JT McCormick. He’s an American businessman, author and speaker. Most recently, he served as President of Technology company HeadSpring before his current role as president & CEO at Book in a Box.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Cyrus the Great
• What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos
• Favorite online tool? — Slack
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4.5
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – It’s not about the high school diploma. It’s about the work ethic and the sacrifice you’re willing to put in to achieve greatness

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:47 – Nathan introduces JT to the show
• 02:08 – It is possible to buy a bestseller from Book in a Box
  • 02:23 – The cost will depend on many factors
• 02:40 – One of Nathan’s friends spent almost $250K on Book in a Box because he wanted to put out a book and increase his speaking fee
  • 03:15 – There are many people who paid more than $250K to get a book out
• 03:21 – Nathan read his friend’s book and thought it was trash, but his friend’s speaking fee increased
  • 03:33 – It’s still a positive ROI
• 04:02 – Book in a Box specializes in ensuring the books are filled with valuable and meaningful content
• 05:11 – Book in a Box has made it possible for authors to publish their book
• 05:27 – JT just met a professional speaker who has been in the business for 22 years, but never had a book
  • 05:34 – He never got the time to write a book
  • 05:41 – Book in a Box will just interview him and write the book for him
  • 05:52 – “Your book written in your tone, your voice”
• 06:09 – Nathan shares how Book in a Box makes you spill the beans
• 06:41 – Cost is $25K which is $5K a month for five months
• 06:58 – The quality of the books are the same as the ones from Barnes and Noble
• 07:13 – Nathan got a deal from Portfolio Random House
• 07:37 – Book in a Box provides proposals and manuscripts for their clients to bring to publishing houses
• 08:00 – Book in a Box has worked with a total of 500 authors
• 08:31 – Book in a Box launched in 2015
• 09:00 – Book in a Box is one of the unicorn companies in the startup world
• 09:13 – “We, as Book in a Box, have no debt, no private equity, no VC money and we are extremely profitable”
• 09:27 – Book in a Box has changed pricing a couple of times
  • 09:38 – When JT met Tucker and Zach, the co-founders, he was actually looking for someone to write his book
  • 10:14 – Tucker offered JT three pricing models, $10K, $18K and $30K and JT chose the latter because he wanted a high-quality book
  • 10:51 – JT explained how the pricing turned out to be just one pricing model which is $25K
• 11:33 – Total revenue since 2015 is $11.3M
• 12:07 – Book in a Box currently averages 25-30 books a month which has continuously grown to 50-75 a month
• 12:29 – Team size is 30 full-timers with over 100 freelancers
• 13:13 – “We’re a relationship company”
• 14:17 – Book in a Box treats their freelancers with respect and pays them on time
• 15:05 – Book in a Box helps with marketing and book sales
  • 15:14 – Customers go to Book in a Box for one of three reasons; credibility, thought leadership or lead generation
  • 15:48 – Book in a Box created Thought Leader Media
    • 16:01 – Pricing starts at $15K to up to $75K yearly
    • 16:17 – The pricing varies depending on the author needs
    • 16:51 – Thought Leader Media just rolled out in Q1
    • 16:58 – 35 out of 250 published books are in Thought Leader Media
  • 17:10 – Total book sales from Book in a Box authors
  • 18:50 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Those who want to have a book written, but can’t manage to start can simply utilize companies such as Book in a Box.
2. Pricing is crucial in every business—it’s either you make it big or lose everything.
3. Respect and an excellent work ethic are keys to success.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Sharat Potharaju and Ravi Pratap Maddimsetty, co-founders of MobStac. 

