The Angel VC

APRIL 6, 2019

Back in 2014, I wrote a post titled “Five ways to build a $100 million business”. The main reason is that I grew up as a consumer software and consumer Internet founder, and even though I had already spent about five years as a SaaS investor when I wrote the post, my experience was heavily skewed towards SMB SaaS.

SaaS 277

SaaS Scale Business SMB 277

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 17, 2018

The peak occurred in February 2014 at 7.7x. Here is an amazing fact: the top 3 companies all target the SMB segment with ASPs at IPO of under $10k. Forward revenue is the sum of the next 12 months’ revenue. Since 2013, we seen an incredible amount of volatility in SaaS forward multiples. So just where are these numbers?

SaaS 186

SaaS Healthcare SMB Enterprise 186

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 21, 2017

Over that 20 year period, annual SaaS investment has increased 20x, peaking in 2014 at $7B. Segmentation - focus on SMB, Mid-Market, or Enterprise, to play where competition isn’t present. Since then, many major categories of software have been saasified. Venture capitalists have financed many of those businesses.

Venture Capital 189

Venture Capital SaaS Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 189

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

Turns out a founding team of six MBAs creating a full suite of products sold solely to SMBs can become a multi-million dollar public company in nine years – and continue growing rapidly ($77.6 million in 2014.). We had a notable funding round in October of 2014. million in 2013 to $115.9 Jason : Everyone’s there.

Part-Time VPE 297

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 297

SaaStock

JANUARY 25, 2019

Omie main goal is to bridge the efficiency gap in Brazilian SMB, helping customers to be more prosperous. Omie is the only SaaS company figuring among 100 fastest growing SMB in Brazil, according to Deloitte Consulting, ranking #3. Founded : 2014. CEO : Marcelo Lombardo. Founded : 2013. Based in: São Paulo, Brazil.

SaaS Payments 257

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Methods Payments 257

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 16, 2020

In 2014, the company smashed expectations, earning $105 million in revenue – double what they had taken in the year before. It wasn’t long before they identified a further growth opportunity: some of their larger customers were jumping ship, saying they had outgrown the company’s SMB-oriented solutions.

Sales Hiring 226

Sales Hiring Scale Artificial Intelligence Enterprise 226

SaaStr

OCTOBER 11, 2023

You don’t want to overwhelm SMB customers, and Monday made this a focus from day one. Since starting the company in 2014, there wasn’t a lot of money you could raise in a startup. The Secret To Conquering High NRR From SMBs monday.com went from 125 to 110 NRR, which is macro yet still epic for SMB.

Scale 183

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Banking 183

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2015

Based in New Zealand, Xero has built a widely adopted small-to-medium business (SMB) accounting solution that counts 371,000 paying customers, a figure that grew 76% in the last 12 months. First, Xero is a glowing example of a successful SMB SaaS company. Xero Income Statement 2007 2008 2009 2010 211 2012 2013 2014.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Metrics SMB Outsourced Development 100

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2014

HubSpot is the second fastest SMB SaaS company to IPO yet, achieving the mark within 8 years. Most other SMB companies, defined for this analysis as having an ARPC of less than $15,000, took at least one more year to go public. Impressively, HubSpot has been able to record much faster revenue growth than other SMB SaaS companies.

Benchmarks 113

Benchmarks SMB Metrics SaaS 113

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

So I went down the hall, met with the head of marketing, and I discovered a lot about in bound SaaS, about SMB, the importance of building this machine as I call it now that generates all these lovely leads. They all looked at me really weird because remember, I’d never done SMB before. Liberate some operating expenses.

Scale 187

Scale SMB VP of Engineering Leadership 187

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 24, 2014

Below are the ranges I’ve seen for these ratios, but keep in mind, there’s lots of variability for different types of businesses (SMB vs Enterprise, Word of Mouth vs Outbound customer acquisition, etc): Marketing : quite variable; it depends on the main customer acquisition channels of the business.

Scale 100

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS SMB 100

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 9, 2020

Having the right technology in place is often the difference between success and failure, and this is even more true for startups and SMB, where you have a small team and limited resources.

Technical Review 133

Technical Review Scale Trends Startup 133

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

So up to 100-150K and SMB, we’re at 2K. The next stage was we hired more junior people who would do the first call and work on SMB accounts and we would have the more senior work on mid-market and enterprise accounts. So we had SMB, mid-market and enterprise. So me, 2014 to end of 2015, I had I think five people.

