Average Contract Value is (“ACV”) is a vanity metric that should be looked at as part of a group of ratios that include number of qualified leads, close ratio, sales cycle, and other critical sales metrics. It shouldn’t be put on a pedestal. Here is why: The world’s biggest and best software companies tend to…
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Venture backed companies like Uber, WeWork, and Spotify, are unprofitable. Is this the norm or just a trend for the more recent vintage of high flying companies? To answer that question, we took a look at the operating income and free cash flow of 119 tech companies at the time they went public going as…
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We recently got Software Equity Group’s SaaS M&A Snapshot for Q3 2019. SEG is an investment bank focused SaaS companies and they put out fantastic data on what they’re seeing in the market. Key observations from their latest report are as follows: Deal volume is still high. There were 314 M&A transactions in SaaS in…
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What valuations are founders asking for when they raise their Series A? Since May 2018, we’ve had conversations with 517 companies about their Series A rounds. Below is aggregate data on these raises with names redacted to preserve confidentiality. Figures like revenue, valuation, and round size are medians from conversations with founders. Remember the valuations…
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SaaS multiples are higher than they’ve been since we’ve tracked the data (Q4 2014): of the 79 SaaS companies we follow, the average public SaaS business is trading at 11.6x revenue while the median is 8.8x. Interestingly, the gap between the average and median continues to be large (2.8x), meaning more attractive SaaS companies are…
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There are many ways to measure SaaS sales & marketing efficiency. One of the simplest is to look at revenue booked over a given time period divided by sales & marketing spend during the period (New Rev/S&M). While the sales & marketing expense in a period may not necessarily be attributable to a given period’s…
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Peloton’s prospectus (known as an S1) is fantastic in that the company shares a lot of data about the business. One trend however, really jumped out at us: while user engagement is increasing dramatically, churn is not declining. Below is a more detailed graphic which shows the trend. As you can see, old cohorts are…
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You probably won’t be a success from day 1. You’re going to struggle and may even come close to failure (more than once). The good news: there are plenty of examples of companies that had setbacks and bumps along the way, but were still a great success. Docusign is one such success story. Docusign went…
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One SaaS metric we monitor closely is net dollar retention. It compares ARR from a set of subscription customers against the same metric for those subscription customers from the prior year, so it reflects customer renewals, expansion, contraction and churn. Formulaically for customers with true annually contracted revenue, it’s beginning of period revenue + upgrades…
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One of the most important metrics for B2C companies is customer acquisition cost or “CAC”. In order to understand how CAC trends for successful tech companies, we took a look at publicly available data for B2C companies which disclosed CAC. While we found only 4 companies that mention the metric, the data was interesting, and…
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