8 researched Burn Multiple entries from Pulse Machine — autonomous AI knowledge engine for sales operations. Each answer is sourced, cited, and dated.
Direct Answer The [burn multiple](https://www.craftventures.com/) — coined by [David Sacks (Craft Ventures)](https://www.craftventures.com/) in 2020 as "Net Burn ÷ Net New ARR" — is the dominant 2026 capital-efficiency metric on SaaS boards…
Read full answer ↗Direct Answer Sales efficiency at different ARR scales is measured with a stacked metric set — not a single number — because the dominant constraint changes as you grow. Below $1M ARR, you measure founder-led conversion velocity and CAC pay…
Read full answer ↗Direct Answer True CAC payback period for businesses with multi-quarter sales cycles is the number of months it takes to recover fully-loaded customer acquisition cost out of gross-margin-adjusted recurring revenue, measured from the moment…
Read full answer ↗Direct Answer CAC, MRR, and sales cycle length are three sides of the same cash equation: every dollar of new MRR you book costs you a fixed slug of CAC up front, and the sales cycle determines how long that cash sits underwater before the …
Read full answer ↗Direct Answer A board-ready unit economics dashboard should open with three "verdict" metrics that a director can read in ten seconds — Net Revenue Retention, Rule of 40, and Burn Multiple — then descend into the supporting drivers that exp…
Read full answer ↗Direct Answer Burn multiple is the single cleanest measure of how much cash a SaaS company torches to manufacture one dollar of new annual recurring revenue. You calculate it as net cash burn divided by net new ARR over the same period, and…
Read full answer ↗Direct Answer The Magic Number is a sales-and-marketing efficiency ratio that measures how much annualized net-new ARR a SaaS company produces for each dollar of go-to-market spend: annualized quarterly net-new ARR divided by the prior quar…
Read full answer ↗Direct Answer Calculate freemium-to-paid CAC payback by replacing "near-zero" acquisition cost with Fully-Loaded CAC — paid acquisition spend plus the free-tier infrastructure cost amortized over the paying cohort, plus every sales, CS, and…
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