How UserTesting Crossed $100M ARR While Its Growth Rate Went Up, Not Down
Companies are supposed to slow down as they get bigger. UserTesting sped up — 25% growth at $60M, 40% at $85M — and Andy MacMillan explained exactly why on tape, days before announcing a $100M round into the teeth of a pandemic.
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The iron law of SaaS is that growth rates decay as revenue bases grow. When Nathan got UserTesting CEO Andy MacMillan on the show in the first days of the COVID crash — MacMillan literally broadcasting from his garage, green screen propped against a ping-pong table, three kids sheltering in place upstairs — the company was breaking that law: roughly $7M a month in revenue, on track to cross $100M ARR mid-2020, growing about 40% — up from 25% two years earlier on a smaller base.
Nathan, not a man free with compliments, said the quiet part on air: you rarely see growth accelerate at this scale. The tape is a record of exactly how it happened — plus one piece of news nobody else had yet.
The $100M disclosed before the press release
Mid-interview, asked whether the cap table still stood at $74M raised, MacMillan casually rewrote it: “We actually just raised a round… we just raised $100 million from Insight Partners, and have yet to announce that publicly.” The round had closed three or four weeks earlier — before COVID hit the US — leaving UserTesting sitting on a war chest at the exact moment the world’s software companies were re-forecasting in panic. His posture with the money was the opposite of hoarding: “We’re definitely leaning into growth,” because customers were calling to move canceled in-person research onto the platform.
$100Mraised from Insight Partners — closed three or four weeks earlier, before COVID hit the US, and disclosed on air ahead of the press release
What the product sells: watching your own customer
UserTesting lets teams “virtually look over the shoulder” of a real user — watch a stranger attempt mobile banking or grocery ordering in their app, narrating their confusion. The company had converted from pay-as-you-go videos to pure subscription five years earlier, and by 2020 had about 3,500 SaaS customers: $2K-a-month SMB accounts at one end, seven-figure research operations at the biggest tech companies at the other.
The acceleration came from a seat explosion MacMillan described precisely: the original buyer was the UX researcher, but “product teams, design teams, marketing teams” had started running their own tests. “Our largest customer a couple years ago might have had 20 or 30 seats. We have a customer right now looking at doing over 10,000 seats.”
When the user base inside an account can grow 300x, expansion revenue stops being a sales program and becomes physics.
The org-design religion: success sells nothing
Under the metrics — 14% gross revenue churn, net retention just over 100% and improving — sits the structural decision MacMillan admitted he debates on conference stages:
“I have a chief customer officer who reports directly to me, and they are solely responsible for making sure the customers are successful. They don’t sell them anything. They don’t upsell them anything… Then I have my sales team, and their job is to manage the contracts and growth and expansion. I view gross dollar retention as an outcome metric.”
Andy MacMillan, CEO, UserTesting
Retention as an outcome of value delivered, expansion as a sales job, and never the same paycheck for both — the direct opposite of quota-carrying customer success.
Manny Medina runs commissions without downside — and defends it just as fiercely.
The debate is unsettled; both companies cleared 100%+ NRR.
The discipline extended to spending. Pre-raise burn ran $1–2M a month against a pipeline up 75% year over year, and MacMillan refused the late-stage default of doubling the sales team on hope: “That’s just not our MO… I can grow the business comfortably and not just throw money at hope.” Q4 2019 had been the first quarter over $10M in net-new bookings. The rest of the machine, by the numbers:
The Norwegian localization startup Teston was acquired the same week the interview aired.
What happened next
The GetLatka dataset picks up the story where the tape leaves off:
- 2021 · NYSE IPO Revenue around $140M by late in the year.
- Late 2022 · Private again Thoma Bravo agreed to take the company private in a roughly $1.3B all-cash deal, merging it with rival UserZoom.
- Mid-2023 · The combined company Headcount in our data grown to about 1,685.
The public chapter was short. MacMillan’s IPO instinct on the tape — “I love the idea of being a public company at some point… we’ve got 24, 36 months” — proved exactly right on timing, twice: in on schedule, and out before the 2022 SaaS repricing got worse. Current numbers live on UserTesting’s GetLatka profile; the full interview is here.
His answer to the closing question — what he wished he’d known at 20 — lands differently from a CEO whose product is literally watching other people struggle: “To focus as much on relationships as gathering knowledge. At this point in my life I’ve realized it’s all about the people.”
SourcesNathan’s 2020 interview with Andy MacMillan; the GetLatka dataset through mid-2023.
