[lettergram]

At least for our product, we only go for the largest corporations (think top 1000 companies in the world).

IMO it’s way easier in many respects to network and build the product — At least for us.

Simple way I think about it - I have max 1000 people to make happy. If I can get 10 to be super happy, the other 1000 will follow. If I can get 3-5 happy we’re a $100m company, 30-50 a $1B company; etc.

It helps for us because I know a lot of these folks already, so it’s basically just making a product my friends love.

[magicalhippo]

> It helps for us because I know a lot of these folks already

I'm not in sales, so to me this sounds a bit like that "how to draw an owl" meme.

Would this strategy work if you didn't have lots of friends high up in those companies?

I'm just recalling one of my colleagues at sales who had just been in the second 1 hour meeting with multiple regional directors of some big company, trying to sell our SaaS product for $50/month for use in one of their local departments...

[lettergram]

It really depends on what you’re selling.

I found a cofounder who knew the space super well (one of these folks). It’s a niche market, for people who manage massive budgets. We can probably save millions per year right out of the gate, so it’s an easy pitch.

“Hey, we designed this for you. Here’s how we save you $X per year. Plus here’s some references. We want $Y and you’ll save $Z net.”

Now, I chose this field because I had tried other side projects and businesses.

Worst one I had was a website called easy-a.net - we FOIA requested universities for the grades for every class for 5-10 years. We could then predict people’s grades & how much effort it’d take for a given semester based on a small sample of real data from that user.

Anyway, we had idk 250k students using it across 10-12 universities. Was crazy to see my whole campus try it out and I basically tossed it together in a night. That said, made no money. Trying to charge was pointless — college students don’t pay. Loved the product; no real net revenue (broke even)

I’ve done that a few times with problems I’ve had. And simply put, I didn’t want to do sales this go around (though it’s still necessary). This time I just picked super high value customer & figure out how to maximize value to them.

I started with who I wanted to help, then figured out their biggest issues.

[neodypsis]

What kind of software would that be that yields 20M / year per customer?

[SgtBastard]

Not the commenter you’re replying to, but you maybe be mixing figures.

I read $100m and $1B as enterprise value, not ARR.

While the long term ARR multiple to EV is ~5.5x for SaaS, I could see niches where that approaches 10x.

So 5 customers, being billed 2m / year each at a 10x multiple, gives you a $100m valuation.

[lettergram]

+1

[Rastonbury]

Sounds like Snowflake or perhaps Palantir