The Latest from SaaStr: SaaS Spend In the Enterprise Will Grow to $195 Billion in 2023

THE LATEST FROM SAASTR

By Jason Lemkin  · Saturday, November 5, 2022

Gartner has its latest report out, talking to hundreds of CIOs, and it breaks down projected SaaS spending in the enterprise in 2023.

The summary:

Gartner predicts SaaS spend in the enterprise will rise to $195 Billion in 2023, up 17% from $167 Billion in 2022.

MARKETING

By Jason Lemkin  · Monday, November 7, 2022 | Early, Marketing

So when a startup finally is able to raise a few million dollars, they’re ready to do some marketing.  

But sometimes, even oftentimes, they want to start with an “agency or two” instead of hiring a real VP of Marketing.

These agencies are everywhere.

Look, some of what an agency can do is nice, and some of it is worthless, but none of it is what you really need in the early days.

You need leads.  You need sign-ups.  You need customers.

FUNDRAISING

By Amelia Ibarra  · Monday, November 7, 2022 | Fundraising, Videos

Raising capital is tough, especially these days.

Regardless of your current situation, what can you, as a founder, do differently when securing funding?

David Karandish, CEO and Founder of Capacity, shares what it was like to raise funds for his startup and describes how he secured $62 million without giving away chunks of the business.

PRODUCT

By Jason Lemkin  · Sunday, November 6, 2022 | Customer Success, Product

A while back I was having a discussion, not quite a debate, but a discourse with an extremely smart VC — far smarter than me — who was relatively new to SaaS, having spent more time in B2C.

Like a lot of folks tip-toeing from B2C to SaaS, his first stop was in freemium.  He was obsessed with apps that you can “grab and go” with — use in just seconds.  Like Canva, Zoom, or Slack.

The thing is, I told him, I hear you, I get it.  For a simple, cheap tool, that totally makes sense.  If I’m paying $0 or $5 a month, I better be able to start using your SaaS app in about 60 seconds, ideally.  10 minutes max.

But a true solution to an enterprise-grade problem, almost by definition, usually requires business process change. Which can and indeed usually should include onboarding, training, follow-up, and often, a full-time admin of your product on the customer side.

INVESTING

By Jason Lemkin  · Sunday, November 6, 2022 | Fundraising, Growth

So we’re at the time of the year where I experience the Worst Part of Investing, multiple times.

What’s that, you might ask?

Losing money?  No.  While not fun, it’s embedded into the business model of investing.  It happens.

A rough quarter or two at a key investment?  No.  While some never have a rough quarter, most do.  You expect a few.

Not being needed anymore?  No.  Some investments just outgrow you.  I can help a lot from $0.1m-$20m ARR.  Some founders still want help after that.  Others don’t.  Sometimes it hurts my feeling a tiny bit, but no big deal.  They grow up.

SAASTR EVENTS

SaaStr Europa is heading to London in 2023!

Early bird tickets sold out in a flash - but as a SaaStr Insider, 

we're giving you exclusive access to our team pack pricing when you buy two or more.

Save $100 now when you purchase your team back before 15th of November.

Q&A

By Jason Lemkin  · Saturday, November 5, 2022 | Q&A

Let me take a stab at signs a team will be underperforming. Outperforming is both seemingly obvious (strong team, strong market, proven ability to create products people want to use/buy) and also nebulous.

But here are 5 factors in my experience that clearly demonstrate future underperformance even in seemingly strong teams:

1) All “Start-up Folks”. This one may seem counterintuitive, but especially in SaaS/business applications, it’s not. You need start-up folks to do a start-up. But people that only want to do early stage stuff, that don’t really want to be around after that stage — don’t scale. They don’t even manage all that well in the early days. You need the 1-2 people at the top to be able to scale, at a bare minimum. To want to scale and enjoy it. A team that wants to quit as soon as everything gets past 20-50 employees … isn’t going to work out well.

Tip the payment scales in your favor by being one of the first to unlock exclusive early access to BlueSnap's 2023 Payment Predictions eBook.

Your sales and customer success teams are losing deals and customers due to backlogged integration requests.

But can you really justify spending months of development on each integration, when an embedded iPaaS can help offload 70% of the work?

There are a lot of factors to consider in this build vs. buy decision, and it's all outlined in this guide.

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