Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Asana third quarter earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Ms. Catherine Buan, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss the financial results for Asana's third quarter fiscal year 2021. With me on today's call are Dustin Moskovitz, Asana's Co-Founder and CEO, Tim Wan, the company's Chief Financial Officer. Chris Farinacci , the company's Chief Operating Officer and Head of Business. Today's call will include forward-looking statements pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Including, but not limited to, statements regarding our financial outlook, market position, and growth opportunities. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements represent our management's beliefs and assumptions only as of the date made.
Information on factors that could affect the company's financial results is included in its filings with the SEC from time to time, including the section titled Risk Factors in the prospectus filed by the company in connection with its direct listing. In addition, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures are in addition to, and not a substitute for or superior to measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures and a discussion of the limitations of using non-GAAP measures versus their closest GAAP equivalent is available in our earnings release, which is posted on our investor relations webpage at investors.asana.com. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Dustin.
Thanks, Catherine. Welcome everybody, and good afternoon. We had an excellent first quarter as a publicly traded company, and as you can see from the results, our business was fundamentally strong. In Q3, we added approximately 7,000 net new customers and reported revenue of $58.9 million, up 55% year-over-year. In addition, the number of customers spending $5,000 or more on an annualized basis was up 58% year-over-year, and revenue growth from those customers was up 80% year-over-year. Last quarter, we mentioned that we saw short-term headwinds from COVID and long-term tailwinds. Now we feel like the short-term headwinds have diminished. Return rates have reverted to pre-COVID levels and markedly improved from their peak in April. Beyond COVID, we're seeing promising signs of continued durable growth in at least three trends.
One, acceleration in new customer additions. Two, faster deployment in some of our existing customers. Three, some of our largest enterprise expansions to date. Success we've experienced in Q3 marks a moment in time that has grown from years of investment in our culture, our product, and our strategy. We're a mission-critical platform that enables the world's teams to work together effortlessly. In a world where there is a fire hose of information, proliferation of collaboration tools, and an increasingly distributed work environment, it's critical to have clarity about what's most important and what each team member should focus their attention on. The pandemic and work from home has accelerated this need. In fact, the collaboration market is expected to be a $32 billion market by 2023, according to IDC.
We believe the world's 1.25 billion global information workers would benefit from a platform like Asana, and we've penetrated less than 3% of the employees at our own customer base. Since this is a relatively new software category, let me explain how we view the landscape and where Asana fits in. Effective team collaboration requires the three Cs: content, which includes cloud storage and file sharing; communication, which includes chat and video conferencing; and coordination, which is where Asana is focused. Teams have invested heavily in technology for the first two, but in most cases, they haven't invested in the Asana layer, the coordination layer. That's our third C. Coordination is about clearly answering the question, who is doing what by when? Historically, teams have had to resort to sticky notes, email, spreadsheets, and status meetings to coordinate work.
With Asana, they have a better solution. Companies work best when everyone in the organization has clarity on the company's mission, its objectives, projects, and workflows needed to achieve those objectives, and who's responsible for each individual task. This enables every team member to achieve focus and flow and have clarity about how their work contributes to the organization's mission. When there's clarity, teams spend less time coordinating work, more time actually doing work, and quite simply, are more productive. Asana solves the problem of team coordination and gives teams clarity. The Asana Work Graph is the data model that makes this team coordination possible. It enables a complete, fully connected, accurate, and up-to-date map of work in your organization.
The Asana Work Graph represents all of the units of work, like tasks, ideas, goals, agenda items, information about that work, like relevant conversations, files, and status information, and how it all fits together, including importantly, who's responsible for each piece. It's a living system of clarity for work that emerges in real-time and expresses a team's past state, present status, future plan. This is one of our biggest competitive differentiators, so I'm going to spend a few minutes on this call and on the next couple of earnings calls talking about different aspects of the Asana Work Graph and the customer benefits it enables. Today, let's double-click on multi-homing, which is a feature of the Asana Work Graph that enables teams to manage complex work in a simple and intuitive way. Multi-homing gives people the ability to host a single task in multiple projects at the same time.
This feature is unique to Asana, and is what allows Asana to serve as a single source of truth for customers working across projects, processes, and functions. For example, we used multi-homing to prepare for this earnings call. We created an Asana task to finalize approvals for the earnings call script, and that task had all the pertinent details for the call, and served as our single source of truth. The task was simultaneously in several different projects, including investor relations, communications, legal review, and in my personal My Tasks. This flexibility allows each of those constituents to manage the work within their normal context and workflows without needing to make their own individual copy of the task. Each time a team member multi-homes a task, a cycle of chaos is averted. Without multi-homing, one of two things happens.
Either you miss a unit of work in one of its relevant contexts, and work falls through the cracks, or teams waste time in email threads and meetings just to communicate status and reconcile changes. Multi-homing gives customers confidence that what they're seeing is the single source of truth across all teams. You might think this is too subtle and abstract for customers to pick up on, but this is one of the aha moments that customers rave about. For example, Vox Media says, "Before Asana, it was like the Wild West at Vox Media. Information didn't flow smoothly between teams, and key details and deadlines got lost in email and chat. Now with Asana, we can add a task, like a legal review for a client campaign, to multiple projects with just a click.
