SaaS companies

“If you look at the history of enterprise software and SaaS companies, you know, most companies rarely build a second product, you know, second product that's kind of as meaningful and as big and has as much potential as the first product.”

“You're much better off Growing a little slower if you're going to actually ensure that you have very high LTV.”

“Most companies, when they get to 1,000,002 1,000,003 million AR, they don't really have the machine yet. So what they, so they typically end up hitting a wall for a few months because they don't really know how, where the growth comes from.”

“This is an interesting study that was done by the folks from Price Intelligently. They talked to over 500 SaaS companies and looked at what a one percent improvement in acquisition, retention, and monetization did to the company's bottom line. And the results …”

“In today's world, most SaaS companies, at least the ones that I'm involved with, the investors on the board recommend using lines of credit as a safety net, but not to actually grow the business.”

“I think one of the things that will make for successful SaaS companies in the future, this is what we're working on, is this kind of connected ecosystem. Like, we should know not just which companies have bought from us, which people have bought from us and tr…”

“To a certain extent, I'd also stop doing multi-year deals, because if you're giving someone a price lock for a multi-year deal and they're not renewing, you gave something and got nothing.”

“We found that if you increase your leads or your conversion volume by about one percent, you can actually expect about a two to three percent boost in your revenue.”

“We did do a study where we essentially looked at the budgets of about 1300 SaaS companies, and we categorized every single expenditure, and we found out, which is really kind of fascinating, that when we categorize all of these expenses, about 57%, at least th…”

“When we looked at other pieces such as monetization, basically no budget, no time, no head count was going to pricing. And then ultimately retention was a little bit better about five to 10% of a budget.”

“If you improve your revenue per customer, your monetization, or your overall retention by about one percent, you're actually going to see about a four to eight X impact on your revenue.”

“The best subscription companies, specifically SAS companies out there, 20% or more of their revenue each month is, or new revenue each month is coming from their existing customer base through add ons expansion, some sort of add on.”

“Multi-product companies between 10 and a hundred million in annual revenue, they typically grow at a 30 to 50% higher growth rate than those folks who are single product.”

“It's key for the vast majority of not all, but the vast majority of SAS companies is you need a second product to drive up NRR.”

“Everyone, I would say five years ago, maybe half of SaaS companies did outbound. I would say today it's like about 80 to 90%, as near as I can tell.”

“If you're not growing at least two X year over year, it's pretty hard to get investors really excited. At least until, let's say, 20, twenty five million in, in ERR.”

“Pricing is a huge leverage. Lots of SaaS companies don't charge enough, so increasing pricing or experimenting with pricing is generally always a very good idea”

“As a general rule of thumb, for SaaS companies, around a million to twenty-five million in an ARR, which I'm assuming is probably the like, the range most people in the audience here are in one to five 1.5 to two is, is good. One to 1.5 or even lower is, is gr…”

“As it is the case, unfortunately, in most SaaS companies, where we see a big attrition with salespeople. Sometimes more than 50% a year.”

“A lot of SaaS companies are seeing 20% of their companies have freezes, but the top 20% are growing faster than ever. So instead of whining about the freezes, go hunt the 20% that aren't frozen.”

“We may be entering a period of very, very low to no new logo growth.”

“Actually, I think most folks wait too long to have an EMEA office. You at least want to do it by the time you have a couple million in revenue to service those customers, right?”

“The commercial models that you choose to build and offer to your customers Not only define the way that you will think about go-to-market, but similarly you need to marry your go-to-market efforts to specific commercial structures that, that you, as SaaS compa…”

“And the reason is, is that there actually is no playbook. There's not a lot of information out there on what is customer marketing? How do you work on that? How do you create the right KPIs? What should your team look like? If you look at marketing in general,…”

“When things do open, when, if multiples do reflate a little bit, we will see this spring of public SaaS companies like we've never seen, right? There's a whole new wave.”

