sutton020

Last week, we've held our third annual SaaS Founder Meetup in San Francisco. Following the first PNC SaaS Founder Meetup in San Francisco in 2012 and the second one in 2013 in Berlin, this has become a tradition for us: Once a year we're bringing together the founders of our SaaS portfolio companies, co-investors and leading experts for a full day of intensive knowledge sharing. To be precise, it was one day in 2012 and 2013. This year we've extended it to two full days. It's hard to describe in a few words how awesome it was and how much we and our portfolio founders have been able to learn thanks to all the amazing speakers who were willing to share their insights at the event. I'll try to follow-up with some additional notes later, but for now here are some visual impressions from the meetup: Impressions from the PNC SaaS Founder Meetup 2014 from Point Nine Capital Huge thanks to all attendees and a special thanks to all of our incredible speakers and pan...

People often ask me questions like: "How many people can I expect to sign up on my SaaS website?" "My conversion rate is x% – is that good or bad?" "My churn rate is x% – is that OK?" "What kind of growth rates are VCs looking for?" While we have quite a lot of data from our SaaS portfolio companies and from SaaS startups pitching to us (which I'll be happy to share, in aggregated form, in another post), I thought it would be good to increase our sample size by asking a larger number of SaaS startups to provide us with some key metrics: SaaS metrics benchmarking survey If you're a SaaS startup I'd love you to participate in the survey. I kept it as short and simple as possible, focusing on three of the most important metrics for early-stage SaaS startups: Visitor-to-trial signup rate Signup-to-paying conversion rate Account churn rate As soon as I have a meaningful number of submissions I'll share the results (in aggregated form) ...

Some time ago my friend (and co-investor in Clio , Jobber and Unbounce ) Boris Wertz wrote a great blog post about "the only 2 ways to build a $100 million business" . I'd like to expand on the topic and suggest that there are five ways to build a $100 million Internet company. This doesn't mean that I disagree with Boris' article. I think our views are pretty similar, and for the most part "my" five ways are just a slightly different and more granular look at Boris' two ways. The way I look at it can be nicely illustrated in this way: The y-axis shows the average revenue per account (ARPA) per year. In the x-axis you can see how many customers you need, for a given ARPA, to get to $100 million in annual revenues. Both axes use a logarithmic scale. To build a Web company with $100 million in annual revenues*, you essentially need: 1,000 enterprise customers paying you $100k+ per year each; or 10,000 medium-sized companies paying you $10k+ per year...