This way, the legal team, for example, doesn't have to sift through all the other campaign work. They have a board that consolidates all of their review tasks in one place. When they complete the review, the update is automatically synced across all of the projects. Multi-homing is so powerful that it's used by 97% of our customers that spend $5,000 or more on an annualized basis. The volume is remarkable. Customers have multi-homed hundreds of millions of Asana tasks. This is just one of the unique capabilities enabled by the Asana Work Graph. From an R&D perspective, we're investing aggressively in the Asana Work Graph and the features it enables. This year, we released more than 130 new features, including approvals, status, Goals, dashboards, and platform integrations with Zoom, Jira, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Tableau, Power BI, and more.
We're also moving quickly towards our product vision of becoming the navigation system for organizations, which we described at our Future of Asana event last quarter. Some of those product investment areas include these areas. First, the Asana Work Graph, visualizations, and reporting. This will give teams real-time data and insights across their organization. Second, the workflow store and builder. This will democratize workflow creation and automation, and enable best practice sharing across teams and organizations. Next, Goals. We're expanding our Goals product to allow organizations to manage all their org, team, and individual Goals for every employee in the company. This enables customers to map their Work Graph top to bottom, aligning work from the atomic level of detail tasks all the way up to the highest level objectives of the organization. In addition, two weeks ago, we previewed some of the themes around our enterprise platform.
We're building out even more enterprise platform capabilities, including enhanced admin controls, permissions, licensing, security, and integrations to serve the world's largest companies. Stay tuned for new product announcements in these areas and more over the next several quarters. Now I'm going to turn it over to Chris to talk about Q3 from an operational perspective and share more details on how our customers are using Asana.
Thanks, Dustin. We're very excited about our performance in Q3, with top-line revenue growth of 55% year-over-year, led by revenue from customers with over $5,000 in annual spend, which was up 80% year-over-year. In Q3, we again saw notable improvements across many of our key metrics, including record top-of-funnel traffic and sign-ups, accelerated incremental paying customers, and expanding deal sizes. Let me discuss each in a little more detail. As you might remember from Q2, our top-of-funnel volume and sign-ups was elevated due to work from home, and it not only remained elevated, but even expanded in Q3. We also accelerated the number of new paying customers in the quarter, adding approximately 7,000 to reach over 89,000 total paying customers to date. The increase in new paying customers in Q3 was almost as large as the volume in both Q1 and Q2 combined.
Third, we saw a move to bigger deals across the board. In particular, we saw traction in large enterprises. Our large deal trends reflected this. We saw the number of customers expending more than $50,000 with us annually increase 104% year-over-year, with the corresponding revenue contribution more than doubling. We saw very strong growth in very large enterprises in Q3. We are continuing to invest in our enterprise offering. Last month, we unveiled new and expanded integrations with Microsoft Teams, Slack, Jira, and Zoom Video, reinforcing our unique role enabling enterprise work orchestration. In Q3, we saw customer wins broadly across industry verticals. Let me talk about a few notable wins. Asurion, a leading provider of electronic device insurance with 300 million customers worldwide, has been an Asana customer for over two years.
In Q3, Asurion upgraded to our enterprise solution for our enterprise-grade security and strong integration capabilities, and expanded to more departments across the organization, including HR, the B2B revenue division, retail, and their IT architecture team. VSP, a leading provider of access to eye care and eyewear to their 94 million members around the world, chose Asana as their enterprise solution, bringing together marketing teams from five lines of business into a single platform. With Asana, what used to be a manual process combining email, SharePoint, spreadsheets, and Jira will now be automated. VSP chose Asana because they need an organization-wide solution that could replace email with an automated approval process, be customized for the business workflows, and provide strategic visibility across the organization for leadership. Zoom Video, a leading provider of video-first unified communications, began using Asana in the mid-2019 to help manage their work.
In Q3, Zoom expanded their use of Asana to more teams across the business. Now they can see project progress in real- time and ensure responsibilities are clear, which is critical when you're moving as fast as Zoom is to serve their growing customer base. Education everywhere has been hit hard by COVID-19, and the bigger the school, the harder it can be to stay aligned and responsive to change. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, Asana is becoming the backbone for a number of administrative units, supporting their teleworking experience and empowering employees to organize their work, delegate responsibility, and drive accountability. For example, the Office of Research is using Asana to run some of its COVID-19 testing operations, and the procurement department is actioning inbound requests and approvals in Asana to streamline the process with other departments.
I also want to highlight that four of our biggest customer expansions in the quarter were with Fortune 50 companies, this including expanding one of our largest customers to tens of thousands of seats. As you can see, while our enterprise motion is still in its early stages, we are clearly starting to see our strategy bear fruit. We are helping some of the most visionary companies in both traditional as well as disruptive industries and expanding rapidly around the world. Our growth levers remain intact, and we are progressing successfully, acquiring new customers, customer expansion, cross-company use cases, and product innovation. In September, I shared with you some of the opportunities in front of us to drive future growth. I'd like to revisit these growth drivers through the lens of what we saw in Q3. I'll start with new customer acquisition.
We remain focused on acquiring new customers through word of mouth, marketing, and our self-serve product. This is a fast-growing, emerging category with the vast majority of global information workers without work management tools and suffering from lack of clarity. For new teams, Asana is fundamentally a broad horizontal product. We see customer use cases within and across virtually all functions and departments, and often including collaboration externally with suppliers, partners, and customers. As you heard from Dustin, in Q3, we added approximately 7,000 net new customers. We continue to see a large expansion opportunity in our existing base of now over 89,000 paying customers. Our direct sales team is armed with department-specific solutions for our customers, and we continue to see strong traction in marketing and creative, sales and account management, and strategy and operations teams, as well as in product and design in HR and IT teams.