Scale 150

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 150

Sales Hacker

APRIL 1, 2025

The exact playbook to move from SMB to enterpriseincluding partner enablement, segmentation, and incentive design. 85% of your customers being SMB and mid-market to at the end of that six years, it was 75%, uh, enterprise. Why retention isn’t just a CS metricand how to build a sales team that cares about it.

Scale 64

Scale VP of Engineering Outsourcing Services Enterprise 64

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Contrast that with companies that might also sell into the SMB segment of the market where the ASPs, the average deal sizes are lower. SMB businesses just go out of business much more frequently, and so their gross retention numbers are going to be lower. Another thing we look at to sort of take a look at the future is our Cloud 100.

Cloud 113

Cloud Scale AWS Artificial Intelligence 113

Sales Hacker

MARCH 18, 2019

Think back to about 2014. That’s because right around 2014 (and probably before then) CRM became table-stakes. For a while, some sales technologies seemed like they were relegated to live in the SMB, Mid Market and Commercial space, but it appears that’s no longer the case.

Technical Review 79

Technical Review Scale Sales Underperforming Technical Team 79

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 15, 2020

After this experience, Zak took the entrepreneurial plunge in 2014. Sam Jacobs: The company was founded in 2014. Back in 2014, me and my two co-founders, Matt and Jafar, we just started getting to work. It goes down to mid-market and SMB as well. He co-founded Loopio with his closest friends, Matt York and Jafar Owainati.

Scale 115

Scale Technical Review Software Review Systems Review 115

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 29, 2018

However starting in 2014 , the tides turned as the number of SQLs/SDR dropped from 20-30 to low 10s. To grow, the company needs to structure its resources into two initiatives; SMB and MidMarket, each requiring a different approach. From these meetings , the AEs close 6-8 dea ls per month with an ACV of $18,000. . POD Modeling.

Sales Recruiting 92

Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring Sales 92

Point Nine Land

APRIL 5, 2019

Back in 2014, I wrote a post titled “Five ways to build a $100 million business”. The main reason is that I grew up as a consumer software and consumer Internet founder, and even though I had already spent about five years as a SaaS investor when I wrote the post, my experience was heavily skewed towards SMB SaaS.

Scale 75

Scale SaaS Business Technical Review 75

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

If you go back to before 2014, what you see is the power of the cloud. Everyone knows Shopify for what it is today, but in the earlier days, it really was the best SaaS platform for SMB eCommerce providers. Leveraging on some of Tobi’s philosophy, it’s something here that we call at Bessemer, Finding Your Second Act.

Sales Hiring 235

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 235

How To Buy Saas

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

HubSpot introduced its free CRM in 2014, lowering the barrier for small businesses to start managing contacts and pipelines without cost. Rapid SMB adoption with 200K+ customers. Startups, SMBs, and mid-market; teams wanting all-in-one marketing + sales. Market share leader (21.7% Also used by smaller orgs with IT support.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Software Review 52

OpenView Labs

MAY 29, 2020

If you bought Workday stock at a 30x revenue valuation with a five-year hold in mind shortly after its 2012 IPO, you’d have had a great 2013 (+50%) but then the stock would have sat flat in your portfolio in 2014, 2015, and 2016. Over that same period, though, Workday grew revenues at a 55% CAGR (between ’12-’16).

Marketing 52

Marketing SMB Benchmarks Pricing 52

Sales Hacker

JUNE 9, 2020

We went public in 2014. This was the first time that I was really focused on the SMB market and had a great experience there. Sam Jacobs : Wow. That’s a long time. And it only went public recently, so for a private company for a very long time. Barrett Boston : That is true.

Leadership 105

Leadership Scale Sales Recruiting VP of Engineering 105

Ramp Ventures

JANUARY 2, 2017

A limited budget and the fact that you’re trying to build a brand from the ground up means your content strategy is probably going to look pretty different from that of a large enterprise, or even an established SMB. Stick with me and you’ll find out just how a startup should be using content marketing for maximum effect.

Content Marketing 40

Content Marketing Outsourcing Services Marketing Social Media 40

SaaStr

JULY 11, 2019

But actually, we met in 2014 when you’d actually been at it for three years, which is-. You go from the leanest organization and very small SMB, to closing seven figure TCVLs for enterprise. Doing a product for SMB is fairly simple. In 2014, when we met, the cloud was accelerating. But with all SMBs, right?

