SaaS

“And I think for SAS companies in particular, You might have done the job at one company, but you probably didn't do it at like, you know, 20 or 50 companies, and you're probably selling to like a lot of companies, so it's just way more critical for you to spen…”

“Recurring revenue businesses, you cannot think about, you know, marketing and growth and the business overall as ending an acquisition. Otherwise you're not in business anymore. And the vast, vast majority of these models Don't take post acquisition, retention…”

“If you're modeling a relatively simple SaaS business, those are the only core building blocks you need.”

“This is why like the effective commission of a marketplace, often, 1015, 20% is much higher than the effective commission of a SaaS business in the two to three percent range.”

“So broadly, I will say, I think it's easier for a marketplace to go SaaS than it is the other direction.”

“It doesn't exist today in SaaS. It does exist in other places. It just doesn't exist in SaaS really.”

“The ratio between your OTE and your quota is typically five to one. Your quota is usually five X. And this comes from this idea that your cost for a sales rep fully loaded should be about 20%.”

“When you take like let's say you have a monthly subscription in your SaaS business, and you also have an annual subscription, you need to showcase your annual subscription as a monthly price. Like if it's like, for instance, it is 29 99 if you actually take an…”

“If you just discounted price guess what's going to happen? Six months later, that's going to be your new price. So before you price discount, Think about what value can you exchange to actually justify that price discount. So you're taking value away in a de-f…”

“If you know that you have a bridge to move up market, then giving up the long tail of individual users can be very worthwhile.”

“A small fliver, less than 10%, around roughly five percent have just pure natural escalator, kind of usage-based model. The vast majority have a hybrid approach.”

“It's very rare that people convert you know, equally across all of those features are typically one or two that are the main carrots for conversion.”

“Over the past decade, if you're building in tech, particularly in like SaaS or subscriptions, you now have 16 times the number of competitors if you started a business today than if you did 10 years ago.”

“Churn tends to be about 20 to 25% lower because people will downgrade, but they're using, you don't get this, like I'm paying for so much and end up not doing, you know, not using a lot of it. It's like, oh, I'm using eight seats this month. I'm going to downg…”

“To make your year, it's really about the first six months and the things you accomplish in those first six months. And the reason is, is for quite a few products. Most products, this isn't true for all products, is that the buying cycle or the decision window …”

“For most SaaS products, your persona, your target customer, it's actually only in market for that once every fewish years or so. And as a result, what most people end up focusing on is just trying to capture that small sliver of those that are in market. And t…”

“The number one thing I would say is keep it simple. It's simple. It's so tempting to like with us, for example, like a lot of SaaS products, you know, have add-ons... With products, tiers, add ons, tiering in the add on. You know, people can't understand their…”

“The idea behind once is David and I kind of feel like, we're probably a bit early here, but we feel like there's going to be a bit of a turn back towards the way things were. Pendulums always swing.”

“Like if you have a sales led motion, half your company is going to be in sales at ten million error, half your company's gonna be in sales at 50, half your company's gonna be in sales at a hundred. It's one of the tough parts of the software model is that ther…”

“And that ties back to when you look like at a SAS company or something, and they're making decisions, having that validation, I think, and that credibility goes a really long way. Especially for a company that might be early stage, you know, they've raised a l…”

“I think that it might just be that SaaS is the place where we're seeing the most indecision these days, you know, but It does not suggest it's kind of an easy target, but it is rife with indecision these days.”

“I don't think SaaS in general should do SEO”

“If you have a hundred page website that sells a SaaS tool, technical SEO is probably going to be less important. So spending money In time and technical SEO would be a waste of time.”

“Collecting the right information, and you usually want to collect more information than most people think you do in your signup flow. If you can then leverage that to personalize the guidance, and this is for a SaaS product, the guidance that someone can get w…”

“If you don't build the network effect into what you are making, You are almost certainly going to fail.”

“The real thing, which is staring everybody in the face, is it's all about the business rules. Like, that is what drives the lock-in.”

“Now we're sort of at the tail end of SAS. There's so many verticalized SAS average company to use like almost a hundred tools. It's not. It's kind of madness, right? So there's more, the market shifting towards more of a bundling approach. And with AI, and wit…”

“There's a value creation aspect to using AI that doesn't kind of neatly fit the mold of SaaS-based pricing or seed-based pricing or even usage-based pricing”

“While I will definitely maintain that we're not anywhere close to anybody being able to like build a conventional SaaS app with zero programming knowledge, aside from just like a demo, there are going to be other forms of software. One of my things is like sof…”

“In the classic SaaS situation, we used to say if you can charge 10 to 20% of the value, that's actually great. But in AI, you can actually charge 25 to 50% because it is autonomous.”

“The savings and costs that there might be in replacing a vendor tool by something you build in-house is probably not worth it in the mental bandwidth that you've lost and the amount of the team's sort of technical focus that's being taken away.”

“Anything about three percent per month cancellation is, is, is terrible.”

“Cancellations automatically grow as you grow, even if you're doing everything right, but marketing doesn't. Marketing grows only as fast as you can improve marketing. We all know that's quite hard. Actually it's linear. It's hard to find new channels that aren…”

“So I think to some degree, the SaaSpocalypse is greatly exaggerated.”

“When I run the agent on that website, I'm using my tokens. I'm not using the vendors tokens. I'm not using the apps tokens. And so it puts SAS back in this place where, yeah, you want to make it friendly for an agent and everyone's got a CLI.”