Essay · 15 min read

Bottom-up SaaS: A Model for Capital-Efficient Growth

Ramu Arunachalam · A.Capital Free Intermediate

The clearest explanation of what changes when you deliberately sell to the user and route around the economic buyer, and what it costs you later. Useful because it treats user-led and buyer-led as two different businesses, not two words for the same customer.

• The median bottom-up company raised 70 million dollars (36 percent) less than the median top-down one, 122 million against 192 million.
• Median net dollar retention was 135 percent for bottom-up companies versus 119 percent for top-down.
• Median payback period was 17 months, 28 percent better than top-down peers.
• Bottom-up companies traded at roughly twice the market cap (about 7 billion dollars against 3.2 billion).