If you are bootstrapped in SaaS, it helps a lot to be SMB focused, viral and/or truly product-led growth
Why?
Sales.
Venture-backed startups just can >afford< to invest so, so much more in sales.
With the average SaaS enterprise/B2D/mid-market leader seeing net revenue retention of 120%-130%, or even higher, it just >pays< to invest heavily in sales if you have the $$$
The lifetime of a customer is often well in excess of 5x the first-year ACV, sometimes 10x
So paying sales reps 30%, 50%, or even more of the first-year ACV can still pay
But when bootstrapped, it's really hard to pay much more than 20% of the total ACV in sales comp. That often means a 10% commission.
VC-backed startups can just pay up here, and should
1/ Slack has become primarily an enterprise sale. Strong synergy here with SFDC.
Slack is approaching 100 $1M+ ACV customers
2/ Salesforce hasn't really made small acquisitions work.
But it's gotten really good at pushing market leaders, at scale, to grow even bigger.
The $1b+ deals -- Mulesoft, Tableau, ExactTarget, Demandware -- have all done well post-acquisition
SFDC is good at this
3/ The Communications segment has over the past 5 years overtaken other areas of collaboration to become the most important area of enterprise collaboration
This is worth owning and Slack is #1 and a pure play here
Digital events are great, but you know what's going to be really hard?
These so-called "hybrid events" everyone is now talking about after we get past Covid. Digital + IRL.
Why so hard? A few thoughts here:
First, expense. A decent digital event is hardly free, even if you don't need a venue. Many SaaS companies are still spending $500k to product a digital event. SaaStr will spend up to $2m on our digital events.
Who is going to pay the >extra< expense to add this to IRL event?
Second, experience. Live streaming at events is nothing new. Yes, it works on Twitch. But WebSummit? Dreamforce? SaaStr?
All have tried it, and abandoned it.
The experience has to be great. Bolting on streaming is not enough.