SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2022

And Salesforce noted it’s slowing down hiring, and taking a break from bigger acquisitions, for now. Snowflake also noted certain industries were buying / using less, even if overall growth at the end of the quarter was very strong. That’s still a cautious note in Salesforce’s optimism and blow-out numbers. 2021 $21.25B 2020 $17.1B

Sales Hiring 347

Sales Hiring Acquisition Cloud Enterprise 347

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2022

From $11m in annual revenue in 2017 to $500m+ in 2022. SaaS leaders at scale often find their cost per acquisition goes up at scale, at they saturate the market, but Monday has gotten better and better here: #8. This is impressive, and Monday is well on its way to 20%+ free cash flow and ultimately operating margins.

Headcount 322

Headcount SMB Engineering Scaling 322

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 23, 2022

An acquisition well done. We talked with CEO Jeff Lawson below way back in 2017 about how to go multi-product. It can seemingly scale forever. While 140% at IPO , it’s still top decile today, even adding in the lower NRR from SendGrid. #2. 240m ARR now from Segment. Segment appears to be thriving under Twilio. #3.

Scale 286

Scale Cloud Scaling Acquisition 286

SaaStr

JULY 7, 2021

Where it Went: $1B acquisition by Vista in 2019. Where it Went: $45m revenue in 2017 and reported $100m+ in 2021, but acquired for modest sum in 2021. Where it Went: Acquired for $850m+ by Sage in 2017. in 2011 GAAP revenue. Where it Went: Now valued at $1.5B and a called Nextroll. Really more Adtech than SaaS. #8 557 SEOmoz.

SaaS 291

SaaS Technical Review Software Review Scaling 291

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 18, 2018

The recent seasickness in the public markets forces most CEOs adopt a more conservative approach to acquisitions. Facing large swings in valuation, these leaders may struggle to advocate and articulate that large acquisitions are accretive and will be immediately rewarded by share appreciation after an acquisition. To an extent.

Blockchain 208

Blockchain Technical Review Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 208

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 29, 2016

Starting in 2017, revenue recognition for SaaS companies will change, and SaaS startups will have more flexibility in the way they record revenue than in the past. Public companies must transition to these new regulations starting in 2017. Private companies have the option to migrate to these new standards in 2017.

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SaaS Consulting Benchmarks Startup 100

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2024

This was around 2017, and CS became simpler and focused on post-sales, retention, and reduced churn. It’s not about marketing or user acquisition. This revenue chart is 2017-2021 before Braze IPO’d. They built new processes and brought in new tools to create better alignment into other functional areas.

Scale 297

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Startup 297

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 23, 2018

from 2015 to 2017, a compound annual growth rate of 35%. In 2017, Dropbox generated more than $300M in free cash flow from ops, and for the past two years has sustained 30% cash flow from ops margins. MC/2017 Rev Multiple. Dropbox has grown from 0 to 500 million users over that time period. COGs stands for cost of goods sold.

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Scale Acquisition Cloud Revenue 214

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2022

This led to our first meet-ups in 2013 and 2014, the first SaaStr Annual in 2015 , the industry’s leading podcast in 2016, the first SaaS founder coworking space in 2017, and SaaStr Pro , the first learning management system for SaaS founders in 2018. 2017 The Third SaaStr Annual: Scale Together. It was awesome.

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Scale Sales Recruiting CTO Hire New CTO 313

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

At Saastr, Jason and I discussed the role of private equity in SaaS on stage as a potential acquisition path for SaaS startups. The excess increases prices and valuation multiples for acquisition targets. The median venture-backed SaaS acquisition by PE has increased to $250M, up from $50M in 2010. But that’s changing.

Startup 202

Startup SaaS Acquisition Pricing 202

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2024

If you grew by acquisitions that drove immediate growth, whatever you buy has to grow 20%, too. Gong was designed for prediction, engagement, and enablement in early 2017, and it took a few years to get there. From that original 2017 design plan, Gong has three more big apps and ideas that they haven’t started coding yet.

Scale 311

Scale AI Sales Underperforming Technical Team 311

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 31, 2017

One of the major trends facing SaaS companies today is the rising cost of customer acquisition. The chart above shows the increasing cost of customer acquisition on a per company basis. Those surveyed have observed a ~65% increase in cost of customer acquisition over the last five years. The first is competition.