We believe we have the right strategy, the best solutions, and now is the time to ramp up our sales capabilities and invest in marketing to take advantage of the $32 billion market opportunity. Third, we see a large incremental opportunity to support company-wide use cases. Starting with our recent launch of integrated goal and OKR management, as we power the Asana Work Graph within companies, Asana is uniquely suited to empower company-wide clarity and engagement use cases. Internationally, we are expanding both our footprint and our product reach. In Q3, we opened an office in Singapore to expand our footprint in Asia and ultimately to be closer to our fast-growing ASEAN customer base. We will also be announcing support for more languages and localizations in the coming months.
Finally, we continue to innovate and expand our market-leading offering to bring the Asana solution to more teams and increasingly larger enterprises and organizations. Our product and go-to-market strategies work hand in hand to meet the increasing customer demand for work management solutions and drive our long-term growth. Now I'll turn it over to Tim to go through our financial results.
Thanks, Chris, Thank you to everyone for joining our call today. I know that earnings season can be an endurance test, and we appreciate your time and support. It was a great quarter across the board. Revenue in Q3 was $58.9 million, up 55% year-over-year, up 13% quarter-over-quarter, led by 80% year-over-year growth from our customers $5,000 and over. We added approximately 7,000 net new paying customers in the quarter and now have over 89,000 paying customers. We now have 8,938 customers spending $5,000 or more with us on an annualized basis, up 58% year-over-year. We saw even stronger growth in our larger customers. We now have 318 customers spending $50,000 or more with us on an annualized basis, up 104% year-over-year.
Subscriptions of $5,000 and over on an annualized basis represented 59% of our revenues in Q3, compared to 51% of our revenue in the year-ago quarter. Please note this represents all customers $5,000 and over, including customers over $50,000. In Q3, our overall dollar-based net retention rate was again over 115%, consistent with Q2. As a reminder, our dollar-based net retention rate is a trailing four-quarter average calculation. For customers spending $5,000 or more with us on an annualized basis, the dollar-based net retention rate was over 125%, also consistent with Q2. For customers spending $50,000 or more with us on an annualized basis, it was over 140%, again, consistent with Q2. Before turning to expense items and profitability, I would like to point out that I will just be discussing non-GAAP results in the balance of my remarks.
Gross margins came in at 88%, up from 87% in Q2 and 86% in the year-ago quarter. We're proud of our best-in-class software gross margins, driven primarily by our leading architecture. R&D was $28.2 million, or 48% of revenue. We have five broad areas of focus, and we are investing heavily to continue innovating at a high velocity. Sales and marketing was $45.6 million or 77% of revenue. We have nearly doubled our sales team over the last year because we are confident as demand for work management continues to move mainstream. G&A was $15.1 million or 26% of revenue, reflecting both increased public company costs as well as building out our infrastructure for scale. As a result, total non-GAAP operating loss was $37.3 million. Operating loss margin came in at 63%. Non-GAAP net loss was $38.3 million, and non-GAAP loss per share was $0.34.
Total cash and marketable securities balances at the end of Q3 were approximately $424 million. Free cash flow is defined as net cash from operating activities, less cash used for property and equipment and capitalized software costs, excluding non-recurrent items such as the direct listing fees and expenses and the build-out of our San Francisco office. In Q3, free cash flow was - $19.5 million. Our total Q3 deferred revenue was $90.1 million, up 56% year-over-year and up 20% sequentially. As you will see on our balance sheet, $88.9 million of deferred revenue was in current liabilities, while $1.3 million, which represents long-term deferred, was included in other liabilities. The $15.1 million incremental deferred revenue that we added from Q2 to Q3 was driven by a variety of factors, including strong sales execution, larger deals, and net new customer adds.
In addition, in Q3 of last year, we had a price change and allowed customers to lock in existing prices and renew earlier, which elevated renewals and deferred revenue in Q3. As you think about deferred revenue in Q4, it's important to note that we expect the usual seasonal trends associated with the holidays and fewer working days. Please note, we consider revenue growth to be the best leading indicator for the health of our business. While we do recognize that investors look at other metrics such as RPO, deferred revenue, and calculated billings, we do not consider these metrics to be good leading indicators for our business trends. With our bottoms-up model, we engage new users with a low-friction entry point package, and a material portion of our revenue base is on monthly contracts.
Looking ahead to Q4, we are raising guidance for the next quarter and for the year. For the fourth quarter fiscal year 2021, we expect the following. Revenue of $62 million-$63 million, representing 43%-45% year-over-year growth. We expect non-GAAP loss from operations of $42.5 million to $39.5 million. Non-GAAP net loss per share of $0.27 to $0.25, assuming basic and diluted weighted average of shares outstanding of approximately 158 million. For the full fiscal year 2021, we now expect the following. Revenue of $220.6 million-$221.6 million, representing 55% year-over-year growth. We expect non-GAAP operating loss of $130.8 million to $127.8 million. Non-GAAP net loss per share of $1.24 to $1.21, assuming basic and diluted weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 106 million.
