SaaStr

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

Meet Wyatt Jenkins: From Construction Sites to Chief Product Officer If you want to understand how vertical SaaS companies scale to $1B+ in revenue while staying true to their customers, there’s no better person to learn from than Wyatt Jenkins, Chief Product Officer at Procore Technologies.

Construction 251

Construction Scale SaaS Travel 251

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2021

Some thoughts on things you don’t really get until about $8m-$10m ARR or so: Churn Lurks. Churn doesn’t happen overnight, especially with annual contracts. 10m ARR + Net Negative Churn + 80% Growth + Great CEO = Unstoppable. The post 6 Things in SaaS That Are Only Obvious At Scale appeared first on SaaStr.

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Scaling SaaS Churn Metrics 293

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2025

Workato’s SVP of Embedded Sales and Director of Solutions Marketing joined us at SaaStr Annual to talk about how to nurture customers — a great topic in general, but especially for embedded sales and APIs that can take a while to scale. Don’t wait until you’re forced to fix churn. Customer Success. Way earlier.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Churn 246

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2024

The burn and the churn. The burn was at a stunning $2m a month, and the churn had spiked. It’s sort of a death spiral: High churn, but no burn = struggle, but the engine self-perpetuates to an extent. What’s really hard to solve is The 3H’s: High Growth for a while — but High Churn. Blitz scaling.

Churn 302

Churn Startup SaaS Payments Venture Capital 302

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2024

From startup to $500M CARR, Spencer Burke, SVP of Growth at Braze, shares how Braze scaled a growth and customer success team. In this AI moment we’re in, there are still many moments in scaling a company where intuition still matters. You don’t have to leave as the organization scales. This isn’t new.

Scale 291

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Startup 291

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

Third, contracts mitigate churn rates because the customer is only making a renewal decision once per year, instead of 12x per year. Similarly, Salesforce began with a usage-based approach before shifting to annual seat contracts when churn rates became significant and revenue predictability faltered. Segment is a good example of this.

SaaS Payments 273

SaaS Payments Pricing Strategy Scale 273

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2021

Everyone talks about hitting 120%+ NRR these days But the truth is, single-seat users & very small businesses churn at a high rate. That sort of churn hurts. Even modestly decreasing churn in Very Small Business and single seat accounts can have a big impact. And it scales the most when you have lots of tiny ones.

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Churn Payment Methods Payments Payment Solutions 306

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2021

Well, it does make sense, when you understand the scenario, a combination of two things: First, this SaaS company has a mix of freemium customers and sales-driven customers (with higher ACV, lower churn). But at least, once you’re at Initial Scale, make sure you maintain 50% of your ARR on the balance sheet. Balance Sheet Rule.”

Scale 343

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Construction 343

SaaStr

JULY 11, 2024

There’s only a small chance that it’ll be an IPO exit, and Stacey Bishop with Scale Ventures shares what it takes to get to that next level of funding. To get VC to put money into your company, Scale Ventures looked at and calculated the minimum level of growth based on what typical venture investors require. You want to see about.7

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Scale Scaling Churn Investment 300

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What are The Most Common Mistakes Founders Make When They Are Just Starting to Scale Revenue? As you scale, your win rate — the % of deals you close vs. the competition — should go down. More on that here: Beware of the Confidence of High Win Rates Not being 100% laser focused on NPS and CSAT (and driving down churn).

Scaling 301

Scaling Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Market Segmentation 301

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 28, 2024

It’s just hard to get most vertical SaaS start-ups to scale if they can’t get to a $10k ACV. Churn is all over the place with SMBs. If I see evidence of that, I get very bullish — even if the market doesn’t seem huge. To me, $10k is the firewall. Then market size starts to be super important. So be honest.

Payment Solutions 261

Payment Solutions Inbound Sales Team Marketing Scale 261

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

When I was running it, it was a lot smaller than that, but scaled that up very, very quickly. And that’s substantial scale in. Blake Hutchison (20:38) And of course, these businesses don’t have the scale or opportunity that a VC asset would typically have for growth. That’s now a billion dollar company.

