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
23 episodes, newest first.
- CAC Payback: 8 Months or 20? Build the 2027 BudgetNo guest this week: Derek and Elena open a spreadsheet and build a 2027 growth budget for a $1M-$3M ARR B2B SaaS company. Benchmarks for sub-$5M companies disagree sharply, with CAC payback quoted from 8-12 months to 20 months, and the hosts treat that spread as the finding. Topics covered: why High Alpha, Benchmarkit and KeyBanc land so far apart, which source fits a $1M-$3M ARR company, how to pin a benchmark to its year and motion, and how to turn a payback target into a 2027 sales and marketing budget. For B2B SaaS founders focused on ARR, growth and acquisition. This is the Wednesday episode of the week; the week number and year are to be filled in at publish time. Hosts: Derek Simmons and Elena Reyes, ARR Autopsy.
- 61% Price Hike: The 38% Break-Even Churn MathA founder at $1M+ ARR opens the spreadsheet behind a 2026 price increase on existing customers, and the hosts test it against the popular claim that raising prices costs little churn. The takeaway: a 61% hike has a break-even churn threshold of about 38%, so the real question is who left, who downgraded, and who didn't notice. Topics covered: how the 61% raise compares with playbook norms for 20-30% raises. The break-even churn formula applied to the founder's numbers. The grandfathering window and announcement timeline against outside benchmarks. The cohort table of leavers, downgraders and customers who didn't notice. What to check before 2027 renewals. This is the Wednesday episode for Week {week_number} of {year}, built for B2B SaaS founders focused on ARR, growth and acquisition. Guest: the founder, name and title to be confirmed before publishing, and company.
- The 94% Problem: Rebuilding NRR Past 110%A hosts-only episode on B2B SaaS ARR growth and retention (no guest this week). Sub-$5M companies sit in the one band where NRR benchmarks disagree by 10+ points, and the hosts treat that gap as the opportunity. Topics covered: why the 94% median and the 103% bootstrapped median can both be true, how to rebuild expansion math on a 100-customer base, which pricing and expansion levers the sources point to for getting past 110% NRR, and how GRR versus NRR tells you whether you have a churn problem or an expansion problem. Also covered: why a few accounts can distort NRR and what the sources do and do not say about CS headcount. This is the Wednesday episode of ARR Autopsy for founders between $200K and $5M ARR focused on growth and acquisition-adjacent retention math. Hosts: Derek Simmons and Elena Reyes, ARR Autopsy.
- Black Friday Prepay: Churn x 6 Breakeven MathARR Autopsy, the Wednesday episode of Week {week_number}, {year}. No guest this week: Derek and Elena run a hosts-only teardown of a Black Friday annual-prepay promo for a hypothetical $1M ARR B2B SaaS. Their takeaway is that the promo is a cash-flow instrument, and the creator's rule of thumb of monthly churn times six, compared against the discount percentage, sets how deep the discount can go. Topics covered: why 30% and 50% prepay offers sit outside the typical discount range, how the churn-times-six rule of thumb and a take-rate model work together, what refund liability does to the cash math, and whether bonus AI credits beat a deeper discount. They run three scenarios (20%, 30%, 50%) on labeled hypothetical assumptions for B2B SaaS ARR growth and acquisition planning, then name which of the three tiers to send, whether to add credits, and when the answer flips with your own churn and take rate. Hosts: Derek Simmons and Elena Reyes, ARR Autopsy.
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- Cited, Not Clicked: Testing the 3x-27x AI ClaimA B2B SaaS founder opens the attribution dashboard that ties LLM citations to signups, SQLs and closed-won revenue, and Derek and Elena check it against the loudest growth claim in AI search. Benchmark sources say AI-referred traffic converts anywhere from 3x to 27x better than search. That range is too wide to trust, so the hosts put it next to one founder's real spreadsheet. Topics covered: - Why the published AI-versus-search conversion multipliers disagree, and who measured them - How the dashboard connects citations to pipeline, and where attribution leaks - Which multiplier claims survive contact with one company's numbers - What the baseline citation audit showed, and the fixes for pricing pages AI kept getting wrong - What to measure before you fund GEO as a B2B SaaS acquisition channel This is the Wednesday episode of ARR Autopsy. It is built for B2B SaaS founders focused on ARR and growth, and it asks what citations are worth as an acquisition source. Guest: a SaaS founder (name, title and company to be confirmed before publishing).
- Cold Email at 3.43%: The AI SDR Math That WorksCold email's average reply rate fell from 5.1% to 3.43% in a single year — but a narrow, signal-triggered playbook is still booking meetings. In this hosts-only teardown, Derek and Elena break down exactly which outbound configuration still returns a positive ROI in 2026, and which ones are quietly burning budget. This episode covers: why net SDR headcount fell 18% while senior 'reply specialist' roles actually grew 14%; why most AI SDR rollouts collapse within nine weeks and the four repeatable causes behind it; how signal-triggered, trigger-event outreach pulls 15-25% reply rates against a cratering generic-blast approach; and the spreadsheet-level breakdown of volume tier, personalization, and trigger type that decides whether your next hire should be a human SDR or an AI SDR seat. For B2B SaaS founders between $200K and $5M ARR weighing outbound spend next quarter. Keywords: B2B SaaS, ARR, growth, acquisition.
- 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.
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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