Every SaaS CEO wants a spot on the Forbes Cloud 100 list.
Let's study the newly released winners...
To make it easy, I pulled the 2024 list into a spreadsheet and enriched it with some Keyplay growth and website signals.
Full sheet here: peersignal.org/cloud100
For the analysis I compared the Cloud 100 to PeerSignal's B2B SaaS index for similar sized companies (300-5,000 employees). Winners stand-out on growth and valuation, but what else shows up?
Take-aways from the 2024 list:
1.) More AI companies.
-- Last year, 9% of winners were AI companies. This year it’s a whopping 15%.
-- OpenAI has the highest valuation, but they aren’t alone. New additions include Perplexity, Glean, Mistral AI.
2.) More AI integrated SaaS.
-- AI is eating software.
-- In 2023, 28% of Cloud 100 talked about AI in their main headlines and company description.
-- In 2024, that number jumped to 71%.
3.) Hiring like it’s 2024.
-- Even the Cloud 100 felt the 2022-2023 SaaS correction.
-- Last year, 33% of the Cloud 100 had *reduced* headcount over the previous 6 months. Only 55% had a net increase. 13% were neutral.
-- This year is different. 80% have increased headcount in the previous 6 months, only 11% reduced. 9% are neutral.
-- Open roles have increased massively. Up 66% Y/Y from ~4,400 to ~7,300 for this group.
4.) B2Bs with strong brands.
-- They sell enterprise software (ie. they’re not Vuori or TikTok), but top cloud cos have increasingly big audiences and broad reach.
-- 250K is the average LinkedIn followers.
-- 86% have top 100K website traffic. 12% are 100K to 500K.
5.) PLG.
-- Consistent with last year, PLG is commonplace in the Cloud 100.
-- 66% have a free plan or free trial, 2.6x more than the comps.
-- 52% have transparent pricing, a massive 5.2x more than their peers.
-- Most of the PLG players this year are horizontal (dev tools, fintech, collaboration).
6.) Partners/ecosystems/integrations.
-- Multiple clues that suggest Cloud 100 are investing in their ecosystem.
-- 74% have a Partners page, 1.7x the comparison group.
-- 48% have a public API, 2.5x the comparison group
-- 39% list multiple integrations, 3.2x the comparison group.
-- This is consistent with last year’s list
7.) Security winners keep coming.
-- 17% are in the security space. That's 2 more than AI.
-- “Boring” problems = big money.
-- Wiz was the highest ranked at #11 and is likely to climb after turning down $23B from Google.
I hope the spreadsheet gives you some SaaS role models to explore more. I'd love to add more to this in the coming weeks.
Today's PeerSignal.org newsletter has all the charts.
What’s your take-away?
#SaaS #B2B #startups #marketing