Longer term, we believe that we can execute on our growth strategy and that our best-in-class gross margins will provide the leverage and flexibility to invest into the large market opportunity. We believe this investment will provide durable and sustainable long-term growth. I now would like to turn the call back over to the operator for Q&A. Operator?
Operator, while you're queuing up the questions, I just wanted to jump in and, first of all, thank everybody for joining us today. I'm going to try to keep the Q&A at a good pace, so if everybody on the polling system could try to keep their questions to, well, one question. If it's a couple questions layered in, that's okay too. Just anything you can do to help us keep a good pace for the question-and-answer session. Thanks.
As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone. And your first question comes from the line of Alex Zukin from RBC. Your line is open.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question first, and also congratulations on a great report, first report as a public company. It's a great thing to see. The first one, maybe just for you, Dustin. If you think about the kinds of conversations that you're having with C-level executives at the moment, when the world is clearly thinking about restacking for a new normal workplace, give us the tenor of those conversations. As you think about it from the context, you mentioned 3% penetration of your existing customer base on a user basis. Where does that go over the next couple of years? What's the main way when you think about unlocking that kind of potential, how do you think about it?
Yeah, I'll start this off, then I think Chris can probably add some more color. I'll just point out, our customers are in a number of different positions. It depends a bit which industry they're in terms of whether they're being aggressive about expansion and hiring or are more conservative. Generally, we're seeing the same sort of positive reaction we've seen to existing deployments in prior years, too. Asana was built to be a great customer experience and something where the initial teams could be successful and really enjoy using the product, and then get the good word out to their peers and other teams and departments.
That's still generally the sentiment we get when we talk to C-level executives, is they're hearing from their teams they're getting a lot of value, and they'd like to expand that value proposition to other parts of the company. In terms of the 3% penetration, it's really just a reflection of the massive opportunity that's left in a lot of our customers. In terms of where it goes in the long run, we obviously hope to get wall-to-wall in all of our customers, so we hope it goes to 100%. I don't know what pace that'll be. Again, it's different in different customers and depends on the size. In some of the smaller enterprises, that figure may be a much higher ratio of employees and may represent entire departments or divisions.
In very, very large organizations like the Fortune 5, it may be a smaller figure. It may take us more years to get the whole organization. Anything you'd like to add, Chris?
Yeah, sure. Maybe I can add some value to your question just in terms of where we're seeing that value and that traction in those conversations. Generally, the conversations we're having are consistent with conversations we've had in the past in terms of the business imperative for basically real-time clarity and alignment and accountability in companies. That's just sort of been amplified in this more globally diverse world over the last couple of quarters. Where we're seeing the traction the most, it's broad and horizontal, but where we're seeing the traction the most is in marketing and creative teams, sales and account management, and strategy and operation teams where we already have departmental solutions. We're also seeing strong traction in other areas that are adjacent, like product design, HR, and IT. That's sort of a use case where the traction is.
Then maybe more broadly, and I mentioned this in my remarks a little bit earlier, we're seeing the traction broadly across industry verticals, particularly in Q3. I mentioned some new examples of wins and expansions in Q3. Asurion, an insurance company, VSP in healthcare, Zoom in tech, and UC Santa Cruz in education, just to give you a feel for the sort of the diversity of demand.
That's perfect. Maybe just as a follow-up, Tim, as I think about, obviously, we're all going to want to talk about the enterprise numbers and the enterprise strength in the quarter that you saw was quite robust. Walk us through the headwind or the, maybe the, not the headwinds, but the lack, what you're seeing from the SMB customer base. The dollar-based net expansion was pretty strong. As we've gotten through maybe the height of the pandemic, hopefully, talk to us about retention and particularly as we come out of it next year, hopefully, how should we think about those comparables, particularly on the SMB side of the business?
Yeah, I think there's a couple of ways you can look at it. I think Dustin kind of alluded this in the prepared remarks, where we certainly are seeing churn diminish versus their peak back in kind of towards the tail end of Q1 and part of Q2. I think we're also being prudent in terms of, hey, we are living in a world where there's a second surge. We do think that the net expansion rate is a four-quarter rolling average, so you can kind of expect some of the cohorts to work their way through over the next couple of quarters. Certainly, the customers that are staying and thriving and expanding with us, even in a pandemic, likely are going to only continue to get stronger.
In some ways, we do think, hey, we're going to come out of this with a much stronger customer base over time, but there's probably still a couple of quarters to kind of work through the cohorts. I'll let Chris and Dustin kind of talk about some of the macro secular tailwinds that we're seeing in terms of the customers.
Yeah, I can add some color. I think you asked specifically about SMB. Just building on what Tim said, although we don't break out our business by SMBs, what I can tell you is that the revenue growth rate for customers spending less than $5,000 with us on an annualized basis accelerated in Q3 versus the growth rate in Q2. More broadly, I'd emphasize what Tim said in terms of, I'd emphasize the strength in the quarter was primarily driven by secular trends in the growing business imperative for work management that's been ongoing. That's where we think the primary focus is for demand and what's driving the businesses. I think some of the recovery over time can help sort of with a little bit of an additive layer, but it's the secular trends that are really driving the business.
Great. Next question, operator.
Your next question comes from the line of Brent Bracelin from Piper Sandler. Your line is open.
