Hey everyone -

We're quickly approaching our largest, and most ambitious SaaStr Annual yet -- and with less than 80 days to the biggest SaaS event of the year, we don't want you to miss out!

Be there September 6-7-8 in the heart of the Bay Area for 3 days of tactical content, hands-on workshops, mentorship sessions, speed networking, recruiting and epic evening events.

With 12,500+ of the best SaaS leaders, executives, revenue leaders and investors joining us this year, this will certainly be the biggest and best SaaStr Annual yet.

Hey SaaStr Community,

Acquisitions are rarer in tougher times.  Everyone just gets more conservative, even the biggest players. 

But if you stay in the game, get past $10m-$20m ARR, and do something important — in my experience at least, in SaaS, you’ll likely eventually get some sort of M&A offer.

A few more existential thoughts & learnings if do you get an offer to buy your start-up:

The “quality”/brand of the acquirer is less important than we tend to think. Selling is selling. It’s not yours anymore. 

I know it may sound appealing to “Continue Your Vision Inside of Google” or “Go 1000x Bigger Inside of Apple” or whatever, but even if it’s true at some level, it doesn’t matter in the end, 2-3-4 years down the road.

Selling to Google, in the end, isn’t more glamorous or better than selling to Waste Management, Inc. for the same amount of money, not in the end, not really.

For most founders, the rewarding part ends about 90 days after you sell, no matter to whom. No doubt it is better to see it flourish in the hands of a leading tech company.

But still, this will matter less over time than you think. Google 10 years from now will have very different tactics (if not strategy) than Google today.

So some SaaS and Cloud leaders have seen big impacts from the post-Covid hangover, but others have just kept accelerating. 

MongoDB is one of those that just has never stopped, although as we’ll see below, even they have seen more cautious buying from their customers.

But even macro challenges haven’t slowed Mongo much.

It’s now at a stunning $1.5 Billion in ARR, growing 29% overall, and it’s worth a stunning $29 Billion.

That’s about as good as it gets in SaaS and Cloud!

This edition of the SaaStr Weekly is sponsored in part by New Zealand Trade & Enterprise 

New Zealand technology is made for the world. From sustainable space travel to AI-driven agritech, we deliver innovative technology on a global scale.

So over the past few weeks I’ve had discussions with 3 good revenue leaders and execs and 2 marketing execs that either left their roles or were let go.

None of these folks am I super close to, but all of them I’ve known just enough over time to know they are at least good.

Great?

I don’t know them well enough. But I do know they are good.

Good enough to do well,  make good money, and add real value in SaaS.

But they all came up short in their current roles. At first blush, the reason was “macro” or the economy or things got tougher this year.  All true.

Since I knew these execs all a bit though, I pushed further. The one I knew the best was the first to admit it.

”I didn’t really get to know the product until it was too late.”

Now I push here again and again and I see this as a top cause of flame-out these days.  

In 2020-2021, you could sell and market a product you only sort of knew.  The demand was already there, and often red hot.  You could just run the standard playbook from your last job and it would almost always just work.

And what that meant is folks just sort of shoot from the hip when they took a new role.  They didn’t dig deep, especially when the next company they worked at was:

One of the biggest changes since we started SaaStr is the massive number of SaaS veterans out there. The decade-long run of next-generation SaaS start-ups, and the incredible growth in SaaS unicorns and decacorns has led to a lot of experienced execs on the market.

This is great. I wish there had been even a fraction of this many SaaS execs when I was getting going.

But many experienced folks just don’t want to do it all again.  Because SaaS is hard.

Each quarter, the bookings plan starts at $0 again. 

The lead commit goes up each quarter and every year.

The bar to grow even faster has been raised.

And as time goes on, not everyone wants to do all of that again.

So it’s natural to want more of a team to do it for you. 

To hire 3-4 folks to do what you used to do mostly yourself. To want a head of sales operations and a director of sales to help carry the load not later … but on Day 1. 

To not have to manage any customers yourself in customer success, and instead be a strategist. To hire a head of demand gen to get those leads for you, so you don’t have to get all those leads yourself this time.

The mistake, though, I see a lot is hiring this SaaS Veteran That Needs a Team Too Early. 

There are so many great experienced SaaS execs out there, you may want to hire one you fall in love with at $2m-$3m-$4m ARR.  That has the experience, the insight, and even the intuitive deep connection to your product that is so appealing.

Does your marketing site really matter, past a point? 

Is it just fluff, something the marketing folks work on?

Two start-ups I work with that just passed $10m ARR sent me the quotes above … this week. 

Both finally updated their marketing sites after a long time (24 months in both cases), with somewhat similar changes … and saw widely different outcomes.

The first startup saw conversions double after they changed their site:

The second startup made similar changes … but conversions fell!

The interesting thing is that both marketing sites had become really dated, and weren’t really changed much from $2m ARR to $10m ARR.  Both were updated with a lot of best practices. 

And while one update had a massive positive impact, the other had a significant negative impact.

No one’s had a bigger exit in a shorter amount of time than Divvy. How did they do it?

Let’s find out the go-to-market models Divvy used to go from zero to a $2.5B exit in just four years with the former CRO, Sterling Snow. 

There’s this idea in rowing called swing, where the oar or paddle of each person in the boat hits the water at the same time and pulls back with the same amount of force. 

Anyone out of sync means the boat veers off course. And when everyone is in perfect unison, it’s magic for a GTM leader.

• SaaStr 673: How To Boost Your Net Retention Revenue (NRR) to Over 140% with Insider's CEO and CMO   
  
• SaaStr 672: Go to Market Strategies That Led To Divvy's $2.5B Exit with Divvy’s Former CRO, Sterling Snow

• SaaStr 671: From Uncertainty to +$400M: How Braze Found Opportunity in Headwinds with Braze's Co-Founder & CEO Bill Magnuson

Listen on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts or Spotify

So M&A is quietly coming back.

It may be tough for unicorns to get a strong acquisition offer,

but for the capital efficient in SaaS,

at $20m+ ARR, with decent growth …

I’m seeing a lot of offers recently

So if you do get an offer to sell your startup…should you?

So I sold my last company in 2011

Most days, I think I'm fully recovered.

Done some amazing things since.

Built some cool stuff.

Made some amazing investments.

But then once is a while, I still feel it

How much your brain just gets rewired as a founder always at the edge

Annual contracts are great, but

Sometimes $100k seems like a lot to pay, digest, and justify ...

But $10k a month doesn't

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