ForgeRock is a software company that went public in 2021. Below are some of the highlights from their prospectus. The key learnings we took away: this is a software company that transitioned to SaaS from perpetual license, pricing is not per-user, 3:1 ARR:loss ratio which is good in our view, sales are global, and upsells…
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We had a company die on us last month. The company and those involved will remain nameless in order to protect the innocent (and the guilty), but I do want to share our learnings. Mistakes made are outlined below. Cash inefficiency. When we invested, the company had about $60k of MRR but was burning $170k…
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We looked at how long it took 224 publicly traded tech companies to exit. Specifically, we took the difference between the founding year and the last year financials were released as a private company. The data is below and organized between SaaS companies (153) and Consumer Focused (71). B2B SaaS takes a long time. On…
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In 2017, we had a death in the portfolio. Once all the employees left, the only remaining assets were some patents, servers, domains, and a lot of code. Eventually we managed to sell that intellectual property (“IP”). Here is what we learned. Set expectations. The value of IP is a small fraction of what the…
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We had the opportunity to speak with Bob Marsh about B2B SaaS sales. He’s spent his career in SaaS sales and is currently the CRO of Bluewater Technologies. Bob also does a lot of speaking; he’s spoken 15 times at Dreamforce as well as at SaaStr and Hubspot’s conferences. Visit his site at meetbobmarsh.com to…
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We’re review quarterly filings of successful SaaS businesses to understand what makes them successful. Below are observations from Gitlab’s Q3 report and earnings call which took place Monday (NASDAQ: GTLB). Much of it is verbatim. What they do. GitLab is The One DevOps Platform, a single application that brings together development, security, operations, IT, and…
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Bridge Group is a sales consulting organization focusing on B2B SaaS exclusively. We hold them in very high regard and consider Bridge to be the source for all things enterprise sales. They do strategic assessments, write playbooks, and can also do management training and coaching. We did a Q&A with Kyle Smith at Bridge (ksmith@bridgegroupinc.com)…
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While the value of any SaaS business is derived from recurring revenue (ARR), do not forsake non-recurring revenue streams. If you do, you’re ignoring free financing and a way to make the product stickier. Below is non-recurring data at the time of IPO for the last 73 SaaS companies. 27 out of the 73 broke…
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What does a successful SaaS business look like? Weave is an example (NYSE: WEAV). We dug through WEAV’s latest quarterly filing and below are some of the structural and business practices that make them valuable. What they do. Founded in 2011, Weave is a leading all-in-one customer communications and engagement software platform for small and…
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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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