Intro to The SaaS Archive
Analyzing publicly-listed SaaS companies and their competitive landscapes.
The SaaS Archive is a newsletter about publicly-listed SaaS companies and their competitive landscapes, represented by both public and private companies.
I write for professional investors and stock pickers. I decided to take the jump and commit to full-time writing because I spotted what I think is a massive gap in the financial newsletter market: many writers analyze companies and do comps without considering what the competitive landscape looks like.
Some SaaS companies can boast of their monopoly status and deserve high multiples. Others are getting crushed by venture-backed startups and will likely never turn a profit. I find that such qualitative aspects are often not well reflected in the valuation of publicly-listed SaaS companies.
I’m not here to help you make minor tweaks to your DCF models… I’m here to inform you about how fiercely the companies you own are actually competing. This competition may be coming from a Nasdaq-listed company working on a new product launch, or it could be coming from a Bangalore-based startup that just raised a $3m seed round.
As notably mentioned by Peter Thiel in several of his speeches, management teams always minimize how intense the competition in their industry is or, in the rare case they’ve actually built a Google-like monopoly, they tend to exaggerate the quality and quantity of competition in order to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Ergo, companies are always lying about their standing on the spectrum that goes from “monopoly” to “perfect competition”.
I’m here to inform you about where the majority of US-listed SaaS companies stand in comparison to their competition. This will help you make better investment decisions!
Who am I? I’m an Italian guy in his mid-20s who’s been into finance and stock picking since age 13. My most recent entrepreneurial venture had me starting a B2B SaaS company in the candidate assessment space… that was pretty much like “Pymetrics for Europe”. That startup didn’t work out and I recently shut down operations.
Nevertheless, I learned a lot about the SaaS industry in the last 3 years. I had to become at least decent at everything, from the deeply technical aspects to outbound sales, I had to quickly expand my skill set and be always aware of the state of the industry.
I launched and committed to this publication simply because this seems to best opportunity available to me. If I combine my passions for investing and software + my “need” to be bossless, starting a newsletter seems like the obvious choice!
I can help you (and your investors) get higher returns by providing knowledge about the current state of several SaaS/Enterprise Software niches, by writing about the $2 billion ARR businesses as well as about the startups coming out of the latest Y Combinator batch.
