Customer count tracks a company’s total end customers. Customers can be broken down into 3 categories:Customer count tracks a company’s total end customers. Customers can be broken down into 3 categories:

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1. Retained customers: active customers who were also active in the previous period
2. New customers: customers who are active for the first time
3. Churned customers: customers who discontinued their subscription in a period

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In SaaSGrid for a customer to be considered active, they must contribute revenue within the period.

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While there aren’t defined success thresholds for number of customers, customer count is an important input for metrics like CAC and ACV. Customer count is essentially a proxy for what your ideal customer profile and business strategy are: you can service many SMB customers, try to build a repeatable mid-market sales motion, or go whale hunting for enterprise accounts. Serving smaller customers typically means having smaller ACVs, so it’s important to closely monitor CAC, gross margins, and retention to make sure you can serve high customer volumes profitably. Low touch sales, product-led growth, and automated customer support are common strategies for servicing high customer volumes. On the other end, true enterprise contracts can reach hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars of annual revenue, justifying large investments in sales and customer success. Either are valid approaches: the main tradeoff is that it can be harder to make the unit economics work with many small customers, which for enterprise sales can lead to lumpy growth.