Tom Tunguz

JULY 24, 2024

AWS & others have stopped charging to move data. AWS cut prices more than 100 times in its first five years. AWS cut prices more than 100 times in its first five years. Plus, data movement is less expensive than in the previous era. New data formats like Iceberg simplify data movement.

AI 306

AI Artificial Intelligence AWS Innovation 306

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 17, 2023

The startup I invested in that were acquired by PE in the 2020-2021 Boom were acquired for 8x in one case, 12x in another, and 15x in a third. The prices would be lower today for the latter two I suspect. Well, certainly it exploded in 2021, in my portfolio at least, if perhaps not as dramatically as in the public markets.

AWS 321

AWS SaaS Pricing Acquisition 321

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 30, 2022

By building a strong business tech stack for your startup – covering everything from incorporation to growing long-lasting customer relationships – you can not only win back time and establish best practices, but create a solid foundation for your business to grow. Ready to take your startup to the next level? Questions to ask.

Scale 163

Scale Payment Services Startup AWS 163

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

AWS can’t support 20 partners equally. When partnering with big folks like Drata does with AWS, you have to bring business to them. Drata was one of three companies mentioned on stage by AWS’ Head of Partnerships because they did the most transactions on the marketplace than any other company. That’s a high value for AWS.

AWS 285

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 285

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 19, 2024

My hope is that this analysis can provide startup entrepreneurs with a framework for how to manage their businesses around SaaS metrics (e.g., It’s worth pointing out that Azure is a bit above the long term trendline, while AWS is still below (but accelerating up). net retention and CAC payback).

Cloud 318

Cloud GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Azure 318

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 4, 2014

Most startups play defense when discussing pricing with customers. They use pricing as an offensive tool to reinforce their product’s value and underscore the company’s core marketing message. For many founding teams, pricing is one of the most difficult and complex decisions for the business.

Pricing 124

Pricing Startup SaaS Payments Payment Methods 124

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

Clouded Judgement

OCTOBER 11, 2024

For software companies, this phenomenon can be a tailwind, as it drives accelerated deal closures and increased sales velocity, sometimes with less price sensitivity from buyers looking to quickly deplete their budgets. As a result, software vendors often see an uptick in revenue and bookings during these periods. Cloudflare is up 17%.

Cloud 167

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

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

TJ Nahigian, co-founder and Managing Partner of Base10 Partners, and Luci Fonseca, Partner, deep dive into the current GenAI landscape, incumbents vs. startups, and the six questions founders should ask themselves to drive value from GenAI. Startup platforms are OpenAI, Hugging Face, and Cohere. How are they doing this?

Generative AI 298

Generative AI Outsourcing Services AI Software Review 298

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

A problem many founders are trying to solve right now is going upmarket to Enterprise, and Lemkin and Grinich have a passionate perspective that every startup should take steps to check those Enterprise boxes in their first year. You can have all of this, the entire Enterprise pricing column, on day one of launch. And you should.

Enterprise readiness 289

Enterprise readiness Payment Solutions Enterprise Payments 289

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

So for the audience, cloud giants are turbocharging startup sales, and the predominant reason for this is because they’re fundamentally changing IT budgets at the customers that we’re all selling to. And it’s one of the three large cloud vendors that we all know: Microsoft, AWS, and Google. Jabari Norton. Crowdstrike.

Scale 262

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 262

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

I’m an investor in maybe 30 SaaS startups. Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? As soon as your competitor cuts prices and quintuples their marketing budget … and is everywhere … can you stay out of the arms race? Raise prices tomorrow. Some are barely burning any cash.

Scale 299

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 299

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

Henry’s found that with SMBs and startups, they’re typically consuming content on social media, primarily LinkedIn, while Enterprise customers aren’t consuming that messaging on social media. By examining a company, their intent data, the companies visiting their website, who’s on the pricing page, who the buyers are, etc.,

New CTO 316

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 316

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Check out this 2018 Europa session with Guillaume Princen, Head of France and Southern Europe @ Stripe, where he talks about the metrics you need to be focused on in your startup. We look at annual churn, given the nature of those businesses that have annual or multi annual contracts with much bigger price items and tickets.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2024

You need 50M active free users to build a paid business, no matter the price. 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. The 2% also doesn’t include advertising, which might be less relevant in B2B.

Subscription 306

Subscription Payment Features B2B Mobile 306

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. At VMware, they priced based on physical CPUs customers chose — a hugely transactional service that constrained growth. Of course, we all know how that turned out. But it also defines your GTM efforts.

Scale 262

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 262

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 25, 2013

This is as true for their books business as their infrastructure business, AWS. Many acquirers will pursue attractive larger, revenue generating startups with an aim to keep running the business as is (without changing the economics of the business).

Acquisition 100

Acquisition Pricing AWS Startup 100

User Pilot

SEPTEMBER 1, 2024

Looking for SaaS pricing examples to get inspiration for your own strategy? In this piece, we’ll explore different pricing models and go over some brands that implemented these in real life. Hopefully, by the end of the article, you’ll have ideas on how to design a pricing strategy that contributes to product growth.

Pricing 104

Pricing Strategy SaaS Scale 104

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

The reason is that in most categories online shopping has become ultra-transparent (something which I’m not completely innocent of ;-) ) and that there’s a group of highly price-sensitive customers which always goes for the lowest price. Starting a new company is always hard and most SaaS startups never get to $1-2 million in ARR.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 3, 2014

Startups benefit from a booming public market for three reasons. First, strong earnings buoy public technology share prices which drives M&A. Anecdotally, I haven’t seen much of a decline in early stage startup valuations after the February correction in the public markets.

