Jason M. Lemkin reviews Asana’s post-IPO growth trajectory, highlighting that Asana grew from $240M ARR at ~55% growth to $400M ARR growing ~70%, driven largely by strong NRR, larger deal sizes, and expansion within existing customers. He compares Asana to peers (Monday.com, ClickUp, Smartsheet), notes international adoption (~42% customers outside the US), a shift toward more sales-driven revenue (roughly 50/50 self-serve vs sales today), and product velocity (about 130 features added in the prior year). Lemkin emphasizes that high NRR and expanding average deal size (from $2,800 to ~$3,500) explain a large share of the company’s growth, while new logo growth contributes only ~20% of total growth.
Questions this video answers
$240,000,000 ARR; ~55% year-over-year growth.
$400,000,000 ARR; ~70% year-over-year growth.
~120% blended NRR.
~145% NRR for $50k+ customers.
About 114,000 paying customers.
Chapters
Asana is the latest cloud leader to be accelerating at scale. And what do I mean by accelerating? Well, I really mean accelerating. After they IPO'd, Asana reached 240 million in ARR, growing a stunning 55%, which is pretty crazy. 55% growth at 240 million in ARR. But after that it picked itself up and grew even faster at 400 million. Asana is now growing a stunning 6. 70%. Oh my goodness, 55% at 240 million. ARR is incredible. 70% at 400 million ARR is breathtaking now. And interestingly, it's not alone. Monday.com, clickUp smartsheet many other adjacent players are accelerating at the scale as well. It's a, it's a category overall project management that has exploded after Covid and is not slowing down. Not slowing down in the way that we've seen folks like Zoom and Peloton and even Shopify who had a big boost from COVID But then it seems to be mostly over. No, now that we're all living in the cloud, we're all running distributed teams, we need project management software even more broadly defined. So Asana Monday, smartsheet, they're all growing even faster today and asana a stunning 70% at 400 million in ARR. So let's take a look at five more interesting learnings and maybe a few other tidbits on top of that. Number one is NRR is good and it is good with SMBs. And we'll talk about the difference between SMB and enterprise. But Asana is still pretty SMB but driving up market. Now post IPO as it crosses into 500 million in ARR. And what does its NRR look like? About what you'd expect. Its overall blended ARR is 120%. In fact, that's gone up since the IPO as it's gone a smidge more enterprise, a smidge larger deal sizes, but not much. We'll talk about it in a second. But overall, 120% NRR across all customers and 145% for its 50k plus deals. So for Asana, 50k is a big deal. They have bigger customers as we'll chat about, but 50k is a big customer for them and they have 145% NRR. So those 50k plus customers keep growing year after year after year, which is pretty interesting too. But Asana isn't huge. It's got about 114,000 total customers paying about 3,500 each. That's actually even more than Monday. Monday, even though it's going more enterprise as well. The average customer pays only $2,000 a year. So Asana's not that expensive no matter what you perhaps think. If you're a larger customer, it's 300 bucks a month on average. But key to the math is the deal size has gone up. So at 240 million ARR, the average deal size was $2,800 a year. Now it's 3,500 and it's scale, that's a big difference. It's still small. But the difference between 3500 and 2800, well that gives you a boost of 25% in revenue right there in that right there. So that's a big piece. Certainly not all. But combine 25% growth in deal size with 120% NRR, it almost accounts for half of Asana's growth. Point three again, where does this come from? The slightly bigger customers. So even though the average customer to Asana pays 3,500, the 5K and up customers again not huge, just 5K and up, are growing 96% and the 50K and up folks we talked about are growing 132%. So that's the pull. Asana is not leaving its SMB and self importantly self serve routes behind. But as it gets really big, as it's crossing 400 million 500 million in ARR, the bigger growth is coming from the 5k and app customers. We've seen this with others. This sort of 5K line is also where Freshworks, which is strong at SMB, is putting all of its efforts and it's really how the math needs to work on the sales driven side of the business, which we'll chat about in a second.4 42% of Asana's customers come from outside the US and that's not shocking, but it's impressive and it's what you can aspire to. And I would say in SaaS and B2B there's two types of apps. There's the ones that can be used anywhere you can grab and grow as long as they're localized, as long as they are in your local language. And Asana is an example of that. It's going to work just as well in Australia, in England and if it's in French or German, probably just as well there. And when you do it just right, when you localize for language, but the product can be used anywhere, you'll often see 33%, a third or more of the revenue outside the the US or North America, just organically. And that's exactly what we see with Asana. 