SaaStr

AUGUST 15, 2020

Recently I was catching up with a good friend who used to be CEO of an enterprise-y SaaS social networking company — and the usage and engagement numbers of his business were just awful. So the buyer really doesn’t even have any success metrics going into the first renewal.

AWS 337

AWS Churn Enterprise Engagement 337

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

Culture Structure You want a culture of checking results and having metrics to evaluate those results from the LLM or a more traditional model. You want a culture that focuses on your metrics and evaluating what’s important to you. Whatever the metric is, you have to translate that into a concrete metric.

AI Search 281

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 281

SaaStr

JANUARY 26, 2023

So there are a lot of rough and arm chair metrics for fundraising in SaaS in terms of valuations. Even If It’s Awful for Series A-E Rounds. 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.

Venture Capital 66

Venture Capital AWS SaaS Startup 66

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

They each have some of the largest cloud businesses in the world in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud respectively. Given most software companies are not profitable, or not generating meaningful FCF, it’s the only metric to compare the entire industry against. Overall, there was weakness across the board.

Systems Review 144

Systems Review Cloud AI Artificial Intelligence 144

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 25, 2022

We work exclusively with AWS as our cloud services provider and currently provide data hosting offerings in three different global regions – US, EU, and Australia – each architected across multiple availability zones for high availability. Our tooling allows for high availability.

Scaling 252

Scaling AWS Software Review Technical Review 252

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

So one thing that has exploded in SaaS in the past decade is the role of Private Equity buying both public SaaS companies (to take them private, “fix” some metrics, and IPO or sell them again), and generally later-stage private SaaS companies. You might be worth less ? is interesting to see.

AWS 313

AWS SaaS Pricing Acquisition 313

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 13, 2022

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Datadog, ZoomInfo, Atlassian, AWS: Epic Growth — But Some Real Headwinds For The First Time. Live: SaaStr Workshop Wednesday with Battery Ventures on SaaS Metrics. 5 Interesting Learnings from Duolingo at $360,000,000 in ARR.

Sales Recruiting 284

Sales Recruiting AWS Compensation Enterprise 284

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). I created this subset to show companies where FCF is a relevant valuation metric.

Cloud 167

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

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

Growing Almost 50% as Approaches $2B in ARR The exact growth rate is based on an The Information report from a few weeks ago, and it seems about right looking at their published metrics. That’s awfully impressive. Importantly, growth has accelerated this year.

AWS 300

AWS B2C Scaling AI 300

Tom Tunguz

JULY 8, 2020

This modern architecture for data analysis, operational metrics, and machine learning enables companies to process data in new ways. The conference features talks from practitioners and open-source leaders from the ecosystem from Netflix, Microsoft, Expedia, AWS, and Preset.

Data Analysis 257

Data Analysis Cloud Data Scaling 257

Chargify

AUGUST 17, 2020

However, with the introduction of Events-Based Billing by Chargify, this event-based billing model is now available to small and medium-sized businesses, giving them the ability to offer the same pricing models and bill customers just as precisely as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or the popular voice and messaging platform Twilio.

AWS 98

AWS Payment Services SaaS Payments Payments 98

SaaStr

MAY 19, 2019

This is a critical metric. Gross margins have grown to best-of-breed at 83%, after a migration to AWS and more automation in customer support. Aim for that at least in your SMB segment if you can, and if you can provide at least as much value as Xero. Customer Lifetime Value is 81 months, from SMB That’s impressive.

SMB 270

SMB Customer Lifetime Value AWS Churn 270

Clouded Judgement

MAY 3, 2024

We now have results from the three hypersclaers (AWS / Azure / GCP). The most notable change in tone was Andy Jassy talking about AWS. Given most software companies are not profitable, or not generating meaningful FCF, it’s the only metric to compare the entire industry against.

Cost optimization & reporting 190

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Software Azure 190

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

For example, Google and AWS are already ZoomInfo customers, but only certain sub-segments within those businesses – not the entire org. The Takeaway — While 2024 should be a bit more predictable, the most important metrics ZoomInfo is focusing on now are utilization and engagement.