Good afternoon, and thanks for the questions here. One for Dustin and a follow-up for Tim. Dustin, love to get your view on this whole Salesforce Slack deal. I appreciate that Asana is agnostic to all the video messaging channels. You've announced several new integrations. That said, what is your view on Salesforce Slack, and how may that or may that not impact your business going forward?
Yeah, great. Thanks for the question. First of all, I just want to say congratulations to both of those companies. It's a huge moment for Stewart and for Marc and for their entire teams. Just to reiterate a couple, how we see the overall collaboration landscape, I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we really think about three big categories for three Cs. The first is content, which includes cloud storage and file sharing. Second is communication, which includes chat and video conferencing. The third C is coordination. That's where Asana is focused. Coordination's all about clearly answering the question, who's doing what by when? From our point of view in coordination, it's really important that we integrate well with the products in the other two categories.
Slack, of course, is part of communications, and it's no surprise it's one of our best and most important integrations. In fact, it's something I use every day myself. We additionally have a great integration with Salesforce and CRM products. On top of that, we're mutual customers. We use Salesforce CRM, they use Asana, and same with Slack. We're really looking forward to just deepening our long-existing relationship with the combined entity, to build the future of work. I think this is just building an even stronger partner for us for the future.
Got it. Helpful color there. Tim, on the follow-up here, I know you mentioned we're not supposed to pay attention to calculated billings and other metrics, but it was very strong, up over 25% sequentially. Just trying to understand, as you think about the momentum there, was there a couple outside deals that drove billings up so much this quarter? Any additional color you can provide on why you saw such a sharp jump in billings this quarter? Thanks.
No, great question. I would say there's not any one thing I can point to that really drove that particular sequential jump. I think we have a bottoms-up business, but I did talk a little bit about, in my prepared remarks, about the seasonality in Q3 related to billings and deferred revenue. One of the things that we did last year was we did have a price change in Q3 and allowed customers to lock in their prices and renew early. There's kind of this natural elevated deferred revenue or renewal cycle in Q3. The way to think about it is probably take a little bit more of a muted approach to Q4 deferred. Really it's really the secular tailwinds and the strength of the business that really drove both the billings and deferred revenue growth.
Helpful color. Thank you.
Yep. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Ittai Kidron from Oppenheimer. Your line is open.
Thanks, again, guys, congrats on the first public quarter and great results. I have a couple of questions. First, on the customer additions, clearly very strong number here. Can you tell us how much of this was potentially some catch-up from the previous two quarters? I would assume that some customers have kind of delayed decisions given COVID, and perhaps have now felt a little bit more comfortable. I'm trying to kind of split up the true business activity versus some catch-up activity in there. Perhaps a question to Chris. Chris, you've talked about bigger deals in the quarter, and you've talked about some of the corporate functions in which you're seeing a lot of traction on marketing and creative.
Help me understand, though, how much of this larger deal activity really reflects more than one corporate function constituency adopting you right off the bat versus a single one that you focus on, but just making a bigger step as a first step?
Sure, let me try to take that first question, Ittai. What I would say in terms of our net customer add, we definitely saw strength in our top of funnel in both Q2 and Q3 during the whole COVID period. I think what's really changing is kind of the diminishing churn rate that we're seeing. Many of the customers that were impacted by COVID were either churned or paused their subscription at that period.
Got it.
I think that was the main impact in terms of our net adds. Then I'll turn the call back to Chris for the other question.
Sure. Thanks, Ittai . To try and answer your question, I'll just sort of remind everyone, at the highest level, we have an intentionally hybrid self-serve and direct sales business model, and that maps to the way customers adopt our product over time, where direct sales is built on top of that self-serve business. Self-serve, of course, maps to acquiring small free and paid teams and companies of all sizes. That sales-assisted motion corresponds to land and expand. Land typically is about establishing a champion, deploying a critical workflow and initial team or two, and then expansion is typically about engaging with the IT and decision-makers to expand more broadly. We don't really break out the revenue versus land versus expand, but what I can tell you is expansion is almost always about more than one function, to your question, and cross-functional.
A good portion of land typically gets into that. Maybe a good proxy for cross-functional usage of Asana is what Dustin talked about earlier with multi-homing tasks, where we start to see work that is shared virally across teams. That's really what drives the usage of Asana from one department to another. Certainly our sales-assisted business corresponds to cross-functional and multi-department, not all of it, but a good chunk of it. Mostly our expansion business is almost all focused on broader usage across companies.
Got it. Excellent. Good stuff. Good luck, guys.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from a line of Brent Thill from Jefferies. Your line is open.
Tim, no one's going to have an endurance problem on our side to keep putting up 55% growth. I guess just as it relates to the digital component that's 60% of your revenue, many are asking, given you're such a digital mix, why the big need for these massive investments you're putting in? You can just put in context of how you're building the direct sales force out and the other components, and how you anticipate bringing this back to more of a natural balance of good growth with caring about the bottom line and profitability. Thank you.
Yeah, sure. Why don't I start and then, Chris , if you want to add on. I'll talk a little bit about kind of how we think about leverage and how we think about growing the business long- term. I think the most important thing for us is acquiring customers, landing with those customers, helping them be successful, and having them expand over time. We have 88% gross margins, which provides a lot of flexibility for us to build a great business. What we've seen with customers that are spending over $5,000 or $50,000 with us, that they naturally not only just expand with seats, but they also expand, moving up the tiers from premium to business and then business to enterprise. There's also a lot of ACV growth down the road for us in addition to seats.
