How did you find out how much Salesforce.com raised in capital? Did they raise any more between initial financing and the IPO?

1/ You write that “A good target ratio [for CAC/ACV] to strive for is 1 or less…” – That’s a trick question for a SaaS company Traditional telecom subscriber models for example would only count the costs to acquire the customer (as the name says), and that’s it. No accounting of follow-up costs, etc. However, with SaaS a lot of the companies you’re listing have a Pay-What-You-Use-And-Quit-Anytime practice. So CAC are ongoing, you never end trying to acquire the customer. Philippe Botteri had an interesting post last year about that (http://cracking-the-code.blogspot.com/2008/03/measuring-sales-and-marketing.html).

2/ Having said that, I guess for every company that CAC/ACV ratio should be less than 1: if your costs for NEW customers is already higher than your revenues (let’s assume you don’t have any other revenues other than from your subscribers), you’re loosing money, right? And that already assumes that you measured the CAC per subscriber / customer for a year, not per quarter or month… I’m confused, maybe you can comment on that.

3/ In the second-to-last paragraph (”In order for the SaaS business model to work, …”), do you say that because SaaS companies are fragile flowers who are more receptive to software usage issues and bugs than other companies? Because I would think that again for any company you would like to keep “sales and marketing costs as low as possible” – and fortunately you later add “practicable”. Self-Service-And-Help-Portals was a buzz word about five years ago, and since then most of the companies have such portals in place, from computer equipment manufacturers to eBay stores to wineries. So why exactly do SaaS companies have to pay special attention to that, more than other companies?