The Ledger
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SaaS multiples still value growth at three times more than profit
“In today's environment, the actual multiple is five to six times, and that's provided that you have growth. So even though we're moving away from a growth at any cost world to a world where efficiency is prized, the reality is that growth is still worth three …”
Sam Jacobs: Valuation Premium of Growth over Free Cash Flow Fell to 3-to-1
“It used to be growth at any cost, which means that growth really was worth almost, not infinitely more, but probably maybe 15 to 20 times what Free cash flow was worth today. We're in a world where growth is still more valuable than free cash flow, but only th…”
Some public SaaS companies spend $5 to $6 per new ARR dollar
“There's certain public companies that are spending five and six dollars in sales and marketing investment to acquire one dollar of new ARR.”
Chili Piper doubled ACV and halved CAC over the past year
“Chili Piper's doubled their ACV cut their customer acquisition costs in half, and also dramatically increased revenue per employee, up to 200,000 dollars per employee, all over the course of the last year.”
Sam Jacobs: Elephant offered $25M investment in Pavilion at ~$105M valuation
“Roughly eighty million dollars. We're going to put in this amount of money post money valuation. We think it's going to be, we're going to put in twenty five million work. It's going to be worth roughly a hundred and five million dollars.”
Pavilion swung from 30% margins in 2021 to multi-year capital burn
“We had, I think, 30% operating margins. Now remember, a community business in twenty-twenty-one and twenty-twenty, not the same thing because we had no hard physical costs, right? We weren't doing this. Everything was on Zoom. Very high margin on Zoom. Low mar…”
Sam Jacobs: Early Salesforce retention was driven by emailed dashboards, not data migration
“And that the thing that led to retention most closely and the clearest time to value within Salesforce wasn't getting the data in. It was building a dashboard that, you know, those beautiful visualized dashboards that I first saw them through Salesforce. Sugar…”
Pavilion self-signup members churn at 3x the rate of assisted onboarding
“We have a self signup flow. Those people turn at three times the rate that people that have an interaction with a customer success manager or an enrollment manager, right?”
Public SaaS growth rates have halved since summer 2021
“So since the, ah, since the summer of twenty-twenty run, growth rate of public SaaS businesses have been cut in half.”
Pavilion maintained 30% operating margins and grew 3x during COVID
“We were a business that during COVID had 30% operating margins and was growing three X from 2019 to 20 20.”
Salesforce found that building dashboards drove retention, not just loading data
“So at first, Salesforce had this idea, right, that all you needed to do was load your data into Salesforce, and that would drive retention because they had all of your data. They did a bunch of analyses, and they realized that that's not what drove retention. …”
ZoomInfo pioneered a promotion and relegation model for distributing inbound leads
“And there's companies like Zoom Info that pioneered almost like a Champions League idea of relegation and promotion, where to get the best leads, you need to perform at a certain level, and if you perform under that level, then you go down to the tier B, you g…”
Pavilion reduced headcount from 62 to 27 employees
“For Pavilion, that means that we entered twenty-twenty-three with 62 full-time employees. Today, we have 27 full-time employees.”
Pavilion spent $2.5M annually building an internal member hub
“We were building our own member hub internally. It would taking two years and it was about two and a half million dollars a year to spend on the product engineering team.”
Pavilion achieved cash-flow positive Q1 with 4:1 LTV-to-CAC
“We've generated, we're cash flow positive in January, February, and March. Our unit economics are back to healthy margins. We're four to one LTV to CAC on, ah, both our corporate membership side and our individual membership side.”