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SaaS Business Operating Model

Develop a forecast model for a B2B SaaS Business, describe and calculate the revenue model at various stages of a startup’s growth, as well as, the components of SaaS waterfall metrics and the concept of cash burn.

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13 Lessons (52m)

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  • Description & Objectives

  • 1. What is an Operating Model

    01:39
  • 2. What is a SaaS Business

    01:07
  • 3. SaaS Revenue Model

    04:31
  • 4. SaaS Revenue Model Workout

    02:53
  • 5. Case Study - SaaS Revenue Model Part 1

    06:46
  • 6. Case Study - SaaS Revenue Model Part 2

    05:40
  • 7. Mature SaaS Revenues

    02:39
  • 8. Mature SaaS Revenues Workout

    04:03
  • 9. Modeling Expenses

    01:31
  • 10. Case Study - Modeling Expenses

    06:39
  • 11. Cash Burn

    05:07
  • 12. Case Study - Cash Burn

    06:54
  • 13. SaaS Business Operating Model Tryout


Prev: Very Early Stage - Forms of Consideration Next: SaaS Business Key Industry Metrics

Case Study - SaaS Revenue Model Part 2

  • Notes
  • Questions
  • Transcript
  • 05:40

A case study on how to forecast SaaS revenues.

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Transcript

What we can now do with those assumptions built is go on to actually build our number of customers and therefore our MRR, the monthly recurring revenue that we're getting from those customers. So let's do this on a monthly basis. What we've got to begin with is the fact that we had 7,800 customers at the end of the most recent historical period. I'm gonna pull those over to be the opening number for the first period, and then I'm gonna use my assumptions to pull down the calculations that we've done for the number of new customers. The churn rate is a percentage that we need to apply the 4.5% to the opening number of customers for the period, but it's gonna be customers who are lost. So I'm gonna multiply by minus one to make it negative, and then we can just add everything up to get the number of customers at the end of the first month. Before we copy this out to the right for the other 36 months, we've gotta be a little bit careful just to make sure that the opening balance for the next period does come from the column to the left, but everything else we could be able to copy right. And then once we've got all those in, we can now copy everything to the right, and this will work to tell us that by the end of the three years, we're expecting to have 91,000 customers. Okay, so what do those customers mean for us in terms of the revenue coming from these subscriptions? Well, all we need to do is multiply each of these numbers by the subscription price for the month. Now again, I want this to move across as I go to the right, but I want to go down for each row within this calculation. So I want to lock onto only the row number six. So the dollar sign in front of just the number six. If I then copy this down, it's going to apply the 100 price to each of those rows. If I've got 7,800 customers at the beginning of the month and I'm charging them 100 per month, that would be my expected monthly recurring revenue. At the beginning of the month, I'm adding new customers 833 who will pay me a hundred per month, but I've lost 351 customers, so that's gonna be lost revenue for me. And if we add those all up, then we can get to our ending monthly revenue number. These, again, can be copied out to the right to see what we're earning on a monthly basis all the way out to the end of the third year. From this, we can then capture the monthly growth rates in the revenue we're generating on a recurring basis on the next row down, just by dividing the ending period by the beginning period and taking one away. That will give us the growth rate. That's our monthly recurring revenues based on a forecast of the number of customers we've got, and a monthly subscription price.

In this model, we're also gonna assume that we have some other annual licenses here. In the prior year, they earned us 250,000 and they grow by 25%. So we could just multiply through by that growth rate To get the annual number and copy that to the right.

And then we can take this and de annualize it down into the monthly revenue forecast. Again, using the offset function that we've set up in row six. Just need to be careful that this is showing me the annual number. So again, I'm gonna need to divide by 12, and then we can copy this out to the right.

It looks like we have the same number to begin with, but once we get to the second year, we can see that number grows as we get the 25% growth rate kicking in. We have some other revenues here coming for maybe some trial periods. And again, that a hundred thousand is growing at 25% per year. So I can just copy the formula we had from before and apply it here to each of those three years. And again, the same formula that we had to turn it into a monthly number, apply it, copy and paste it for the other revenues. Okay, so what we've built so far is all of the revenues. We've got the ending monthly subscription numbers. We've also got our other revenue items as well. And as a result of this, we can then put this together to build up our income statements. Our income statements is gonna be build up of the monthly recurring revenues and also of the other license revenues and other revenues as well. That will give us our total revenues.

If we copy this across for all of the 36 months, we'll get to see how those revenues grow. But what we can now do is start to build what our income statement might look like. As a result, we're gonna need to add up the first 12 months of data for the first year.

For the second year, we're gonna need to go and grab the second 12 months worth of data, and we're gonna need to repeat this for the third year. Once this is all done though, we can use these formulas for every other location where we're going to wanted to summarize the monthly data into annual data so we can just copy this down for the other revenue, and then sum up what our total revenue's gonna look like. Because we're experiencing this substantial growth in our number of new customers, we're expecting to take our total revenue for the year from 3.8 million last year up to 13, then 29, then 85 as we go through this substantial growth in the company.

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