The SaaS Ecosystem in Canada - with Lauren Thibodeau, SaaSCan

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics and form decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Lauren Thibodeau, founder of SaaSCan. We'll be covering three main topic areas of Lauren today. First, the state of the SaaS industry in Canada. Second, the use of SaaS metrics in early stage SaaS companies. And third, the intersection of customer experience and metrics. Lauren, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics It Measure Up podcast.

**Lauren Thibodeau** (1:06)
Well, thanks so much, Ray. And I love how you asked this question. Everything has prepared me for this moment. So I'll cover, I guess, three quick stages that have shaped my perspective today. The first is education. I have a unique background. I did four university degrees that cover business, French literature, adult education and linguistics, including a stint in Belgium. So that sort of prepared me for the second stage, which was a 20-year career in global tech companies, publicly traded large, mostly B2B SaaS, IBM, Cognos, PTC out of Boston and Kanaxis. And then the third stage, for almost the last four years now, I've been running my own advisory services practice focused on B2B SaaS companies and really specifically building customer-centric, metrics savvy SaaS companies in Canada.

**Ray Rike** (1:59)
Oh, someday, we'll have to talk about how you pivoted from linguistics to the SaaS industry and metrics. But one of the things that really impressed me was when I started hearing a little bit about SaaSCan and the research you're doing across the SaaS ecosystem throughout Canada. So I guess the first question I have for you, because a lot of our guests are SaaS founders and they were thinking about, you know, how large is the SaaS industry in Canada? Is it a market we want to serve? So what do you view your insights into the state of the SaaS industry in Canada?

**Lauren Thibodeau** (2:29)
Yeah, thanks for that question, because it's been fascinating as I've peeled back the layers here. I'll maybe start with some quick Canadian trivia for some listeners who may not know Canada as intimately. So we have about 38 million people, almost 10x smaller population-wise than the US. Ten provinces, three territories, and almost three-quarters of our population lives in just three of those provinces, Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia. Surface area-wise, we're a little bit bigger than the US, so we're really spread out, which many people know. I have been fascinated to learn more about the ecosystem that's venture-backed, but first people probably know some of our biggest and probably most mature SaaS companies. There's publicly traded ones, private ones. You know, people heard of Shopify, OpenText, Constellation Software. Those are, you know, publicly traded large.
We also have a couple of large privately held ones, Point Click Care, 4BillionValuation, AppliBoard out of Waterloo, 4BillionValuation. And so those are some names people may have heard of. What they might not know is there's this incredible ecosystem. At last count, with our data partner, LSpark Global, we counted 3,170 venture-backed SaaS startups in Canada, so almost 3,200 coast to coast. So out of the 10 provinces, there's SaaS companies in all 10 Out of the 3 territories, there's 2 out of 3 territories have SaaS companies represented, and that doesn't even include bootstrapped and publicly funded companies.

**Ray Rike** (4:01)
That's a lot of data in there. So about 3,200 SaaS companies in a country of 38 million people. So if we did just kind of pure math, I would say we should have about 30,000 VC-backed SaaS companies in the United States with a population of about 360 million now. By the way, that's pretty close. So very interesting if the ratios are similar. But one of the challenges when I've talked to Canadian SaaS founders is to really gain scale beyond kind of that initial product market fit, getting to maybe 2 million, even up to 5 million is they have their eyes on the United States marketplace. So are there any common challenges that you see when a Canadian SaaS entrepreneur is trying to enter the US market?

**Lauren Thibodeau** (4:44)
Yeah, I would. And I would say just for context, it's anecdotal, I haven't done quantitative studies on this, but of the 30 or so SaaS companies where I've either been embedded or consulted, I would say there are a couple of common challenges. The first is network, just getting into the network and expanding contacts to sell into the US market. Now, there are lots of great organizations in Canada who are enabling and helping founders there, the C100, Canada Silicon Valley connection, you know, trade missions, and even the Council of Canadian Innovators. But network is the first challenge. The second one, and I have three here, the second is really, success can crush a Canadian company if it scales too fast. You know, associate, one of my clients sells to professional associations. The size of the membership base in the US, just 10x, right? And so if you're not prepared with your people, process and tech, success in the US will crush you.