New CTO 305

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 305

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2021

Commoditization From AWS & Google Cloud. In addition, the SaaS metrics dramatically improved, including increased growth rate, faster pipeline velocity, shorter sales cycle length, and higher gross margin. No matter what VP of Sales they hired, sales consistently failed to meet their quota. Competition in the market rose sharply.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Data AWS Leadership 300

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2024

In B2B, the classic metric for this is 2% now and was 2% in 2006. In B2B, you also have fixed costs, but you can diversify monetization based on tokens or seats, or in the case of AWS, however you like. That’s up from 60% in 2023. While free trial offerings have increased, conversion to paid remains fairly low at 1.7%.

Payment Features 294

Payment Features Subscription B2B Mobile 294

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 But also it’s allowed us to get much closer to our provider, I mean, we host and run 100% on AWS, but pull data from everywhere. It was pretty easy to drive that from our side.

Scale 256

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 256

SaaStr

APRIL 3, 2021

There’s a metric the very top founders track quitely, but ruthlessly, that I find other founders either don’t track, or sort of hide from. DigitalOcean is growing more slowly than its mega competitors Azure, AWS, etc. That’s % of marketshare. And importantly, if it’s growing, or shrinking. Why does it matter?

Azure 240

Azure Headcount AWS Education 240

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Now, let’s take this idea and apply it to the world of marketing metrics. Knowing that people are incentivized by what they’re rewarded for, marketing metrics boil down to alignment. If revenue is the North Star metric, everything you do should drive towards that. They are a vanity metric. Our unanimous pick?

Metrics 123

Metrics Revenue Scale Marketing 123

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2021

Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Global Vice President for AWS Storage will deliver one of the keynotes. Data modelling companies create single definitions of metrics for consistency across organizations. This time, the conference will build on the foundation from last year’s event. Data engines query the data rapidly, inexpensively.

VP of Engineering 203

VP of Engineering Cloud Data AWS 203

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2021

So I always have to pass here, no matter how good the metrics look today. “Quarterly MRR”, 100% Gross Margins, and Other Crazy Metrics. But if your metrics make truly zero sense, to me, that’s a flag. Gaming the metrics doesn’t help here. This is sort of awful. Not perfectly.

Sales Recruiting 339

Sales Recruiting Scale AWS Investment 339

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Amazon on AWS : “…customers are continuing to shift their focus towards driving innovation and bringing new workloads to the cloud. Azure (excluding Azure AI) continued to decelerate, and while AWS did come in ahead of expectations, it wasn’t a blow out. Follow along to stay up to date!

Cost optimization & reporting 167

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Azure AWS 167

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

Through these interactions, I’ve built up mental benchmarks for metrics on which I place extra emphasis. My hope is that this analysis can provide startup entrepreneurs with a framework for how to manage their businesses around SaaS metrics (e.g., This metric is more self-explanatory, so I won’t go into detail.

Cloud 184

Cloud Software Azure AWS 184

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. Sell To Customers How They Want To Be Sold To When Lenta first started building AWS in Australia, they were crude in how they thought about customers. Of course, we all know how that turned out.

Scale 255

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 255

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 7, 2025

With a background that includes leadership roles at AWS, Microsoft, and Lenovo, Fred brings a wealth of experience in building high-performing teams and driving revenue growth. And I know you’ve had some great experience, particularly while you were at AWS, running different partner sales, channel sales. They cannot resell.

Outsourcing Services 118

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development AWS 118

Clouded Judgement

OCTOBER 27, 2023

Subscribe now Cloud Giants Report Q3 ‘23 Not a great signal for software this week from the Cloud Giants (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud)…After Q2 (3 months ago), the tone from the Cloud Giants around optimizations was largely: optimizations have started to ease, and net new workloads have picked up. That is not new.”

