Future SaaS Stars: Koan
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My SaaS pick of the week, future superstar companies at seed stage or below.
Building off my past article “Bottom Up Deal Sourcing: Business Collaboration Market” this is a great feature as it falls right in that business collaboration space. Koan is an organizational alignment software platform that helps teams manage goals and status collaboratively. Founded in 2016 by Arend Naylor, Matt Tucker and Scott Campbell, Koan has recently raised another $1m in their seed round, BMNT is the most recent investor.
With work operating systems like Monday.com generating so much buzz, there is certainly a growing thesis around the space.
Many well known investors actively participate in the funding of work os companies it is becoming hard to ignore this vertical of SaaS.
Alongside the above, there certainly is growing attractive tailwinds around the industry with the recent rapid influx of WFH. More so than ever, teams are looking to centralize processes and get team members on a platform where it’s easy to track milestones and goals.
Koan has a simple pricing model offering free, pro and enterprise levels. At the pro level, organizations will pay $6 per user per month on an annual subscription.
Although I’m not very familiar with the investors that are currently on the cap table, I’m very bullish on the product and it seems to be clear they’re hitting milestones and new investors are showing interest.
One of the most important elements when it comes to SaaS businesses like this and monday.com, is the UI element. Clean, simple and easy to use designs are at the core of the product and Koan really hits the nail on the head here.
Above we can see the design for the status reporting features and has elements of well known social media such as Twitter. Easy to digest data in a visual appealing way is the winning formula here.
We can also compare the pricing to monday.com and see it is very competitive.
Although the features may not be as robust the pricing at the pro level comes in at half the price, which is a large discount when you need to seat countless individuals that are apart of a large team.
Overall, we are going to want to target these KPI’s when further diving into Koan.
- LTV/CAC (Target 4:1)
- MoM Growth (15%+)
- Margin Profile (targeting high margins here, 70%+)
- ARR Growth (90%+ at this stage, targeting 50%+ at growth stage)
Right now, Koan should be experiencing ~100% ARR growth if not much more. With their recent $1m round they have the capital to further develop their product, but really focus on bringing in a great sales team to start landing large enterprise clients.
I’m certainly looking forward to keeping track of Koan in the future and will track any major funding progressions/news worth pieces.