We think building the business is really about landing with customers. The category is relatively new, with 1.2 billion knowledge workers, and we're barely penetrating into that opportunity. For us, it's really about investing into the opportunity and driving growth and then creating leverage over the longer term.
Yeah, I don't have much to add. I'll just bring it back maybe to the business model. Again, it's an intentionally hybrid self-serve, direct sales business model. Given the market opportunity and the rising business imperative, the reality is we're investing in growth for both and one feeds the other. In self-serve, acquiring new customers, as Tim said, the market is wide open. It's in land grab mode. Most of the world doesn't yet have solutions. For future growth, we're very focused on landing new and prepaid teams and companies of all sizes. We're investing in marketing and top-of-funnel in our self-serve business there. Again, on the sales-assisted side, that's all about the large expansion opportunity in our paying base. We shared some metrics on that.
For example, in customers spending more than $50,000 with us annually, we more than doubled the revenue and the number of customers year-on-year in that segment. That's a good metric there. We're investing again to sort of roughly double the sales team to ensure global coverage for growth, particularly with quota-carrying reps to take advantage of that opportunity.
Thanks.
Your next question comes from the line of Stan Zlotsky from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Your next question comes from the line of Stan Zlotsky. Your line is open.
Sorry about that. I was on mute. Thank you so much for taking my questions and congratulations on a very strong quarter. Maybe a high-level question from me. As you guys look at the world and as the world really starts to settle into this new normal in 2021, how do you think Asana fits into the new patterns of collaboration that emerge as a result? Then I have a quick follow-up.
Yeah. I think you're partially referring to the trends towards more distributed work. The thing I'd point out is just well before COVID came onto the scene, I think there was a rapidly increasing business imperative for increased clarity and alignment. Clarity is really difficult for teams to achieve even when they're working in an in-office environment, but it's particularly difficult with remote work. I think, going forward, we're going to see some companies return to the office, we're going to see some companies decide to continue with remote distributed work, and we're going to see everything in between. Across that entire spectrum, I think Asana has a really important role to play in terms of driving clarity for teams. I think we're just really well-suited to all of those different environments. Yeah, we're happy to help customers.
Perfect. That makes a lot of sense, Dustin. Maybe just a follow-up for Tim. When we look at new customer acquisition that you guys saw in the quarter, obviously very impressive numbers on a net basis, and some people are trying to ask that question. As I think about it, there's essentially kind of three levers to net new customer acquisition in your model. You have conversion of free usage to paid. You actually have just brand new top-of-funnel acquisition, and then you have just sheer improvement in gross churn. As you think about those kind of three vectors, maybe stack rank them for us to help us understand what were the drivers of such an improvement in the quarter?
Yeah, I would say the improvement we definitely saw was on the logo churn basis. Because primarily most of the churn that were related to COVID for us and impacted industry like hospitality or retail and small businesses mostly happened in Q2. We definitely saw improvement in logo churn. I would say, if we go back and look at both our paid to free ratio, those have maintained relatively strong and hasn't changed dramatically. Our acquisition channel continues to be really strong, just the top of the funnel. I would say the main difference change between this quarter and probably last quarter and even part of Q1 is just the logo churn has improved.
Perfect. Thank you so much.
Sure. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Mark Murphy from JP Morgan. Your line is open.
Thank you. My congrats on a very solid start. Tim, can you help us to try to understand how much of the $15 million deferred revenue increase, would you say was unusual or seasonal relating to that price increase? I understand you don't guide to it, but how does deferred revenue normally behave at a Q4? Because I don't think we have the historicals to go back too far and try to ascertain that.
Yeah, I think if we look at deferred prior to this Q3, deferred has probably grown anywhere between $5 million and $10 million on a quarter-over-quarter basis. I think in Q4, it's a little bit more muted, primarily because we have the holidays of Thanksgiving and December. I think if you can take a more muted approach in terms of the growth rate from quarter to quarter sequentially, and you should probably be fine.
I'm sorry, you're referring to 5%-10% sequential, and then muting it.
No, $5 million-$10 million. Yeah, $5 million-$10 million.
$5 million-$10 million.
Yeah.
Okay. Dustin, I'm curious, roughly what you saw in terms of paid user growth in Q3, if you're able to say, and just in your mind, what do you think is the optimal balance of paid user growth versus ARPU expansion going forward the next couple of years?
I don't think that we typically break those out from a metrics number. I definitely think that the revenue growth was a combination of those. Yeah, in terms of the talents, I don't know how to answer that very precisely, but we're definitely very interested both in driving seat expansion within our existing customers and capturing the opportunity we mentioned. We're only 3% penetrated into the employees for our existing customer base. That's 97% seat expansion opportunity. We also think there's still a lot of opportunity to drive ARPU as well. I think that'll be part of the future, but can't really give a prediction on the exact mix of them.
Thank you.
Hey, Mark, let me just comment on that deferred revenue. I know many of you are really focused on our deferred revenue and calculated billings, but a material portion of our revenue is still on monthly contracts. You won't see those in our deferred, but they certainly help, and they help drive the business, and they help drive our GAAP revenue. Just want to make sure that you guys are aware of that as well.
Your next question comes from the line of Brad Zelnick from Credit Suisse. Your line is open.
