We’re getting closer!!  Its 2023 SaaStr Annual, Sep 6-8, in SF Bay Area!!

Want to learn from and meet top CROs?  We’ve got just a ton of the best coming, sharing, and presenting:

• Jonathan Vassil, CRO @ Toast
• Jameson Yung, SVP Sales @ Gong
• Scott Sutton, CBO @ ZoomInfo
• Jane Kim, CRO @ CircleCI
• Laurabeth Harvey, CRO @ Lattice
• Erica Anderson, CRO @ Notion
• Sangeeta Chakraborty, CRO @ Miro
• Aliisa Rosenthal, Head of Sales @ OpenAI
• Megan Prince, VP of Sales @ Zeni
• Bryan Caplin, CRO @ Thoropass
• Colin Danaher, VP Enterprise Sales @ G2
• Ankur Passi, VP of Enterprise Revenue @ Greenhouse
• Veronica Fernandez, SVP, North America Head of Business Solutions @ Visa
• Mark Kosoglow, CRO @ Catalyst
• Meghan Gill, SVP Sales Operations & Sales Development @ MongoDB

So if you’ve looked for real estate lately, you’ve probably used Matteport software to see those cool 3-D renderings of homes and buildings.

The business exploded during lockdown when in-person tours were more difficult, growing 100% YoY from 2020 to 2021, and the business continues to grow today.

It’s now at $160,000,000 in “ARR” growing a healthy 33% year-over-year.

 Its market cap is $945m, but that’s including $450m in cash, so the net enterprise value is closer to $500m, or a bit less than 4x revenues.

One reason to do a deep dive on Matterport is as a case study for the pro and cons of “SaaS + Services” models.  These hybrid models have exploded over the past few years. 

The pro is they let you do a lot more than you can do just in software.  E.g., 25% of Matterport’s revenues come from sales of its Pro2 Camera (“Product” revenue), and another large chunk from scanning their properties (“Services” revenue).  The cons include lower gross margins, as we’ll see.

How do you win with a high-velocity sales strategy in a fast-moving, competitive market? What are common pitfalls to avoid, and how can teams maximize efficiency and meet quota?

In a special session of Workshop Wednesday, Gorgias Founder & CEO Romain Lapeyre and Gorgias VP of Sales & Partnerships Aasif Osmany share their learnings, advice, and hacks for optimizing your sales process.

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

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One of the top minds in B2B PR I’ve worked with is Ed Zitron.  We’ve had him at SaaStr Annual and SaaStr several times over the years, and we’ve worked together on over a dozen on my SaaStr Fund portfolio companies.  I asked him to put together a primer on just what PR really is .. in 2023. Jason – ed.

What Worked Before And Still Works Today

If you’re knowledgeable about a subject and a reporter needs a comment, give them one. People pick up the phone for helpful people. 

And if you’re asked for something, provide it quickly. Respond quickly.

Be useful.

There’s also really something to be said for having meaningful commentary on things that you truly understand. Usually founders are either scared to ruffle feathers or way, way too firebrand-adjacent – find your “thing” and really stick to it. Jason has done well getting quoted – when he wants to – talking about the state of major enterprise software companies. He’s a master of this stuff. 

I do caution you to be aware of when you’re out of your depth. Don’t talk about politics. Don’t get into culture war stuff. Focus on your work, and the world around your work. 

Many start-ups, and even larger SaaS vendors, are reluctant to provide a Service Level Agreement — an SLA — that says they will, well, stay up.  It’s not our fault, they think.  What if Amazon goes down?  Or our email provider?  That’s not our fault.  The lawyers tell you to try to not to do this.  Sometimes, the accountants too.  But they are wrong.

An SLA is most importantly a cultural commitment. That you truly, fully stand behind an enterprise-grade product.

Look at Cloudflare’s commitment in their base SLA -> “1.1 100% Uptime. The Service will serve Customer Content 100% of the time without qualification.”  Is 100% possible for any CDN, and web product?  Not.  But they are committing to doing everything humanly possible to deliver it.  That’s what you want as an enterprise customer, when you’re paying $100k+ a year. $5 a month, maybe, maybe not.  But enterprise customers have the right to expect it to not, well, be their problem.

As a buyer, you can and (if you want) should demand one for a mission-critical application. It shouldn’t be your job to worry if the service stays up. It is table stakes for an enterprise application to stand behind its reliability.

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

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Always take them.

When I look back at the many mistakes I made as a 2x founder, both times with some degree of success in the end … and there were so many … one thing I am 100% glad I did was take vacations.

And I mean — normal, full vacations.  

By that, I mean, a full week. In a normal place. And I only checked email once a day, once I had real VPs in place (before that, when I was the VPs, I still had to be on email all the time).

But — it can be tough to take any time off until you have a strong management team, at least a partial one. In the early days at Adobe Sign / EchoSign, I did the customer support shift from 11am-6am. That’s an anti-vacation, let me tell you.

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