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Traction
• What CEO do you follow? – Ed Catmull who wrote Creativity Inc for Ravi
• Favorite online tool? — Rapportive
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “That entrepreneurship is a very, very painful journey”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 02:07 – Nathan introduces Sharat and Ravi to the show
• 02:23 – Sharat and Ravi were classmates since fifth grade and were roommates in college
• 02:53 – MobStac is trying to solve the problem of online to offline device connections
  • 03:04 – They use the technology of WiFi, bluetooth and beacons in mobile devices
• 03:17 – Beaconstac is one of MobStac’s products
  • 03:22 – It is a SaaS-based product that uses Bluetooth beacon technology
  • 03:29 – It allows businesses to gather analytics
  • 03:34 – It charges monthly
• 03:47 – Beaconstac is MobStac’s main revenue stream
• 04:08 – Businesses use bluetooth beacons that can be deployed to physical stores
  • 04:18 – Beaconstac’s platform can then be used to track marketing and analytics
• 04:27 – Pricing starts at $49 to $99 monthly
  • 04:34 – The price will vary depending on the number of beacons deployed in any physical location
  • 04:45 – Average cost per beacon is $5 monthly which is on top of the starting price
• 05:25 – Beaconstac has a mixed group of customers, from mom and pop stores to enterprises
  • 05:57 – Some would pay $50 a month and $5000 a month for others
• 06:04 – There are currently around 10K beacons deployed in total
• 06:27 – MobStac is a software company
  • 07:03 – MobStac has partnered with a Chinese OEM who makes the hardware
• 07:35 – The pay for the hardware is a one-time cost
  • 07:40 – “You own the beacons once you pay for the beacons”
  • 07:43 – Charge per beacon is $22
  • 07:50 – The margin is very small
• 08:07 – They make revenue mostly from the software and not from the hardware
• 08:15 – MobStac was launched in 2010
  • 08:24 – It was focused in building products in the mobile space
• 09:20 – After pivoting, first year revenue was not zero but it was small
• 09:35 – 2014 revenue was less than $250K with 10-15 people on the team
  • 09:54 – Current team size is 20
• 10:00 – The company is based in Bangalore, India but Sharat goes to New York as well
• 10:17 – Last month total MRR is close to $25K
  • 10:22 – Target ARR by the end of 2017 is 500K
  • 10:37 – Which was only from the Beaconstac product
• 10:56 – Beaconstac currently has 100 customers
• 11:12 – One of Beaconstac’s biggest customer is Google India
  • 11:14 – Google has deployed over 2000 beacons at 117 train stations
  • 11:28 – It is the largest public Wi-Fi project in the world
  • 11:32 – The beacons are used to send notifications and awareness to people who are waiting at the stations
  • 11:46 – Sample notification
• 12:20 – MobStac has raised $3.5M
• 13:07 – The strangest customer acquisition strategy they’ve done
• 14:10 – Google has made the beacon technology compliant with the chrome browser
  • 14:23 – Someone who is near a beacon can receive a notification as long as he has a chrome browser and bluetooth on; no need to download an app
• 15:15 – One of their customers is a freelancer who bought a beacon so whenever he goes to an event, the beacon will send a notification to other attendees to market his services
• 15:56 – MobStac isn’t spending anything on paid marketing
  • 16:01 – Ravi does some content marketing for the company
• 16:37 – Cap table
  • 17:31 – Sharat and Ravi still own more than half of the company
• 19:00 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Don’t be scared to pivot if it is for the betterment of your company.
