The days of easy money and explosive growth are mostly behind us. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still grow fast – you just need to be smarter about it. Paddle’s CMO Andrew Davies and Pricing Strategist Vivian Shao joined us at SaaStr Annual to do a deep dive on growth metrics across 4,000+ B2B companies.
Here’s what Paddle’s seeing across their 4,000+ software customers:
The Reality Check on Growth
- Growth has stabilized (read: slowed) as interest rates rose
- 2024 showed lower but more predictable growth compared to the 2022 boom
But Here’s The Real Gold: Your Existing Customers Are Your Best Bet
Paddle’s data shows two clear paths to accelerating growth in this market:
- Get Serious About Pricing (Like, Really Serious)
- Companies that update pricing every 3 months see a massive 103% jump in ARPU over 3 years
- Most founders still leave money on the table with set-it-and-forget-it pricing
- Go Global or Go Home
- Regions like ANZ, Western Europe, and Southern Europe are showing stronger growth than the US
- Basic localization (currency + language) = 30% growth opportunity
- Full market localization = even bigger upside
The 5 Non-Obvious Things About Pricing That Actually Work
- Stop using “seats” as your default pricing metric – it’s lazy and probably wrong for your product
- Your value metric needs to:
- Be dead simple to understand
- Align with actual customer value
- Scale with company size
- Feature differentiation matters more than ever
- Price based on value, not gut feel
- Test pricing every quarter (minimum)
The One Thing You Must Do Tomorrow
Schedule a recurring quarterly pricing review. Seriously. Do it now. The data shows it’s the difference between stagnation and hypergrowth.
A Final Thought
The average growth rate is meaningless – it’s dragged down by thousands of companies playing it too safe. The real question is: do you want to be average, or do you want to be one of the outliers growing 2-3x faster than everyone else?
What’s Next?
The winners in 2025 will be the ones who:
- Build a true pricing muscle (most haven’t)
- Go international early (most wait too long)
- Focus on expansion revenue like their life depends on it (because it does)
Remember: In this market, good enough isn’t good enough anymore. But if you execute on these learnings from Paddle’s massive dataset, you’ve got a real shot at breaking out of the pack.
