How Discourse Scaled to $10M ARR With Only 1 Salesperson

Announcements Blog
1

It all began in 2013 with a vision – and a small team of engineers building a product that would disrupt the rapidly stagnating online forum space. While we didn’t specifically call it out at the time, we were going to market with a product-led sales strategy that we nurtured to a point where it became a fully blown growth strategy which sustained us for the next decade.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.discourse.org/2023/03/how-discourse-scaled-to-10m-arr-with-only-1-salesperson/
32 Likes
2

I didnt realize Discourse is worth 10m! And I didn’t even realise you had a “salesmen” and thought everybody does a little bit of it.

5 Likes
3

That are nice numbers. Wasn’t aware of this as well. Anyways always enjoying the blogs, very insightful and nice to read.

7 Likes
4

That’s not a value, it’s an annual revenue number

Presumably the company value is at least an order of magnitude greater?

10 Likes
5

In this case ARR refers to “Annual Recurring Revenue”

13 Likes
6

For SaaS companies averaging a 10x from ARR, assuming growth rate is at least 1 and NRR (Net Revenue Retention) is 1 (both are probably higher), that would be 100mm+ valuation, never realized this actually, go Discourse!

8 Likes
7

As the others mentioned above, we’re worth a lot more than that! $10M is our annual recurring revenue (i.e. the revenue we make each year at the current time). And you’re correct that we all do a lot of it, but I was focused on Enterprise level sales negotiations, hence the one salesperson.

Thanks for the kind words, everyone!

18 Likes
8

Nobody does it like Discourse. Y’all are the GOAT compared to any other platforms I’ve used–and improving all the time. Thanks to all!

9 Likes
9

Impressive growth achieved by Discourse with a product-led sales strategy. Sustained success over a decade with a small team of engineers.

3 Likes
10

Kudos for the team!

I’m a super random guy but I only recognize value at companies and foundations started with a real purpose, builded with heavy work and focus on that :pray:

5 Likes