Startup 100

Startup Trends AWS Marketing 100

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

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 has all resulted in the median stock price declining 5% YTD. Through these interactions, I’ve built up mental benchmarks for metrics on which I place extra emphasis.

Cloud 184

Cloud Software Azure AWS 184

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

JUNE 1, 2021

One is, lots of folks that have been through the startup cycle, you have this extrapolation from a single data point problem, which is, “OK, we have this story. Another piece of very, very good startup advice that I’ve given myself a hundred times is the “Do one thing exceptionally well.” This is what we did.

Part-Time VPE 296

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 296

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 17, 2014

The concept of negative churn is a bit amorphous so let’s illustrate the impact on a startup. This startup acquires 100 customers per month, each paying $1 per month to use the product. In the 5% monthly churn case, the startup exits 2014 with $919 in MRR (monthly recurring revenue) and the typical customer is worth $77.

Churn 124

Churn AWS Startup Revenue 124

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 11, 2014

Cloud computing prices are hurtling to zero. AWS has decreased prices for EC2, elastic compute cloud, and S3, simple storage service, 42 times in eight years. Meanwhile, gigabit internet has been deployed in about 8 cities in the US so far with another 12 to 15 slated for next year , typically at $70-$100 monthly price points.

Innovation 100

Innovation Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Scale 100

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

It has a portion of its revenue that’s very sensitive to the economy and a lot of startups in the customer base, good and bad, right? We’re seeing pockets of strength and then we’re seeing pockets of startups that overnight not only are struggling but might even want to immediately stop their spend, right?

Merchant Services 265

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 265

SaaStr

JUNE 26, 2024

Maybe endless price increases,” Jason says. You can see the growth on the platform side with Azure, Google, and AWS and how much it’s accelerating in AI. How does a startup benefit from this? If you squint, this is the top 10% of all VC-backed startups by top-tier seed funds. If we’re adding 20%, where is the money going?

CTO Hire 147

CTO Hire AI Venture Capital Sales Hiring 147

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 9, 2023

They did call out sequential growth in Confluent Cloud every quarter this year which was a big positive Still seeing elongated deal cycles and less expansion revenue The Bad AWS: Headwinds Getting Worse Their quarter ended in March, but on the earnings call they called out weakening growth in April.

Trends 130

Trends Cloud Azure AWS 130

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 31, 2023

The majority of COGS (revenue less COGS = gross profit) fall in hosting costs (ie AWS), and some customer support. The only way for software companies to avoid this gross margin compression when incorporating AI features is to raise prices. Double the price! Startups and younger companies don’t have this luxury.

Cloud 130

Cloud Sales Hiring AI Headcount 130

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 28, 2021

If you’ve seen our recent articles on AWS migration, the updated stripe integration and the acquisition of Flightpath Finance, it will come as no surprise to you that our team is getting pretty busy! Just look at the Baremetrics dashboard and the Open Startups project to see how we try to empower founders with financial transparency.

AWS 94

AWS Forecasting Onboarding Finance 94

Full Session

DECEMBER 30, 2024

We’ll break down their use cases, key features and pricing and explain how each alternative compares to VWO. Whether you’re a startup or an enterprise, by the end of this article, you’ll have enough information to select the best platform for your business. Pricing starts from $0.0000500/event.

Payment Methods 52

Payment Methods Payment Solutions Payments SaaS Payments 52

Chargify

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

pricing or the traditional “Good, Better, Best” plans—many businesses have found static subscription offers don’t always align with customers’ needs and limit growth potential. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a poster-child for the Relationship Economy—they truly understand the modern B2B customer.

Subscription 75

Subscription Payment Features AWS Scale 75

Andreessen Horowitz

SEPTEMBER 22, 2023

When you go public, your company’s performance suddenly has a real-time scoreboard: your stock price. It’s easy to think that high growth can make up for a low stock price, especially for founders at fast-growing late-stage startups that are still burning cash. They’re a disaster.”

Travel 113

Travel Forecasting Pricing Scale 113

Neil Patel

SEPTEMBER 22, 2020

. #3 – Brex Mastercard Corporate Review — The Best Business Credit Card For Startups. This card is branded as “the first corporate card for startups.”. In simple terms, the card aims to provide smaller companies and startups with rewards similar to cards designed for larger corporations. 1x points on all other purchases.

Payment Methods 145

Payment Methods Airlines Business Travel 145

OpenView Labs

MAY 20, 2019

That’s certainly true in developer tooling (AWS), sales and support (Salesforce), MarTech (Adobe), commerce (Square), HR tech (Workday) and even vertical markets (Veeva). This begs the question: how much room is left for emerging startups? The median growth rate of startups with $1-2.5M Now it’s table stakes.

Scale 70

Scale Startup Technical Review Software Review 70

User Pilot

MARCH 5, 2025

Pricing: Is the pricing model transparent, and does it offer a free trial or a freemium version? The 10 best customer engagement software solutions Here, you’ll find a quick overview, core features, and pricing information for each solution. Userpilots pricing. The three pricing tiers that Intercom offers.

Software Review 52

Software Review Engagement Software Scale 52

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 14, 2019

Buyers were forced to depend on salespeople to provide the details they needed to make their purchasing decisions – everything from pricing to product specs to customer evidence. Products like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the rise of engineering talent globally have reduced the barrier of entry for software startups in recent years.

Software Review 162

Software Review AWS Social Media Artificial Intelligence 162