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Where is the SaaS world relative to how far it can go? With valuations of as-a-service companies and all-time highs or close to it, and more and more startups leveraging this model to serve an ever-larger number of consumers, I wondered how much more business is there to capture?

Let’s try to estimate. We do have enough data to get a sense of total as a service penetration. Last year, Zylo published a study suggesting that the average business spends about 10,000 dollars per year on as-a-service (aaS) software.

When a new leader joins a startup, their impact hinges on their ability to build their teams. Whether you manage a team of engineers, a team of regional sales managers, or the company, your first responsibility is to hire and successfully manage the seven people who will form your leadership team.

Managers who hire those seven people - either from talent inside the company or outside the company - will be more effective. Why?

On Tuesday, September 15th at 10 AM PT, Redpoint will welcome Kimbre Lancaster as the next co-host of Office Hours. Kimbre is the former Director of Global Events and Field Marketing at Gremlin where she managed the industry sponsorships program, Gremlin’s produced conferences (Chaos Conf, Failover Conf) and the new remote field program. Prior, she built and scaled the programs at both Split and Scalyr.

How do you tell if your sales team and marketing team are working well together? There’s a simple diagnostic that I’ve come to use. Compare the slopes of marketing’s lead generation efforts to sales’ bookings trajectory.

The marketing pipeline trend should be the pipeline for this quarter, pipeline that’s available to close (ATC). ATC is a concept I learned from Lambert Billet, the CRO at Looker. It means the prospect will buy this quarter. Sometimes, teams report aggregate pipeline generated, but prospects ready to buy 12 months from now aren’t relevant.

Asana filed their S-1 this week. Asana builds productivity and task management solutions. When they launched, their vision of eliminating email through task management made big waves in the market. Today, the company is a massively successful SaaS business and another example of the flywheel business model that creates demand at the individual user and leverages that interest to sell department and company-wide contracts.

Asana competes with SmartSheet, another publicly traded productivity company. In this analysis, I’ve compared the metrics of the two companies at the time of IPO. Also, I’m trying a new format for these analyses that you might call a baseball card analysis, rather than a series of charts. Let me know which you prefer.

Demand generation limits growth. To scale, a company must find customers in ever larger numbers.

The ideal scenario is one where purely external signals confer a prospect’s propensity to buy. A prospect experiences hypergrowth is perfect example. Massive headcount growth presages large software purchases and expansion. A company anoints a new department head catalyzing change.

The more external the signal of lead quality, the easier the demand generation task will be. External signals are powerful proxy metrics.

Rippling published their fundraising deck. Within it, Adil Syed, (a former Redpoint VC!), introduced a gem of a new metric: month zero cash-on-cash payback. It’s not a metric one sees very often in pitch decks. But it’s another metric to add to the toolkit.

Month Zero Cash-on-Cash Payback is a mouthful. Let’s dub it ZCP for Zero Cash Payback to save us from the more evident but unwieldy MZCoCP.

On Wednesday, August 26th at 9 AM Pacific, Redpoint Office Hours will welcome Tyler McNally, the VP of Customer Experience at Gainsight. My partner, Jamin Ball, will be leading the discussion. He provides weekly data driven analysis of SaaS companies on his blog Clouded Judgement.

During the presentation, we will cover customer success trends and how they impact early stage B2B SaaS companies, share our point of view on how early-stage customer success drives growth, and provide a “game plan” that focuses on the key things to get right from the get-go.

After I wrote a post on the health of the seed market during COVID, AngelList Venture emailed me saying they observed different patterns in their early-stage data and offered to collaborate. This data set is unique because it records transacted deals on the AngelList platform.

The first post highlighted a 40% reduction in seed investment in Q2 2020 and 42% increase in Series A investment, quarter over quarter. AngelList data shows different patterns.

In 2017, I wrote the post Managers Must be Insane to Brainstorm in Groups. If you’ve been a group meeting for brainstorming, you’ll identify with the three problems reasearchers identified with in-person brainstorms:

1. Only one person can speak at a time.
2. Many people don’t participate and free ride hiding in the back of the room, unengaged.
3. Some attendees are glossophobes: they fear speaking in public. And you’ll resonate with the frustration of this meeting format.

Remote work changes this for brainstorming meetings and collaboration broadly defined. The secret is Google Docs.