Jason M. Lemkin
Co-Founder and CEO of EchoSign from inception through tens of millions in cash-flow positive SaaS revenue and acquisition by Adobe Systems Inc.
Jason then served as Vice President, Web Services at Adobe, where EchoSign was named the most successful acquisition of 2011-12, posting 199% YoY growth.
The False Choice of Prepaid vs. Monthly Contracts
In scaling the cash-flow side of SaaS, there’s almost nothing more powerful than annual contracts combined with prepaid cash. It’s just such a huge benefit. You get all the cash up-front, and your churn almost by definition goes down. Because the earliest chance the customer has to churn is 12 months hence. So get pre-paid annual deals whenever […]
5 Interesting Learnings from Slack at $1B in ARR
So this 5 Interesting Learnings post is a bit bittersweet. We’ve recently checked in with a bunch of our Cloud and SaaS favorites as they cross $1B in ARR: 5 Interesting Learnings from Zendesk. As It Crosses $1B in ARR 5 Interesting Learnings from HubSpot as It Approaches $1 Billion in ARR 5 Interesting Learnings […]
Eating My Own SaaStr Dogfood: Why I Invested in RainforestQA
To keep me honest (in this age of misremembering just which helicopter one was on), I want to continue our small series re: investments where I’ve put more that $1m into a SaaS company, and why I did it as examples of the SaaStr themes and learnings. My most recent investment here is a company called RainforestQA. […]
That Super-Successful VP of Sales. Great? Or Just Lucky?
I get sent this resume to review all the time. Director+ of Sales at Yammer / Salesforce / Successfactors / Pick Your Brand Name SaaS Company. Took Hot Start-Up from $0 to $30m as VPS from Day 0. Was there “early” through IPO and did amazing things. That all sounds impressive, for sure. But was […]
At Even Just $1m ARR — You Need to Stop Doing Low ROI Things
In SaaS, I think one of the biggest traps you can get yourself into as a founder is doing Low ROI things for one minute longer than you have to. Of course, this is true in all start-ups. But quickly in SaaS it becomes worse. Why? Because they are more functional areas to handle, earlier. […]
Roundtrip Revenue: Probably, Just Do It.
If you’ve been around since the Web 1.0 days, a certain phrase may send shivers up your spine — “Roundtrip Revenue.” People went to jail at AOL for this, folks, overstating revenue by as much as $1 billion that wasn’t really real. It was just matched against AOL purchases, making the revenues in essence nonexistent. […]
Ok, We’ve Shut Registration Down at 1,850 Folks for The SaaStr Annual. What You Need to Know.
Phew. Ok well we went a bit over capacity, but we’ll have 1,850 SaaS founders, CEOs, execs and entrepreneurs at the (first?) SaaStr Annual this Thursday in San Francisco at The Regency Ballroom. A few things to know, if your coming, and if you’re not: > If you’re coming to the day sessions, come early […]
Why CAC is Usually Irrelevant in Early-ish Stage SaaS Companies (vs. B2C Where It’s Critical)
I recently meet with a very high-growth “XaaS” company. Not software as a service, but one that provides some version of humans-as-a-service. And after huge top-line growth, they were struggling now with CAC. They’d fueled their hyper growth with a combination of Adwords and Groupons and Facebook Ads and Twitter Cards. And when that party […]
How to Ensure Your First 2 Sales Reps Actually Work Out
A long-time reader, first time caller recently wrote in to ask a question that pretty much everyone asks some variant of: If you had to force rank these items in terms of what we should primarily be looking for in these first sales reps, how would you rank them? – has sold SaaS before (as […]
All These Enterprise IPOs: Why It’s Just Getting Good. Why These are The Best of Times for SaaS.
Reading the tech press you might get the sense that The Enterprise is something they are sort of forced to write about because it’s having a good run. We had a great Consumer run, a nice set of Multi-Billion Dollar deals around Social Networking, a WhatsApp/Snapchat fad around mobile messaging, an Alibaba, Instacart, Fab-ulous e-commerce […]
