Christoph Janz

While there are only a few SaaS companies with an ARPA of around $500,000 (not quite a whale yet, but definitely much larger than an elephant) across the entire customer base (Veeva, Workday, Demandware, Opower,...), there are quite a few SaaS companies with a significant whale customer segment. Most public SaaS companies, unfortunately, don’t report any data broken down by different customer segments, but it’s pretty safe to assume that Salesforce, Box, Zuora, and a number of other companies derive a significant portion of their revenue from whale customers. One of the underlying reasons is that in order to get very large, you have to get your churn rate close to zero (or better yet, achieve negative churn), which is usually not possible if you’re selling only to SMBs; the other reason is that outbound sales doesn’t work if your ARPA isn’t large enough, which sort of limits your addressable market to companies that are more or less pro-actively looking for a solution like yours. And second, even if there is a statistically significant clustering of mid-market and enterprise SaaS companies at the $100M ARR mark, the data also shows that it’s possible to get there with a low ARPA!

Thoughts on Internet startups, SaaS and early-stage investing from Christoph Janz @ Point Nine Capital.

Thoughts on Internet startups, SaaS and early-stage investing from Christoph Janz @ Point Nine Capital.