Latka Blog
38 articles from the Latka blog in Marketing & Sales, newest first: Gomodus Revenue: What's Behind Modus's $35M ARR Claim in B2B Sales Enablement.
GetLatka records Modus (gomodus.com) at $33.6M implied ARR in February 2018 — seat math from the Latka tape, affirmed by co-founder and CEO Orrin Broberg. Five years later Bigtincan bought the company for US$9.5M. Here is what the record actually supports, and where it doesn't.
The founders were too profitable to take Eugene Levin's investment, so he took a job instead. His 2024 stage interview opens the machine — perpetual affiliate fees, three-axis expansion, an IPO-day faceplant — and history added the Adobe ending.
Colin Nederkoorn spent six hours of a twelve-hour outage drafting the letter that would end his company. It is one of nine mistakes he catalogues from Customer.io's run to $10 million ARR.
Mark Kilens went from HubSpot employee 140 to Drift to Airmeet, and the playbook he brought is almost entirely about people. Airmeet's own numbers tell a more complicated story.
vFairs 10x’d revenue in the pandemic year on inbound alone, bootstrapped, then stalled near $30M once events went back in person. Its CRO’s answer was deal size, not demand.
Animoto doesn’t publish its revenue. In October 2019, co-founder and chief video officer Jason Hsiao gave Nathan Latka the inputs — about 130,000 paying subscribers at roughly $250 a year, 20% growth, 25% annual revenue churn — and explained why a business run cash-flow neutral could wait 24 months to earn back what it spent on a customer.
Chris Cabrera founded Xactly in 2005, took it public in 2015 and sold it to Vista Equity Partners in 2017 for about $564 million. Two years on, he told Nathan Latka what private ownership changed: three acquisitions in fifteen months, 1,600 customers to cross-sell to, a Denver hub and longer contracts.
Zinrelo is profitable on $2 million raised and growing 50% a year. Latka spends several minutes arguing that its new self-service tier is a mistake.
Vivek Sharma told Nathan Latka that Movable Ink had passed about $40M in ARR on about $14M raised, including about $5M in a note from inside investors, by charging a CPM on email opens. Growth was strong, he said, but “not doubling.”
On tape in January 2023, Appbroda's Ashish Aggarwal declined to give a revenue figure. The $2M run rate got assembled anyway, out of three numbers he did give — and it is a slice of his customers' money, not a subscription line of his own.
Neil Lustig joined Sailthru as CEO seven years after it was founded, doubled the average contract, and explains the retention arithmetic that holds a $48M business together.
ConvertKit — now Kit — reached $25M revenue with no funding by engineering flywheels: creator stories that generated photography that generated backlinks that generated search traffic. Nathan Barry explained every gear on tape, including the profit-sharing spreadsheet.
Bruce Buchanan found his company inside his last one: airline checkout pages that doubled profitability when the right offer appeared after purchase. Rokt turned that thirty-second window into a $200M business — and explained its accounting more honestly than any founder we've taped.
Chorus charged almost nothing in 2016 and was carrying $8.4M a year later, with under $50,000 a month in paid spend and a head of marketing hired weeks before this tape. The channel was the product itself.
Wunderkind crossed $100M in annual revenue in early 2020, and Ryan Urban called $150M 'in the ballpark' in late 2021 — but the old version of this post got the dates and the claim wrong. Here is the sourced two-era revenue story, from BounceX to today.
Jason Zintak inherited four quota-carrying reps and 30 customers, and refused to hire more until attainment proved the product fit — then tripled bookings three years running at $1.10 per new dollar of ARR.
ActiveCampaign last confirmed $165M ARR in April 2021. By mid-2024 its CMO was citing $250M. Casey Hill told Latka in July 2024 how LinkedIn, podcast guesting, and performance-paid influencers power the growth program — and why the company won't confirm the number.
Surefire Local reached $26 million in ARR on about six million dollars of equity, by using debt at every step and refusing the dilution that comes with the alternative.
Sarah Bird told Latka in July 2019 that Moz’s 2018 revenue was just shy of $60M. Under it: 34,000 customers in two cohorts, self-serve churn that was steep for months and under 5% a year past month nine, and a 5.5x LTV to CAC that paid for the sales side.
The old headline said Upfluence hit $9 million ARR. On the December 2018 Latka tape, co-founder Kevin Creusy corrected that math: SaaS ARR was about $4 million, and agency services added about $2 million, for roughly $6 million in total revenue.
Mike Dickerson told Latka in December 2018 that ClickDimensions would close the year at about $40M ARR, sold almost entirely through 650 Microsoft Dynamics partners on a 21% margin. Here is the tape's math, what the old post got wrong, and what happened after Accel-KKR sold the company.
Gong said its ARR passed $500M in April 2026, up more than 55% year over year. Here is the dated revenue record from $6M in 2018 — what's company-stated, what's estimate, and where the numbers disagree.
Lenny's Newsletter is the benchmark every paid-newsletter founder measures against — but its ARR has only ever been disclosed in fragments. Here's the dated paper trail, assembled, with the arithmetic labeled.
HubSpot reported $3.13B in 2025 revenue, up 19%, with 288,706 customers at year end. It guided 2026 to $3.7B — and the market cut its valuation in half anyway. The filed numbers, year by year.
In August 2019 Rytis Lauris was billing 7,200 merchants $75 a month and had just turned down a strategic buyer. Five years later Omnisend was a $50M ARR company that had still raised only $1.6M.
“We sort of Forrest Gumped our way into business.” – Ben Chestnut, Co-Founder of Mailchimp More like “Forest Gumped” their way into…
“We are building a SaaS platform first that can stand alone as the best SaaS platform for sending emails in the industry…
Pavilion's revenue reached $11M as of March 2024. Sam Jacobs raised $25M from Elephant in 2021, burned $8M chasing growth, then cut headcount from 62 to 27 to get the community business back to cash-flow positive.
No sales team until $100M ARR, a killed $7 trial, programmatic short-form only, data on every surface: nine operating lessons from Patrick Stox's March 2024 SaaSOpen talk on how Ahrefs grew from a $300K bootstrap, each anchored to what was actually said.
2005: Launched Venture Voice Podcast, interviewing other founders 2009: Launched Muck Rack, initially as a platform for journalists to showcase their social…
Metadata.io reached $15M ARR in March 2024, per founder Gil Allouche — nine years after founding, and four after the bank balance hit $25. The dated timeline, the funding record where it disagrees with itself, and the four playbooks that drove the run.
Nathan Latka introduced him as bootstrapped. Jim Yu's first move on stage was to correct it — then explain the five-day calendar that carried BrightEdge from $22.59M to $100M with nothing new raised.
How does a SaaS founder make over $100m in profits in the last 12 years, yet very few people know of him?…
Ross Paquette's 2016 round put no money into Maropost — which is exactly why he could undo it. The cap table today is him and his option holders.
COVID killed the physical events SpotMe was built on and churned roughly half its 250 customers. Recurring revenue doubled anyway — because the disaster finished a services-to-SaaS conversion the company had only started in 2019.
In two years Rock Content's average contract went from $2,000 to $20,000. Diego Gomes did it by moving the small customers to self-service and letting them self-select out.
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