The Ledger
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Olson: Startups must let systems break to know what to fix
“Sometimes things have to break and fall over to actually see what you need to fix.”
Olson: Pendo reached $100M ARR while growing over 50%
“Announced that we crossed a hundred million dollars in ARR. Last year, we're growing north of 50%, so you can get a sense of where we are.”
Olson: Pendo will probably reach nearly $200M ARR by year-end
“We'll probably end the year just under two hundred million ARR, so and we've gone from basically zero to that in under eight years”
Olson: I still monitor Zendesk and work support tickets at Pendo
“Folks, I still am in the Zendesk queue, and actually, even this morning, I was communicating with my VP of support. We're looking at doing a sprint to burn down our backlog, and I volunteered to go into the tickets and burn down the backlog with our support te…”
Olson: I personally read every Pendo NPS response every morning
“This morning when I woke up, I read every Every single MPS response we got this morning from the last time I looked, which is last night when I got off the plane and got to the hotel”
Olson: Personally interviewed nearly every candidate until Pendo reached 500 employees
“It is a fun fact that I interviewed nearly every person at the company up until 500 employees.”
Olson: Corporate layers sanitize frontline data shown to top executives
“The fact is you've got a lot of layers, and they all want to look good, and they all care about how they're perceived inside the organization, so if there's a presentation to someone high in an organization, you're gonna get three people's filter on what that …”
Olson: Pendo and Intercom don't compete; Intercom targets Zendesk
“I see them trying to disrupt the support tools like Zendesk and Freshdesk more so than attacking Pendo. So I think there's plenty of room in the market for Intercom and Pendo to coexist. So I don't actually see them as competitive at all.”
Olson: Pendo is typically the premium-priced product in its space
“But our prices are typically higher. So we typically are the premium product in our space. And it's because we actually have a broader platform.”
Olson: Pendo maintains a net retention rate above 150%
“We still carry a very high net retention rate. North of one 50, so .”
Olson: Pendo's CAC payback period exceeds 12 months
“More than 12. Yeah, I think it is. I mean, it, We should be under 12. But I think a little more than 12 is fine for the stage. Growing in our growth rates, I think it's fine.”
How Pendo positions its in-app messaging against Intercom
“I think intercoms focuses more around being a next generation communication platform. Think of our in-app messaging more like campaigns, like let's launch a campaign to do guided tour when you log in. So onboarding, new feature announcements, those sorts of th…”
Pendo achieves net negative churn with net retention over 130%
“We have net negative. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Our net numbers are in the one 40 range. So north of one 30.”
Olson: Pendo jumped from a $1.5k deal to $60k ARR
“It was a 60 K deal ARR when our largest deal previous was about 1500 dollars ARR.”
Olson: I personally phoned every customer who emailed in early days
“In the early days of the company, I picked up the phone every single time a customer emailed me. Every time.”
Olson: Battery invested in Pendo after an Austin CEO recommended it
“We heard about us because an investor, Battery, was here in Austin, and they were meeting with a local company, and the CEO, they asked the CEO Who, who's the interesting company that you use, and that Liz Pinto thing is like pretty good, and it's, they got gr…”
Olson: Pendo processes over 100 billion events per week
“We now get over a hundred billion a week, and this is when we had a hundred billion cumulatively. This is probably back in that 20 17 range. We have tens of trillions of events now.”
Olson: Moving upmarket to larger deals typically reduces customer churn
“When you move up market, you know, the larger the deal size, typically you see lower churn”
Olson: Pendo carries 98-99% CSAT with zero-negative weeks
“We carry a 98, 99% CSAT. We, you know, we've gone The last seven days, we haven't set a single negative response. So and on multiple seven day periods, we average that. So across weeks, I mean, not a single negative interaction.”
Olson: WalkMe is Pendo's most frequent competitor in deals
“Yeah, I think the company we see most frequently in deals is a company called WalkMe.”
Olson: Pendo has raised $56 million in total funding
“We've raised now forty-five million dollars. No, 56, actually, in total.”
Olson: Pendo has expanded to well over 400 customers
“Yeah, yeah, we're well over 400 customers. Our average revenue per customer has increased significantly since then as well. We've kind of moved up the market, selling larger deals to larger companies, but yeah, well over 400 customers now.”
Pendo's top 20 customers now each generate over $100,000 ARR
“So now if you look at our top 20 customers, It's all north of a 100,000 dollars in ARR and above, right? And that's complete change from a year ago this time where we probably had two or three.”
Pendo's minimum annual contract size has increased to $18,000
“Our minimum price point now is 18,000 dollars annual.”
Fast feature adoption directly drives conversion and customer lifetime value
“Every product has a key set of features that, you know, if people get to those fast, they're more likely to either convert to a paying customer and or stay a happy customer and ultimately renew and generate a ton of lifetime value.”
Pendo generated zero revenue during its first two years
“Zero year one, zero year two, and then we started making some the next.”
Pendo's average customer pays over $2,000 per month
“Average amount customers paying us per month is over 2000 dollars a month.”
Pendo expands primarily by adding products rather than seats
“So we typically land on a single product and we expand when they put us on another product.
So take a company like an Infor, you know, we may start with a couple of products, then the product management products will go to their peers and say, Hey, check this …”
Pendo maintains an annual revenue churn rate under five percent
“I mean, churn as a percentage is as a percentage of overall revenue is very, very small under five percent.”
Olson: Pendo's customer success has ~24 people, sales is double
“Well, support and success are part of the broader customer success organization, so that organization is probably two dozen people, and, you know, it's sales is about double that.”
Optimizely uses Pendo to analyze and guide trial onboarding
“I think a good example of someone who's using a company people have heard of is Optimizely. Optimizely uses us to one, understand people who are in their trial flow and onboarding flow to help get up and running, start creating experiments. Their team can get …”