40, 42% of their customers are outside the US and think about that for a minute. Many of you, if you're earlier stage, probably have 10, 15, maybe 20% of your customers outside of the US. This is a reminder you can do much more. HubSpot at over A billion in AR is dramatically accelerating outside the US and Asana is another one with SMBs that is growing more and more at scale outside the North American market. To go back to that initial point about how sana is growing 70% at 400 million ARR versus 55% at IPO, to be more specific, it's actually accelerated every quarter, just about since 200 million in ARR. And so this is just as a reminder that if your NRR is high and you keep iterating on your product, there is no clear natural ceiling to growth, as crazy as that sounds. Again, at 240 million ARR, we had 55% growth, then 57% the next quarter, then 61, then 72 and 70. That is just breathtaking acceleration quarter after quarter. And we all have this sense that the law of large numbers has to hit us. In a sense it does. Our initial tams are usually not large enough. We have to add more features, penetrate more markets, go more horizontal. But the best teams find a way to do that and they grow faster and faster at scale these days. Okay, a few other interesting notes. At IPO, about 60% of their customers still went through self service, 40% through the sales team. That looks to be about 5050 today at 400 million ARR. And that might be what you expect with a deal size of 3,600. You're trying to get the small guys to self serve, to self provision as much as possible and focus your sales team on the bigger folks. They've got about a 5050 split in terms of revenue. And it's a reminder that it can be done at scale. You do not have to abandon the small guys. You do not have to abandon self service. If you have an app like Asana that the smallest customers can use as well as the largest. Half of Asana's revenue now comes through sales, but half of it doesn't. Post ipo, they went more enterprise. They started to double the sales team and added their first real quota carrying reps. And that's a reminder that one you can do it later. Sometimes you don't have to be enterprise from day one. And also just think about the Math for a minute. Asana post IPO doubled the size of its sales team to double its sales from larger customers. And I know everyone knows that math intuitive in your head, but you know software scales to some extent. Get the service right, get that code right, more and more people can use the same code base. But sales, boy, you're going to need, you're going to need a sales to higher headcount almost linearly consistent with your growth. And Asana is just one visceral example for that point. Number seven. Features, features, features. Asana is in a competitive space. Last year they added 130 new features. Now whether we define them as big or small, I certainly don't know all of them. But nevertheless the fact that they trumpet that is instructive. 130 new features a year. Asana is not giving up at innovation, at scale. Nor really do you have to. Okay, one final point to note is just when you sort of peer through the numbers, Asana's growth is breathtaking. Again, not to be too redundant. 70% at 400 million AR and going up just about every single quarter. But the majority of that growth comes from the existing base. And this is just a reminder. Their new logo growth is about 20% on that 70% growth. And so that's a function of very high revenue retention and very high NRR and driving up your deal sizes. You can get a lot more money out of the base. But the new logos are only growing about 20%. And that's pretty much what we tend to see with almost all high NRR companies. But it's something you have to, you have to keep watch on. If your logo count dips too low, if it dips below 20 or 30% a year, it's really going to be hard to have top tier growth at scale. And so it's a reminder to watch your grr and watch your logo count almost as religiously and carefully as your NRR and your total top line revenue. Or you may end up accidentally exhausting your base and not having invested enough in new customers. Because going back to the, well, going back to your existing customers and selling them more product, more seats, more licenses, it's always easier. So you've got to make sure you have both KPIs. Anyhow, incredible story for Asana. A very competitive space, competing with everyone from Atlassian before it to many, many newer entrants that are adjacent like the Monday, the clickups, the notions that we all use. And yet even with so many competitors, they're all at scale. So many are well beyond 100 million. ARR. And they're growing faster than ever. You can too.
