The Ledger
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Moore: The TAM for Monolithic BI Platforms Like Domo Collapsed
“We just saw our TAM get completely crushed at RJ Metrics, because on one side, all this money is pouring in to companies that are doing exactly what we are doing, which is making it really, really hard to scale in an economically efficient way, but on the othe…”
Moore: APIs Drove Software Buyers From Suites to Interoperable Stacks
“The emergence of, ah, not just the cloud, but also the API economy, the extreme ease with which you can build interoperable products, was basically taking the world into this massive unbundling cycle, where you used to buy this one kind of monolithic solution …”
Moore: Slack and Zoom are ecosystem super nodes, not true platforms
“What we're seeing out in the market is that the big success stories, you look at companies like zoom companies like slack, you know, the latest IPO crop in SAS, I would argue that very few of them are like true platforms. What they really are is super nodes in…”
Moore: Strategic Decisions Cost RJMetrics a $3 Billion Market Opportunity
“How ultimately I think a series of decisions led to us missing out on what was probably a two to three billion dollar market opportunity.”
Moore: The SaaS Sector Is Exiting a 'SaaS-pocalypse' Downturn
“There is a bit of the tail end of a SaaS-pocalypse going on where it has just been significantly more difficult to sell, to generate leads, to convert, to function in a ROI-positive, cash-efficient way than it was 18 months ago, 24 months ago, etc.”
Moore: Domo and Josh James Had Blank-Check Access to VC
“Domo, in particular, on the right was just raising as much money as they wanted at any given time. Josh James, the founder of Omniture founded Domo, and kind of had a blank check from a lot of VC firms.”
Moore: BI Market Growth Lagged Behind the Influx of VC
“While the market was blooming, it wasn't blooming as fast as the dollars going into it were, right?”
Moore: Founders Underappreciate How Fast Markets Drift Away From Products
“Particularly in the markets that many of us operate in, and AI is a great paradigm to look at around this, the speed with which markets actually are moving as well is really, really underappreciated. So while you are pivoting your way to product market fit, do…”
Moore: RJMetrics Survived Until the Market Caught Up, Then Lost PMF
“What we really did was not die when we were too early, and be there when the market actually drifted into the window for what we had built, and just as quickly, while we were in a hiring frenzy, and while we were focusing so much on sustaining the demand that …”
Moore: The Recent SaaS Downturn Mirrored the RJMetrics GTM Breakdown
“So, we get in this world where it goes from, like, too good to be true to too hard to handle, and that reminded me of, you know, twenty-twenty-one to twenty-twenty-three for most of these companies, right? Forget about raising cash. A lot of these strategies t…”
Moore: Stitch Matched RJMetrics' 8-Year Customer Count in 20 Months
“And in 20 months, we got to as many paying customers as it took us eight years to get at RJ Metrics. With almost no salespeople. It was a PLG, ecosystem-led motion.”
Moore: Talend Acquired Stitch for $60M With Zero Outside Capital
“So just 20 months in Talend came along. We hadn't raised any outside capital, and they kind of made us an offer we couldn't refuse, and we sold Stitch for sixty million dollars.”
Moore: Over 80% of the Bessemer Cloud Index Uses Crossbeam
“I think we've got over 80% of the Bessemer Cloud Index that now uses it.”
Moore: Stack Interoperability Is the Primary Factor for SaaS Buyers
“Their buying decisions are actually governed by what tools Are interoperable with the things they already have in their stack, which is probably the prominent buying determiner at this point for most software products, particularly in SAS.”
Moore: Looker won the BI market hands down with $2.6B sale
“Looker just got bought for two, 2.6 billion. And the consensus was basically like we fucked up. Yeah. They won hands down with that number.”
Moore: Closed SaaS data silos are an antiquated architecture
“RJ was almost like where your data went to die. Like, we pulled data in from all these systems, and we analyzed it, but the outputs of our system didn't really go anywhere. You just kind of came to RJ and consumed what RJ created. In the modern SaaS economy, t…”
Moore: Partner ecosystems are a major new SaaS growth channel
“The maturity of the API economy and all the interoperability of all these SaaS platforms Has created basically a new channel, a new growth channel for SaaS businesses, which is selling through and building market through your partners and all the different com…”
Moore: Crossbeam is pacing to reach $1M ARR in 6 to 9 months
“If we hit our targets, it'll be six ish, nine ish months total will get us from zero to a million. And I think we're based on this quarter, we're pacing toward that.”
