SurveyMonkey is one of the most long-lived SaaS apps, founded 21 years ago!

We all use it and have used it. It just works.

And it's now at $400m in ARR

5 Interesting Learnings:
#1. Eventually, most of us go upmarket.

SurveyMonkey was relatively slow to go enterprise, which suited it well for a long time.

But since it started to march into bigger deals more recently, growth >re-accelerated< ... from 17% at IPO to 20% today Image
#2. Enterprise is now growing 53% YoY and accounts for 29% of total revenue, so the tilt upmarket clearly worked and was the right thing

Yet, self-serve is >still< growing 11% at $400m in ARR

So don't leave the small folks behind Image
#3. Price Increases Do Work at Scale.

The other thing that worked for SurveyMonkey was price increases for SMBs.

At IPO, about half of its growth came from pricing increases. We've also seen this with Dropbox

Of course, you can't do that forever ;)
#4. 78% Annual payments at IPO ... but 22% Monthly

As we saw with Zoom, don’t force it. Let customers pick. They are driving this up to 90% as they go more enterprise.

But let SMBs buy how they want to
#5. 100% Dollar-Based Retention for SMBs at IPO.

While not the 120%-140% we've seen with some that sell more B2D like PagerDuty + Slack, this is in-line with Shopify

So yes, you can do 100% NRR with SMBs
A deeper dive on how SurveyMonkey looked at IPO here:

saastr.com/5-interesting-…

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More from @jasonlk

13 Jan
I really don’t care at all losing all my money on any investment

So long as

The founders truly gave it all
Never quit
Didn’t just do it “on their terms”
Went wherever customers took them
Never left a lead on the table
Never stopped recruiting
Spent it like it was their money
Actually I’ve never lost money when this was all true

Where I’ve lost money:

- Founders burned money just to hit the plan
- Founders fired people they shouldn’t have
- Founders argued among themselves
- Founders blamed others
- Founders thought money would solve their problems
Where I’ve had a mediocre outcome:

- Founders didn’t want to go enterprise when customers did
- Founders didn’t drive down churn
- Founders didn’t talk to customers every single week
- Founders didn’t recruit VPs after $2m-$3m ARR
- Founders too arrogant in fundraising
Read 4 tweets
12 Jan
What's your "Moat" in SaaS? Do most SaaS companies even have a moat?

10 potential Moats:

#1. Brand.

Brand can be a big moat in SaaS.

Most customers just want to pick the app they’ve used and heard of. We all underestimated this in the earlier days of SaaS.
#2. Data.

Data lock is real. LinkedIn owns the human record. Getting your data out of Salesforce in a >structured< format is really hard.

Build more analytics, more connections, more worflows on customer data.
#3. Structured Data.

Even if data resides in many silos, structuring makes it unique.

And aggregating multiple cloud datasets into one set of data is a moat.
Read 12 tweets
11 Jan
Xero is one of the most interesting SaaS companies we don't talk about that much in the U.S. etc.

They are coming up on $1B ARR, selling to SMBs

Yet, only 17% of their revenue is in the U.S.

5 Interesting Learnings: Image
#1. All the way until $600m+ ARR, the majority of Xero’s new bookings and revenue still came from Australia and New Zealand!

The U.K. has since grown substantially to $100m ARR, but they got all the way to $500m+ selling mainly in Australia+NZ

Nail a niche Image
#2. The U.S. isn’t everything.

The U.S. remains an important but a smallish market for Xero, and isn't outperform the rest-of-the-world.

The U.S. is growing 17%, just a smidge faster than 15% overall growth -- and from a much smaller base. Image
Read 7 tweets
4 Jan
Twilio has long been one of our favorite companies at SaaStr, combining B2D + B2B, long-tail, SMB + enterprise, and much more

They are >still< growing 52% at $2B+ in ARR

Here are 5 Interesting Learnings from Twilio:
#1. The Top 10 Customers at Twilio have been 15%-20% of its revenue for years.

Yet Twilio has 200,000+ active accounts.

So they work hard to make a long tail AND big whales work together in 1 company

You don't have to choose. Don't let folks force you to.
#2. NRR has come down a bit from 140%-150% around the IPO, but is still world-class at 137%.

It's a great reminder NRR does not have to come down as you scale

Accounts can remain less than fully penetrated for many, many years

All the way to $2B+ in ARR
Read 8 tweets
4 Jan
I’m no @HarryStebbings, but having done a lot of interviews of busy decacorn and unicorn CEOs, a few tips for podcasts + interviews:

#1. You’ll be surprised who you can get via outbound — >if< the pitch is strong.

Really research guest you want & find a way to appeal to them
#2. Don’t make VIP guests, or any experienced guest, do a prep call.

But do ask if they want to do one.

Some folks will decline the invite if there is too much prep work (e.g., me). Others will appreciate it, especially for top events, podcasts, etc.
#3. Send the list of questions you have for the guest over 3+ days in advance.

I do it in a Google Doc so they can make edits, add stuff.

Everyone reads it. Everyone. So they prep that way.
Read 8 tweets
3 Jan
Bill.com is one of my favorite SaaS stories

We run SaaStr on it & it makes my life 10x easier

It's a great 2nd-time founder story. CEO sold first co for $150m & then did it again. It was hard. But today runs an $11b leader

Let's look at 5 Interesting Learnings:
#1. It can take a long time with SMBs. Bill.com has 100,000+ SMB customers ... and it took them 14 years to get to IPO.

Growth often was slow. But it >accelerated< at $100m ARR< to 56% YoY.
#2. Bill.com had 110% NRR at IPO and 121% today, and 86% logo / customer retention.

So again, you can get to 100%+ NRR even with the tiniest of customers ... IF they really need you.

They run their businesses on Bill.com.
Read 9 tweets

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