Business
ARR Autopsy
Every episode tears apart one B2B SaaS company's path from scattered revenue to $1M+ ARR, with the founder who built it sitting across from us.
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Episodes
The archive
17 episodes, newest first.
- AI Overview Tax: 82% Coverage, Half the ClicksNo guest this week — Derek and Elena return to the AI Overview Tax with harder 2026 numbers, and the single biggest takeaway is this: B2B tech's AI Overview coverage jumped from 36% to 82% in twelve months, confirming last month's Cadence dashboard drop wasn't a fluke. Why a 36-to-82 point AI Overview coverage jump is the steepest of any industry tracked. Why position-one click-through rates fall even when a brand still ranks. How YouTube quietly became the most-cited platform inside Google's AI Overviews. Why organic search still drives most B2B SaaS traffic despite the panic, and what a real content-budget reallocation toward video and citation-optimized formats looks like. Derek Simmons and Elena Reyes, hosts, ARR Autopsy. This is the Wednesday episode for Week {week_number} of {year}. B2B SaaS, ARR, growth, and acquisition — the reallocation math founders need before Q4 budgets lock.
- AWS Marketplace: How 40% of SaaS Revenue Skips CFOsThis episode digs into the $900 billion committed-cloud-spend claim reshaping B2B SaaS procurement, and the single biggest takeaway: that headline number doesn't survive a side-by-side with the industry's own benchmarks, even though the underlying mechanism for skipping procurement is real. Derek and Elena pick apart what actually happens when a deal gets paid out of a customer's pre-committed cloud spend instead of a discretionary budget line. Topics covered as statements: Why the $900 billion figure clashes with a $470 billion committed-spend estimate and more conservative marketplace-revenue projections from Omdia and Canalys. How AWS's express private offers and a listing-fee cut to 0.5% change the math for sellers. What a founder actually has to do to list, price, and close a deal through AWS Marketplace instead of a CFO audit. Why routing revenue through committed cloud spend is a real channel, not a settled market-size story. B2B SaaS, ARR, growth, and acquisition are all on the table. This is the Wednesday episode of this week, hosted by Derek Simmons and Elena Reyes.
- Procurement: The 8 Weeks Before 2027 Budgets LockDerek and Elena break down the fresh enterprise AI spending data (86% of buyers raising budgets, governance now eating 8 to 12% of it) and map the exact Q4 weeks SaaS founders have to land in next year's line item. Hosts-only, no guest this week.
- The $230K AI Inference Leak: A Hosts-Only Deep DiveThis is a hosts-only data-breakdown episode — no founder guest this week. Derek and Elena dig into the ICONIQ-sourced data point every AI-adjacent SaaS founder needs to know: inference now averages 23% of revenue at scaling AI B2B companies, roughly $230,000 of every $1M in AI revenue. They connect that number to Uber's public $1,500-per-tool AI spending cap and the token-based repricing already rippling through vendor contracts. Topics covered: Why inference costs don't shrink with scale even as blended gross margins improve industry-wide; how Uber's per-employee cap and quiet vendor pricing shifts signal buyers are already repricing AI tools themselves; what a documented public case study on Intercom's move from seat-based to $0.99-per-resolution pricing on Fin shows about usage and NRR, presented explicitly as a case study rather than a guest interview; a framework for building hybrid, margin-protected pricing before a customer forces the conversation. B2B SaaS founders between $200K and $5M ARR will get a concrete number to drop into their own margin model. This is the Wednesday episode for Week 35 of 2026.
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- Loopwork: Off 3 Cut Lists With a 12-Page ROI PacketA $1.4M ARR AI-adjacent SaaS founder walks Derek and Elena through the ROI packet, usage dashboard, and re-pricing conversation that kept the company off three enterprise cut lists in one quarter.
- Cadence: 71% Click Drop, 3 Channels That Refilled ItA SaaS founder whose trial signups came almost entirely from blog content walks Derek and Elena through the before-and-after dashboard after AI Overviews ate the clicks on their top-ranking pages. Real traffic, lead, and CAC numbers, plus what broke when the replacement channels scaled.
- LoopMetrics: The 3-Year Lock That Beat the Second CutA founder walks Derek and Elena through surviving round two of the 2026 SaaS consolidation wave, showing the exact ROI packet and price-lock clause that turned a renewal review into a saved contract.
- NRR Cliff: 98% to 121% in Two Quarters, No New SalesDerek and Elena dig into why the median NRR for $1 to 10 million ARR companies is a brutal 98 percent, then sit down with a founder who moved that exact number to 121 percent in two quarters using a three-lever framework built on fixing gross retention first.
- Seat-to-Usage Migration: NRR Dipped 9% Before It Hit 128%A founder who migrated a $1.8M ARR seat-based B2B SaaS to a hybrid usage-based model in six months walks Derek and Elena through the NRR collapse-then-recovery, the billing guardrail that saved two enterprise accounts, and what broke when expansion revenue finally outpaced new logo growth.
- CFO Audit Trap: 3 Enterprise Renewals at $1.1M ARRA founder at $1.1M ARR walks Derek and Elena through the quarter a CFO audit of their customer's AI spend nearly killed three enterprise renewals at once, and the exact dashboard, budget caps, and ROI proof they built in 60 days to stop it. The episode autopsies the new procurement objection hitting AI-adjacent SaaS vendors heading into H2 2026.
Talent
Talents in this show
Each one has a profile of their own.
About
What the show is
Two hosts grill each guest on the specific acquisition channels, conversion numbers, and operational changes that turned unpredictable income into a system. You'll hear which experiments burned money, which pricing moves doubled close rates, and what the dashboard looked like the month things finally clicked. Built for SaaS founders and growth operators between $200K and $5M ARR who are done with vague strategy talk and want the spreadsheet version of someone else's breakthrough. New episodes drop every Wednesday, brought to you by the team at SaaSLaunch.net.
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