Scale 112

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 112

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What’s The Number One Challenge for Scale-Up Stage Founders? You will need a VP of Product to scale your roadmap. You can smother customers with love alone in the early days, but as you scale, you need a seasoned customer success team and VP that has done this before. She can be your CTO forever. As are you.

Scale 274

Scale Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Fractional VPE 274

SaaStr

JUNE 22, 2021

This is a positive trajectory, but it presents a challenge for your customer success efforts: How can you scale your support and CS while still delivering a memorable, quality customer experience? According to the Totango report, 77% of respondents said that scale was their top challenge. Key Takeaways For Scaling Growth.

Scale 278

Scale Customer Success Scaling Compensation 278

SaaStr

AUGUST 5, 2024

3: A Forecast You want a data-driven forecast and to see your book of business for the whole year, not just the quarter, in terms of retention or churn and upsell, so net revenue retention. The post Three Revenue Growth Strategies to Scale Up Customer Success with Hook appeared first on SaaStr.

Scale 284

Scale Customer Success Scaling Revenue 284

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2024

How do you diagnose and solve churn? She was hired because they saw a bit of softening in new business growth, and she came to help diagnose what was going on and help scale the business. While it may seem smart when you have five or fewer salespeople to sell anything and everything between $3k and $100k, that won’t scale.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Revenue 273

SaaStr

JUNE 13, 2022

And I’m going to suggest two that will worry you a lot as you scale — Churn and Sales Cycle — you should track, but not obsess over, until you are well, well past initial traction, that first $1m-$2m ARR. >> Let’s Start with Churn. Absolutely, getting your churn trending downward is important.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Scale Churn Metrics 274

SaaStr

JANUARY 5, 2022

Companies that spend $500k with us in their first contract may or may not churn down the road, but companies that slowly increase their spend year over year are much more likely to stay with you in the long run, ultimately bringing you more revenue. We put a lot of focus on driving larger deals and big accounts.

Scale 301

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Software Review 301

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2023

While Zoom Enterprise is growing at a healthy clip, churn is over 3% a month for its SMB customers As a result, it’s now predicting 1% growth next year 1% pic.twitter.com/i2k2W9QbVX — Jason Be Kind Lemkin  (@jasonlk) February 27, 2023 So Zoom has just been the craziest story of all time in SaaS. It probably couldn’t last.

SMB 273

SMB Churn Enterprise Engineering 273

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2022

But maybe not while you are scaling, you can often afford to invest more if you have funding. if Churn > 2% = Bad, Just Terrible. What most matters is that churn is going down , rather than the core absolute value, IMHO. This is pretty much where most of us end up at, at scale. Well — Maybe.

Scale 261

Scale Customer Success Sales Hiring Scaling 261

SaaStr

MARCH 9, 2025

Personalization at Scale is the Real AI Win Here’s what’s actually working with AI at Calendly: Automatically surfacing relevant features based on usage patterns Personalizing the experience across all touchpoints (product, support, marketing) Using AI to rapidly understand customer segments and needs 5.

AI 202

AI Scale Education User Experience 202

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 27, 2024

Retention isn’t prioritized, and churn increases. The post The Revenue Playbook: Rippling’s Top 3 Growth Tactics at Scale with Rippling CRO Matt Plank and Former CRO at Brex Sam Blond appeared first on SaaStr. As CSMs, they only owned retention. As Account Managers, they only owned revenue.

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Scale Sales Hiring Revenue Scaling 320

SaaStr

OCTOBER 17, 2023

is a number to back into, at scale. It’s a reminder CSM staffing overall is actually fairly thin at scale. And some great related data from Churn Zero here : Where Customer Success Reports To Typically, Who Really Owns Renewals, And More from ChurnZero The post At Scale, Customer Success On Average is Paid 5.3%

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Customer Success Scaling Management Churn 201

SaaStr

JULY 29, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about how to scale faster. And I’ve watched them fairly quickly scale, to soon they’ll be at 10 million in revenue. As they scaled, they radically changed how they did sales. Jason Lemkin: Okay. Let’s get it going. Times are good.

