Marc Lou says 758 startups show revenue slightly down
A four month read on 758 startups above $1,000 MRR, with $41.63M of revenue behind it.
Marc Lou says he analyzed 758 startups with over $1,000 MRR and found their revenue over the last four months is slightly declining. He puts the compounded pace at about 11% a year, which he says works out to 45% degrowth over five years if it holds.
That compounded decline would be about 11% per year. At a steady pace, that's 45% degrowth in 5 years.
Median revenue growth was 0% for B2B (255 businesses), versus −6.2% for B2C (257).
The split underneath is the interesting part. Median revenue growth was 0% for the 255 B2B businesses in the set, against −6.2% for the 257 B2C ones. B2B is flat. B2C is shrinking.
Momentum sticks
The third finding is about persistence. Among businesses whose revenue grew at least 5% from June to July, 54% went on to grow MRR (monthly recurring revenue). Among those whose revenue had previously fallen by at least 5%, only 35% grew. Whatever direction a small SaaS is pointing in, it tends to keep pointing that way.
The sample is 758 startups and $41.63M in revenue over the last four months. That is a real dataset by indie standards, and it is also one founder's dataset from one platform, pulled over one four month window that includes the summer. It is not a market verdict, and Lou frames the whole thing as a question rather than an answer, opening with "Is SaaS dead?"
The business read
The number most founders will stare at is the B2C one. The default indie playbook of the last few years has leaned consumer, cheap, volume driven, and this is the first hard read suggesting that side of the house is losing ground while B2B holds flat. A median of −6.2% is not a collapse. It is a slow leak, and a slow leak is harder to notice from inside your own dashboard than a crash is.
The momentum finding cuts both ways depending on where you sit. If you are growing, the odds are decent you keep growing. If you are already sliding, roughly two thirds of businesses in that position kept sliding, which is a useful prior when you are deciding whether to grind on a product or move.
Nobody has a second dataset to check this against yet, so treat it as one operator's snapshot rather than the state of small SaaS.
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