Awesome SaaS Growth

A curated list of the best resources about SaaS growth strategy, metrics, and fundraising for founders, CEOs, VP of Growth, and investors building or analyzing software businesses.

Inspired by awesome lists. Maintained by Rework.

The SaaS business model has produced more wealth creation than almost any other structure in the history of business. But it's also produced more confusion about what metrics matter and when. This list cuts through the noise - from the napkin math that helps you understand if your unit economics are healthy, to the playbooks for scaling past each revenue milestone.

Contents

Articles

Books

  • From Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross & Jason Lemkin - The playbook for creating predictable revenue through outbound sales and a repeatable go-to-market machine.
  • Founding Sales by Pete Kazanjy - The founder's guide to building a sales function from scratch, before you have the resources to hire a VP of Sales.
  • The SaaS Playbook by Rob Walling - A founder-focused guide to building profitable, bootstrapped SaaS businesses without VC pressure.
  • Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore - The classic framework for technology adoption curves and how to cross from early adopters to mainstream market.
  • Obviously Awesome by April Dunford - How to position your SaaS product so customers immediately understand why it's the right choice for them.

Videos & Talks

Tools & Software

  • Baremetrics - MRR and churn analytics for Stripe businesses, with benchmarking against other SaaS companies in their Open Benchmarks.
  • ChartMogul - Subscription analytics and revenue recognition platform that works across Stripe, Braintree, and Recurly.
  • ProfitWell - Free SaaS metrics dashboard with paid add-ons for churn reduction and price optimization.
  • Amplitude - Product analytics platform used by PLG SaaS companies to track activation, feature adoption, and expansion signals.
  • Stripe - The default payments infrastructure for SaaS companies at every stage, with built-in billing and subscription management.
  • Recurly - Subscription management platform with sophisticated billing logic for companies with complex pricing models.
  • HubSpot CRM - The most widely used CRM for sales-led SaaS companies from seed through Series B, with strong free tier.

Templates & Frameworks

Case Studies & Real-World Examples

  • Slack - Grew from $0 to a $7 billion acquisition offer from Salesforce in roughly seven years, almost entirely through product-led growth. Slack's "aha moment" engineering - teams experience the product's value before ever speaking to a salesperson - became the textbook PLG case study. Its free tier generated enterprise leads faster than any sales team could have prospected, and NRR consistently exceeded 130% at scale. Source

  • Figma - Scaled from $75M to $10 billion valuation in four years by embedding its multiplayer design tool inside every organization that used it. Each designer who shared a Figma link with a developer or stakeholder created a new entry point into the product, making the product itself the primary growth channel. Adobe's $20 billion acquisition offer (later blocked by regulators) validated the PLG flywheel Figma built. Source

  • HubSpot - Launched a free CRM tier in 2014 and used it to generate millions of inbound leads for its paid marketing and sales products. By 2023, HubSpot had over 194,000 paying customers, with the freemium flywheel accounting for a significant share of new customer acquisition at near-zero marginal cost. Net revenue retention above 100% kept revenue compounding even in down cycles. Source

  • Zoom - Grew ARR from $60M to $4B between 2017 and 2021 using a PLG motion built on frictionless free accounts, a product that users installed without needing IT approval, and a viral loop where every video call invited non-users to join the platform. The bottoms-up motion let Zoom penetrate enterprises before its sales team ever made contact with a procurement department. Source

  • Notion - Reached a $10 billion valuation with a team of fewer than 200 employees largely because its product spread through organizations virally. Individual users created and shared workspaces, gradually pulling in teammates and entire departments, converting free users to paid plans. Notion's efficiency ratio (revenue per employee) became a benchmark case for how PLG compresses go-to-market costs. Source

  • Twilio - Built $1B+ ARR on a usage-based pricing model where developers start with free API calls, prove value, and scale spending with usage. The model meant Twilio could land in an organization through one engineer and expand revenue without additional sales effort as the product embedded deeper into the company's infrastructure. NRR above 120% for years reflected the compounding nature of the usage-based approach. Source

Communities & Newsletters

  • SaaStr Community - The largest community for SaaS founders, executives, and investors, with a free annual conference and active forums.
  • Lenny's Newsletter - The most-read product and growth newsletter, with data-driven breakdowns of what's actually working in PLG and SaaS.
  • Mostly Metrics by CJ Gustafson - A CFO-focused newsletter on SaaS financial metrics, benchmarks, and what the numbers actually mean for decision-making.

Rework Resources

Explore more content on the Rework blog:

Contributing

Know a great resource that belongs on this list? Let us know.

This list is maintained by the Rework team. Resources span pre-revenue through $100M+ ARR and cover both PLG and sales-led growth motions.