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Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣2️⃣

1 Jan, 10 tweets, 4 min read

THANK YOU to everyone for making 2021 a big year for SaaSt:

8 STATS:

#1. Largest IRL tech event in Bay Area.

It cost an extra $2m and took 2 extra weeks to build out, but moving SaaStr Annual outdoors into a festival-style event rocked.

Thx to 5,000+ that came!!

#2. 5 Major Digital Events.

With 100,000 total digital attendees, we had the best of the best join SaaStr University, SaaStr Build, SaaStr Money, SaaStr Scale, and Annual Digital

#3. SaaStr Podcast Grew Streams 170% and Listeners 149%

We rebooted the podcast a bit per your requests, and thanks for driving it up!

#4. We Had Over 200 Unique Speakers — Including the Best Founders in SaaS

CEOs of GitLab, Twilio, HubSpot, Chime, Box, Okta, Dartabricks, Bill, Tripactions, Monday, Airtable, Webflow, Vimeo, Brex, PagerDuty, DigitalOcean, Expensify, Upwork and so much more!

#5. Majority of Our Speakers Were Women For 4th Year in a Row, and Were 66% Less Represented Speakers.

Thank you to everyone that supported us here!

#6. We More Than Doubled Weekly Content on SaaStr

You wanted more in your Daily feeds, so we increased content 2x, mainly by adding more new voices, founders, analysis, and more

#7. We Rebooted Our Newsletters, With Over 10,000,000 Sent

Our open rates crossed 30% as we put more work into our 3 core newsletters, doubling the subs

Folks like newsletters — especially on mobile

#8. Our Free online courses at SaaStr.University grew to almost 12,000 members sharing their learnings

We upgraded our daily discussions and doubled the structured content on SaaStrU

For 2022 look for:

1/ More Mentorship. Much more to do here, both at our events and beyond.

2/ More Founder-VC Connections. The VC world has changed, we’ll connect even more folks.

3/ An even Bigger, Funner Annual 2022 in September. Outdoors again!

Again THANK YOU for all the support. SaaStr got hit a bit hard in 2020 but we bounced back stronger than ever!

And Let Us Know what more you want to see from SaaStr — we’ll try to do it!!

Tell us here -> surveymonkey.com/r/8FKKTZD

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More from @jasonlk

Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣2️⃣

@jasonlk

26 Dec 21

In theory, SMB > Enterprise

More customers, much faster sales cycles, faster PLG and viral cycles

But even 100% NRR is tough to hit with SMBs,
While 120%-140% common in Enterprise

Most SMB SaaS goes at least bit enterprise or at least into more “bigger deals” to balance it out

Bill.com + Shopify added payments to get > 100% NRR from SMBs

HubSpot is core SMB, but focused on high value and a $10k ACV. Not low.

Canva, Calendly, etc.’s fastest growing segment is Enterprise despite starting 100% self-service

DataDog has gone from 5% enterprise in early days to 80% now at $1.5B in ARR: saastr.com/5-interesting-…

FreshWorks and Samsara have moved the SMB focus to $5k+ up accounts. E.g., only 25% of FreshWorks customers pay > $5K, but they are 84% of revenue: saastr.com/5-interesting-…

Read 4 tweets

Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣2️⃣

@jasonlk

20 Dec 21

A lot of older times in VC talk a lot about the incentives of “fees” in venture

Why? Let’s take a look at the Old Days. Like, until 2019.

1/ Until 2019 or so, a “3x fund” — that tripled the LPs’ money was top tier. “2x” was not great, but good enough for another check.

2/ Today, the bar has gone way up. LPs want 4x net funds or better now, and may have multiple funds per cohort that are 5x-10x or more.

3/ Now, depending on the maths and fund structure, in a “2x net” fund, the partners might still make the majority of their money off fees — not “carry” from investing

At “3x net”, the math would favor carry, but only many years down the road

Read 5 tweets

Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣2️⃣

@jasonlk

18 Dec 21

So you might have missed one of the most impressive SaaS IPOs on 2021 this week ... Samsara

It's at $500m+ ARR growing a stunning 72%, and the founders still own half the company

5 Interesting Learnings: ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️

#1. Multiple Products are Key to Growth at Scale

We’ve seen this time & time again. 89% of 700 $100k+ customers use multiple Samsara apps. One for video and one for telematics do $200m ARR >each<. If wasn't multi-product, Samsara would be less than half the size is today.

2. Still hit 72% Gross Margins even with a hardware component.

This is pretty impressive, many SaaS companies with hardware struggle to hit 60% gross margins. Having customers sign 3-5 year contracts (see below) helps Samsara amortize the hardware costs over a lengthy period

Read 12 tweets

Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣2️⃣

@jasonlk

13 Dec 21

@asana

Most popular sessions for FREE SaaStrScale.com THIS Wednesday!! Sign up NOW

#1: "How to Increase Revenue and Grow Your Customer Base by 10x Through the Power of Self-Serve and Direct Sales with @asana 's COO and @figmadesign 's CCO"

@Airtable

#2. "The Secrets to Building Your Marketing Engine To Drive Scale with @Airtable's CMO"

FREE this Wed -> SaaStrScale.com

@gorgiasio

#3: "Acquiring 10,000 SMB Customers Solely from Data with @gorgiasio ' CEO"

FREE this Wed -> SaaStrScale.com

Read 7 tweets

Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣2️⃣

@jasonlk

6 Dec 21

Is that new sales rep going to make it? It can be so hard to tell for sure during an interview process

In the early days, until you have a great VP of Sales, it's your job to figure that out

Here are 8 Signs of a Sales Rep That Isn't Going to Make It: 8⃣⬇️⬇️

1/ Immediate, massive discounting

Mediocre and failing sales reps do this because they have no other idea how to close a deal or create urgency.

Discounts don't create urgency, they create agency. They get the deal from the red zone to the end zone.

2/ Don't truly understand the product.

Way too many AEs don’t even really understand, let alone use, the product they are selling.

They don't know how to tweak it, configure it, sell to different personas, and more.

Early reps have to be product gurus. And evangelists.

Read 10 tweets

Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣2️⃣

@jasonlk

30 Nov 21

1/ Lots of talk from folks about "Down Rounds" in venture but the reality is these are pretty uncommon

Bridge rounds and No Round at All are more common than Down Rounds

But what is pretty common and less discussed "Weak Rounds"

2/ "Weak Rounds" are rounds at < 2x the price per share of the last round

They get done all the time and much more easily, but the VCs rarely hit the IRR goals from the last round with a raise like this

And they are often very dilutive on top of it

3/ A Weak Round or even two, and VCs can end up making half of what they expected, even with the nominal valuation going up

This isn't the end of the world, but bear in mind VCs are looking for the next round to be at least 2x-3x the price per share of the last round

Read 4 tweets

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Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣2️⃣

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