Statistic Info

The WSJ published a recent chart of the 49 startups with billion dollar valuations. According to their research, there have never been as many privately held companies with such high valuations ever. The absolute number of these massively valuable companies alone is amazing. Ten years ago, most of them would have gone public by now. But what other insights can we tease from the data about these very special businesses?

First, the Billion Dollar Club (BDC) is nearly evenly split between Consumer and Enterprise companies, as the table below shows. I’ve noted the median dollars raised, the median valuation and the valuation efficiency in the table. The valuation efficiency is the valuation divided by the capital raised. This metric tries to answer the question, how much capital did the startup need to raise to achieve that valuation? This is a somewhat flawed metric[1] but I’m going to use it to compare the relative attractiveness of sectors[2].

Tomasz Tonguz

More Tech Services Stats

Smaller SAAS companies reported more frequent use of third-party providers as their primary application delivery method, while the largest companies were more likely to use self-managed servers

The metrics that matter for each sales funnel, vary from one company to the next depending on the steps involved in the funnel

83% of China’s digital shoppers made an online purchase in the past month

63 percent of the time, women receive lower salary offers than men for the same job at the same company

Is your SaaS business viable?

Unlike many other industries, if a software company grows at only 20%, it has a 92% chance of ceasing to exist within a few years

Internet Sales strategies have a significantly lower CAC of just $0.42

Non-renewal rates are higher than gross dollar churn rates and higher for shorter duration contracts

Revenue per employee has been steadily increasing in SAAS companies. It serves as a great longitudinal measuring stick to understand the increasing or decreasing efficiency of the business

If your Net Revenue Churn is high (above 2% per month) it is an indicator that there is something wrong in your business; this will become a major drag on growth

More Growth Strategy Stats

orecasts suggest that global blockchain technology revenues will experience massive growth in the coming years, with the market expected to climb to over 23.3 billion U.S. dollars in size by 2023.

In all SaaS businesses there will likely come a moment where they realize that not all customers are created equal

Internet Sales strategies have a significantly lower CAC of just $0.42

The very best SaaS businesses have a negative revenue churn rate and will have a Revenue Retention Rate of greater than 100%

It’s 4x cheaper to upsell existing customers than acquire new customers: costing just $0.28 to acquire an additional dollar of revenue

The best SAAS businesses have a LTV to CAC ratio that is higher than 3, sometimes as high as 7 or 8

When venture capitalists participate in seed rounds, the average round size is 3x larger

The 2015 median revenue growth rate was 44%, while the median projected growth rate for 2016 is 48%

Internet sales strategies are the only sales method to see a decline in CAC, dropping from $0.54 to $0.42 between 2014 and 2015

The average SaaS company spends just 6 hours determining their pricing strategy