sutton020

In last week's post I shared some thoughts about Dropbox and why, although Dropbox is unquestionably one of the most amazing SaaS companies ever built, I am a tad less confident in the company's long-term future than I am in other SaaS leaders such as Salesforce.com, Zendesk, or Shopify. As mentioned in the first part of the post, I took a closer look at Dropbox’s recent IPO filing and would like to share some tidbits, along with a few observations. #1 – Dropbox on consumerization "Individual users are changing the way software is adopted and purchased Software purchasing decisions have traditionally been made by an organization’s IT department, which often deploys products that employees don’t like and many refuse to adopt. As individuals increasingly choose their own tools at work, purchasing power has become more decentralized." As mentioned in the first part, Dropbox was one of the early champions of the "consumerization of enterprise software" movement...

I’m late to the party here, I know. Dropbox went public a bit more than a month ago and I’ve finally had a chance to take a close look at the company’s S1 . I’ll be sharing a few specific observations from the S1 review, but let’s start with some more general thoughts about the company. The mighty king of Freemium Like Zendesk, Yammer, and a few other SaaS companies that were all founded around 2007-2008, Dropbox was one of the early champions of the "consumerization of the enterprise" movement. In contrast to Zendesk (and I think, Yammer), which eventually moved upmarket and now generates an ever-increasing percentage of revenues from larger customers , Dropbox is still getting most of its revenues from individual users and small teams. The company hasn't disclosed how much revenue it is generating from larger companies, but according to its S1 filing, a staggering 70% of its 11 million paying users are on an individual plan as opposed to a "Dropbox Business"...

I usually use this blog when I write new posts. Occasionally I re-publish selected posts on our Medium channel . Lately, however, I've observed myself publishing on Medium first, for the simple reason that the authoring experience is much better on Medium than on Blogger, especially when you're including a lot of pictures.  What can we learn from this? You can lure users away from an old product by offering a much better UX. A bit better isn't enough to get over inertia and to offset switching costs. It has to be 10x better and cheaper , like Sarah Tavel said. (When I say "10x better" I don't mean it literally but figuratively because in most cases I don't know how the superiority of one user experience over another can be measured quantitatively.) If the incumbent benefits from network effects, it's much more difficult. A complete migration from Blogger to Medium would be very painful for me because like you, most of my readers are here – and many ...

I’m very excited to announce that we’re looking for a new Associate. In all modesty, I think that for a young, smart person who’s passionate about startups and technology, an Associate role at Point Nine is one of the fastest ways to learn, build your network, and advance your career. Case in point: Rodrigo, who started as an Associate four years ago, is now a Partner at Point Nine ; Fabian is running his own fund ; Nicolas became a “30 under 30” and is now VP at Insight ; and Mathias is now GM Germany at Uniplaces. As I wrote last time when we were adding an Associate to our team, I'm pretty sure that it took me more than 10 years to get the expertise and network which you'll get during three years in this job. If you’re interested, here are all the details . If you know somebody who could be a great fit, please pass on the link or let me know . Thank you very much in advance! PS: As you may or may not know, the Associate role at Point Nine has historically been called “Tru...

While doing some research for another post I just stumbled on this excellent overview from Pacific Crest on the churn rates of publicly listed SaaS companies. I’ve seen posts with churn benchmarks of public SaaS companies before, but this one is by far the most comprehensive collection I’ve seen and I think it’s very useful. What’s maybe even more interesting than taking a look at the numbers themselves is to see how different companies define churn (or the inverse, retention). Since there is no official US-GAAP definition of churn or retention, different companies use different ways to measure and report these metrics. And because public companies are under the scrutiny by the SEC, any non-GAAP metric they report must be accompanied by a razor-sharp definition. Most public SaaS companies report churn in the form of their dollar-based net retention rate, i.e. the inverse of net MRR/ARR churn (as opposed to account/logo churn), which compares the recurring revenue from a set of custome...

After a Clio Board Meeting last week I received the following email from Jack Newton, the company's amazing co-founder & CEO. Hi everyone, I'd like to experiment with requesting some 1:1 feedback on our board meetings. Please take 5 minutes and provide feedback through this Typeform: https://xxx.typeform.com/xxx... Cheers, Jack I thought this was a really great idea and worth sharing here. I removed the URL from Jack's Typeform but rebuilt it quickly so that you can check it out: powered by Typeform If you're not getting feedback from your Board members you're missing out on something. Preparing and holding Board meetings is a big time investment, and making them really effective isn't easy . So you should try to get as much value out of them as possible. Sending out a post-meeting Typeform is, of course, not the only way to get feedback: In some Boards that I'm a member of we sometimes do an executive session between the CEO and the directors. Someti...