Latka Blog
244 articles on SaaS revenue, growth playbooks, and founder interviews from the Latka blog.
Brandwatch’s data backend is both its moat and its ceiling: 80 million sites crawled, roughly a thousand servers, and contracts that have to be worth $30,000 a year. Giles Palmer bought BuzzSumo to reach the customers that architecture locked out.
Numerator collected about one of every 500 US grocery receipts and sold the picture to P&G, Coke and Nestlé. In November 2018 its CEO, Dennis Moore, expected about $130M of revenue that year across roughly 12 acquired companies, and walked through the first two changes after Vista bought it.
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.
In August 2018 Jeremy Almond said Paystand’s revenue had grown nearly 4x the year before, on a flat subscription rather than a cut of each payment. He gave no revenue figure, and the $5 million milestone in the episode’s title was Nathan Latka’s number.
In February 2018, Raj De Datta would only put Bloomreach's revenue between $50M and $100M. The company itself later confirmed $150M ARR — here is the sourced record, reconciled against Latka's own database.
Asked for AppDirect’s revenue, Daniel Saks said “Can’t disclose.” He did explain how it is earned: Bell Canada as the first customer, a platform fee plus a share of what partners sell, monthly fees from a few K to the hundreds of thousands, and a sales team where some large deals take “one rep.”
Pete Catoe bootstrapped ECRS from $7,000 in 1989 to $30 million a year selling point of sale to grocers. Growth has been flat for two years, and he says that's how the business has always worked.
In November 2018, mParticle was earning $3 million a month from just 150 enterprise customers with 150% net revenue retention. Michael Katz explained the pricing meter behind it — and six years later, Rokt bought the company.
James Isilay knew nothing about B2B sales intelligence when he started Cognism. His answer at every revenue threshold up to $71M ARR was the same one he used on his first two bad hires — find someone who had already done it, and put them in the room.
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.
Three years, zero revenue, $100,000 in the bank — then Coralogix inverted the order of two verbs and went from a near-shutdown to $24M in run rate with net retention above 130%.
Nathan multiplied 185 customers by a $50,000 average contract and got $9 million. Cropin’s founder corrected him to $2.4 million — and the gap is the whole story of how agritech SaaS prices in India.
Every rival in flat-rate creative work resells freelancer time. Russ Perry put 470 of them on staff with benefits — and says the design was never the hard part.
Serge Barysiuk says PandaDoc delivers roughly 800 product updates to production a month across 40 teams. The CI pipeline is the part he sprints through; the flags, the rollout ladder and the packaged launch are the rest.
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.”
Before WorkBoard, Deidre Paknad spent seven years turning around PSS Systems, which had raised $60M with nothing to sell. By 2018 WorkBoard had about 50 enterprise customers at a $125K average ACV, won on one rule: sell the alignment before the tool.
The swag industry fell 20–40% in 2020. Swag.com doubled — because Jeremy Parker had built remote-distribution infrastructure three years before anyone needed it. The whole story runs on curation: 300 SKUs, one perfect domain, under $4M raised.
Coveo's CEO refused to give a revenue figure, then explained at length why the number the interviewer calculated for him was wrong — and what he measures instead.
In 2017 Tomer Levy declined to give Logz.io’s revenue. He did walk Nathan Latka through pricing, churn, acquisition cost and $24M raised, and a funnel built on open source his team didn’t write.
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.
Matt Ellison paid the proverbial dollar for a distressed British safety-software company that was being sued by its own largest customer. Eleven years later Evotix was at $17M ARR, growing 40% a year and six months from breakeven.
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.
The $130 million attached to SecurityScorecard is a forecast Aleksandr Yampolskiy gave three months before the year ended. The last figure in the record not flagged an estimate is $106 million, recorded October 2023.
Astronomer ended 2016 at a $600K annual run rate without a finished product — it billed $6K–$10K a month for access to its own engineers, then grew the accounts. Here is the arithmetic behind that first revenue year.
Jotform’s VP of enterprise operations would not confirm a revenue number on the Latka podcast. He explained everything else: two dozen in-house SEO people, video with a multi-year shelf life, and a free tier that closes the sale by itself.
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.
Nutrisense tripled to $3.3 million a month by selling glucose monitors it doesn't manufacture. The founder's answer on gross margin breaks the usual SaaS arithmetic in half.
Suresh Sambandam calls Kissflow a digital marketing company that happens to sell workflow software. At a $9M run rate, 99% of signups arrive without a salesperson.
Vendr can count how many products its customers buy in a category. In mature ones the number grows 25 to 30 per cent a year — which is the evidence behind Ariel Diaz's argument about speed.
A thousand customers at roughly $40,000 a year is $3.3 million a month — the same measurement two old GetLatka headlines each quoted in a different unit. Matt Straz explains why he never moved up-market.
In November 2018, Bynder founder Chris Hall told Latka the DAM company had gone from $19M ARR in January to roughly $4M a month in revenue. Here are the numbers as he actually gave them — including where GetLatka's own database gets the interview date and the CEO wrong.
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.
Trulioo's Series D was $394 million, but only $150 million went into the business. CEO Steve Munford explains what a profitable identity company does with a round it doesn't need.
In March 2020, days before announcing a $100M round from Insight Partners, Andy MacMillan said UserTesting’s growth had sped up from about 25% to about 40%, and forecast crossing $100M ARR around mid-year. Its 10-K later put 2020 revenue at $102.2M.
Three acquirers came knocking at once, a growth round was forming — and Chris Savage realized the company he'd rebuild after selling Wistia was Wistia. So he borrowed $17.3M, tendered his investors at 20x, and turned profit into the strategy.
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