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Insights On SaaS From The $32 million HubSpot Mega-VC Round
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OnStartups
Today’s big news is that my company HubSpot announced a major new round of venture financing. Details can be found in the non-clever, but descriptively titled “Sequoia, Google Ventures and Salesforce.com Invest $32 Million in HubSpot”. We could not hope for a better set of investors for this round, and we’re thrilled with the further marketing validation that this group of investors brings.
My co-founder, Brian Halligan and I have been thinking about the Software-as-aService (SaaS) industry for many years now. It started when we were classmates in grad school back at MIT. We consider ourselves eager students on the subject. As part of this most recent funding round, we dug into more details and want to share some of our insights, lessons learned and data with you. We’ll also share some of the same arguments we made to our new investors.
Lets start things off with a few fun data points.
* At the end of 2010, the median valuation of publicly traded SaaS companies was approximately 4.2x their revenue. (This median was 3.2x in 2009).
* The highest multiples were awarded to Salesforce.com (9.5x) and SuccessFactors (9.6x).
* Size matters. The market seems to value the larger revenue SaaS players more. The companies with revenue above the median had a 5.2x multiple vs. 3.3x for the companies with revenues below the median.
Lesson #1: Winners win big.
We’re going to argue that in the age of the Internet, winners win big. 10–15 years ago, in most technology categories, oligopolies formed. [To save you the Wikipedia lookup on oligopoly, it’s a market where a small number of sellers dominate an industry.] The #1 player in a category would get a decent chunk of the market-cap of the industry, but #2, #3 would have respectable portions too. Basically, the top 3–4 companies would have most of the market power. That seems to have changed. In modern technology-driven industries, over time, the #1 player ends up capturing a very large portion of the mindshare and marketshare.
To demonstrate this, try this short mental exercise. For the following leading companies, see if you can name the #2 player and #3 in their category. You have 30 seconds, I’ll wait:
- Amazon
- NetFlix
- VMWare
- eBay
Difficult, isn’t it? Chances are you struggled a bit with coming up with the #2 and failed completely to come up with #3. The point here is, as these tech categories evolved, the #1 player became so dominant that we often don’t even know who #2 and #3 are.
This is the main reason that HubSpot has been aggressively investing in growing our marketing platform and growing our marketshare and mindshare. Similar to how Salesforce.com dominates the CRM industry, we think there will be one emergent leader in the marketing software industry. We’re working hard to be that company.
Question: Doesn’t this reek of the late 1990s craziness when startups were spending heavily to acquire “mindshare”?
Yes, back in the dot-com days, many startups raised millions of dollars of capital to try and “get big fast” (and be first-mover). But, there’s a big difference today. In the dot-com bubble, companies were investing heavily to acquire “eyeballs” (or some other proxy for value). In our case (and in the case of many SaaS companies), we’re investing in growing revenue (not a proxy for revenue). Like Salesforce.com did in its early years, we understand the economics of our business. We understand how much it costs to acquire a customer, and the lifetime value of that customer. And, for us, Lifetime Value >> Customer Acquisition Cost. So, we don’t think it’s like the dot-com bubble at all. We’re investing capital into building a real business. At HubSpot, we not only have gross margins (gasp!) but they’re trending upwards month after month.
Question: OK, that’s great. But do you really need $50+ million in capital? It’s a SOFTWARE company!
That’s an excellent point. 3–4 years ago, when I was just starting, I thought it was somewhat crazy to even be raising $5 million for a software company (my prior two software startups were self-funded). I never would have believed we’d end up raising $50 million. But, I’ve since learned that it’s not only not crazy to raise this kind of capital, it’s quite possibly necessary. I’ve written about this (and other fun SaaS topics) before in the super-popular article “SaaS 101: 7 Simple Lessons From Inside HubSpot” (it’s been retweeted over 3,000 times!) But, the point bears repeating: SaaS companies often charge on a subscription basis — so cash comes in over time (often monthly). However, the acquisition cost is paid up front. The result is, even if you’re making margin on each sale, the faster a SaaS company is growing, the more cash it will need to fuel that growth.
Lets dig into this a bit deeper. Below is a chart that HubSpot created a while ago. It does something interesting — it looks at some prominent, publicly-held SaaS companies and then time-shifts them. The reason we did this analysis was we wanted to understand how our growth, cash burn and fund-raising matched up against other SaaS companies for which there was public data available.