Inc - $100k Deals Take About 70 Days to Close

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

Gong has its 2025 State of Revenue out.

In general, the report ties to what we’re seeing everywhere in SaaS.  We’re ending the year in general with stronger growth that the prior year.

Gong also looked across its entire customer base to measure deal velocity.

The findings aren’t much different from what we’ve discussed before at SaaStr, but still very helpful to see, given how much data they are pulling from:

On average, $100k deals take about 70 days to close.

As you enjoy the Holidays, why not set yourself up for success to attend the biggest SaaS event of the year — SaaStr Annual, May 13-15 2025!

Grab your tickets now before prices go up Jan 4:

• Save 20% on 1-2 tickets, $200 savings
• Save 30% on 3+ or more tickets, $350 savings
• on each ticket!

But should you miss these holiday savings: 

• Startup tickets will be $1099 on Jan 4th
• Big Co & VC tickets will be $1299 on Jan 4th

This is your chance to hit your goals next year and experience the biggest SaaS event of the year. Not to mention, this will be 11th SaaStr Annual so we'll be adding even more new ways to network and get together, building off the success of the CEO + CRO, CMO, CCO and CFO summits we launched in 2024.    

SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin recently sat down with HubSpot Chairman and co-founder Brian Halligan, going deep on the current state of SaaS, evolving board meeting formats, and how AI is reshaping the industry.

So as we wind down 2024 … what were the most popular SaaStr posts of the year to catch up on? We had 940 posts in 2024 alone!

Let’s look at the Top 10 SaaStr Posts of the Year:

#1.  Venture-Backed or Bootstrapped? There’s a Third Way. Just Raise One Round.

#2.  How Revenue Multiples Really Fall After Each VC Round

#3.  A Framework For Your First SaaS Sales Comp Plan

#4.  Is SaaS Dead?

#5.  The Actual, Real Dilution from Series A, B, C and D Rounds

#6.  What Are The Odds You Get Acquired Within 5 Years for a Good Price? Around 1%-1.5%

#7.  How Would a Person Start a Venture Capital Fund?

#8.  The Beginning of The End of Customer Success, SDRs, and Support Agents

#9. The New Normal: 700 Employees at $200,000,000 in ARR

#10.  The Thing Is, Maybe 10%-15% of Venture-Backed Startups Are Still Running the 2021 Playbook. In 2024/2025.

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

Read how Duro Labs increased integration adoption, reduced engineering time for integrations, and launched them 10x faster.

Adding a sales team for the first time?

Increase your pricing 25%

So they can discount 20% And yes, it will feel wrong and unnatural at first

So Wikipedia publishes its financials each year, although I’d never taken a close look before.

It’s interesting. As a Top 10 website:

• Wikipedia only spends $3m on hosting.  I would have thought a lot more.
• Wikipedia spends $107m a year on salaries.  Given that all the content is free and community-edited, I would have thought less.
• My guess probably would have been $20m / $40m or so.  $20m for hosting, $40m for salaries.

And note that since Wikipedia’s runs its own data centers, the fully burdened costs of hosting are higher. This does not include most of the headcount-related expenses.  Still, the hosting expenses are much lower than I would have expected.

No.

First, it takes too long.

If a VC doesn’t know you, and you aren’t a “super hot” start-up, even if you do get a term sheet — it may take months. Yes, term sheets get done in one day. I haven’t done that, but I’ve done “handshake” deals in one day in maybe 50% of my investments (i.e, if X, Y and Z are true … then I’m in).

But … in those cases … i’ve usually had a chance to at least partially get to know the company and founders beforehand. At least to observe and track them.

If I don’t have any context ahead of time, I may need weeks or yes even months to learn enough. Not literally months to do the “homework” … that doesn’t take long … but sometimes months to see enough progress for the investment to make sense to me, to connect enough dots.

Second, multiple offers are better.

Even if you don’t get a better price with >1 offer, you at least will dramatically simplify the process. VCs don’t screw around on the small stuff if you have another offer already. “I already have an offer at $6m pre.” OK, well that simplifies things.

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