2. The easiest and cheapest way to market your product is by using it.
3. Entrepreneurship is definitely not an easy route—prepare your mindset for a rough (but worth it) journey.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Patrik Fagerlund. He’s been working with mobile internet since the 90s. He’s an engineer by training and now, he’s the CEO and founder of Widespace, a mobile adtech company. Outside of work, he loves spending time with his family with his four kids and his wife along with many activities and sports.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Business Insider
• What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
• Favorite online tool? — Slack and Flatly
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Be what you want to be”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 02:00 – Nathan introduces Patrik to the show
• 02:36 – Widespace is a mobile advertising campaign
  • 02:40 – It was spun out in 2007 from what Patrik thought was a great media channel
• 03:04 – Patrik sold media fueled by their technology
  • 03:10 – Selling media per CPM which is $10 per impression
  • 03:31 – This was the business model in 2009
• 04:00 – $2M was the total ad spend for the previous model and 40% went to the company
  • 04:26 – Team size was 9
• 04:38 – Widespace's current business model spent $30M for ads
• 04:40 – Team size is 130
• 04:41 – “We’re moving into selling technology at a rapid space”
• 04:49 – Widespace extends their tools and technology for both the supply and demand
• 05:09 – Widespace focuses more on selling their technology
• 05:28 – The model is close to SaaS, but the pricing depends on the volume and usage
• 06:11 – Of the top 50 global advertisers, Widespace serves 70% of them
  • 06:24 – Widespace works with most of the umbrella agency companies in the world
• 06:51 – The tech of Widespace is a full-stack offering
  • 07:01 – The algorithm is based on interests
  • 07:18 – If Widespace goes against other legacy technologies in adtech, Widespace will outperform them
• 07:46 – A customer pays 50% of their ad spend to make use of Widespace’s technology
  • 07:54 – It’s a volume game, the more a customer pays, the less Widespace charges
• 08:04 – If a customer puts $20M into Widespace’s system, it will go down to below $10M
• 08:53 – Average ARR is around $4M
• 09:06 – Since Widespace is a full-stack, they service both demand and supply
• 09:11 – There’s a cap on the demand side and a supply cap to serve the supply
  • 09:26 – The suppliers are the top publishers in the world
• 09:45 – Widespace takes a cut from the demand and supply side
• 09:56 – Widespace charges on the extended version of the algorithm as well
• 10:11 – Last year’s processed ad spend is shy of $40M
• 10:49 – 2016 total revenue is around $17M
• 11:04 – Widespace was initially bootstrapped
• 11:16 – Widespace has raised close to $30M
  • 11:33 – Over the years, Widespace had propositions from strategics but they turned them down
• 12:08 –Widespace is currently working with 500 suppliers/publications
  • 12:17 – Widespace keeps control of their supply and has deeper integration
• 13:07 – A few years ago, Widespace was the only one who was servicing the publishers
• 13:40 – Widespace doesn’t have any exclusivity
• 15:02 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Adjust your technology depending on the needs of your target market.
2. Find the right partners with whom you can grow your business.
3. Be what you want to be!

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Eyal Hertzog. He’s been a venture-backed technology entrepreneur for over 20 years. He’s the founder of Metacafe, Israel’s fastest growing video sharing site which has reached over 15M uniques at its peak. Previously, he founded Contact Networks which was one of the first social networks in 1999. He’s now at Bancor Network and has been an outspoken thought leader on cryptocurrency in Israel and is a talented piano and bass musician.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Spider and the Starfish
• What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
• Favorite online tool? — Google Keep
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “You never stop evolving”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:49 – Nathan introduces Eyal to the show
• 02:40 – Bancor is a non-profit organization which is in a new model that has been rising recently
• 03:36 – Similarly to Etherium, Bancor is also a token that is solving the problem of liquidity
• 04:00 – Eyal talks about any kind of liquidity that works today with crypto tokens
  • 04:14 – There is a token that represents gold and a token that represents a dollar which you can convert back to gold and dollars
  • 04:24 – “Real assets from the real world are already represented in the blockchain”
• 04:47 – Bancor provides a different way that doesn’t require traders to bid for an asset; it automatically finds a market trait according to a certain formula
