The Latest from SaaStr: 5 Interesting Learnings from Adobe at $18 Billion in ARR

So we focus more on the newer up-and-coming public SaaS companies in this 5 Interesting Learning series, from Datadog to Zoom to Snowflake to Monday and Shopify.

But Adobe’s a good one to examine right now.

Why?

They aren’t seeing any decline in their business at the end of 2022.

None.

At almost $18B in ARR, it’s still growing an impressive 15% year-over-year on an FX-adjusted basis. And my old division of Adobe, Document Cloud, is growing 21% at $2.4 Billion in ARR!

So it’s early … SaaStr 2023 events really have just gone on sale.  And attendance and buying patterns have clearly changed since the pandemic.  More people attend events at the last minute now.

But still, it’s one set of tea leaves to read.  And so far for Q4’22:

• Early SaaStr IRL event attendance is up 226% year-over-year.  And that’s after a record Annual 2022 and Europa 2022.  Ultimately, this number will come down from 226% (that’s too high to sustain over the year), but no matter what, we’ll end up way ahead in 2023 over 2022 attendance for both Annual and Europa, and are on track for 800-1000 at our first ever SaaStrAPAC in Singapore in February.
• Sponsors and partners are up 142% year-over-year.  Although certainly many are scrutinizing marketing budgets much more than a year ago.

Airtable CEO Howie Liu shares Airtable’s journey into enterprise, what he’s learned from scaling the company, and his best advice for other SaaS companies looking to make a similar move.

The part I didn’t originally get as a first-time SaaS founder was how relatively easy it is to grow existing accounts and account size if your customers are happy.

We segmented customer retention by Small, Medium, and Large accounts after about 24 months and saw a pattern that we now know is very common: ~85% revenue retention from our Very Small Businesses, about 105% from Mid-Market; and about 120% from Larger Customers.

And the key is — that 120% revenue growth annually from Larger Customers as a cohort (and even the 105% from Mid-Market) compounds.compounds.

3, 4, 5 years out to something really large. In 3–5 years, you can double the revenue from your existing customer base, or at least a segment of it.

With three live events, two digital events, and our two special series, Workshop Wednesdays and CRO Confidential, we have 200+ videos just from 2022 for you!

Our top videos alone cover a wide range of topics important to SaaS Founders and CEOs: scaling, fundraising, building and retaining a high-performing team, PLG, and more.

Today, we’re giving you #25-#13 of our top videos of 2022!

Everyone is being asked to make do with less, one way or another.  Layoffs are back, and hiring freezes are even more back.  And even if growth is strong, folks are getting more conservative.  They want less spend for more output.

And what often gets cut first, and what investors especially push on, is to cut back marketing.

Unless it can get us more deals right now, this month.

And indeed, that’s what we’re seeing at SaaStr.

Amy Borsetti, GM of Americas at Asana, and Jessica Gilmartin, Head of Revenue Marketing at Asana, share lessons learned from the company’s shift to product-led sales (PLS) — discussing strategies on how to drive cross-functional alignment, break down silos between sales and self-serve and unleash the power of sales and marketing through product-driven insights. 

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.

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.

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