Tag: SaaS

G2 Aiming for $100M ARR by End of Year

Nathan Latka interviews Godard Abel

On Nathan Latka’s podcast, Godard Abel, CEO of G2, said that he expects to hit $100 million ARR before the end of the year.  G2, which raised $157M at a $1.1B valuation in June 2021 (Series D), grew at 40% over the past year.  At the time of its Series D, its Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) was $55 million.

G2 maintains a product/vendor taxonomy for its review site, with vendors identifying their product categories.  “If you’re a software vendor, you want it to be right on G2,” said Abel.  That way, its seven million monthly visitors can properly discover a vendor’s offerings.

Along with categorizing vendors, G2 editors determine the key features for each product category and let customers rate these capabilities.

The number of G2 listings grew 48% over the last year.  Its fifty-person research team collaborates with its “community of vendors” to maintain vendor and product profiles.

G2 also licenses its taxonomy to partners and investors.  For example, ServiceNow licenses the G2 taxonomy for its ITS Management tool for categorizing apps.  Abel also noted that around fifty of the “World’s leading SaaS investors” have licensed G2 data to help understand the SaaS competitive landscape and adjacent markets.

G2 has additional revenue streams.  It offers second-party opted-in intent data and a G2 Track service for tracking SaaS expenses.

Nathan Latka interviews SaaS CEOs and posts them to his podcast. This data is then loaded into his database of SaaS metrics. As he regularly reinterviews executives, there is often historical ARR and employment data. The database is a freemium service with limited free data.

G2 Revenue (Source: GetLatka.com)

SaaS Sales Efficiency

RBC calculated sales efficiency for 72 public SaaS companies and found the average sales efficiency at .8X, meaning that public SaaS companies returned 80 cents for every dollar spent on sales and marketing in the previous year.

Sales Efficiency is defined as the revenue growth rate over a period divided by sales and marketing expense margin in the previous period:

According to OpenView Partners SaaS benchmarking report, “Sales and marketing spend peaks at 50% of ARR at the expansion stage.  Too many companies underinvest in sales productivity, saddling them with huge costs without the ROI…You should be carefully monitoring your sales efficiency and looking for ways to improve or maintain it year-over-year.  Look out for the ‘leaky bucket’ problem, where you spend significant sums to acquire new customers, but then they churn shortly thereafter (churn bait).“

As a general rule, firms with a sales efficiency less than 0.5 do not have a “sustainable investable growth model,” wrote startup advisor Anna Talerico in SaaSX.  A ratio between 0.5 and 1.0 is “much better;” however, “while this isn’t necessarily capital efficient (which would make it a hard ratio for a bootstrapped company to maintain for any length of time), it does indicate sales & marketing efficiency and many investors view this as acceptable.” Better yet, firms with a ratio above one have a “strong sales efficiency and a capital-efficient growth model.”  However, when the ratio is significantly above one, the firm may be underinvesting in sales and marketing and “leaving growth on the table.”

Gartner Forecasts Robust Growth in Global Public Cloud Services

Gartner forecasted continued growth of global public cloud services.  The analyst firm projected 17.5% growth in 2019 to $214.3 billion.  The fastest growth rate will be in Infrastructure as a Service which will jump 27.5% to $38.9 billion.  Platform as a Service is expected to rise by 21.8% this year.

“Cloud services are definitely shaking up the industry,” said Gartner Research VP Sid Nag.  “At Gartner, we know of no vendor or service provider today whose business model offerings and revenue growth are not influenced by the increasing adoption of cloud-first strategies in organizations.  What we see now is only the beginning, though.  Through 2022, Gartner projects the market size and growth of the cloud services industry at nearly three time the growth of overall IT services.”

Gartner research found that a third of organizations listed cloud investments as a top three investment priority.  Thirty percent of technology providers new software investments are shifting from cloud-first to cloud only.  Thus, SaaS and subscription cloud models will continue to replace license-based software sales.

SaaS Market Valuations

Venture Capital and Private Equity firms place a higher valuation on companies with recurring revenues. In Q1, software companies with a SaaS model received multiples of seven times revenue while other software companies received a multiple of 6.1.

“Any firm with recurring revenue is extremely attractive to investors,” said Rohit Kulkarni, head of research at SharesPost. “The subscription model translates to greater visibility of revenues, less volatility.”

According to PitchBook Data, Software-as-a-Service deals grew 217% between 2010 and 2016.

“SaaS is a more predictable and reliable revenue stream than if you had to go out and sell the software — the perpetual license model,” said Peter Fair, managing director at Golub Capital LLC.

Michael Larsen of Cambridge Associates said that SaaS models provide a “better measuring stick” as “these companies are moving toward more attractive, more readily transparent ways of selling products and they have attractive, meaningfully recurring revenues.” Employing a SaaS model does not prevent firms from failing but “it creates a more intensely analytical and measurable way of determining how a company is doing.”

For example, subscription firms that employ discounted offers to lure new customers may suffer from churn and see their business model unravel quickly. Subscription length needs to be carefully factored into valuing a firm and estimating its viability.