June, 2023
I have been thinking more about the traits of business application software products which naturally tend themselves to the divergence in slopes of ‘revenue’ and ‘cost of sales’.
One combination of traits results in a product(s) that is used by multiple users across multiple teams and business functions inside an organisation, between whom there is constant flow of data, and the half-life of this data is very long (e.g. CRM data). This gives rise to network effects as the marginal utility of the software product(s) increases with every incremental user. I call this “intra-customer network effects”.
If such network effects are actively chased within business software, the number of touch-points with users and overall user count within the customer’s organisation will have to increase. This means the product will need to become broader and deeper, and also have a unified data core. A broader and deeper product will naturally lead to increasing ACVs, higher upsells, and better win rates. This coupled with a unified data core will dratsically increase switching costs, thereby increasing logo and net dollar retention.
These forces allow a company to build operating leverage in the business model over time as OPEX for every dollar of new ARR should theoretically reduce. Hence, the ultimate representation of such traits on a company’s P&L is seen in the form of divergence in slopes of ‘revenue’ and ‘cost of sales’
Most successful business application software companies such as Microsoft, Atlassian, Datadog, Slack, Salesforce, Veeva, Shopify, Procore etc. exude this product trait because of which they have built operating leverage in their business model over time and grown their market cap.