Slack, CrowdStrike, and PagerDuty – three SaaS companies have already gone public this year, and we are only halfway through 2019. For institutional investors that are active in this market, or simply curious about the space, we discuss some alternative approaches (and, of course, alternative datasets!) that could shed light on adoption, churn rates, recurring revenue, and acquisition costs of SaaS providers.

ADOPTION

It is a given that the first metric any investor looks at when evaluating a SaaS stock is adoption. One could rely on official press releases, earning calls, and other company-reported sources for information on customer numbers. However, these are rarely published regularly, and are typically stale by the time they are eventually made publicly available.

For readers interested in alternative approaches for assessing how many customers a SaaS provider currently has, we suggest