Article · Long read

Datadog: The Archetypal Example for SaaS Product-Led Growth

Aakash Gupta · aakashg.com Free Advanced

Seven concrete lessons with the numbers attached, including the 15 minute time to value and net retention above 140 percent. The best single breakdown of how land and expand actually compounds.

  • Datadog aims for 15 minutes to value from signup, one of its four product-led growth criteria.
  • It went from 100 paying customers at the end of 2013 to over 14,000 by the end of 2020.
  • Dollar-based net retention hit 141 percent in 2017, driven by land and expand.
  • Datadog spends more on product development than on sales and marketing, and 75 percent of new logos land with two or more products.
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The question it answers

  1. How does Datadog run bottom up and top down selling at the same time without the two fighting?

Read with it

  1. Datadog's own VP of Marketing describing the dual motion and, more usefully, saying you have to actively reach out to the... OpenView Article · Short read An Inside Look at How Datadog Reached $500M in ARR (and Counting) Kristin Hillery
  2. The best source on stopping the two motions fighting, with real penetration triggers and named cases where it went wrong,... Andreessen Horowitz Article · About 15 min read The "$20M to $500M" Question: Adding Top Down Sales Sarah Wang and David George
  3. It states the anti-conflict thesis directly: bottom up usage is what generates top down pipeline, so the two motions feed each... Bessemer Venture Partners Article · About 14 min read Introducing enterprise sales to a product-led growth organization Janelle Teng and Elliott Robinson
  4. Video · Long-form interview Every Lesson From Scaling Datadog to $40B Olivier Pomel
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