New ARR and CAC in Price-Ramped vs. Auto-Expanding Deals
In this post we’re going to look at the management accounting side of multi-year SaaS deals that grow in value over time. I’ve been asked about this a few times lately, less because people value my accounting knowledge [1] but rather because people are curious about the CAC impact of such deals and how to […]
Important Subtleties in Calculating Quarterly, Annual, and ATR-based Churn Rates
This post won’t save your life, or your company. But it might save you a few precious hours at 2:00 AM if you’re working on your company’s SaaS metrics and can’t foot your quarterly and annual churn rates while preparing a board or investor deck. The generic issue is a lot of SaaS metrics gurus […]
Bookings vs. Billings in a SaaS Company
Financial analysts speak a lot about “billings” in a public SaaS companies, but in private VC-backed SaaS companies, you rarely hear discussion of this metric. In this post, we’ll use a model of a private SaaS company (where we know all the internal metrics), to show how financial analysts use rules of thumb to estimate […]
Is it SaaS? Is it ARR?
A lot of us SaaS old timers feel like it may almost be time to retire the SaaS acronym. Isn’t everything SaaS now? No one is building on-prem software from scratch anymore, are they? It’s a fair point. I remember when Salesforce used “No Software” as their tag line. I was at a Salesforce event, […]
Theoretical TCV: A Necessary New SaaS Metric?
The more I hear about SaaS companies talking up big total contract value (TCV) figures, the more I worry about The Tightening, and the more I think we should create a new SaaS metric: TTCV = theoretical total contract value. TTCV = PCV + NPCV Prepaid contract value (PCV) is the prepaid portion and NPCV […]
David Sacks (Yammer) Stewart Butterfield (Slack): Unicorns or Bust
Missed the 2015 SaaStr Annual? We’ve got you covered! We’re publishing the full series of both the videos and transcripts from all of the 2015 sessions. Today we’ve got David Sacks, Co-founder of PayPal and Yammer, now COO at Zenefits, and Stewart Butterfield, President/Co-founder of Slack, where we had a wide-ranging, 40 minute discussion on […]
Measuring SaaS (or Cloud) Renewal Rates: Way More Than Meets the Eye
I love cloud computing. I love metrics. And I love renewals. So when I went looking on the Web for a great discussion of SaaS renewals and metrics I was surprised not to find much. Certainly, I found the two classics on SaaS metrics: The Bessemer Venture Partners 10 Laws of Cloud Computing white paper, […]
