So there’s an uncomfortable truth that VCs don’t discuss outloud that often, but everyone has sort of accepted. Everyone resisted in 2022 and into 2023, but by 2024 they began to capitulate.

That a lot of unicorns that hit $1B+ valuations in 2020-2021 … probably aren’t really unicorns anymore.

How many? Over 60% haven’t raised funding since 2021 and likely never achieved the scale to do so, or have seen growth slow.

Hey SaaStr Fans,

The biggest SaaS + AI event of the year is almost here. 

Join 12,500+ SaaS leaders, VCs, and founders for 3 days of tactical content, hands-on mentorship, and networking that will help you scale to $100M ARR and beyond—with less stress and more success.

• 10,000+ SaaS + AI leaders.
• Legendary speakers from Snowflake, HubSpot, OpenAI, Canva, and more.
• Unmatched networking, fundraising, and deal-making.
• New AI Demo & Pitch Stage—your chance to win up to $5M in funding!

Don’t miss your chance to lock in your tickets with an insider discount.

So there’s a lot of talk in B2B and AI about the per-seat model being dead.  That per outcome pricing and other AI pricing models will kill it.

Well maybe.  But it doesn’t seem so … yet:

• Open AI itself still gets most of its revenue from per-seat pricing!
• HubSpot and other leaders are doubling down on per-seat pricing.
• The majority of Shopify revenue is from payments and merchant services, not even software.  Same with Toast.

The 5 Key Product Strategy Decisions That Helped Neo4j Scale Past $100M ARR.

4 Nonobvious Learnings:

• The “Too Horizontal Too Early” Tax: Companies that expand horizontally before $100M ARR typically waste 30-40% of their R&D resources on features that provide marginal value.
• The All-Team Roadmap Rule: Neo4j discovered that involving every team member in roadmap prioritization and ensuring everyone gets at least one priority item per release cycle increased adoption of new features by 47%.
• The “Premium at Lower Cost” Paradox: Category creators can charge less than legacy solutions while still maintaining premium positioning—Neo4j is 70% more cost-effective than traditional databases for graph problems.
• The Engineer Shield Protocol: Keeping engineers out of open-ended customer conversations about prioritization increased development velocity by 35% while improving customer satisfaction.

At SaaStr Annual Neo4j’s CTO Philip Rathle shared their playbook for scaling from $0 to the first $100M.

As the category creator in graph databases, Neo4j’s journey offers critical lessons for enterprise SaaS founders, especially those building deep tech products. Philip was kind enough to do a deep dive on their mistakes and lessons learned on the product and dev side. And Neo4j has powered ahead — and just crossed $200m ARR!!

Up Next: Wednesday, March 5th @ 10AM

Topic:  How to scale from $0-$40M and win a vertical market with an enterprise GTM motion

Speaker: Robby Allen, CRO, AgentSync

Workshop Wednesdays is our weekly series where we’ll be bringing some of the best SaaStr speakers to you LIVE, every Wednesday. 

Each workshop will be hosted in a live, interactive 30-minute format at 10am Pacific each and every Wednesday. This workshop will be 100% LIVE, not pre-recorded, and will be hosted in an, interactive 30-minute format, including Q&A.

The hardest part changes every 12–24 months, and the whole company changes every 30-36 months or so.

But a few thoughts on “the hardest part” for the first few stages:

• From $1-$100k in ARR, the hardest part is often how little revenue you get from each customer. Most SaaS products are inexpensive. You work so, so hard to close 100 customers … at $10/mo/customer … and that’s only $1,000 a month! Not enough to pay even a single salary. So much work, so little revenue.
• From $100k-$1m in ARR, the hardest part is how slow it is. For a few high fliers in AI, it may be different.  But for everyone else, this stage … just seems to take too long to get anywhere. Yes, you now know how to make customers successful and happy now. But it is so slow. You have 2,000 customers now. But at $10/mo, that’s still just $20,000 a month. Enough to pay some salaries and AWS bills, but it’s not that much. And each month, you barely add enough new revenue to hire just one of those great engineers you need.
• From $1m-$10m in ARR, the hardest part is you don’t have enough people or patience. You finally sort of get the formula working, but you need 2x-4x the number of people you can afford, or even find.
• From $10m-$40m in ARR, the hardest part is growing fast enough. At this point, your customers start to generate most of your growth going forward, and you know you’ll grow X% a year, more or less. The hard part is growing 20% faster than that. So much work and stress to grow a smidge faster.

