Expected:

There’s a wide spread of growth rates across the board. It may seem like every other startup is experiencing hockey stick growth, but the reality is that growth rates above 100% YoY are more the exception than the rule.

Unexpected:

There’s still a large portion of companies growing at least 50% YoY. These numbers can be inflated by early stage startups working with small numbers, e.g. going from $10k ARR to $100k ARR and showing 10x growth. But that kind of growth is needed in the early days, so I would be concerned if there weren’t that many companies growing by 300%+. Still the 50%+ crowd is encouraging to see what’s possible.

Expected:

100k+ unique visitors per month is a pretty rare achievement. It’s hard to imagine a market even being that big for a lot of SaaS companies. Mid thousands to mid tends of thousands of unique visitors is a very achievable milestone for most SaaS companies.

Unexpected:

I’m surprised to see so many companies with less than 1k unique visitors per month. That’s an extremely small amount of traffic that makes it virtually impossible to grow.

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Expected:

Converting visitors to leads is hard! Even achieving 4%+ is a rare feat.

Unexpected:

I am encouraged to see the portion of companies converting 2%+, as that’s a significant amount and makes life a lot easier as a marketer.

Expected:

40%+ lead to customer conversion rate is amazingly exceptional. If you’re one of the rare companies who can relate, you’re either really lucky or working with a really small number of leads.

Unexpected:

The 0-10% portion feels larger than what I originally expected. It’s disproportionately larger than any other category, and a little discouraging given its the lowest conversion rate range. Alas, converting leads to customers is also hard!

Expected:

It’s split pretty evenly between less than 6 months and more than 6 months, which isn’t surprising.

Unexpected:

There’s a much higher amount of companies with a payback period of 0-2 months than I originally expected. That is an exceptional payback period, but my hypothesis is that it’s due to only working on “free” marketing channels or not doing much marketing at all that’s the real reason.