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The biggest SaaS event of the year, SaaStr Annual is coming up this September 6-8. 

Right now we're hosting our Summer of SaaS event, so spin the wheel to reveal your exclusive deal on tickets. 

Join 12,500 Cloud and SaaS Founders, VCs, and Execs. Indoors/ Outdoors, festival style! The 9th SaaStr Annual: 3 full days, 100’s of workshops, and 1000s of Mentoring sessions— all to help you scale faster.

So a vertical SaaS player many have heard of but rarely talk about as a business is LegalZoom.  You’ve seen the commercials for years.  LegalZoom was founded way back in 1999.  But you probably didn’t know they IPO’d not all that long ago.

Today, the self-service legal services giant is worth an impressive $3.4 Billion at $660m in ARR and is fairly mature.  

They’re only growing revenue 7-8%, but they are relatively efficient, with 13% adjusted EBIDTA margins.

So while no longer a rocketship, LegalZoom is still growing and working on becoming even more profitable, guiding to $100m+ in adjusted EBIDTA for this year.

“The fastest company will always win,” says Daniel Dines, CEO and Founder of UiPath, one of the fastest-growing software companies in the world. 

Ten years ago, no one would have guessed Europe would generate the largest software IPO globally, yet UiPath has done it, and net retention is 144%.

At SaaStr Europa, UiPath’s Dines shared five insights from growing a company from nothing, so other founders can learn what it takes to scale a SaaS startup to $1B+ ARR.

“When you have the courage to be bold, people will take you seriously.”

Join us as we uncover lessons from UiPath’s success in creating a new category within RPA Enterprise Automation – Robotic Process Automation – while navigating the challenges inherent in digital transformation powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.

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

Learn how to earn more revenue by embedding payments into your solution, without doing it all yourself.

I personally was terrible at many growth tactics, growing Adobe Sign / EchoSign. I didn’t know much about anything other than direct sales at the time. I’ve sure learned a lot since.

Integrations & Partners. We were in the first batch of apps to integrate with Salesforce on AppExchange, several years ahead of competition. We did the same with Box, Zoho, WebEx, NetSuite, SugarCRM, Oracle, Conga … basically any app we could find with a reasonably open API.

In the end, this becomes table stakes.

Everyone has to do this eventually. But if you can get out ahead of the market here, you can get brought into, and win, a lot of deals just because you are the only decent vendor at the table.

Press and PR. By getting out early, this seemed to perform. We weren’t amazing at it, but back in the day, no one except Box in SaaS could get much press anyway. We did a good job getting in TechCrunch and other pubs at the right time to get a boost.

Being in the Bay Area. With hindsight, this helped a lot.  Today, it might not matter as much, but it still has real value. Our key competitor ultimately moved to SF, but for a while, it was our backyard. It just made partnerships and tech customer visits easier. We would drop by Google, Salesforce, Facebook, etc. all the time. It’s hard if your HQ is somewhere else to do that as effectively. It takes time to see the benefit, but it’s real.

Burnout is a real risk in SaaS.

Not usually in the early days. But as time marches on — It’s a huge risk.  

One piece of “evidence” — a lot of fairly successful SaaS startups all sell at about the same point in time … about 5 years in. B

ecause the founders get just too burnt out around Year 4 … and as Year 5 rolls in, they’re running a bit on fumes, and … they sell.

Or take a bad venture deal.

Or just plain start to give up a little.

Often, as it’s just finally getting good.

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

Free trials and freemiums can be a powerful sales strategy. But it’s not a one-size fits all! Learn how to increase conversion by leveraging other PLG modules, such as sandbox product experiences, and show prospects how your product can solve their challenges. 

Yes, if their salaries are unfair, unequal, or below market. Otherwise — maybe not.

Here’s what I’ve learned across 3 startups of my own, and investing in 25+ more:

Underpaying certainly leads to departures. Employees that are underpaid get bitter and leave. Don’t let it go. Review salaries quarterly, not just annually. And especially, don’t take advantage of those that do well but don’t complain. Eventually, they’ll leave, too, if they don’t feel treated fairly.

Moderate overpaying does not appear to create any stronger retention. Folks seem to just acclimate to it.

Year-end and time-based bonuses lead to some retention, but maybe not the right kind. Sales folks, in particular, will stay until a big bonus check. But I’ve found non-sales folks will leave even days before a bonus and don’t care.

Massive overpaying increases retention of the so-so and mediocre. They don’t leave at BigCos when they are paid 2x or more what they could get elsewhere.

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