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

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The last IPO of the 2020-2021 era was HashiCorp in December 2021.  And it’s one of the first to be acquired!  IBM just closed on its $6.4 Billion acquisition of HashiCorp.

And CEO David McJannet came to SaaStr Annual a little ways back to share his top scaling learnings.

CEO Dave McJannet shared his systemic approach to scaling companies through distinct growth phases. After nearly two decades building infrastructure companies from zero to IPO, Dave has distilled the repeatable patterns of successful scaling into a framework that works across any B2B SaaS business.

About Dave McJannet: Dave McJannet is the CEO of HashiCorp, and led the company from early-stage to its successful IPO and $6B+ acquisition yb IBM. With over 20 years in the infrastructure software space, Dave previously held executive roles at Microsoft, VMware, and GitHub. He’s known for his systems-thinking approach to company building and has helped scale multiple businesses from zero to public company status.

My list:

1. Finding a truly great co-founder. Yes, some can do it on their own. Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom did. But he also did it before as SVP of Engineering at WebEx — and brought a ton of his team with him. Almost all of us don’t need just a co-founder, but a truly great one. Are you sure you have this? At least be honest if your co-founder and especially if you aren’t technical, your CTO, are truly great.  The world is just too competitive now to win otherwise.
2. Funding the first 24 months — not just 6 or so. Yes, as CEO your job will always be to keep the company funded. But the first 24 months are particularly tricky. Folks can’t work on smiles and promises for 2 years. Maybe a few months, but not 2 years. Yet, in SaaS it generally takes 2 years to iterate, iterate, iterate and get to a true MSP — a Minimum Sellable Product. Can you fund it? How? Yes, it’s hard.
3. Finding and executing in a real, truly monetizable white space. It’s not enough to build a product that is useful, or even needed. It must be one customers are willing to pay for in general, and in lieu of other proven solutions. Why do you have that? Are you sure? 
4. Having at least one 10x feature vs. the competition. Your product is new, bug-ridden, and feature poor. Why will someone pick you? Being cheaper or even free is rarely enough on its own. You need one killer feature than is 10x better than the competition — that at least some small segment of the customer base really needs and will pay for.   In the age of AI, this is often even harder. There are so many more competitors doing so many more powerful things. 
5. Getting great folks to follow you, and your vision. A great co-founder is critical, per point #1. But you’ll need then to go even further. And get a small group to follow you. A few engineers. Some partners in the ecosystem. Some vendors that shouldn’t take the risk on you. Can you do that?

Without these 5 … it’s tough to get to the first $1m ARR in B2B and SaaS.

Slow it down.

Email is amazing. CEO, CXOs, VPs and more read their email. Including cold emails. They don’t pick up the phone anymore. They don’t listen to voicemail much anymore. They don’t care about your tweet. But they do read email everyday. All day long, in fact.

But:

• There is way too much spam & promotional email.
• Stuff that goes into your Promotions tab is also never read.
• So what about your email in particular.

The key is to slow it down. Write 10 personalized, well-researched emails a day to top potential prospects. Research those emails. Research the prospect. Propose a solution to their particular problem. Instead of 500 identical blasts in a cadence.

Blasts can work if you have a solid list. They work if you have a well-develop pipeline that needs regular drip marketing.

But don’t confuse drip marketing with high-quality prospecting. There are no shortcuts.

If you can solve a big problem for a CEO, she will open an email from you. But you have to do that.

Not ask for a coffee. Or 5 minutes of their time.

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