Payback period on spend is defined as net new revenue divided by net operating loss. It’s a fully weighted calculation that includes the cost of COGS, G&A, and R&D. Traditional views of payback period compare new revenue to S&M spend only, and while that’s good for evaluating just the S&M organization, it doesn’t account for…
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How much has SaaS growth slowed? We looked at the YOY data of every SaaS company that has IPO’d since October 2017 (62 companies). The data is below and shows a material slowdown. YOY growth in Q2 2022 was 30% and as of Q1 2023 it sits at 19%. Revenue is still growing, but that’s…
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How is net dollar retention trending in SaaS? We looked at the net dollar retention of every SaaS company that has IPO’d since October 2017 (62 companies) over the past 6 quarters. 34 of them release net dollar retention data, which is below. Falling NDR. The current median of 115% is very…
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Are SaaS companies burning less cash? We looked at the operating income and margin of every SaaS company that has IPO’d since October 2017 (62 companies). The data is below and shows that operating margin and loss have improved. Below is the data. Margin has really improved. In Q2 2022, operating margin…
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Are SaaS companies spending less to add new revenue? We looked at the ‘cash efficiency’ of every SaaS company that has IPO’d since October 2017 (64 companies). The definition of cash efficiency is net new revenue/operating loss, so the higher the figure, the more revenue is being added for each dollar of loss. The reciprocal…
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We keep close track of every SaaS IPO in the past five years (since MongoDB in October 2017). Those 62 companies have all now issued their Q2 2023 earnings reports (Except Zscaler, but we’re not waiting on them). Below we summarize key financials and metrics. Median quarterly revenue of $144mm. Median and average revenue…
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Alongside multiples of publicly traded SaaS companies, public SaaS acquisitions are some of the most relevant you can look at for deriving SaaS revenue multiples. These transactions are all cash, the financials are public and audited, and these are all control transactions so the data is about as pure as it gets. Below is the…
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We met with a SaaS business that in our view is operating using best practices. Below some of my notes which you may find helpful for your own SaaS business. Customer Success. At this company, customer success reps are specialized by industry so that they can speak the customer’s language and develop some real domain…
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What is an appropriate level of development or R&D expense for a successful SaaS business? We looked at 141 SaaS IPOs at the time of IPO (since Dropbox in March 2018 ) to get a sense for how successful SaaS businesses allocate to R&D. The raw data and observations are below: R&D spend is…
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Strategic investors, defined as corporations that make venture investments, can be a valuable source of capital but are they critical? No. We dug through the filings of 202 tech companies and found that only 32 of them had a strategic investor (16%). The list is below. Some industries have more prevalence of strategic investment than…
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