Great. Thanks so much. Congrats on a great quarter. Dustin, it's good to see that the business remains well-diversified with strength across several industries and, functionally, in particular, the strength that you have in marketing departments. I don't know if this analogy resonates with you, but is it fair to think that Asana could become sort of the Atlassian of marketing? That said, along those lines, how do you think about the recent deal that Adobe made to acquire Workfront?
Sure. I think I would just start off by saying I think we have a really broad base of customers, both across industries and geographies, but also across departments. Marketing is often the place where we land in the customer. It's where we most often land, but it's the sort of plurality of landings, not the majority. One of the reasons for that is actually that marketing tends to work so much cross-functionally. I mentioned in the prepared remarks that we see 97% of our customers over $5,000, paying $5,000 or more on an annualized basis, are using multi-homing, and we've seen hundreds of millions of multi-home tasks. We actually see that as a huge signal of the fact that our customers are using Asana cross-functionally.
I think we can be really strong in marketing, but I think part of the reason for that is that marketing will work with all the other departments in the company as well. We're really looking to be a horizontal solution for our customers. Do you want to add anything there, Chris?
Yeah. Can you also ask about Workfront, so I can mention something on that. I'd also add, as a former CMO for 10 years, exactly what Dustin said about the cross-functional nature of marketing. It gets us into other teams and helps us spread virally. I'd also say that, unlike some other functions, marketing teams do not have systems of record for these business processes, right? For events and campaigns and product launches and those kinds of things. Sort of what we're doing with work management, there were no standard tools for that. Just super greenfield, and it is a super exciting category. It is our strongest, even though we are very diverse, it tends to be, if you have to pick a starting point, probably where we see the most traction up front at land.
Then I think you asked the question about the Workfront acquisition by Adobe. Yeah, we see that as validation in two ways, validation of the category that large cap tech companies are taking note of the business imperative, the problem we solve and hearing it from their customers. And validation of the marketing segment. We just talked about it, but what a huge greenfield opportunity it is. I would just add in that our partnership with Adobe and the integrations we provide there is strong and driving a lot of traction with our customers right now.
Thank you so much for that. Maybe, Chris, just one quick follow-up or perhaps for you, Dustin. You talked about a lot of the new features. I also took note of the press release, Asana for the enterprise, that you had out last month. In particular, when I think about Goals that you've launched, and I think it's now been several months, can you maybe just double-click on that a little bit further in terms of some of the early customer reception to the feature and how you view its potential to help drive greater seat expansion within an organization?
Do you want me to take that, Dustin, or would you like to?
Yeah, I'll just start off by saying, we launched Goals earlier this year. It's the first version of the product. We've seen some great response from the initial customers. This is really a multi-year product strategy for us. We're going to be investing quite a bit more into Goals this year. I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we're going to be allowing organizations to manage all of the org team and individual goals for every employee in the company. This is really about sort of manifesting the full vision for the Asana Work Graph and allowing customers to map their work graph top to bottom and aligning work from the atomic level of detail tasks all the way up to the highest level objectives of the organization.
I think we've got a great sort of view on it out there, but there's a lot more that we can do to fully manifest that vision, and make sure that it's flexible enough to be adopted by the broad base of customers. Do you want to add on, Chris?
I think you covered it well. Thanks.
Great.
Your next question comes from the line of Pat Walravens from JMP Securities. Your line is open.
Oh, great. Thank you. Let me add my congratulations and also kudos to whomever coined the phrase in your script on multi-homing when you said the cycle of chaos is inverted. Those are six great words. Dustin, when you think about the TAM, I think one question investors have, it seems like in this market, in the coordination space, you often have competitors that coexist in the same customer. I mean, just as a funny example, a question before me, I think we mentioned Adobe. Adobe bought Marketo. Before Marketo was a reference customer for Smartsheet. Now they bought Workfront. Obviously we're going to have to figure that out. My sense is this sort of thing occurs a lot.
I'd just love to hear your big-picture themes in terms of does that mean that the TAM is actually maybe smaller and the 3% is actually a bigger number? How does it play out?
This is Chris. Why don't I take a stab at that and Dustin, add anything you want. If I understand you correctly, your question's really about the TAM. It all starts with the amount of information workers in the world that don't have a solution yet. Again, the vast, vast, north of 90% of information workers in the world don't yet have solutions. They're doing this manually. The way they're trying to get clarity for their teams and align their teams is with spreadsheets, meetings, and sticky notes, and email threads. That's, I think, why the business imperative for the need for clarity and alignment real- time of who's doing what when is just growing at a time when no one's ever really had it before other than manually.
I think that's overall what's driving the opportunity and what has us so excited, and it's true at the individual level in companies. It's true for kind of all business processes across companies. It's true where all that work execution connects to the strategies and issues and goals at the management layer. Ultimately, that's a lot of white space, right? On the customer acquisition side, it's a huge opportunity for us. Sure, there are certain segments in that where we see more traction than not, but it's still so horizontal, the demand and the interest and the teams that we're acquiring today. On the customer expansion side, in our paid base, we are less than 3% penetrated, so 97% of the addressable employees are still there.
