It's Never Too Late to Go Upmarket

Over the weekend we put out a post on SaaStr about "How to Build a $100 Billion SaaS Company". While Salesforce is the only $100b+ SaaS company today, there are ~15 more gunning for $100b in valuation, which means $100b isn't "outlier" status anymore. It's achievable.

Check it out here:

One thing I learned putting the post together is how much Salesforce is still accelerating in its bigger accounts.

While its most mature CRM business is only growing in the teens on its own, its $20m+ ACV customers are growing 70%!!

It's not just Salesforce.

Shopify announced it had crossed 1,000,000 customers (!!) last week.

But the fast growing segement there? Its largest, "Shopify Plus" customers:

Shopify's biggest accounts have grown from almost 0% of their revenue 5 years ago to 27% today. And more importantly, that's up from 24% just a year ago. So the Bigger Customers at Shopify, like Salesforce, are out accelerating the rest.

One big difference between Salesforce and Shopify: both started SMB, but Salesforce quickly tilted to the enterprise. Shopify, by contrast, waited over a decade before taking bigger customers seriously as a distinct product line and segment.

We can see the same story at RingCentral, which also waited almost a decade to grow from SMBs into an enterprise play:

The lesson? Most of us end up going upmarket.

Sometimes, we're in a rush to do it early. Sometimes we wait a decade like Shopify + Ringcentral + (maybe even Mailchimp, which seems to be just starting now).

It's never too late. Learn from your biggest customers. Listen to them. And decide if you want to follow them further upmarket.

And if you aren't ready now, still learn. You may be ready to go more upmarket next year. Or even in a decade.

Jason + Team SaaStr