Sales Hiring 270

Sales Hiring SMB Scale Cloud 270

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 22, 2021

And back in 2014, I co-wrote an article called Grow Fast or Die Slow. In 2014, it was pretty insightful, not so insightful now. If your product market fit seems like it’s on a roll, but you’re still more on that B2C, SMB stage, well, then I would really advocate for ambassadors and creators. What does that mean?

B2C 307

B2C Scale Consulting Sales Hiring 307

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2022

The closer you are to B2C and, to some extent, eCommerce, you’re going to see more impacts in SMB, and in infrastructure, cloud and enterprise you’re going to see less. SMBs are doing that every day. Especially if you sell to SMB and mid-market, what can you do so that no one in their right mind will rip it out?

Scale 245

Scale SaaS Payments Scaling SaaS 245

SaaStr

AUGUST 13, 2019

Salesforce started at SMB and they moved up market and they have really done a fantastic job. How do you actually go from selling to consumers to then to SMB customers and then going up market. And in 2014, for example, we went into Australia and we went into Japan at the same time. So the path of market is treacherous.

Scale 177

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Sales Recruiting 177

SaaStr

JULY 30, 2020

Prior to founding Atrium, Pete founded TalentBin, culminating in their exit to Monster Worldwide in February 2014. How does this differ between SMB and enterprise? My previous software company was a company called TalentBin, which was a recruiting software company that started in 2010, and was acquired by Monster Worldwide in 2014.

Part-Time VPE 289

Part-Time VPE Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 289

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2022

Salesforce was a very rudimentary SMB app for a brief period of time, but it was. There was a moment in time when I didn’t have that much to do 2013, 2014, and I was an angel investor, but really a mentor. It sold to very small companies. It didn’t even have custom tabs. It just had four tabs out of the box.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Scaling 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

So, Aaron and I wrote a book together in 2014 or something. SMB numbers are harder to get with, but it’s like 60 or 70 for SMBs. So, we’ve got three of them here. Aaron’s going to talk about what in a few minutes? Aaron : The playbook for reigniting growth. Jason : All right. Aaron : 2016. Jason : 2016.

Sales Hiring 247

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 247

SaaStr

MARCH 13, 2020

So fast forward to 2014, I was in LA and finalizing my visa application. And I think the SMB mid-market sector is actually what’s fueling this tremendous growth we’re seeing year over year. This is actually one of the most exciting developments for me in SaaS.

SaaS Payments 251

SaaS Payments Payment Methods Finance Payments 251

SaaStr

APRIL 3, 2019

Some of the same investors ended up placing me at URX, which was sort of the deep linking standard of 2014. Ben Braverman: June, 2014, when I started, we had an $18,000 month. Having said that, most of our salespeople do come into our SMB segment, and this is intentional. I worked for them for a little while.

Scale 100

Scale Sales Hiring Systems Review Marketplace as a Service 100

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 7, 2021

It took me a long time to admit to myself that I don’t enjoy transactional SMB sales. I started my career as a high school English teacher, and jumped into Chicago tech sales in 2014. What is your best piece of career advice for women in sales? Be honest about what you enjoy doing and don’t settle for anything less.

Scale 137

Scale Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 137

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2019

I joined in late 2014, and the origin story of Plus is one of just following customers. The only objection when they invested was that this sort of store thing for SMB was so small, they projected the maximum exit would be seven hundred million. I want to talk less, but I am a super fan of this whole story. Loren Padelford: Yes.

Sales Hiring 160

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Underperforming Technical Team 160

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 18, 2015

A startup initially targets the SMB segment, develops a product to suit those customers and uses marketing to acquire large numbers of them. Only the SMB marketing team is permitted to acquire new leads. Atlassian has mastered this method and achieved terrific success, recording $215M in revenue, growing 44% in 2014.

Innovation 150

Innovation Startup SaaS Sales Hiring 150

Sales Hacker

MARCH 25, 2025

I think about every business that I’ve seen, and I still engage with a lot of startups and SMB, and small, medium companies as well. Focused on the use cases. Not just the big S 500 or big accounts that we serve at Microsoft, but I’m seeing the full range of people. so they’ll push us on all of those controls.

AI Search 70

AI Search AI Scale Software 70