SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2022

Why Customer Success and Product Should be Best Friends: Lessons Learned with AWS’ Head of Customer Success Harini Gokul. In this session, Harini will discuss the optimal engagement model for the product , services, and customer success teams in the SaaS world to deliver value and innovation to your customers.

AWS 246

AWS Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2023

So there are a lot of rough and arm chair metrics for fundraising in SaaS in terms of valuations. For years, the standard was “about 10x” Top tier SaaS companies would tend to raise at around 10x ARR, with ones with slightly lower growth often raising at 5x. Even If It’s Awful for Series A-E Rounds.

Venture Capital 67

Venture Capital AWS SaaS Startup 67

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2021

It can be easy for SaaS companies to lose momentum if they haven’t quite found the perfect product-market fit. Kazuki Ohta, CEO & Founder at Treasure Data, shares his company’s story of how pivoting at the right time saved their business and accelerated their growth to $100 million ARR. Commoditization From AWS & Google Cloud.

Sales Hiring 313

Sales Hiring Data AWS Leadership 313

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2025

AI is already reshaping B2B SaaS, and its only going to accelerate. Gross Margins Will Improve for AI-Driven SaaS. AI is also transforming the economics of SaaS. Or are you still focused on users input data? AI is forcing every SaaS company to level up. Heres what I think is happening and whats next: #1.

AI 147

AI Trends SaaS AWS 147

SaaStr

DECEMBER 7, 2020

Ok the Best But Craziest Year Ever for SaaS isn’t quite over, but as it drives to a conclusion, we thought it would be worth looking back at top posts you may have missed in 2020. “The Era of the SaaS Decacorn is Here” That’s for sure. The Era of the SaaS Decacorn is Here. What a crazy year for Cloud.

Venture Capital 336

Venture Capital Sales Hiring AWS Cloud 336

SaaStr

AUGUST 3, 2024

So a lot of good stuff has happened in SaaS recently. OneStream had an epic SaaS IPO at $500m ARR, growing 34%. Overall Cloud spending has bounced back off lows for sure: AWS at a $105B run rate growing 19% Quarterly YoY growth trends below. Sapphire Ventures, a leading growth-stage VC fund, has some good data. #

AWS 239

AWS Scale Social Media SaaS 239

SaaStr

MAY 23, 2022

There are many ways to slice-and-dice public market data, but the headline one Bessemer called out is the most visceral I’ve seen: Public SaaS and Cloud companies lost $1 Trillion in market cap so far in 2022. And the number of public SaaS and Cloud decacorns has fallen from 50 to 17. Strange Days, Indeed.

Cloud 338

Cloud Azure AWS Marketing 338

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 28, 2025

Data from Stripe (below) shows the speed at which AI native companies are growing compared to SaaS companies. If you wanted to scale users and growth, you needed to scale a physical data infrastructure footprint. Fast forward to the launch of AWS and the public cloud. ” This used to be how companies scaled!

Cloud 184

Cloud AI Scale Scaling 184

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 18, 2023

SaaS products and services like Pilot track the finances of 1,000s of SaaS and other startup so they’re an interesting source of hard data. What does Pilot’s latest data say? SaaS and Cloud growth overall will remain strong. Shopify , Datadog, Crowdstrike , Google Cloud-Azure-AWS, Snowflake , etc.

Startup 357

Startup Venture Capital Azure AWS 357

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 3, 2022

My summary of Venture Markets in Nov 2022: Series B and later even worse than looks in data: 85%+ of investing here has simply ceased. So we’ve talked about it often here at SaaStr, but things are just so … odd right now in SaaS. Seed and Early Series A: Deals take longer but off about 40%.

AWS 351

AWS Venture Capital Azure Cloud 351

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2024

SaaS outside of classic “B2B’ is often holding up well. And AI is obviously on fire, pulling up AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc. But classic B2B SaaS is definitely in many cases seeing tougher times. So not everyone is seeing tougher times these days. Klaviyo, Toast, etc. just had very strong quarters.

Azure 307

Azure AWS Sales B2B 307

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

In this new SaaStr series called “What’s new at…,” Jason Lemkin chats with WorkOS CEO and founder Michael Grinich about what it takes to be Enterprise ready in SaaS, building vs. buying, and who the stakeholders are in a B2D motion. That’s unheard of in other SaaS categories. 50% of SaaS sales are outside of North America.