That's without really getting into this wall-to-wall type thing, which is the third leg of our growth strategy and relatively new for us. We've begun to see some greater wall-to-wall deployments in small and mid-size companies, but it's early days. Examples of names you might recognize are Quora, MIRROR, which was recently acquired by lululemon, and Epitaph Records, and AppsFlyer, and so on. It is a huge opportunity, and I think that's why the rise of the business imperative combined with this huge opportunity that's largely untapped and never been solved right before is why I think you see so much interest in the category.
One thing I'll just add, so we've really emphasized that the work graph data model uniquely enables Asana to be very successful cross-functionally. A corollary to that is customers actually get increasing returns to scale as they expand their Asana usage throughout the organization and have a more complete work graph. We think that gives us a special kind of advantage as we expand within these customers, even if they're maybe running into some other alternatives and other teams.
Okay, good. That was the core root there. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Alex Kurtz from KeyBanc. Your line is open.
Yeah, thanks for taking the question. Dustin, I just want to go back to your philosophy, if you could remind us on how the team thinks about price increases, when to do it, how to do it, and kind of the flow year-to-year around that. Tim, back to earlier question about deferred revenue and kind of how price increases drives behavior in the prior periods before that goes into effect. Is that something we should be looking at more closely in our calculated billings projections?
Yes. I'll start off just on a philosophical basis. We think it makes sense to raise prices when we've made a stepwise change in the amount of value that we're providing to the customer experience. It typically comes after we've done quite a lot of investment into the product and released some new major features in whichever tier we're increasing, as well as just generally improve the customer experience across the board. I think that just points to relatively infrequently, but it's something that is likely to occur again in the future, but we don't have any specific timing to speak to right now.
Yeah. In terms of the impact on deferred revenue, I think the seasonality did happen in Q3, and you should model and think about that as a Q3 just because we do have a cohort of customer where the renewals came, got pulled into Q3. We will definitely, when prior to announcing any type of price increase, we generally give our customers time to adjust and reflect on whether they want to maintain. You will have the same update when we notify our customers.
Got it. Right. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Zane Chrane from Bernstein Research. Your line is open.
Hi, thanks for fitting me in. Really nice quarter. I'm curious, what portion of your bookings this quarter came from direct sales versus self-service, and then how do you expect that to trend going forward? Secondly, the incremental revenue added in the quarter, if I look at the year-over-year growth in that metric, it's been pretty volatile. I think it was up double digits in Q1, down double digits in Q2, up 38%, really impressively this quarter. Your guidance implies it's down 25% roughly at the high end of your guidance in Q4. What's driving the volatility in that metric, and how should we think about that going forward? Thank you.
Okay. I think what the first question was, let me just make sure I have it here. It was a self-serve. I think I would say it hasn't changed dramatically. I think Chris, on the Investor Day as well as on our Q2 earnings call, talked a little bit about both the breakdown between our self-serve and sales-assisted business. Those have generally been in the 60/40 range, 60% being self-serve and 40% being sales assisted, and sales assisted nudging up and becoming a higher percentage over time.
That's exactly right.
Yeah. Zane, you will probably have to walk me through your math in terms of how you're coming up with the implied growth rate, because I don't understand exactly the calculation. We can take that offline. I'll follow up with you directly.
Okay, sounds good. If I could just have one quick follow-up. How should we think about the maturity in terms of your enterprise sales order build-out? I know that's been a big priority for you guys, and it seems to be yielding some results. What inning are we in in terms of that enterprise sales order build-out? Thanks.
Yeah. The enterprise business, think of it as moving into the large expansion business and eventually wall-to-wall businesses. It's in early days. We're really encouraged by what we're seeing in early days, and we shared a lot of that, so I won't revisit it too much. Maybe to just add a little bit to it. We are building out the offering. We talked about that. Generalized, the enterprise offering is focused on providing deeper security and administrative controls and support that IT needs. We talked about some of the expansions of integrations as well as some business rules and admin controls in this quarter. In terms of large deals, it's early innings, without a doubt. We're starting to see it pay fruit. Two-thirds of the Fortune 500 are already free or paid customers.
Some of the world's most valuable customers are some of our largest customers. In Q3, four of our biggest customer expansions were in the Fortune 50. As we mentioned earlier, we're still only 3% penetrated in the addressable employee base. I would think of it like in those large accounts, we're seeing really strong traction, but it's very early innings still.
Got it. That sounds good. Thanks, gents, and happy holidays.
Your final question comes from the line of Andrew DeGasperi from Berenberg. Your line is open.
Thanks for taking my question. Just one to close it off, I guess, would be the integrations you've made with the communication layer like Slack, Zoom, and others. I was just curious, I know that it's still in the early stages, but can you maybe share with us how many users have started using Asana with those tools?
I don't think that we have a metric that we're able to share offhand on that. Maybe that's something we can try and set up for the next call. I do think, like I said, Slack is our most used integration. I know that for sure, the communications integrations as a category are extremely popular. It's very common to using work management side by side with those. Again, it's something I use every day myself. Yeah, in terms of actual quantitative stats, I don't have a lot to give you.
Well, maybe something I could add is, it's anecdotal, but it's helpful, is Slack's the most popular, and Google, Microsoft, and Zoom are the next most popular, so of all our integrations. I think that gives you a feel for how important the connection to that communication layer is.
Great. Thank you.
There are no further questions at this time. Catherine Buan, I turn the call back over to you for some closing remarks.
Great. Thank you very much. Thank you everyone for joining us again today. As always, please feel free to reach out if you have any follow-up questions. We are looking forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.