Dollar retention is the most important measure in SaaS. There are two ways to measure it: gross dollar retention and net dollar retention. Gross dollar retention looks at how much of the customer base you’ve kept year over year without including upgrades. Formulaicly, it’s ARR — downgrades — churn all divided by beginning ARR and as such it’s always…
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We had the chance to speak to Ben Weiss, founder and CEO of Zcruit. Zcruit was acquired by Reigning Champs in November 2017. Ben shared his story with us and lessons from his journey are below. What is Zcruit? Zcruit helps colleges sports teams access information on recruits. Ben started working for the Northwestern football…
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When a startup founder shepherds his company to a successful exit (IPO), what are the paydays like? We dove into the major tech IPO’s of 2018 and 2019 to find out. Note that paydays aren’t necessarily what the founders took home at the IPO (shares are usually subject to a 6 month lockup), rather they’re…
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We caught up with Sasha Poljak, the Executive Chairman of Ximble, about Ximble’s successful exit to Paycor. Ximble is a staff scheduling and time tracking platform used by SMB’s to organize their workforce. Learnings from Sasha’s story are below. Ximble was born from an observed problem. The founder’s sister in laws was a nurse. He…
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We recently had the chance to catch up with Chris Wood, one of the founders of Clario Medical Imaging, about his successful exit to Intelerad. Clario Medical Imaging is workflow management software for radiologists. Learnings from Chris’ story are below. At first, Clario was unsuccessful. Clario started in 2005. The company had the license…
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If you’re a startup on angelist, crunchbase, or have had publicity, chances are good that VC are emailing you about raising money. Here are some tips to maximize the benefit of these inquiries: Emails from decision makers are good. Knowing principals, managing directors, and original founders at venture funds is a good thing. These…
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We recently got Software Equity Group’s SaaS M&A report for 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 was a record. SaaS M&A saw 1,248 deals, up 27% compared to…
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Below are some of the things investors say to early stage companies that is just wrong. “Don’t take the first offer you get.” While true, this is a very misleading statement to make to a crowd of early stage founders. It’s wrong to make early stage founders believe they will get all kinds of…
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Building a relationship with VC and speaking to VC when you’re not fundraising isn’t a good use of your time. Here is why: You have better things to do. We love founders that are so busy building the business, they’d prefer to stay heads down and grind as opposed to talking to us outside…
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We’ve invested in 21 companies since our founding and we’ve seen some CEO’s use their time much better than others. In our view, below are the tasks a CEO should prioritize. Partnering. One of your priorities should be to build partnerships with bigger companies. The reasons: i) larger partners ultimately become strategic acquirers that…
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