So for a while, unicorns took a bit of a breather. With the stock market for tech stocks and cloud stocks in a big decline in 2022, unicorn production slowed down. And what had become a rite of passage in 2018-2021 … “Becoming a Unicorn” … seemed to recede as a critical milestone.

But we’re back.

AI has refueled unicorns, and 100x, 200x+ deals for the very hottest, fastest growing AI B2B companies.

The world's largest SaaS conference returns in May!!

So the best of the best in SaaS and Cloud are still on fire. Canva, Stripe, Databricks, ServiceTitan, Gusto, Wiz should all have epic IPOs in 2025 or maybe 2026.

But one thing is clear: it’s taking longer to IPO:

• It used to take 10.4 years on average to IPO in SaaS. 
• The last 3 SaaS IPOs took 11.3 years to IPO (Klaviyo, Rubrik, OneStream)
• And the current top of top performers below? 13.6 years

So I’m proud to have co-led the Series A investment in Salesloft back in the day, and to have brought in almost all the later stage investors, too. A fun one for me, especially as they exited for $2.3 Billion in 2021!  Seemed like an almost ordinary exit in the go-go days of 2021.

Today? I mean, where are these exits.

One of the top things I learned from founding CEO Kyle Porter was being utterly tenacious in competitive spaces.  

What do I mean? First, while Salesloft was overall very early to the space, in terms of the ultimate product, it actually came a bit after Outreach, Toutapp, Yesware, and many others you may have forgotten. It had $7m in ARR already in a different product — but the addition of a sales communications tool and a revenue management tool came after.

And you know what I always heard from Kyle?

“We’ll build an ever better version”.

Rather than be bowed or worried about competition, he had such confidence in his team, he viewed them as a roadmap that he could always catch.

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

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So we’ve talked a lot on SaaStr about how Customer Success has changed over the past 24 months. In many cases, it’s now part of the revenue team, and bringing in more revenue is Goal #1. So be it.

But as part of that, I haven’t seen any point in showing up to QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews) anymore. They are simply upsell exercises, which would be fine if at least an incredible subject matter that could also help us with our issues show up.

But if it’s just a junior sales exec doing the “QBR” — you’re just wasting everyone’s time.

The QBR was always, at best, a forcing function to make sure customers were at least heard and checked in with formally every quarter.  If you don’t do something here, accounts may never be followed up with.  So you do have to enforce some sort of check-in process, at least with mid-sized and larger accounts.

But if it’s all just an upsell opportunity, you are missing a huge opportunity.  To add value.

The goal of the QBR should be to add value. Do that every quarter, for a year, or two, or three. And then … the upsell do get a lot easier.  And they just come, naturally.

Most startup companies in earlier stages don’t have the most mature product. While differentiating your product against the competition is important, you have to differentiate yourself elsewhere as you build your company. This is where customer success comes in.

Drata VP of Customer Success Management, Wen Yao, and VP of Customer Experience, Ashley Hyman, share how to scale customer success from 0 to 5,000 customers. They believe CS is a fundamental building block to the success of your organization.

So ServiceTitan has filed to IPO, and will be just the 4th SaaS IPO since 2021, after Klaviyo, Rubrik and OneStream.

It’s another very, very good one. And all four are IPO’ing / IPO’d at well above $500,000,000 in ARR. A high bar indeed.

ServiceTItan is SaaS for plumbing, HVAC and now many other trades.  It’s true ERP / operating system for the, handling everything from orders to CRM to marketing to payments. It’s a good one :)

The best tactic I’ve ever seen is a simple combination of 3 things:

• Measure it,
• Segment it,
• and Drive it Down — Irrespective of Where It is Today.

Churn is a bummer, and high churn is bad. But I’ve yet to work with a SaaS company that can’t improve.

First, measure Churn. For real. Be ruthlessly honest here.

Know exactly what your churn is, and don’t judge it (too much). Set a goal each quarter to improve some amount (say 20% better). And make driving down churn each quarter a Top 5 goal of the company. And then magic will happen. Because churn is the one thing everyone in the company can impact, on some level.

Second, segment churn.

Big customers should churn less on a net revenue basis (including upsells) than small customers. I see too few SaaS start-up and scale-ups truly segment churn.  If you don’t, you’ll likely take the wrong actions. Because the bigger customers need a different approach here than the smallest ones.

GitHub, founded in 2008, is a leading platform for software development and version control that has made waves since 2018 with its AI Copilot. Microsoft acquired GitHub also in 2018 and it has since grown to over 100 million developers and more than 420 million repositories, including at least 28 million public repositories, making it the world’s largest source code host.

At this year’s SaaStr AI Summit, GitHub CRO Elizabeth Pemmerl shared how to bring AI products to market at scale successfully. With 90% of the Fortune 100 on GitHub and 40% of its $2B revenue coming from AI products, these real-world examples will also help you launch an AI-powered product at scale.

• SaaStr 776: How to Successfully Bring AI Products to Market at Scale with GitHub’s CRO Elizabeth Pemmerl

• SaaStr 775: If You Fall Off the Venture Track, At Least Stay on The PE Track with Andy Wilson CEO Logikcull and SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin

• SaaStr 774: The Vertical SaaS Rocketship: Samsara's CEO and Co-Founder Sanjit Biswas and SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin on Samsara's Journey to $1.26 Billion in ARR!

Listen on Apple Podcast, Spotify or Google Podcasts

A players see everyone good as a potential asset

B players see everyone good as a potential threat

Caught up the other day with a founder that had an

M&A offer that would have made him $130,000,000 in 2022

Today, they can’t raise another round and are a bit stuck

Just a reminder how thin liquidity is in 99% of start-ups

It’s there, and then, oftentimes, it’s gone

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