Cost optimization & reporting 157

Cost optimization & reporting Cloud Azure AWS 157

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 8, 2023

The Semantic Model Becomes a Must-Have: Semantic models unify a single definition across an organization for a particular metric. BI systems marry the centralized control of data teams with the ability to define and promote metrics at the edge of an organization (Omni). Looker did this within the context of a BI system.

Artificial Intelligence 220

Artificial Intelligence Trends Data Software Review 220

Clouded Judgement

SEPTEMBER 27, 2024

Subscribe now Foundation Models Are to AI what S3 was to the Public Cloud Many people look at 2006 as the birth of the public cloud - the year Amazon launched AWS. Given most software companies are not profitable, or not generating meaningful FCF, it’s the only metric to compare the entire industry against.

Cloud 176

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) AWS Azure 176

Panintelligence

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

Panintelligence recognized as Rising Star Partner of the Year (ISV) – EMEA finalist, one of many AWS Partners around the globe that help customers drive innovation. Geo and Global AWS Partner Awards recognize a wide range of AWS Partners, whose business models have embraced specialization, innovation, and cooperation over the past year.

AWS 64

AWS Innovation Business Model Metrics 64

Clouded Judgement

OCTOBER 20, 2023

Hyperscaler Preview Next week Amazon, Microsoft and Google report earnings and we’ll see Q3 data for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Given most software companies are not profitable, or not generating meaningful FCF, it’s the only metric to compare the entire industry against. Even a DCF is riddled with long term assumptions.

Cloud 167

Cloud Azure AWS Software Review 167

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 28, 2023

AWS (Amazon), Azure (Microsoft), and Google Cloud (Google) all reported this week. Then AWS appeared to add fuel to that hope before giving us a huge rug pull. After all, they had a lot of AI tailwinds, and benefited tremendously from consolidation (without a headwind of a larger base of smaller startups, like AWS).

Cloud 130

Cloud Azure AWS AI Search 130

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

Even if you come up short, and/or even if it takes much longer, you’ll then have a real solid chance of creating something of value. And if you don’t know how to get there … if you can’t honestly build a real, data-driven model that proves it at least to you … then that’s awfully telling.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital AWS 273

Clouded Judgement

JANUARY 6, 2023

Cloud Downgrades This week UBS came out with a couple research reports citing concerns in AWS / Azure growth. This brings me back to AWS / Azure downgrades. This was the worst tone that we’ve heard in years from large AWS/Azure partners, a group that usually expresses different shades of optimism about AWS/Azure growth.”

Cloud 130

Cloud Azure AWS Underperforming Technical Team 130

Clouded Judgement

OCTOBER 28, 2022

Hyperscalers Report Quarterly Earnings This week we saw AWS (Amazon), GCP (Google) and Azure (Microsoft) report earnings. Overall, it wasn’t pretty… AWS grew 28% when expectations were 30-31%. Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date!

Cloud 130

Cloud Azure AWS Cost optimization & reporting 130

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 15, 2019

5–10+ year leases are awful. Perhaps if there hadn’t been crazy metrics like “Community Adjusted EBIDTA”. But the bet was that, in The Best of Times, the public markets would see WeWork a bit like a crazy Amazon for space, one that would consume billions more, but revolutionize one of the largest markets in the world — office space.

AWS 166

AWS Pricing Revenue Metrics 166

Clouded Judgement

AUGUST 4, 2023

” These are two quotes about AWS on the Amazon earnings call. AWS grew 16% in Q1, but called out growth in April (first month of Q2) was 11%. Given most software companies are not profitable, or not generating meaningful FCF, it’s the only metric to compare the entire industry against.

Cloud 130

Cloud Azure AWS Cost optimization & reporting 130

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2019

Alibaba is their AWS (or becoming it): The Cloud is better. Zoom is Growing at A Rate, And With Metrics, As We’ve Rarely Seen Before. Clippy was AI before AI: China is a whole different world for SaaS. It is even cheaper. That doesn’t mean it is cheap, tough. Shopify and MailChimp Go To War. This is a Big Deal.

Cloud 146

Cloud AWS AI Acquisition 146