Filed under: saas
16 storiesThe archive, indexed. Every story carries its tags at the foot of the page.
MarinaControl splits into two apps and drops in-app upgrades
Sami Bessadi built one platform for marinas and yacht owners. He has now separated it into two products and stopped selling the marina version like a consumer subscription.
SaaStr runs on three people and 20 agents. Here is where they broke
Jason Lemkin has published an account of every AI agent SaaStr runs, including the one that emailed 1,000 founders from a banned address. The useful part is the failures.
Two $1.3bn exits in five weeks, both priced under 3x ARR
Bending Spoons has agreed to buy Miro at a $1.355bn enterprise value, five weeks after announcing Airtable at $1.285bn. About a third of the combined price was money the two companies already had in the bank.
Miro sells for $1.36bn, 92% below its 2021 price
Bending Spoons is buying the whiteboard company in cash. The 2021 mark was $17.5bn, and it is the second such deal in a month.
Kleo built the audience first, then the product
Lara Acosta and her co-founders reached $1m in annual recurring revenue in six months without paid ads, according to an account published by Inc. The order of operations is the lesson.
Fastest-growing SaaS added 133% more staff; mid-tier halved hiring
ICONIQ's latest dataset splits software hiring into three playbooks. The companies growing 50% to 100% cut headcount growth from 46% to 25% in a single year.
Kroll: growth pays 3x, margin above 25% pays nothing
Kroll's Summer 2026 software data puts public companies growing above 20% at 7.2x revenue and shrinking ones at 2.4x. Profitability barely moves the number.
Mailchimp added everything, then Intuit stopped counting it
A product that won by doing one job now has its numbers stripped out of its parent's growth rate. The roadmap decision that got it there was made in 2019.
How 141 accounts got re-tiered in three days, not a quarter
Backstory's customer success lead described the exercise at SaaStr AI Day: eight signals cut to four, four connectors instead of five teams, and one signal that was scoring the wrong way round.
ServiceTitan cuts off Podium after nine years, with 30 days' notice
Roughly 1,000 shared contractors lost the integration in the middle of peak HVAC season. None of them were party to the agreement that governed it.
Quote double your biggest deal ever, and watch where it breaks
Jason Lemkin's exercise for founders going upmarket: take the next prospect that looks like your largest customer, ask for twice your highest price, and pay attention to what the deal demands of you.
Atlassian starts billing Loom's watchers, and deletes the growth loop
Loom's free viewer seats inside paying accounts are being converted to full paid seats automatically. Four acquirers have run the same free-tier cut inside two years, and the defaults tell you who understood their funnel.
Airtable sells for $1.28bn, having raised $1.4bn
Bending Spoons is buying the spreadsheet-database company for cash, four and a half years after a private valuation above $11bn. The sale price is less than the money investors put in.
Mailchimp sold for $12bn without raising a round
Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius built an email tool as a side project inside their web design agency. Twenty years later Intuit bought it for about $12 billion.
Airtable sells at 2.7x ARR, a ninth of its 2021 mark
Bending Spoons is buying Airtable at a $1.285bn enterprise value on roughly $480m of recurring revenue. The company was worth $11.7bn in December 2021 and raised $1.4bn along the way.
One vendor in 30 asked how the product went. It cost $50
Jason Lemkin signed up for more than 30 APIs this year. Exactly one company sent a question instead of a sequence, and got a 400-word product spec back for the price of some credits.