Scale 273

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Enterprise 273

SaaStr

JULY 15, 2022

Jason recently opened up an AMA on Twitter Spaces to answer questions about scaling from $1M to $10M. We did a good AMA on this scaling at SaaStr Europa in Barcelona, a couple weeks back. That will scale, and then take those emails after four great pieces of content and do a weekly webinar and do a weekly get-together for them.

Scale 293

Scale Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring VP of Engineering 293

SaaStr

APRIL 10, 2024

Up 2% Year over Year — But Paying Customers Shrank This Quarter DropBox has a big business push, but in many ways at this scale, it’s as much a consumer company as a business software company. Seat Contraction and Churn Remains Elevated DropBox is still seeing elevated levels of customers reducing seat count and elevated churn. #4.

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Scale Churn Scaling Pricing 300

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2023

If churn doesn’t grow, your lifetime customer value is at its peak. They learned there was no point going after them because they churned too quickly. The post How To Scale Your Go-to-Market Strategy at Every Stage with Cipio Partners Managing Partner Rolan Dennert (Video) appeared first on SaaStr. One thing is for certain.

Scale 246

Scale Scaling Strategy Outbound Sales Team 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 24, 2023

They initially double their ARR each year in scaling post $10M. Although churn and down-sell rates are relatively consistent during growth, this ability to capture new logos consistently can help to avoid client concentration in a volatile market. How do the best-in-class companies perform when ARR is treated as a growth metric?

Scale 246

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Venture Capital 246

SaaStr

JANUARY 15, 2025

“We’ve debated this out as we go to scale,” Marchelle explains. Churn is naturally higher, so you have to trim off a few days of the sales cycle to allow AEs to more easily hit quota. .'” And these were big SaaS companies, tools Mangomint itself was using. Mangomint takes a different approach.

Scale 274

Scale Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales 274

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2021

But perhaps not that uncommon for higher-churn SMB categories. Most higher-churn SaaS companies seem to obscure, or at least, not highlight any NRR below 100%. Wix doesn’t disclose its churn, but it’s likely similar. #4. So seasonality is real here at scale. 70% annual, 30% monthly subscriptions.

Payment Methods 337

Payment Methods Merchant Services Payments Payment Services 337

SaaStr

MAY 20, 2024

Almost every founder regrets using capital to keep a high-burn rate engine going that isn’t scaling rapidly. #2. Not Jumping on High Churn Some types of churn certainly can be addressed over time. But if your churn and retention numbers aren’t at least mid-pack for your category, don’t let it lurk.

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Trends Scale Sales Hiring Venture Capital 313

SaaStr

MAY 1, 2024

SMB Churn coming down, but still at SMB-Like Levels Zoom for years defied what we knew about SMB churn. But in the end, today, at scale, their small customers churn is at the same high rates as other “grab and go” SMB products. Still, they’ve brought churn down from 3.6% What a crazy story.

SMB 299

SMB Scale Banking Enterprise 299

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 6, 2021

Contract As don’t require burning equity dollars to hire more AEs; the company reinvests customer revenue dollars to scale. Let’s take this idea time scale further out: multi-year deals. Especially if logo churn is low, account expansion is strong, and the sales cycles are brief. That’s a useful tool.

Sales Hiring 352

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Payment Solutions 352

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2020

But New Relic has continued to scale, crossing $650,000,000 in ARR (or so) and a $4B market cap. New Relic’s net negative churn / net dollar retention has dropped to 98% in the last quarter, despite a record 77% of revenue being from the enterprise. Do whatever you can to drive up NRR / net negative churn.

Scale 341

Scale Outsourced Development SMB Cloud 341

SaaStr

APRIL 1, 2023

What It Takes To Win With small businesses, you will have more churn and business volatility than with an enterprise. The key takeaways for SMBTech companies to scale in today’s economy are: Now is a great time to build for SMBs. Know Your Customer and be choosy as you scale. SMBTech is primed for growth.

Scale 245

Scale SMB Merchant Services Payment Methods 245