OpenView has released its SaaS Benchmarks Report 2023. It’s an interesting report (requires registration for the full PDF) that can be compared to earlier reports from ChartMogul and Insight Partners. In general, revenue growth is slower but efficiency and profitability is much stronger.
75th percentile companies (with $1-5 in revenue) grew 100 % year-over-year in this data, which indicates overall revenue growth rate has slowed as top quartile companies grew 183 % in the ChartMogul data and 190 % in the Insight Partners data from earlier this year. It is not an apples to apples comparison, but to me it makes sense that growth has slowed somewhat.1
As revenue growth has slowed, startups has cut the number of employees. For companies with $1-5 million in revenue the average number of employees is down 26 % between 2022 and 2023.
This means revenue per employee, which is a good top-level metric, for top quartile startups with $1-5 million in revenue is up 47 % between 2022 and 2023 to $150k.
- 75th percentile and top quartile is not the same, which I messed up in the initial version of this post. Top quartile is the top 25 % companies and 75th percentile is the data on only the first (a.k.a. “worst”) company in the top quartile. ↩︎
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