sutton020

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...

Founder salaries are not a topic I’ve had to spend a lot of time with so far. I usually just “OK” them, since the founders we are working with are all super reasonable people who carefully weigh how much they need against the interests of the company – their company. But sometimes founders ask me for a suggestion or some guidance because they are uncertain as to what is fair, and so I thought it might be useful to create a simple model. Here it is . The model calculates the founder salary based on three drivers: stage, family situation, and location. Stage Unless you’re in the fortunate position to generate revenues almost from day 1 or to raise a sizable seed round right at the start you’ll probably not be able to pay yourself any salary at all, at least in the first few months, for the simple fact that the company doesn’t have any money to spend. If you raise a small angel or friends & family round, you’ll probably want to spend it on other things than founder salaries. Once you’...