Why We Founded SaaSGrid

SaaS companies deserve their own dashboarding platform.

Today we are launching SaaSGrid, the data and analysis platform for SaaS metrics, and announcing a $3.3M seed round led by Craft Ventures. SaaSGrid is the first dashboarding product built specifically for SaaS companies: users simply connect their data sources and get perfect, real-time charts displaying the metrics every SaaS business should be tracking. The need for a tool like SaaSGrid has never been more critical as companies strive for efficient growth amidst a difficult fundraising environment. I announced the product on stage at SaaStr Annual today. 

The Problem

Having evaluated or worked with thousands of SaaS companies, we’ve observed three major problems: 

1. SaaS founders are not properly instrumented.

2. Even when they are, the metrics often contain errors.

3. Even when the metrics are accurate, they are not available on a real-time basis.

The reason for this is that creating charts is a manual and time-intensive process that involves pulling data into warehouses and CSVs, cleaning up messy data and correcting edge cases, and writing SQL queries and Excel formulas. There is a lot of room for errors to creep in, and the process is burdensome enough that the full package of SaaS metrics is produced only periodically (eg for a quarterly board meeting or financing process) instead of being available continuously. 

The Solution

We built SaaSGrid to change all of that. After connecting data sources including Salesforce, Hubspot, Stripe, Quickbooks, and spreadsheets, SaaS teams have instant access to the metrics they need – including some they might not have known they should be tracking.

Our collective experience building, running, advising, diligencing, and investing in hundreds of SaaS companies has allowed us to identify the most important metrics, and how to calculate them: 70 essential metrics, including mission-critical calculations such as MRR, ARR, Net Dollar Retention, CAC Payback, Burn Multiple, and Runway can all be transformed into real-time dashboards.

With SaaSGrid companies can:

• Build dashboards for leadership, sales, and customer success teams

• Prep the numbers needed for board meetings in minutes

• See every ARR movement in real-time

• Track Net Dollar Retention

• Understand how this quarter’s renewals are trending

• Report efficiency metrics like CAC Payback and Burn Multiple

• Compare bookings to billings

• Know exactly how much runway is left 

SaaSGrid works seamlessly with existing tools so companies don’t have to change their workflows. 

History of SaaSGrid

SaaSGrid CEO and co-founder Ethan Ruby developed an early prototype of SaaSGrid to help the investment team at Craft Ventures run metrics for prospective investments. In 2021, we wrote a blog post called The SaaS Metrics that Matter. At that point, SaaSGrid was just a free tool.

The “Aha!” moment for creating a new SaaS company was when Ethan saw founders using our tool not just to provide metrics for financing rounds but to monitor their business performance on a daily basis. At that point, we realized that SaaS companies needed their own dashboarding tool. 

Surprisingly, despite broad agreement on which metrics are most important for SaaS businesses, there have been no dashboarding or business intelligence (BI) tools that calculate them automatically. By verticalizing a BI app for a specific industry (SaaS), we can provide a much greater level of convenience and value. SaaSGrid has an exciting product roadmap and intends to instrument and benchmark all the controls that SaaS founders need to run their business.

For the last two years, Ethan has been working to develop SaaSGrid as a stand-alone product. Ethan’s brother Teddy Ruby, formerly at Affirm, joined as the third co-founder to lead engineering and a startup was born.

SaaSgrid is now fully independent of Craft. It’s SOC 2 compliant and already the source of truth for KPIs for hundreds of SaaS companies. There’s no longer an excuse for messy data, calculation errors, and tracking the wrong metrics. SaaSGrid will set the new standard for SaaS metrics.