The SaaS Metrics that Matter Most with Jonah Midanic, Forum Ventures
Forum Ventures is currently investing from its fourth pre-seed fund and its first seed fund. Partner Jonah Midanic has a unique perspective on Canadian SaaS given he’s a Canadian, working for a US fund, investing exclusively in Canadian SaaS companies. Notable Seed-stage investments in Canadian SaaS include:
MinervaAI – MinervaAI is a highly-automated solution for financial regulatory compliance that reduces the burden of performing enhanced due diligence.
PrivateAI – PrivateAI develops privacy-preserving machine learning and natural language processing tools.
VendorPM – A software-enabled marketplace that empowers property managers to effortlessly work with vendors. VendorPM streamlines efficiency at the site-level while providing head office with centralized control through actionable-intelligence.
Jonah underscores that at the early stages, founders aren’t expected to have clean metrics that show an extensive history. Instead, he advises founders to align on a story, select the metrics that fit best, and show proof points along the way. For example, to illustrate demand for their project, a founder could highlight that they spent $50/day on Google ads and have an 800 person waiting list.
Examples of top SaaS Metrics Jonah advises founders to consider at this stage include:
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost (LTV:CAC)
Monthly Recurring Revenue Growth Rate
- Enterprise: a good target is signing up 2 – 3 new customers/quarter.
- Mid-market: a good target is a Proof of Concept conversion rate of almost 100%
- Small and Medium Businesses (SMB): look at month over month growth, want to see traction and a go to market channel that matches the sales price
Examples of Product Metrics include: Daily Active Users (DAU) Growth Rate, Time to Value.
Examples of Demand Metrics include: Landing Page Bounce Rate.
Finally, Jonah advises Canadian SaaS companies that US investors will look for early traction or proof points from US customers.
About SaaSCan
SaaSCan was created to bring deep experience in customer-centric growth and SaaS metrics to Canada’s growing SaaS ecosystem.
SaaSCan for Startups services were born in the early days of COVID-19 to help Canadian SaaS companies understand COVID’s impact on churn and retention. We have expanded to provide enablement for SaaS startups on SaaS metrics and benchmarks.
SaaSCan for Early Stage Growth services emerged from the need startups have to adopt a customer-centric approach as they grow, so they can deliver ongoing value to existing customers and optimize key SaaS retention, expansion, and efficiency metrics.
SaaSCan for Later Stage Growth services empower SaaS companies to be customer-centric and metrics-savvy at scale, further optimizing customer retention, SaaS metric performance, and company valuation.
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