Enterprise readiness 290

Enterprise readiness Payment Solutions Enterprise Payments 290

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

In this post, I’ll take a data-driven approach in evaluating the overall group’s performance, and highlight individual standouts along the way. My hope is that this analysis can provide startup entrepreneurs with a framework for how to manage their businesses around SaaS metrics (e.g., net retention and CAC payback).

Cloud 318

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2024

So there’s a curious thing anyone close in venture capital fundraising and rounds today: Valuations for Hot VC Deals remain far higher than pre-March 2020 … even though growth for the overall public SaaS and Cloud companies has slowed to … all time lows. Most likely no matter how well you are doing — that’s likely not quite you. We’ll see.

Venture Capital 304

Venture Capital AWS Cloud Scaling 304

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 28, 2020

When we announced our investment in and partnership with Mattermost about a year ago , I wrote about a new architecture for SaaS. The idea behind the new architecture is split a SaaS app into code and the data. The SaaS company writes, updates, and maintains the code. And the customer manages the data.

VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) 223

VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) Cloud Enterprise Data 223

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

Welcome to the latest installment of our “ What’s New ” series where SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin sits down with some of the top leaders and founders in SaaS and Cloud to discuss What’s New and what should be top of mind for fellow founders. AWS can’t support 20 partners equally. Otherwise, it falls apart.

AWS 286

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 286

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

" As with many other companies reporting strength in the market, AI & unstructured data workloads are fueling growth. ” Unstructured data is the growth engine : 17x growth y/y suggests a small number last year, but phenomenal interest. “Over 30% of customers use Snowflake to process unstructured data in October.

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 187

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Azure Data Startup 187

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2022

Aiven provides managed open source data technologies on all major clouds. Meanwhile, we do what we do best; manage cloud data infrastructure. We’ll see 10,000 of the best SaaS founders, execs and VCs Sep 13-15 at 2022 SaaStrAnnual.com ! With Aiven, developers can do what they do best: create applications.

Cloud 276

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Payments SaaS Payments 276

SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2021

Open Source is here to stay—and Open Source + SaaS is the future. Databricks started out in the Cloud; we never provided an on-prem offering, only a SaaS Cloud offering. Slowly, you’re going to find lots of companies like Databricks that offer open source technology as a SaaS service. It was difficult, but it was worth it.

Enterprise 246

Enterprise AI SaaS AWS 246

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

Generally you need to aggregate data from a number of places to “group.” They each have some of the largest cloud businesses in the world in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud respectively. The promise of SaaS is that growth in the early years leads to profits in the mature years. The list goes on. There are so many others.

Systems Review 144

Systems Review Cloud AI Artificial Intelligence 144

Clouded Judgement

OCTOBER 11, 2024

The hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP) are always some of the first companies to report earnings during earnings season (coming up in 2 weeks), and there’s always a read through for consumption names (meaning people believe there’s a correlation). Cloudflare is up 17%. Datadog is up 14%. Mongo is up 16%. Snowflake is up 14%.

Cloud 167

Cloud Cost optimization & reporting GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Review 167

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2024

A lot of you reading SaaStr are probably more B2B SaaS oriented and may not be paying attention to the consumer market, but it’s already massive and is continuing to grow quickly. So, let’s look at the state of subscription apps and how B2B SaaS can learn from it. You can tune into Workshop Wednesday every single Wednesday at 10 a.m.

Subscription 307

Subscription Payment Features B2B Mobile 307

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

The role of finance in SaaS is changing. Accountants are responsible for ensuring the company has clean financial statements and data. Business Development Identify and assess partnership opportunities to drive growth Business Intelligence Turn data into insights to inform decision-making. So, Miao and the team got to work.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

JUNE 3, 2020

It’s 2020 and SaaS buyers are more skeptical and suspicious, more disbelieving, more unconvinced than they were in 2019. The SaaS Trust Crisis is making it harder to market and sell software and services than ever before. And what I’d like to talk to you about today is the SaaS Trust crisis we’re seeing.

Software Review 260

Software Review Scale Technical Review SaaS 260

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

I have a strong, semi-proven thesis that in SaaS, market size doesn’t matter that much … at least in the traditional top-down sense. Yes, many of the big winners in SaaS entered already large markets, from CRM (Salesforce) to ERP (Workday) to Collaboration (Workday, Asana). And it’s better than that, these days.

Scale 285

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital AWS 285

Chargify

AUGUST 17, 2020

Until recently, only industry titans like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google could successfully and effectively harness continuous, real-time data use statistics to fuel events-based billing models. How AWS Does It. What Amazon Web Services and Twilio Get Right.

AWS 98

AWS Payment Services SaaS Payments Payments 98

Frontegg

JUNE 30, 2021

Imagine that you want to create a SaaS application and structure it so that several users can use it; how would you implement such a project? You can use a multi-tenant architecture for the SaaS application. What is a Multi-tenant SaaS Application? Multi-tenant and Data Isolation. That is not the best solution.

AWS 88

AWS SaaS Payments Payment Methods Enterprise 88

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 31, 2021

Changing how and where you host your product is one of the most challenging decisions for a SaaS company to. Changing how and where you host your product is one of the most challenging decisions for a saas company to make. None of us started a saas company to deal with server migrations. Over time all of that changes.

AWS 115

AWS DevOps as a Service Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review 115

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

In the latest installment of SaaStr’s What’s New series – where we sit down with the leaders in SaaS and Cloud for the inside scoop on what’s top of mind and what’s new, SaaStr CEO and Jason Lemkin chats with the CEO of ZoomInfo , Henry Schuck. So, what’s new at ZoomInfo?

New CTO 316

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring AWS 316

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2023

It’s one of the few still commanding a premium multiple in today’s world, and still growing at tremendous rates: Snowflake is also a barometer of everything in SaaS and Cloud, because a significant amount of its revenue is consumption-based, at least in part. AWS is seeing this, and so is Snowflake. Not none, just less.

Headcount 246

Headcount Scale Sales Hiring AWS 246

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 6, 2023

In the cloud, AWS, Azure, & GCP have created about as much market cap as all the top 100 B2B & B2C publics built on cloud (Netflix, ServiceNow, AirBnb, etc). Access to proprietary data provides a moat. Usage & distribution, like in classical SaaS, are likely the most sustainable & repeatable.

Generative AI 228

Generative AI AI GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Startup 228

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

And it’s one of the three large cloud vendors that we all know: Microsoft, AWS, and Google. AWS’s marketplace has seen 1.5 million subscriptions transacted and Google’s marketplace has seen 3X growth in SaaS sales. Like I said, we run 100% of our platform on AWS, so the fit was great.

Scale 263

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 263

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Customers range from AWS skills-builder platforms with billions of users to Zoom using it for customers and employees. Docebo was started and funded in 2005 and became a SaaS player in 2012. A Misconception: You Need A Lot of Data to Solve Your Problems People want a lot of data, but they don’t know how to use it.

Sales Hiring 283

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 283

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

Whether it’s selling ads or storing data, The Four have become the nerve center of businesses all across the world and therefore take a cut from almost every business, regardless of whether it’s winning or losing its own particular battle for market share. In past lives I’ve been a soldier for two of The Four, Amazon and Facebook).

Outsourcing Services 224

Outsourcing Services Software Review Software Outsourced Development 224

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Ed Lenta, the SVP and GM of Databricks, had the rare opportunity of scaling three hypergrowth companies — VMware, AWS, and Databricks. Customers’ data architectures today are an incredible mess with massive amounts of legacy. Of course, we all know how that turned out. Is there a big Total Addressable Market? It was inevitable.

Scale 262

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 262

SaaStr

DECEMBER 26, 2022

Despite economic headwinds, SaaS spending continues to grow, with most companies having self-reported increasing or maintaining SaaS spending. G2 track, their proprietary SaaS spend management platform. This includes data from companies on how they utilize SaaS and their spending. What do buyers want?

Software Review 245

Software Review Software Azure Cloud 245

The Angel VC

MAY 12, 2018

In last week's post I shared some thoughts about Dropbox and why, although Dropbox is unquestionably one of the most amazing SaaS companies ever built, I am a tad less confident in the company's long-term future than I am in other SaaS leaders such as Salesforce.com, Zendesk, or Shopify. 8 – Weaning off AWS Look at this.

AWS 187

AWS Scale Subscription Payment Features 187