Why valuation of saas companies is required?
For a startup entrepreneur, one of the most challenging tasks is to figure out how much their fledgling company is worth. First, you have to understand that there’s no single way to determine a company’s value; rather, you have to use various methods and metrics.
A common valuation methodology used by VCs (and other investors) is called the “Two-Step Dividend Discount MModel."To break it down, the model looks at a company’s historical performance and projects its future cash flows, then discounts them to present day value using an appropriate discount rate.
Startup entrepreneurs are not alone if they are confused or uncertain of how to determine their company’s value. One of the most popular ways for determining a SaaS company’s worth is by using the Two-Step Dividend Discount Model (DDM). I first learned about this valuation method when springboarding my first startup during Y Combinator in 2008.
This traditional way of valuing companies uses assumptions that may not accurately represent your own business. We can use tools like BuiltWith & Alexa to determine the market share growth for a particular company or industry.
We can estimate a company’s value by looking at their historical performance and projecting future cash flows, then discounting them to the present day. The Two-Step Dividend Discount Model is an effective way of valuing mature companies as it allows you to incorporate both the time value of money and risk into its core components.
Recommended by LinkedIn
The DDM is not the only way to value a SaaS business. Thingslike sales multiples may also be used widely in practice, but they’re typically only useful for late-stage startups who have already achieved substantial scale and market penetration (e.g., Pinterest and Twitter).
BuiltWith lets you see which technologies are used on over 700k websites across the iinternet. ou can also see which technologies are rising or falling in popularity using Google Trends, which allows you to compare trends among different search terms over time.
It’s important to understand that there is no one single right way of valuing a startup business , but it’s essential for entrepreneurs to do their homework before pitching an investor so they don’t get turned down based on their valuation alone.
Alexa shows you traffic statistics for your competitor’s website, including information about who visits and how often, geographic location, search keywords used, conversion rates, etc. It allows you to benchmark your own site performance against similar sites by category & industry.