Bessemer Ventures collected a great set of learnings around what it takes to build a successful SaaS (“Software-as-a-Service”) company: Bessemer’s Top 10 Laws for Being “SaaS-y”. It’s excellent!
-
Your key monthly business metrics are: CMRR (Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue), Churn, and Cash flow – “Bookings” is for suckers
-
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer LifeTime Value (CLTV) are the best indicators of long term value creation
-
Tune before you scale: the Sales Learning Curve is even more critical for SaaS and it takes at least $300k MRR to climb it. Stop at three sales reps until at least two of them are making $100K MRR quotas
-
Separate your “hunters” and “farmers” and pay them all on CMRR growth [My blog post about it]
-
SaaS is a whole new ecosystem where traditional IT channels don’t work – Focus your business development efforts on business services channels, but you will need to sell directly for a long time as these new set of partners are not easy to ramp-up
-
By definition, your sales prospects are online – Savvy online marketing is a core competence (sometimes the only one) of every successful SaaS business
-
Stay local – Prove your business in North America first. Only after reaching $1M in CMRR should you consider hiring European sales and services execs behind customer demand. Save Asia for post-IPO
-
Single instance, multi-tenant, single datacenter – Have only one version of the code in production. Really. “Just say no” to on-premise deployments
-
The most important part of Software-as-a-Service isn’t “Software” it’s “Service”!
-
Be prepared to cross the desert – SaaS requires R&D and sales expense up front for a multi-year stream of revenue, so it demands enough investment capital to fund 4+ years of runway. Load up for the long trip and pace your consumption of calories!
-
BONUS LAW: You can ignore one of these, but not more than two. Great companies innovate, but pick your battles!
-
Click here to see the slideshow of the Bessemer 10 Laws for Being “SaaS-y”
Thank you Bessemer!
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post. It’s always refreshing to read a well written piece.
Fantastic data! Completely formulaic and relevant. Thank you for sharing.
Wonderful post. Lots of great info.
Yep, this one was really worth sharing. Glad you all appreciated it!
Aaron: great post. Is there anything on the list that is really SaaS specific? It sure seems like these laws could be applied to any product that is a service. Something to ponder.
I’d add just one more based on the very public learning experiences of the folks over at Salesforce: you need to work very, very hard to make sure that your service is reliable. You’ll be punished for any and all outages.
- Dr. Jim Anderson
The Accidental Negotiator Blog
“Learn The Secrets To Successful Sales Negotiation – Close the Deal Every Time!”