“20% or so of SaaS companies are not impacted at all. They have no macro impacts for a lot of reasons.”

“I track this with SAS companies and it's a niche metric, but it's super interesting in terms of long-term health, which is the ratio of revenue growth to new customer growth on a percentage basis. So I like to see at least a sort of a two to one ratio. Like if…”

“As you scale, even though you do performance marketing, you do the Super Bowl, you do whatever you want, that increment is going to be insignificant compared to the subscription revenue you already have. So, let's say you want to grow 30%, 40%. How do you do i…”

“The first is thinking about the split between existing customer base and new customers, and what you see here is by the time companies are ready to IPO, over 50% of their revenue is generated by existing customers through either upsell or cross-sell.”

“Cross-sell obviously requires a more diverse product suite, and what you can see along the bottom here is, on average, companies at the IPO stage have three products.”

“Everyone raised prices, even though they didn't often, usually they didn't earn it. They jammed price increases down customers throats.”

“Maybe you're right in 20, 24. Maybe, maybe, maybe you are right, but you're going to lose that deal eight times out of 10 when you're Compare. It looks a lot like you goes in and gets everyone excited about efficiency for AI.”

“You basically got to have 700 people when you get to two hundred million in ARR. And that may sound, hey, what does that mean for me? I'm not at two hundred million in ARR today. Roll it back to where you are. You can bridge some of the gap with capital, but a…”

“You gotta play in categories where you lose most deals to win. This is a weird thing. You gotta play in categories where you lose most deals.”

“Not only do you have to drive up NRR and drive down churn and solve those 82 feature gaps and build that integration, but you got to add a layer if you really want to do it. And the best teams, the most agile teams, the ones that are killing it are doing this.”

“Before they used to have Challenging gross margins. And now they'll probably look the same as SaaS companies, which means you have pretty significant multiple and valuation expansion.”

“If you look at SaaS companies, the amount that they're spending on sales and marketing is a percentage of revenue. This was as high as over 50, 55% in 2019. The peak of spend, free money, investment, growth at all costs. That's down to 30% in 2024, just becaus…”

“I did this analysis a little while ago that of the SaaS companies that IPO, 90% of a founder CEO.”

“It takes at least a year before you even say you want to go IPO if you can to do it.”

“And only 20 SaaS companies per year can actually make it public. We don't think this number is going to go higher than this anytime soon.”

“We think that you need to be at least four hundred million of ARR. You have to be growing at least 30% a year. You're probably going to be worth three to five billion dollars and trade anywhere from that eight to 12 X range.”

“Irrespective of all market conditions, 80% of the time, SaaS companies are beat, are beating current quarter guidance and raising the subsequent quarter guidance.”

“People don't realize that the SMBs and mid-market of today are the enterprise of tomorrow. So they getting used to use another product, they're getting used to use another platform, and eventually they become the enterprise companies. And then those enterprise…”

“If you talk to VCs here that have been around for a while and you have a quiet conversation, ask them how many folks in your portfolio are north of a hundred million, and now are seeing growth in the 10 or 20% range. All of them. All of them. It didn't used to…”

“Besides wanting to work for cool AI companies, the good ones actually want to work for companies where they have more access to data.”

“You won't make self-harming decisions to win. You'll protect revenue. You don't want to piss off the board. You know, you don't want to piss off your sales leader. Like there's loads of reasons and loads of places where you won't say, do you know what? We're g…”

“Cuz there's really no excuse today and you're gonna be quickly disrupted and churned if you can't build something magical with your AI app today.”

“But then I still think there are going to be over the next 1015 years, just as Microsoft dominated the client server and PC age and was the operating system, but there were hundreds of client server apps companies that achieved successful and great outcomes in…”

“I haven't logged in in six months and you're raising my pricing. That's it. That's an F you, right? At least don't increase prices on your users that haven't logged in. That's my, that's what's triggering to raise price on a product you haven't used, right?”