We plan to bring eChai across 100 cities in India. It starts with eChai Startup Demo Day on 26 September, all in person. 11 cities confirmed, 318 founders registered. Any city that reaches 20 interested founders is on too. See your city
Breaking into GTM

What does land and expand mean, and does it apply to my company?

Land and expand means you deliberately sell a small first deal to one team, prove it works, and grow from there into more seats, more teams or more products. It applies if your product can deliver real value to a single team on its own and if the natural buying unit inside your customer is a department rather than the whole company. It does not apply if the product only works once the whole organisation is on it, in which case a small land just produces a stalled pilot. The economics only work when the expansion actually happens, so decide up front what the second and third purchases are.

Go deeper

5 resources, 1 India-specific, 5 link-checked.

📄 Article
✓ Link checked India Free Advanced

Accel's argument that expansion revenue is the specific thing that carries a company past $50M ARR, with the Twilio and Shopify revenue-mix numbers to show what it looks like when it works.

How can SaaS startups tackle scaling beyond $50mn in ARR?

From SeedToScale by Accel by Vyushita Sahay 9 min read

  • Past 50 million dollars ARR the equation is Revenue = new revenue + expansion revenue minus churn.
  • Twilio held a net expansion rate of roughly 135 to 140 percent for four straight years.
  • Shopify's transaction-based merchant solutions went from 24 percent of revenue in 2013 to 57 percent in 2018.
Open seedtoscale.com
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

The cleanest definition of expansion MRR with the formula and the benchmark that matters: top companies get up to 40 percent of new ARR from existing customers.

Expansion MRR: Definition, Formula, and Impact on SaaS Growth

From Chargebee 7 min read

  • Established subscription businesses run 10 to 30 percent annual expansion rates.
  • Some companies get up to 40 percent of their new ARR from existing customers rather than new logos.
  • Expansion MRR rate = (end-of-month expansion MRR minus start) divided by start, times 100.
Open chargebee.com
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

The Gainsight CEO on why CS should own an NDR number rather than just a churn number, including the idea of giving every CSM their own book of MRR to grow from 100 to 115.

8 Things I Learned from Dave Kellogg About Net Dollar Retention

From Gainsight by Nick Mehta 8 min read

  • Gross retention is ambiguous (which ARR is the denominator, is a product swap churn), while NDR folds churn and expansion into one number.
  • One cloud company cut NDR by acquisition channel (self-service, enterprise, channel) and found some sales motions were losing money.
  • Some accounts churn whatever a CSM does, so that time is better spent expanding healthy customers.
  • Break upsell into its parts: more of the same product, new products to the same buyer, new products to new buyers.
Open gainsight.com
📰 Newsletter
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

The benchmark study everyone quotes: good and great net revenue retention by business type, built from 20 growth experts plus real public company numbers. It stops the 'is 105 percent good' argument in one page.

What is good retention?

From Lenny's Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky 15 min read

  • Benchmarks differ by business type, so compare yourself only to your own category.
  • Enterprise SaaS net revenue retention: about 110 percent is good, about 130 percent is great.
  • Bottom-up SaaS: 100 percent revenue retention is good and 120 percent great, with Slack at 135 to 155 percent.
  • Warns startups rarely move retention much after launch, so weak early numbers are a hard signal.
Open lennysnewsletter.com

Browse all 796 resources →

The same ground, at another level

How expansion, upsell and churn reads from a different seat.

Terms in this answer

People also ask

Also in Starting Up

The same ground, over in Grow & market, our Starting Up track.

Also in D2C

The same ground, over in Grow organically & retain, our D2C track.

eChai Partner Brands