The SaaS Retention Report: The AI Churn Wave
ChartMogul
Aggregated retention data from roughly 3,500 subscription companies on ChartMogul's platform, breaking net and gross revenue retention down by segment, price tier and AI-native versus traditional SaaS, with medians and quartiles rather than anecdotes. Retention is the metric the topic note cares most about and where founders' intuitions are worst; this shows how far medians sit below the 120% NRR figures repeated in blog posts, and how sharply retention varies by price tier.
More resources on SaaS Business & Metrics
The SaaS Playbook: Build a Multimillion-Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital
Rob Walling, founder of Drip and TinySeed, covers the operating decisions of a bootstrapped SaaS: which metrics matter at small scale, pricing and packaging structure, marketing channel selection, hiring order and the founder mistakes that stall growth.
Growth Unhinged
Weekly newsletter from Kyle Poyar, formerly the operating partner behind OpenView's SaaS Benchmarks survey, publishing original data on pricing and packaging changes, product-led funnel conversion rates, free-trial versus freemium outcomes and go-to-market efficiency at named startups.
Five Years Later: Five Ways to Build a $100 Million SaaS Business
Point Nine partner Christoph Janz plots average revenue per account against customer count, showing the five distinct business shapes that reach $100M ARR - from self-serve mice to enterprise whales - and what each demands of acquisition channels. The clearest mental model for why ARPA determines everything downstream - which pricing tier you can support, which acquisition channel can ever pay back CAC, how many customers you need.
Scaling to $100 Million
Bessemer's benchmark study of 200+ cloud companies in its portfolio, reporting growth rate, net retention, gross margin, burn and valuation multiples at each ARR stage from $1M to beyond $100M, with a downloadable benchmarking template. This is the actual benchmark table investors judge against, segmented by ARR stage rather than quoted as a single industry average - the missing empirical half of Skok's formulas.
16 Startup Metrics
Four a16z partners disambiguate the terms founders and investors routinely conflate: bookings versus revenue, recurring versus total revenue, TCV versus ACV, gross profit, LTV, CAC variants, churn and burn, plus the chart tricks that hide weak numbers. Complements Skok by attacking definitional sloppiness rather than formulas - it is the reference for what a metric legitimately means before you benchmark it, and the section on misleading chart presentation teaches readers to audit numbers instead of accepting them.
SaaS Metrics 2.0 - A Guide to Measuring and Improving What Matters
Skok, a Matrix Partners GP and four-time founder, defines the metrics a subscription business runs on. The foundational text for the whole topic. Derives LTV, CAC, CAC payback and the 3:1 LTV:CAC and sub-12-month payback heuristics from first principles rather than asserting them, and explains the cash-flow trough that makes SaaS structurally different.