Saas

Foundry is partnering with High Alpha to drive survey responses for the 2025 SaaS Benchmarks Report. Take the survey now at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YBJXXDQ to contribute to the data and get early access to the 2025 SaaS Benchmarks. Over the years, the SaaS Benchmarks Report has become a trusted resource for early and growth-stage SaaS operators. To make this year’s report as impactful as possible, we need strong participation from the SaaS community — that’s where your support by taking this year’s survey would make a big difference. ...

A few weeks ago I was in Atlanta for Techstars Atlanta Demo Day and the Venture Atlanta Conference . I had a great time and it’s fun to see the vibrancy of the Atlanta startup community. My brother Daniel came with me and we had dinner with our cousin Kenny, who lives in Atlanta, so we got some nice, quiet, emotionally intimate family time. My favorite keynote at Venture Atlanta was from Scott Dorsey . While our paths have intersected for more than a decade and I knew him from a distance, I’ve gotten to know Scott pretty well over the past year. I put him in the awesome category. ...

There’s a long-standing cliche concerning SaaS companies that once you get to $10m in ARR you are unkillable . As Jason Lemkin says in his post from early 2013: Inevitability in SaaS comes around $10m in ARR, plus or minus. Once you hit this point, you have a brand, you have a fully baked team, you have a robust product, and you have a self-generating stream of new leads and new business. Will you get from $10m ARR to $100M ARR? I don’t know. Is an IPO in your future? Not sure. But once you hit $10m in ARR or so, you cannot be killed by anything. That’s the power of compounding SaaS revenue. And actually, as we’ll get to, $10m in ARR — this is when it really gets fun. ...

As we get to the end of 2016, I’m in many conversations about 2016 performance and 2017 budgets. While 2016 isn’t over yet, most SaaS companies know how things are going to end up within a few percentage points. As a result, their focus on 2017 is an extrapolation from how they have been doing in 2016, typically building on month over month activity. Since there are plenty of variables, the conversations are generally quantitative. In the midst of one last week, I said “why aren’t we talking about increasing conversions and lowering churn?” This was in response to a CFO who had modeled conversion rate and churn at a fixed percentage each month throughout the year. ...

Congrats to my friends at Rally Software on the announcement that they’ve signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by CA Technologies for $480 million . Part of the fun of having a blog for a long time is that it captures some of the history – in the moment – of what’s going on. For example, from a post in 2008 about Rally’s $16.85m financing , I riffed on the origins of the company. ...

There are lots of blogs and anecdotes on (a) how to build a successful SaaS company and (b) what a successful SaaS company looks like. Yesterday’s post by Neeraj Agrawal from Battery Ventures titled The SaaS Adventure is another great one as he describes his (and presumably Battery’s) T2D3 approach. If you want to follow these posts more closely on a daily basis, I encourage you to subscribe to the Mattermark Daily newsletter . Or take a look at the VCs I follow in my Feedly VC channel . ...

“We have product/market fit.” “We are searching for product/market fit.” “We are raising this financing to find product/market fit.” “Our customer traction demonstrates product/market fit.” Product/market fit. It’s a wonderful phrase, thanks to Marc Andreessen, Sean Ellis, Steve Blank, and Eric Ries. But it also one of the most overused, and inappropriately used, phrases that I hear with SaaS companies on a daily basis. I was in a meeting a month ago with a company I’m on the board of where product/market fit was asserted. I sat quietly for a moment and then stated as clearly as I could that the company didn’t have product/market fit, they had the illusion of product/market fit. A long conversation ensued which resulted in me pondering this illusion and trying to put some parameters around it. ...