Sam Jacobs

and we're not immune, right?

So since the summer of 2020 run, growth rate of public SaaS businesses have been cut in half.

The cost of acquire, and I just actually did a webinar today, this is the mean, right?

So on average, there's been a dramatic increase in the cost of sales and marketing spend to acquire one new dollar of annual recurring revenue.

If you take out some of the best performing companies from the cohort that did this analysis,

which includes companies with incredible net revenue retention like Snowflake, it's actually there are certain public companies that are spending $5 and $6 in sales and marketing investment to acquire $1 of new ARR.

So we're in a dramatically different environment, and the cost of getting somebody's attention and converting them to a customer has conservatively doubled over the last couple of years, if not tripled or grown 4X.

while net revenue retention has also declined.

And that's particularly problematic because all of these fundamental assumptions are assumptions that underpin the idea from a couple of years ago that SaaS businesses and software businesses are worth

10 times revenue.

And we used to hear that that was a conservative valuation, and you could be valued on a multiple of revenue.

In today's environment, the actual multiple is five to six times.

And that's provided that you have growth.

So even though we're moving away from a growth at any cost world to a world where efficiency is prized, the reality is that growth is still worth 3x more than profit.

But even in that environment, it's not worth anything close to what it used to be worth.

And that's because the technology sector, but particularly the SaaS industry, has faced so many different headwinds.

So we're moving, and again, I'm sorry about the formatting, but on the left it should say investor value, and on the right it says customer value.

So what do successful companies need to do in this environment?

And none of this is gonna be rocket science, but I wanna make sure.

that it's 35 slides and 14 more minutes.