State of SaaS — Q1 metrics and financials

We keep close track of every SaaS IPO in the past five years (since MongoDB in October 2017). Those 67 companies have finally all issued their Q1 2022 earnings. Below we summarize key financials and metrics. We will update this post when all Q2 earnings are released likely at the end of September.

Median quarterly revenue of $102mm. Median and average revenue of the 67 companies was $101.6mm and $166.8mm respectively. Annualized, that’s $406mm and $667mm respectively. These companies are quite large and note that revenue does include services which tends to be a small line item for most SaaS companies.

YOY growth of 36%. Median and average YOY growth was 36% and 41% respectively. Given the size of these SaaS businesses, that is fantastic growth.

1 in 5 generate an operating profit. Only 19% of the companies generate an operating profit. The median operating loss is -$19.8mm and average is -$33.4mm. Those are margins of -30% and -31% respectively.

Growing efficiently. Even though these companies generate a loss, they are adding new revenue at a very efficient pace. On median and average the companies are adding $0.75 and $1.44 of new revenue for every dollar of loss. That means so long as net dollar retention is over 100%, the payback on median is 1.3 years and 0.7 years respectively. That’s outstanding. So long as your payback period on new revenue is inside of 2 years and you’re retaining the client forever (100%+ NDR), your investors should be happy to see you burn cash to grow ARR.

Revenue to loss ratio. The median and average revenue to loss ratio is 2.83x and 5.55x respectively. In other words, for every dollar of loss, the companies generate at least $2.83 of revenue. It’s a healthy ratio given the efficient growth, strong net dollar retention, and quick payback periods of the growth.

Only 55% report their NDR. Of the 67 SaaS companies we follow, only 55% of them (37 companies) report their net dollar retention in their quarterly filing. Nearly none report gross dollar retention.

Median NDR of 120%. Median net dollar retention for those companies reporting is 120% and the average is 122%. These are very strong retention metrics in SaaS. If you’re anywhere near that, you’re doing very well. It means the current customer base is a source of growth, growing 20%+ YOY even after accounting for downgrades and churn.

Adjusted median NDR is 107%. Since only 55% of the SaaS companies we follow actually share their net dollar retention, this data is highly subject to reporting bias whereby some companies with poor net dollar retention simply may not be reporting it. As such, we believe the median net dollar retention of 120% needs to be adjusted down. We do this by assuming those that didn’t report net dollar retention are experiencing NDR of 100% (this may be generous). Assuming the 30 non-reporting companies have NDR of 100%, the median and average net dollar retention of the entire dataset is 107% and 112% respectively.

Sammy is the Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Blossom Street Ventures. Visit us at blossomstreetventures.com and email directly at sammy@blossomstreetventures.com. We invest in companies with run rate revenue of $3mm to $30mm, with year over year growth of 20% to 100%+ depending on revenue. We lead or follow in growth rounds and special situations like inside rounds, small rounds, rushed rounds, corralling investors with our term sheet, cap table clean up, and extensions. We can commit in 3 weeks and our check is $1mm to $4mm. Also visit https://blossomstreetventures.com/metrics/ for always up-to-date SaaS metrics.