Scale 189

Scale SaaS Acquisition Banking 189

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2019

Even post-acquisition. note: an update of a classic 2017 SaaStr post). At least for Decades. SAP, Oracle, Concur, Ariba, Successfactors … you can take some shots at these oldie products, but these brands endure for decades. Salesforce is coming up on its second decade, and still growing 30% at $10 billion in ARR.

Scale 353

Scale Churn Construction SMB 353

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2024

There were big opportunities in the QR space, so Bitly made an acquisition that was a big accelerator and set the stage for becoming a multi-product platform. Optimize your acquisition funnel. You’ll have to figure out how to best optimize acquisition funnels for your PLG path. You might have to rebuild your marketing team.

Scale 307

Scale Scaling Underperforming Technical Team User Experience 307

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 6, 2016

What is your SaaS startup worth in an acquisition? What is your SaaS startup worth in an acquisition? The chart above shows the median multiple across all software acquisitions. This figure takes into account all acquisitions, including old and slow growing software companies. EV/Revenue multiple is a composite metric.

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Acquisition Startup SaaS Benchmarks 100

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 8, 2019

We specifically wanted to pick her brain all about customer acquisition : just how does HubSpot do it, and what marketing tactics do they deploy? Amazon collected 42% of all purchases made online in 2017. ” Emerging customer acquisition channels. And cost-per-acquisition itself is up 50% over the past five years.

Acquisition 116

Acquisition Scale Underperforming Technical Team Advertising 116

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 13, 2024

A $1B Acquisition with a Singular Leader for Both Sales and Customer Success In 2017, tech leader Vikas Bhambry found himself at a crossroads. Seamless customer journey Owning the entire customer lifecycle from acquisition to retention eliminated disconnects between pre- and post-sales teams. Lets get into it.

Scale 109

Scale Sales Hiring Acquisition Customer Success 109

SaaStr

DECEMBER 25, 2020

6: “Automation: The Digital Transformation Accelerator with Jennifer Tejada, CEO of Pagerduty” We reached out to Jennifer to speak at SaaStr 2017 or so the day she took the helm as CEO of Pagerduty, and she’s brought amazing learnings and content to SaaStr ever since.

Technical Review 307

Technical Review Cloud Enterprise Engineering 307

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2019

In this session, Anna and Sameer will highlight SendGrid’s journey from growth stage through acquisition and why focusing on people and culture is mission critical to success as a company goes through the scaling process. I’m Sameer Dholakia, CEO of now Twilio SendGrid as of Friday after our completed acquisition.

Scale 160

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 160

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 20, 2014

And third, Nest’s sale to Google last week set the high water mark for IoT acquisitions, measured at more than $3B , firmly establishing the category as a strategic imperative for the world’s largest technology companies. Second, the sector witnessed its first IPO, Control4.

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Acquisition Innovation Startup Investment 100

SaaStr

JULY 27, 2022

Boterri’s company Accel invested in PayFit in 2017 and again in 2021. But happy customers can not only expand your recurring revenue but also contribute to new conversions and acquisitions. . Founded in 2015, PayFit is a software company that empowers entrepreneurs and SMBs to digitize payroll and HR processes.

SMB 244

SMB Sales Hiring Scale B2C 244

Incredo

JUNE 25, 2019

Some experts claim that it’s extremely harmful to the company’s ROI and increases customer acquisition cost (CAC). Freemium plans decrease customer acquisition cost (CAC) as you spend fewer resources to attract people to free access. Dropbox’s annual revenue for 2018 amounted to $1.392 billion (25%+ more than in 2017). #4

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SaaS Pricing Software Review Acquisition 236

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 10, 2018

I hosted Andrew on our podcast to chat about the changing landscape of customer acquisition, how his “Law of Shitty Clickthroughs” manifests itself in today’s growth channels, and what the rest of us can learn from the likes of Dropbox and Uber. This creates an acquisition treadmill with built-in natural churn.

Acquisition 224

Acquisition Marketplace as a Service Retention Startup 224

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 23, 2017

By my estimate, AppDynamics is the fifth largest software acquisition in modern times. More astounding, the AppDynamics acquisition does set the absolute high water mark in one regard: acquisition multiple. It’s a very promising predictor of the 2017 M&A environment. price implies a 17.3x price implies a 17.3x

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Deferred Revenue Software Acquisition Government 100

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 19, 2018

To many who have used both products, this was a no-brainer and a welcomed acquisition. Beyond the obvious though, this is an important acquisition which signals and reinforces other trends for the sales industry: RELATED: Artificial Intelligence: The Sales Renaissance is Here.