Moore: Acquirers demanded RJMetrics' full customer list before term sheets
“This literally happened to me when we were selling RJ to Magento because we had other potential buyers and all the buyers wanted to see our full customer list before they gave us a term sheet.”
Moore: AWS and Salesforce qualify as true platforms
“When I think of platforms, I think of like, you know, Amazon web services. I think Salesforce is a platform because their app store is a true, true there are companies that are entirely existent because the only thing they do is provide technology on top of Sa…”
Moore: Software hiring in non-tech hubs signals strong investment targets
“One of the tactics that always worked really well is actually looking at job sites. Like if you look in cities that are not traditional tech cities and just see who's hiring software engineers, it's usually a really good giveaway of who's, Doing well and well …”
Moore: Three Competing BI Companies Raised Over $100M Each
“You've got at least three companies here that raised at least a hundred million dollars to do precisely what we were doing.”
Moore: RJMetrics Laid Off GTM Staff After Outbound SDRs Collapsed
“We ended up needing to lay off a bunch of people in our go-to-market team Because we had an SDR team where the economics were just incredible, and it made perfect sense in 20 11 and 20 12. And in 2015, everything just went upside down and underwater. And we re…”
Moore: Selling Stitch for $60M Was a $2.6 Billion Mistake
“Oh, and by the way, my 2.6 billion dollar mistake, which was the headline here, very shortly thereafter, Looker gets acquired by Google for 2.6 billion dollars.”
Moore: Cloud warehouses broke RJMetrics' full-stack model by unbundling data storage
“Redshift and later Google BigQuery and companies like Snowflake innovated on this model, and basically, if you think about that data warehouse as being, like, in the middle of the stack of what RJ Metrics was, it broke our stack right in half, because No one w…”
Moore: Stitch matched RJMetrics' size in 28 months with no new capital
“Yeah, we didn't put any new net new capital into the business. When it got acquired, I think the team was in the thirties. And from a like magnitude standpoint, it was almost the same size that RJ metrics was when we sold it. So in 28 months, we drew stitch up…”
Moore: Insight Venture Partners targets mature companies with $50M+ checks
“These days, it's a fifty million dollar check, hundred million dollar check, you know, multi hundred million dollar leverage by us. This is not a venture capital firm that invests in startups. Or companies that have not made it to a very mature growth equity f…”
Moore: RJ Metrics has raised about $22M in total funding
“About twenty two million dollars we raised in total.”
Moore: RJMetrics has nearly 400 customers and 100 employees, doubling yearly
“We've got just under 400 customers and it's a software as a service sale. So our prices you know, they tend to be you know, on an annual basis, kind of in the tens of thousands of dollars range. And, you know, we've been growing pretty pretty consistently at t…”
Moore: RJMetrics operates at a 1 to 2 ARR-to-CAC ratio
“It would basically be between one and two is our ARR over CAC ratio, which is that kind of SAS magic number. So, you know, if our bounds of what we get out of a customer is 10 to a hundred grand a year, you know, the all in sales process broken out within thos…”
Moore: RJMetrics customer lifespan is 3-4 years; startup closures drive churn
“So we typically see customers stick around for multiple years. If you extrapolate out our churn rate, the predicted lifespan of a customer is somewhere in the three to four year range. And that is The biggest source of churn for us, honestly, is because we sel…”
Moore: RJMetrics hit $1M profitable revenue in four years with 8 employees
“Over the course of about four years, we went from zero dollars to one million dollars in revenue. It was a slow, long grind to get there, but we were operating with a million bucks in revenue with only eight employees or so and kicking off cash profitably.”
Moore: RJMetrics targets 20 weekly data connections for high-converting trials
“It's not like hundreds because there is an implementation process but we try to get about 20 companies having their data connected on a per week basis and those convert into trials at a pretty high percentage.”
Moore: RJMetrics Bootstrapped to Its First Several Million in ARR
“Let's attempt to bootstrap this thing, and that's precisely what we did for the first several years of the business. We were kind of the tortoise in the tortoise of the hare story, right? Like, we had some market pool, but we kind of were early to the market, …”
Moore: RJMetrics Launched on the Day Lehman Brothers Collapsed in 2008
“That was 2008 the day Lehman Brothers collapsed, we launched that company.”
Moore: Made nearly $100k selling poker software in college
“Yeah, it was almost a hundred grand. It was a pretty steady flow of, you know, I'd go to bed at night and I wake up in the morning and there'd be another half dozen or so of these things that had sold online.”
Moore: RJMetrics splits customer acquisition 50/50 between inbound and outbound
“It's about a fifty-fifty split between inbound and outbound.”