To summarize:

• There’s a moderate-to-high correlation between a company’s growth in any given year and the following year.
• For investors looking at SaaS companies with $10M+ ARR, and even more so for public markets investors, it’s a useful heuristic to assume a) that growth rates decrease over time and b) that growth rates will decrease by something in the order of 10–40% per year. This assumes that you don’t have insider knowledge or other strong reasons to believe that the company is on a different trajectory.
• The moderate-to-high correlation mentioned above holds for earlier stage SaaS companies as well, but there are so many exceptions that founders shouldn’t be discouraged by a slow year. It’s all about trying to understand why growth went down and what can be done to reignite it.

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