Acquisition 74

Acquisition Technical Review Artificial Intelligence Sales 74

Andreessen Horowitz

AUGUST 9, 2022

As I reflect upon my experience building Bond Street (an SMB lending startup we sold to Goldman Sachs in 2017), one of the biggest challenges we faced was in scaling customer acquisition.

Scale 115

Scale Software SMB Business 115

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

The charts below show the change in quarterly revenue YoY (so Q1 ‘24 rev - Q1 ‘23 rev) going back to 2017. Their ongoing revenue can “fund” new logo acquisition and allow the business to operate profitably at paybacks much larger than what private companies (with smaller ARR bases) can afford.

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Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 11, 2019

A few months ago we wrote about Zoominfo’s acquisition of Datanyze in an effort to strengthen its sales intelligence engine. Great Hill Partners, a PE firm, invested in ZoomInfo in 2017 and reportedly made a 6x return on their investment two years later. The post How Will DiscoverOrg’s Acquisition of ZoomInfo Affect Sellers?

Acquisition 67

Acquisition Technical Review Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 67

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). & Customer acquisition. Customer acquisition is basically how much do you spend in terms of sales people, sales team, and in terms of marketing to acquire a new customer. But also generally pretty high CAC, customer acquisition costs. Or maybe ARR, depending on your model. Transcript.

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SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 21, 2022

We’ll also hear Andrew Chen, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, talking about the changing landscape of customer acquisition. We spent most of 2017 building it out. Chasing free customer acquisition. It also means that engagement can power organic acquisition because you naturally tell your friends about it.

Outsourcing Services 215

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring CTO Hire Acquisition 215

InsightSquared

NOVEMBER 16, 2017

The two acquisitions that were personally most interesting to me, and I definitely heard the most about, were Quip and Salesforce CPQ. All in all, Dreamforce 2017 was a great experience. Quip, a new collaborative tool, changes the way teams work together by way of a living document, where users can chat and work at the same time.

Payment Solutions 48

Payment Solutions Payment Services Sales Payment Methods 48

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 8, 2020

Kristen joined Atlassian when it acquired Trello in 2017, where she is now Global Head of EDR Sales. And from the seller’s side, there’s less investment needed in nurturing leads through a lengthy pipeline, so the customer acquisition cost is lower. Like Trello before, Atlassian has a non-traditional sales model.

Scale 205

Scale Sales Hiring Software Review Technical Review 205

Tom Tunguz

JULY 7, 2015

Gartner has forecasted that by 2017 CMOs will spend more money than CIOs , which should eventually translate to substantial increases in the aggregate market caps of marketing SaaS companies. One blind spot in this analysis is it fails to look at the total value of SaaS acquisitions.

Sales Recruiting 113

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring SaaS Scale 113

SaaStock

JANUARY 30, 2019

By 2017 as things stabilized, VC firms such as Accell and Tiger came back, while a new breed of local Seed stage ones was established. Founded: 2017. Founded: 2017. Most well-known funds experimented with funding Brazilian and Latin American B2C ventures. This time around, though, they were not focusing as much on e-commerce.

Venture Capital 155

Venture Capital SaaS Healthcare Finance 155

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Tara joined the company in 2017 and has been instrumental in helping the company scale and retain more customers through a unique customer-centric approach to marketing. . I think the statistic is about 5% to 30% of your revenue comes from your acquisition side whereas 75% to 90% comes from retention.”

Retention 34

Retention Scale Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 34

Tom Tunguz

MAY 3, 2016

These two acquisitions form a notable moment in time for the evolution of the vertical software industry. Below, the table shows a comparison of the key operating metrics of each business and the ultimate acquisition multiple. These are not the first vertical software acquisitions, nor will they be the last. OPower 149 15.5%

Startup 100

Startup SaaS Acquisition Construction 100

Hitenism

DECEMBER 26, 2016

Work backwards from there to get your pricing model and acquisition channels. In 2017, companies will find success by getting back to basics and focusing on the “service” part of Software as a Service. The Drip team shares how to break down the market to find your biggest opportunities in SaaS in 2017.

Scale 152

Scale SaaS Marketplace as a Service SMB 152