I noticed something interesting about SaaS companies looking at a diverse selection of startups from $1M to $60M ARR and plotting headcount against ARR: no matter the growth rate, product, market, average contract value, etc., companies tend to grow headcount linearly with ARR

When you get into it, SaaS companies can be pretty high marginal cost businesses: need leads to close sales, which requires incremental marketing and sales people, and then post-sale you need customer success/account managers, ongoing consulting/managed services, etc

Bake in enterprise sales cycle length, time to train and ramp new hires, allowance for attrition, continued R&D to keep product ahead of the pack, etc. and you can get fairly people-heavy organizations from the early-growth stage onward

All this highlights another reality about SaaS: it takes a while to grow to the point where you can confidently invest in lower marginal cost growth (leveraging existing customer acquisition/retention) such as product expansion, seat/usage expansion, and simply increasing price

Selling SaaS isn't getting easier, but the potential rewards are enormous (see current public markets and M&A premiums). Just have to manage the unit economics, marginal costs, and ultimately people productivity carefully!