Surprising Takeaways from our Private Company Benchmarking Report
The SaaS metrics you love to track
When I went full time on the newsletter, what got me most excited was building a data product for our readers.
As a kid I collected baseball cards. As an adult I collect benchmarking reports.
I’ve had the idea written on a sticky note slapped on my shitty Acer monitor for two years:
I didn’t totally know what it would look like back then, but I had ‘concepts of a plan’.
I wanted to blend private company performance benchmarking with public company valuation context and operator relevant commentary.
It’s what I call ‘operator equity research’.
We’ve all been passed a sell side equity report from an investment bank at one point or another, and been like, oh this is so cool. But also like not 100% on point for what I need.
Well, the benchmarking report we just dropped is awesome. At the same time, I’ll probably look back on it in two years and think it was total crap. But that’s why you just ship it, baby.
The good thing is we are going to do this every quarter.
Here were the most surprising insights from the report:
📉 Growth is modest—even for the top performers.
Even the top decile failed to clear 100% YoY ARR growth.
💸 CAC Payback gets efficient fast.
Companies at $25M+ ARR are recovering CAC in under 14 months.
🎯 $100K+ ACV deals recover CAC nearly 3x faster than <$10K deals.
Small ACVs = harder to close, slower to pay back.
📊 Sales outpaces Marketing earlier than expected.
By $25M ARR, the GTM mix is already 60/40 Sales to Marketing.
💪 Burn multiples drop meaningfully by $25M ARR.
The best companies hit <1.0x well before scale.
👥 Revenue per employee is catching up to public SaaS.
Top operators at $25M ARR are hitting $265K+ per head.
📈 Vertical SaaS leads on gross margin.
They’re outperforming Infra and Security—flipping the public script.
This is what “operator equity research” looks like.
And I couldn’t do it without the operators who read this newsletter and contributed their data. You are truly real men and women of genius. It’s an honor to be in this benchmarking club with you.
If you want to see the full 34-slide report (yes, it’s really that long. My fingers hurt) —packed with benchmarks by ARR cohort, ACV band, and company type—it’s now live for paid subscribers: