The Latest from SaaStr: 5 Interesting Learnings from Asana at $600M ARR

So Amazon came out with its latest annual shareholder letter and it was even more cautious on AWS growth than I was expected.

AWS said they weren’t going to push folks to sign punitive contracts, or block downgrades, etc.  That if customers want to manage their spend more careful, they they should.

Net net?

AWS projected for now only $85 Billion in sales in 2023 … which sounds like a lot, but it’s only 6% over 2022’s $80 Billion in AWS sales. 

Lower than I predicted.

Wall Street is still projecting more, and saying Amazon is being too conservative, and predicting 16% growth.

But it’s still way way down. 

Growing, yes. 

But a lot of macro headwinds here.

There are a couple of exercises you just have to do when you go to hire your first VPs. 

Because the cost of a mis-hire is so high.  It’s not just the money, and the recruiting fee.  It’s all the lost time.  And the wrong hires that VP will make.  A bad VP will set you 6-15 months back. 

You can’t afford that.

The best exercise is to have them do a 60-day plan. 

At least, as a penultimate step before they start.  This helps make sure the new VP and you are on the same page on priorities and goals.

As part of that, usually, you’ll get a priority list.

Not always though.

This edition of the SaaStr Daily is sponsored in part by SAP

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So one of my favorite categories to track and analyze in SaaS is project management.  Why?  Diversity of vendors and customers.

There are so many leaders that have IPO’d (Asana, Monday, Atlassian, Smartsheet, etc) and so many that will (Notion, Clickup, Airtable, etc.).

And so many different strategies, from more enterprise to more SMB, from more tech focused (Asana) to less tech focused (Monday). 

You can just learn so much.

Asana is one of the leaders now, and they’ve cruised past $600m in ARR, growing a very healthy 34% — which will push them to one billion+ in ARR soon enough! 

Impressive, although as an overall barometer for tech and tech spending, it’s important to note that while growth is still very strong, it’s down substantially from a stunning 70% at $400m in ARR. 

Things are great at Asana, but still harder than it was at the peak of 2021 craziness as for most of us.  In 2021, everyone was just buying everything.

Many startups crash and burn when they hit the Series A crunch — that do-or-die time where many seem to lose their footing even if they’ve been successful up to that point. 

If you’re standing at the precipice of Series A, it takes more than having a great idea or being an awesome founder to make it. 

At SaaStr’s APAC 2023, Vertex Ventures General Partner Carmen Yuen, GGV Capital Managing Partner Jenny Lee, Square Peg Capital Partner Piruze Sabuncu, and moderator Arnaud Bonzom (Co-Founder and Managing Director of Black Mangroves) discuss the common pitfalls to look out for when you are raising your Series A.

So fundraising is a lot harder these days, especially Series A and later.  It sort of has to be.  The public markets for SaaS companies are down 70%+ from their peaks in 2021.  So fundraising sort of has to be, too.

So don’t make unforced errors in fundraising.

Here are 9 simple tips that are easy to implement — and almost 100% guaranteed to impact your odds of raising seed or Series A funding.

This edition of the SaaStr Daily is sponsored in part by Secureframe

Secureframe makes it easy to get SOC 2 compliant. With guided workflows and one-click integrations, the entire process is automated.

SaaStr events couldn’t happen without our partners, and we wanted to give a special shout-out to some of our newest sponsors for SaaStr Annual 2023. At the 9th ever SaaStr Annual, ~200 of the best and hottest companies on earth will go BIG as partners/sponsors. Join these incredible companies to experience all the value of SaaStr!

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