS world, friction is the enemy of the customer. Putting customers in charge of the journey.

Product Marketing 276

Product Marketing Marketing B2C Strategy 276

SaaStock

JANUARY 30, 2019

As we showed you in the list of SaaS companies coming out of Latin America, the region has no shortage of SaaS superstars. One of those was 2008/2009 when 5 funds were started. It was SaaS that they were looking at. SaaS Investments: Pipefy, HeyDoctor. How did this come about, though? Founded: 2017. Founded: 2016.

Venture Capital 155

Venture Capital SaaS Healthcare Finance 155

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 18, 2019

PagerDuty was founded in 2009 by 3 former Amazon engineers who were often on-call. Let’s first look at one of the key SaaS metrics: the dollar attention. To engineers, being on call means carrying a pager to respond to crises when software breaks or services go down. The average customer is worth about $10,000.

Metrics 222

Metrics Benchmarks Software Review Engineering 222

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

Different Pathways to CRO For Jane Kim, former CRO of CircleCl,, she used to work in finance before transitioning to SaaS. After switching to SaaS, she started as an SMB sales leader with no prior management or SMB sales experience. During her time in finance, she did multi-million dollar deals with 12 to 18-month deal cycles.

Scale 303

Scale Underperforming Technical Team SMB Finance 303

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2021

Talk to any experienced SaaS sales leader in a competitive space. But still, that takes time in SaaS. 2009: Fully localized platform. Recently there was a lot of discussion around if there are truly “10x engineers” or not. It’s a complicated topic. She’ll agree. What’s a 10x Feature?

Scale 246

Scale Mobile Branding Engineering 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2020

Justin Welsh, former SVP of Sales at PatientPop explains how he started in SaaS in 2009 as the second sales hire at Zocdoc. It’s an SMB SaaS company in the healthcare technology vertical. I broke into SaaS in 2009 I was the second sales hire and the 10th overall hire at a New York City based SaaS business called Zocdoc.

Sales Recruiting 332

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 332

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2019

He moved the company to San Francisco in 2009. PagerDuty was founded in 2009 and recently began trading on the NYSE under ticker symbol $PD this April, seeing a whopping 50% pop in the stock right at open. The company boasts over 10,000 organizations and 350,000 paid users on it’s SaaS incident response platform for IT.

Sales Recruiting 173

Sales Recruiting Software Review Technical Review PayPal 173

SaaStr

AUGUST 24, 2019

Talk to any experienced SaaS sales leader in a competitive space. But still, that takes time in SaaS. 2009: Fully localized platform. Recently there was a lot of discussion around if there are truly “10x engineers” or not. It’s a complicated topic. She’ll agree. What’s a 10x Feature?

Scale 220

Scale Mobile Branding Engineering 220

Hitenism

DECEMBER 26, 2016

2016 has been a year where knowledge has become freely available for anyone interested in knowing about all things SaaS. That’s because the people who are working in the SaaS industry or investing in these businesses are sharing much more of the details about all aspects of growing and scaling a SaaS business.

Scale 152

Scale SaaS Marketplace as a Service SMB 152

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 12, 2014

This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. In 2009 and 2010, the company recognized more revenue from services than subscription.

Benchmarks 113

Benchmarks Deferred Revenue Venture Capital Outsourced Development 113

The Angel VC

JANUARY 15, 2015

Yesterday I shot off a Tweetstorm about some important developments that I'm observing in the SaaS world as we're entering 2015. The point that I made was that most of the tactics which smart SaaS entrepreneurs developed around 2007-2009 – inbound marketing, conversion optimization, lifecycle marketing, etc. –

Growth Hacking 113

Growth Hacking Scale SaaS Content Marketing 113

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 9, 2015

But foremost, Atlassian is one of the best examples of flywheel SaaS companies yet. The chart above details the revenue growth of the business compared to the median of the 50+ publicly traded SaaS companies. gross margin, 12 percentage points above the SaaS median of 70.9%. In 2015, the company will generate $320M in revenue.

Benchmarks 124

Benchmarks Metrics Venture Capital SaaS 124

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 21, 2013

The value of publicly traded SaaS companies has grown by 200 to 400% while the underlying customer unit economics of those businesses hasn’t changed. Below is a chart of the ratio between enterprise value to revenue for two segments of SaaS companies. The All Segment contains 36 publicly traded SaaS companies.

SaaS 100

SaaS Trends Startup Revenue 100

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 8, 2015

Worth $11.5B, ServiceNow is the third public SaaS company, after Salesforce and LinkedIn. The business was founded in 2004, but hit its stride 2009 and went public in 2012. Compared to other SaaS companies, ServiceNow is among the top 3 fastest growing, and isn’t showing any signs of slowing.

