So Freshworks in another in our line of “hero companies” in SaaS. 

While Freshworks is very much a global SaaS leader, its history as perhaps the first with deep roots in India to IPO in the U.S. makes it one we all root for as a break-out global leader.

It’s now at $560m in ARR, growing 23% on a constant-currency basis, and while that growth has slowed from the go-go pace of the last 2 years, it still beat Wall Street’s estimates for both revenue and adjusted profit!

Freshworks is doing a lot of things right in a challenging time for many “traditional” B2B segments like CRM, Support, etc. — so a great one to learn from!

Your VCs aren’t the boss. They should work for you. You don’t need to do what they say, or have pre-pre-board meetings if you don’t want to.

But … many, if not most, founders I work with make life harder on themselves by not doing easy things to “manage up” a bit. 

Here are my best 10 ideas to keep your board and investors calmer, happier — and on your side.

It’s worth these relatively small investments of your time.  And if you do all 10 of these, you’ll look more professional than 90%+ of their other investments.  That can only help.

#1:  Respond to emails. You don’t need to take their suggestions. But do reply.  Many founders just don’t reply at all to emails from their largest investors.  Think of them as large customers.  You don’t have to do what they ask.  But you should reply to their questions and concerns, promptly if possible.  If you don’t, the customers start to worry that you don’t really want their business.  I’ve seen founder response time just really stretch out in tougher times, often to weeks.  VCs sort of write these ones off.  The best CEOs really do respond promptly.

#2: Send out monthly updates — and quickly. Few things instill confidence more than a crisp, metrics-filled monthly investor update that comes right after the month ends.  Don’t make this complicated.  Use a format that takes you no more than 30 minutes.  But you should know how much you booked by the end of the month, what your NPS is, and how much you burned at least the month prior.  Share those key metrics, plus some quick color.  And push it out quickly.  The “final final” update with exact numbers can come later.  Don’t use “we don’t have all the final numbers yet” as an excuse not to get a prompt, quick update out.  Perfect is the enemy of good here.

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

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Scaling a company comes with all kinds of hiccups and failures. Sometimes the best way to avoid hard-to-fix mistakes is by hearing how other people flubbed it while they were scaling. 

In last week’s Workshop Wednesday, held every Weds at 10 a.m. PST, Nick Mehta, the CEO of almost $200M ARR Gainsight, shares the top 10 mistakes founders can make when scaling their start-ups — mistakes he made himself over the last ten years of growing Gainsight. 

For a quick rundown, Gainsight is the leading platform for customer success. They are close to $200M ARR with 1200 employees. Their mission is to help companies drive better customer success and improve net retention for businesses through different products like scaling teams, driving better in-app adoption, and building customer communities. 

Nick shares ten lessons learned over the past decade. Growth doesn’t happen naturally, so you have to figure out what works for you. 

So there’s no doubt things are a bit harder for everyone in SaaS and Cloud right now. A few of us are seeing no macro impacts, but probably the biggest tell are Cloud platform giants — AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

All are still growing at very strong rates. But all are growing more slowly than a year ago, and even more so than 2 years ago.

But they are still growing.

The Cloud is still growing.

SaaS spend is still growing. It’s harder to access that spend, but it’s hardly shrinking.

How much? Well, Gartner has its latest report and predictions out. They see overall SaaS spend still growing a very healthy 18% in 2023 to almost $200 Billion Worldwide in 2023. And after interviewing 100s of CIOs and CXOs, it still sees SaaS growing another 18% in 2024 to $232 Billion a year.

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

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One thing if you are a first-time founder in SaaS that may seem as boring as you can imagine is … webinars.

You yourself as a founder or even sales exec never go to them.  And they seem like something you do, well, later.  When you are bigger.

But I’d challenge that thinking with one simple rule:  if even 2 qualified prospects and/or 2 existing customers come to a webinar, that’s great. 

Because think of webinars as scaleable ways to interact, as a human being, with groups.  Email is fine and all, eBooks have their place, but there is no human interaction there.  No Q&A.  And no chance to get to know the humans behind an application.  1-on-1 chats are also great, but not only can you only do so many, sometimes prospects don’t want a 1-on-1.  Sometimes they want a more passive experience, where they can consume a demo and a discussion without having to answer a bunch of qualifying questions up front.

I’ll take it a step further: Consider doing a webinar every week.  And just cancel it if no one shows up.  Even at little Team SaaStr, we do.

It's almost here:

SaaStr Europa 2023 is just about a month away. And we're bringing the largest SaaS event of the year to LONDON, 6-7 June. 

Last-minute attendance has been surging, so if you want to reach 4,000 SaaS CEOs, Revenue Leaders and Founders across 2 days, this is your chance. 

Our final call for sponsors is here as we have just 2 spots left! 

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