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The Complete Guide to SaaS Pricing Strategy

Tom Tunguz

Price low to minimize adoption friction, grow quickly, and then move up-market after developing broad adoption. Skimming is less common in the software world because few startups develop a product at launch that will be accepted by the most sophisticated customers (and those willing to pay prices that generate the greatest margin).

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The New Rules of AI Startup Growth: 5 Key Lessons from Cohere, Together AI & Salesforce Ventures

SaaStr

Successful companies are running three motions simultaneously: Bottom-up developer adoption Top-down enterprise engagement Strategic partnerships And they’re doing it from Day 1, not sequentially like in traditional SaaS. Focus on Production Use Cases The key metric isn’t initial adoption – it’s production deployment.

AI 268
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4 Unexpected Learnings from Databricks’ Sales Growth Machine From Its VP of Sales

SaaStr

4 Unexpected Learnings from Databricks’ Sales Growth Machine Calendar scraping reveals top performers spend disproportionate time on new prospects – Databricks uses calendar data to track how their best AEs allocate time, discovering that overachievers focus on prospect development over existing accounts.

Scale 195
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GitLab S-1 Analysis: How 7 Key Metrics Stack Up

Tom Tunguz

implies a 17 month payback period with a contract size of $55k, but the S-1 suggests the enterprise part of the business has been an important focal point. The significant delta in the figures suggest customers pre-pay their contracts often. Revenue, $M. Revenue Growth. -. Gross Margin. Sales Efficiency. -. Net Income Margin.

Metrics 304
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The Enterprise Journey: 8 Keys to Going Upmarket Successfully with Workiva’s CEO Julie Iskow

SaaStr

Look for an innovative enterprise customer who: Is willing to be a development partner Has clear needs you can solve today Will give you access to testing environments Can help shape your roadmap The goal isn’t to build custom features – it’s to deeply understand enterprise requirements and bake them into your core product.

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How Windsurf / Codeium Built a Billion-Dollar AI Company and a Winning Sales Machine

SaaStr

Their product is generating an impressive 45% of developers’ code on average. Beyond their code assistant, they’ve developed Windsurf AI, an agentic IDE allowing non-technical users to build applications – accelerating productivity even further. The 5 Key Elements of Codeium’s GTM Scaling Playbook 1.

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Transitioning from Sales-Led to Product-Led Growth and Scaling to $100M ARR With Apollo’s CEO Tim Zheng

SaaStr

This inefficiency stemmed from the high costs associated with maintaining sales development representatives (SDRs), customer success managers (CSMs), and account executives. Apollo’s sales-led approach was proving unsustainable, spending one dollar to acquire just eighty cents of revenue.

Scale 159