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:
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.
#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.
"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
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:
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