About Bottom Up

When starting out, founders often ask whether it’s better to build a consumer or enterprise software company. Actually, the perfect software business is a hybrid. It monetizes like an enterprise product but spreads like a consumer product. I call this Bottom-Up SaaS.

Also known as Product Led Growth (PLG), this is a category I helped pioneer by taking the consumer growth tactics I had learned as founding COO of PayPal and applying them to enterprise software. The company I founded, Yammer, grew so quickly that it was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012, just 4 years after founding.

Today, Bottom-Up SaaS is a vibrant category that includes thousands of startups, including many public software companies which have successfully combined traditional enterprise playbooks with PLG.

In this blog, I convey lessons learned through my experience as a founder/CEO and as an investor in many SaaS companies. I focus on topics relevant to founders who are starting or scaling software companies.

Everyone has to start somewhere. You might as well work your way from the Bottom Up. That is where change comes from. That is where revolutions come from.

Subscribe to Bottom Up by David Sacks

Playbooks for building software companies.

People

Founder who backs founders through @craft_ventures. Previously: Created two unicorns, invested in a dozen more. Occasional movie producer.
VP of Analytics @ Craft Ventures and creator of saasgrid.com