Founders constantly ask how other SaaS companies are doing.
And it doesn’t matter that all the businesses are different, hardly any two are comparable, and that the answer is always “it depends”.
For those who find “it depends” not enough – good news!
You are probably already familiar with this resource. If not, you’ll be happy to learn about it. Barametrics, a company providing metrics, forecasting and engagement tools, provides real-life aggregated data from over 800 startups using their tools, mostly SaaS companies.
They call it Open Benchmarks.
What can you find there?
Cohort Analysis
To make it easier to compare your business to other similar businesses, data is divided into different cohorts, based on average revenue per user, from under $10 to $250 and up.
For each cohort, you’ll find valuable stats, like lifetime value and revenue churn, revenue growth etc.
Pricing Models
If you’re trying to figure out the best pricing for your business, you’ll find plenty of interesting data here too. You’ll be able to see what price points are being used most often, what numbers are working the best, and it’s even broken down into monthly and annual pricing models.
Where and why charges are failing
As a bonus, you can also see where and why credit card charges are failing.
If you already are charging users, especially on a recurring basis, you’re probably all too familiar with a generic “Declined” reason. It constitutes about 2/3 of the failing reasons, with “Too many tries” at distant number two.
Real data from real companies
If aggregated numbers are nice, having all the granular info about specific companies is even better.
Some of the companies using Baremetrics decided to make their data public, embracing transparency and openness by sharing their metrics with everyone.
You can find the companies and their data on the Open Startups page.
Some of the larger and better-known companies include (links are to their stats pages):
- Buffer ($1.6m+ monthly revenue)
- ConvertKit ($1.3m+ monthly revenue)
- Hubstaff ($400k+ monthly revenue)
- Baremetrics ($100k+ monthly revenue)
And many other companies, from large to small.
Conclusion
You can’t do any better than this. Aggregated data to see where you stand in the landscape of companies similar to yours, in terms of revenue, pricing, lifetime value, churn etc.
And then, even more granularly and with all the details, full data of many individual companies. You can see how they do, how they grow, how their users behave, their churn, even failed charges or coupons redeemed.
If you ever feel the need to compare yourself to anyone, you should be able to find all the guilty pleasures here. No need to go anywhere else.
And if you want to learn more about churn rate benchmarks, I wrote more about it in Churn rate benchmarks: How high is too high?
Baremetrics Open Benchmarks
PS. Once you’ve compared yourself to everybody and anybody, don’t forget to do, not just measure. Let the others look at your data and wonder “How did they do that?”
