Coupa is a $16B SaaS success story anyone selling mid-market and enterprise should know more about

They dominated their Web 1.0 predecessor (SAP Ariba) and grew the TAM of their space, Spend Management, 20x

5 Interesting Learnings: ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️
#1. Network effects are real in many spaces in SaaS, like Spend Management

Coupa now manages $2.5T in spend management over 7 million suppliers. Could you switch to another vendor? Yes. Would you want to? No. Imagine how many vendor relationships that would be to switch over
#2. 80% of implementations led by partners, with 5,000 trained partner consultants

The really big deals & even smaller ones are deployed by partners. 80% of deals. The “biggies” are Accenture, KPMG, and Deloitte. But Coupa has implementation partners across all segments
3. Even at $700m in ARR, Coupa has only closed 2,000 of 100,000 target customers. 2%.

There’s just so much room to run in SaaS now. Even at $700m ARR, they’ve just scratched surface. Cloud is huge. This is why all the SaaS leaders seem to have almost unlimited room for growth
4. Serves both mid-market >and< enterprise at the same time. ARR per deal has gone up every quarter.

Coupa shows you can do both even in a complex offering, and has driven up ACVs in the mid-market in particular. You don't have to only go enterprise with a rich solution.
5. Slowly becoming a fintech.

Coupa isn’t as much a fintech as SMB players like Bill.com, but it’s getting there with Coupa Pay. Coupa plans the majority of its customers to be running payments through their platform in 10 years. Today, about 12% do.
A deeper dive here on Coupa at $700m ARR, growing a stunning 40% (!), here:

saastr.com/5-interesting-…
And a look back at how Coupa won here:

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More from @jasonlk

Oct 28, 2023
So Freshworks hasn't been immune to macro issues, but its bigger customers continue to grow and scale at an impressive rate

It's at ~$600,000,00 ARR today, growing 20%. But the bigger customers are growing much faster.

5 Interesting Learnings:
#1.  Bigger Customers Keep Growing, But SMBs Have Slowed

A common theme across tech today.  Freshworks has 51,700 customers at around $2k ARR, with a quick sales cycle of just 25 days.  But in contrast to their bigger customers, the macro environment — or perhaps market saturation — has led to slowing growth in their SMB segment in 2023.
Image
#2.  Leveling Up PLG to Accelerate SMB Customers, Including More Attention to Onboarding

It can seem hard to invest heavily in small customers, but if you don’t especially invest in their onboarding, that’s a big shame.  Because there are few things worse than closing a customer that never actually uses your product.  So much wasted energy getting them there.

Freshworks is doubling down here
Image
Read 11 tweets
Sep 24, 2023
Klaviyo and Instacart reopened the IPO markets, from a 20 year low

Two great leaders, worth almost $10B now and public, and both priced at high end

But they IPO’d without any “bounce”

A little easy money and greed does help restart markets

We didn’t see that Image
Klaviyo and Instacart in the end didn’t leave any money on the table

They maximized what they could raise, with the minimum dilution

But no bounce probably leaves the next wave of folks that are strong, but not as strong as Klaviyo or Instacart, in a slightly tougher position
IPO investors are a weird, thin niche of the market

After all, you can always just buy the next day, next week or next quarter if you want

We probably learned this week the demand is there in this niche market (buying at the IPO), but it’s not all that deep
Read 6 tweets
Jun 27, 2023
I caught up with a sales rep this week on track to make $350k this year so far — and was miserable

I asked why?

A bad boss? No, he said

A crummy startup? No, it’s fine. No Snowflake, but fine.

Rough commute? No, he still works from home.
What’s wrong then, I asked? How bad can it be?

“I made $500k in 2021, and now am making $350k working twice as hard or harder than back then”

He felt underpaid for working harder in 2023 than 2021

Even though he was still making $350k in today’s macro

He felt very underpaid
Then I asked, OK, what do you think you’d make it you started over and went to another startup?

“Probably less than half. No one’s hitting their number. I’d probably make $130 or $150” he said.

Again, he’s making $350k today

That’s just down from $500k in “easy money” in ‘21
Read 6 tweets
Jun 13, 2023
Want to get a SaaS start-up going?

Here are my Top 20 Tips to get a SaaS startup going and off the ground: 🔽2️⃣0️⃣🔽
1/ Take your time to find a great co-founder

It may seem like you are in a hurry, but in the end, anything less than a great co-founder will set you back. A bit more here:

saastr.com/a-simple-commi…
2/ Find a co-founder complementary to your skills, ideally

Someone great at something core you aren’t: Sales, Engineering, Marketing. Great at sales. Great at engineering. Great at marketing.

More here: saastr.com/what-to-look-f…
Read 23 tweets
Jun 9, 2023
"A Top 10 Mistake:

Not going multi-product early enough."

saastr.com/add-second-pro…
"Don’t take the easy route.  Your customers will want things that are fairly easy to build, and you’ll understand those problems well, because they are adds-on to what you are already selling.  

But these rarely move the needle."

Peter Gassner, CEO Veeva
“It’s critical to be truly multi-product by $100,000,000 in ARR … and the biggest mistake is trying to sell to different ICPs” — Spencer Skates, CEO Amplitude
Read 4 tweets
May 21, 2023
I can be slow sometimes, but it’s taken me a while to understand what’s >different< in SaaS in 2023

Budgets are tighter, but SaaS is still growing, folks are still buying more software than ever

Here’s what’s different:

2023 is the first time SaaS itself got harder since 2005
SaaS has never been truly easy outside of a window from mid-2020 to late 2021

But every year, it got easier and easier. Not easy, but easier and easier: Image
There was a bump in 2016 when budgets were slashed, but it didn’t last long enough to really impact renewal cycles

Even the 2008-2009 downturn, while brutal, didn’t hit SaaS as hard as the rest of the economy. The best of us kept growing, albeit with elevated churn through 2010
Read 8 tweets

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