This morning at Asana’s San Francisco headquarters, the startup announced a new version of its product, a new brand — logo — and, happily, some metrics about its growth.
As you will recall, the startup picked up a new Head of Business from Google on Monday, announcing at the same time that it has expanded its revenue by 230 percent over the past year.
Growth
Asana announced that it has annual recurring revenue in the “low tens of millions,” a metric that it predicates on the 140,000 companies currently using its platform. The firm also announced that it is expanding that number by 10,000 companies a month, giving it just under 100 percent year-over-year growth, on a customer basis.
(You can grok the implied positive dollar churn of Asana’s revenue growth compared to its customer growth.) (Protip: Looks good.) (Other protip: Ignore me.)
In addition, Asana described a fast ramp-up to profitability. In the wake of the company hiring its new business head, TechCrunch indicated that Asana’s performance is notable as a potential IPO candidate. Say, 18 to 24 months. Onstage, the company extended its revenue chart to include a note about going into the black, off of the red:
That matters, because so many companies in the software as a service (SaaS) space grow quickly, but do so while main-lining a molotov cocktail of Other People’s Money, leading to a years-long binge that can help some on their board presume that the bigger the loss, the greater the future positive cash flows. That can be, and sometimes is not; Asana is trying to play a different game.
Product
Asana’s product has racked up users because it can be useful for inundated teams that want to escape email, while, at the same time, managing a less convoluted workflow. That’s the firm’s goal, at least.
To that end, Asana announced today a redesign, and several new features that, presumably, it expects to bolster its current in-market performance. Asana’s executive duo Justin Rosenstein and Dustin Moskovitz said that new new Asana is “redesigned from the ground up.”
According to the two founders, alongside their product team, the largest request that they received from users was to improve the design of their app.
The new version of Asana launched to its users this morning, including new features designed to bring communication inside of its own platform (hello, Slack), and a tool built to assist users in keeping tabs on information inside of their current work environments.
The last piece won’t be available until “early 2016,” while the communications tool is now out.
Asana therefore managed to complete the Current Business Trifecta, if you will, stressing quick growth, product advances, and a strategy to integrate its product into the workflow of others. That may sound like a reiteration of cliché, but in this case we should allow the bland, given Asana’s capital efficiency.
Oh, and this is the new logo:
