How to Watch SaaStr Annual Live this Week

Hey SaaStr Community,

We're live this week at SaaStr Annual 2023!

If you're here, keep tagging us on Linkedin and X! We love seeing all your photos and posts.

If you're not here (yet) -

there's still time to grab a ticket or tune into our live stream throughout the day.

Ok so many folks have been in cut, or conserve, or hold down cost mode for a year or so at this point. Great. And if growth is still mediocre, maybe you have to keep doing that.

But for many, growth has returned, or remains strong, and for many, it’s even accelerating. MongoDB for example just reported a blow out quarter, accelerating on the way to $2 Billion in ARR.

And so many of you are going to get caught next year with not enough sales reps and capacity. Just when things get good, or good again — you literally will not have enough scaled, high quality reps to hit the plan for next year.

So almost every Cloud infrastructure leader has done pretty well at least during these “macro impacted” times.  They’ve seen some impacts, but not as many as others in many cases.  Everyone has spent the past year managing their budgets more carefully, but the awesome force of simply running more workflows in the Cloud has still pulled growth forward.

HashiCorp is one example to look at. They’ve had some macro headwinds no doubt. But, growth it still 26% at almost $600,000,000 in ARR. Strong, although down significantly from 51% growth at $400m in ARR.

Also, importantly, for them Q1’23 seemed to be their low point of macro impacts.  We’ve seen this also with MongoDB, ZoomInfo, Zoom, and many — though not all — Cloud and SaaS leaders.  Things may not be easy going forward.  But we do seem to be past the lows.

This edition of the SaaStr Weekly is sponsored in part by Booking.com

Upgrade your business travel with Booking.com for Business. Enjoy exclusive business rates and earn loyalty points on flights, accommodation and car rental, along with 24/7 travel support - all for free!

So ever since I started in SaaS, I’ve been trying to answer a basic question: how quickly do the best take off and get to $10m ARR?

It took us about 5.5 years back in the day, but SaaS was much smaller then.  And I worried when I compared us to Dropbox, Yammer, Box and others that were our peers that got there faster.

Then I started investing and I came up with a basic ruie that the best startups needed to grow at least 8% a month once they crossed $1m ARR. I realized many got there in all different amounts of times.  But once you hit $1m ARR, you sort of needed to grow at that rate to break-out.  Roll that over a few more stages and you get to “Triple Triple Double Double”, i.e. that the best SaaS companies triple at $1m ARR, triple the next year, and at least double each year after that. That puts you on a path to $100m+ ARR in 7-8 years or so.

Now ChartMogul has summarized all this in one very useful chart in their latest report summarizing the data from their 1000s of SaaS customers.

Never.  It’s just, as you scale, what you do in the sales process as CEO evolves and changes.

I remember when we closed Groupon as one of our Ten (or so) Largest customers, back in the day.

They’d brought us on shortly after they’d deployed Salesforce all across the company. My guess is they paid Salesforce $20m a year back then.

We flew out for a Big Hands On, in the bitter middle of a Chicago winter.

Anyhow, my VP of Customer Success, VP of Product, and I were in one small conference room working with the Sales Operations team. Talking about how to deploy faster, better, bigger.

Across the floor, with the 25-year-old CEO Andrew Mason … was Marc Benioff and his team. He’d flown out to Chicago in the dead of winter as well, probably all the way from Kona, who knows. He knew he had to be there, too.

Anyhow, he was still selling, the CEO of Salesforce. Salesforce was probably worth $10 billion then. It’s worth $220 billion today. And he’s still selling.

That’s your answer.

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

Win customers by creating compelling offers with flexible pricing, billing, and bundling options with end-to-end automation. Learn more at the SAP booth in the Sponsor Hall, Hanger West! 

© SaaStr 2023

644 Emerson St. Suite 200, Palo Alto, CA 94301

If you'd like to stop receiving the SaaStr Daily, click here