Benchmarks 113

Benchmarks Metrics SaaS Investment 113

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 2, 2015

In the 2009-2011 period, churn mitigation improved the LTV/CAC. Tracking the metric over time provides SaaS companies with an indicator for the health of the business. A real tree would be much more granular and could extend several layers deeper. At some point, the company couldn’t squeeze any more juice from that lemon.

Startup 113

Startup SaaS Churn Engineering 113

Tom Tunguz

JULY 29, 2015

Founded in 1998, Netsuite is worth about $7.7B, making it the sixth largest SaaS compay behind Salesforce, LinkedIn, Workday, ServiceNow and Splunk. Netsuite’s revenue per customer averaged $19k in 2008, and $23k in 2009, the last years for which the company provided customer counts. Netsuite keeps about 14% of revenues as cash.

Benchmarks 113

Benchmarks Outsourced Development Metrics Scale 113

Point Nine Land

SEPTEMBER 6, 2023

One of the lessons I, along with many other founders and investors, have learned in my roughly 15-year journey in SaaS investing is that most businesses adopt new technologies at a painfully slow pace. ServiceTitan, a leading vertical SaaS for home services, penetrated 1% of its core TAM of 900,000 home services businesses.

AI 119

AI SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Artificial Intelligence 119

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 5, 2015

On November 18, SaaS Office Hours at Redpoint will welcome Pete Koomen, Co-Founder and CTO of Optimizely, the incredibly fast growing AB testing and personalization company Pete founded with Dan Siroker. Numbering more than 400 people, Optimizely has built an amazing business since 2009, serving thousands of customers.

CTO 100

CTO SaaS Engineering Education 100

Hitenism

JANUARY 6, 2017

I was founding a SaaS business, KISSmetrics. At that point in 2009, I was also responsible for marketing. We launched it in 2009 with a pretty good idea, a strong product, and a vague plan for growth. SaaS Marketing Step 1: Who is your target customer? SaaS Marketing Step 2: Where do they hang out?

Startup 182

Startup Marketing Content Marketing Engagement 182

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 30, 2014

Since I wrote “ The Correction in SaaS Company Valuations ”, SaaS company valuations have continued to fall. As a basket, SaaS companies have fallen 33% from their highs (median), wiping all the gains for the last year. And these share price decreases have been distributed across all the basket of SaaS companies.

Marketing 100

Marketing SaaS Pricing Enterprise 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 21, 2015

Despite the fact that SaaS companies are building some of the most efficient business models ever , newer software companies are raising more capital. In 2009, there were 4 megarounds. Some companies like Veeva raised only $4.5M before IPO and others like Box have raised $571M+, so the distribution has some outliers.

SaaS 100

SaaS Startup Business Model Enterprise 100

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2014

One of the best ways I’ve found to understand SaaS companies is to pore through their public filings. in 2009 revenue to 2013 revenue of $71M - an 88% CAGR. HubSpot’s revenue trajectory is effectively identical to the median publicly traded SaaS company. A few months ago, I analyzed Box’s S-1. QLYS 1999 13 91.

Benchmarks 113

Benchmarks SMB Metrics SaaS 113

FastSpring

SEPTEMBER 16, 2022

Pricing positioning based on regional purchasing power (2 minutes): Note: Check out our Recession-Proof Pricing Report for a collection of data from the 2009 recession and the global inflation surge in 2021 to look for trends. How to Price a New Product. No matter what your business model, we meet you where you are. About FastSpring.

Pricing 146

Pricing Payment Solutions Payment Services Scale 146

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2015

This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. First, Xero is a glowing example of a successful SMB SaaS company. The median SaaS company charts 0.81

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Metrics SMB Outsourced Development 100

Outseta

JANUARY 20, 2020

In this post I’m going to share the most important lessons about growing a SaaS business that I learned at Buildium—collectively, these things had an awful lot to do with the company being valued so highly. My role at Buildium In late 2009 the economy had tanked and I had a newly minted MBA but no real job experience.

SaaS Payments 145

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Methods Payment Services 145

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 12, 2015

In 2009, the Corporate Executive Board, a consultancy providing expertise to some of the world’s largest companies, studied the distinguishing characteristics of great sales people and well-run sales processes. They surveyed more than 6,000 sales reps across 90+ businesses. The analysis revealed three interesting things.

Sales 100

Sales Startup Consulting SaaS 100

The Angel VC

MARCH 21, 2012

In 2009 TEV raised a ~ €6M fund, which was managed by Pawel and invested in 24 companies. Point Nine Capital II has made four investments already – one is a great Canadian SaaS startup called Jobber , the rest hasn't been announced yet – and we're looking forward to making many more investments in the coming months and years.

Mobile 108

Mobile Startup Investment SaaS 108