• 05:09 – Nathan shares about his interview with Joe Zhou who is the founder of Firstblood
• 05:56 – The pricing of ether and other cryptocurrencies is always changing
  • 06:25 – Bancor provides a much better solution than cryptocurrencies exchanges, like what Coinbase is doing, for liquidity
  • 06:46 – Bancor is an alternative way to convert cryptocurrencies
  • 06:52 – The exchanges that are based on smart contracts are automated so they won’t require central services
• 07:14 – Bancor did their own ICO for their token which is BNT or banking network token that will be used in Bancor’s network of token conversion
• 07:26 – Within three hours, Bancor raised $153M
  • 07:44 – It was in June 12, 2017
• 08:03 – Bancor was very open during their ICO and told people that everyone who will invest in 2 hours will have an opportunity and they will get exactly the same rate
• 09:11 – There are currently 20 people involved in Bancor’s operation
  • 09:31 – Bancor liquidates as little as possible which is less than 10%
• 10:11 – Bancor currently has 12445 token holders
• 10:22 – Eyal has worked with VCs for a long time prior to Bancor
• 12:05 – People who hold a lot of cryptocurrencies are called “whales”
• 12:29 – The goal of people in the crypto world is to build a new financial ecosystem
• 13:14 – The foundation where the proceeds from the crowdsale go is called V Protocol
  • 13:27 – The foundation sold 50% of the tokens and the other 50% went to different buckets
• 14:07 – Bancor runs on the ethereum blockchain so they already have miners and won’t need miners for their own tokens
• 15:18 – Nathan summarizes Bancor’s figures
• 16:40 – Eyal had a dream to build something that will have a cultural effect or something that will change how we do things
  • 17:07 – When Eyal learned about bitcoin, he thought that it would be a huge, cultural evolution one day
• 17:55 – In terms of completed ICOs, Bancor ranks number one
• 18:28 – Eyal shares where the demand for Bancor came from
• 20:34 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. There are better ways to do cryptocurrency exchanges that benefit the token holder more.
2. Be open to your investors, so you can earn their trust.
3. You are always learning and evolving.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Mitchell Reichgut. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Jun Group. Prior to founding Jun Group in 2005, he led Bates Interactive, the online unit of Bates Worldwide Advertising which is now owned by WPP. As general manager and creative director, he helped grow Bates Interactive into a 70-person integrated unit with clients such as EDS, Warner-Lambert and many others. Before joining Bates, he was the creative director at Think New Ideas. He began his career as Art Director at Grey Advertising where he created print and TV ads for clients. Throughout his career, he’s worked with major brands in the industry including Procter and Gamble, Parker Brothers, Reebok and others.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Anything written by Seth Godin
• What CEO do you follow? – Jack Welch
• Favorite online tool? — Google Calendar
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Mitchell wished he knew the kind of discipline it took to make things work

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 02:05 – Nathan introduces Mitchell to the show
• 03:08 – The “Jun” in Jun Group means truth
• 03:11 – Mitchell founded his company believing that advertising can be transparent, honest and deliver tangible results
• 03:19 – Jun Group’s job is to get millions of people to engage with videos and visit websites of the Fortune 500 brands
• 03:38 – Nathan reads Jun Group’s website line
• 03:52 – Mitchell gives an example of a spaghetti sauce brand that targets Hispanic mothers who are 35 and up, in the USA
  • 04:01 – Jun Group will use the video of the brand to connect with their target market on their phone, tablets and computers
  • 04:16 – Customers can opt-in in exchange for something like rewards points
• 04:38 – Jun Group is an in-app solution
• 05:37 – Jun Group only charges when someone chooses to engage and the client gets the value of what they’re paying for
• 06:06 – When you don’t interrupt people, they tend to watch to the end
  • 06:08 – Jun Group gets 90% of people to watch a 30-second ad until the very end
  • 06:13 – 3-5% of the viewers are visiting the brand’s website
• 06:50 – From the publisher, the brand will appear in a mobile app
  • 07:29 – Each app integration creates an interaction depending on the app user’s behavior
• 07:46 – In web environment, app developers pay CPI
• 07:52 – Jun Group never had a pop-up and they never interrupt
• 08:14 – Jun Group has a sophisticated tech platform that works well with app developers
• 08:21 – “Apps are complex business”
• 08:41 – Jun Group was bootstrapped until 2015
  • 08:47 – Then they had a private equity deal with Howard Capital
  • 08:58 – They’ve raised $28M
  • 09:09 – They’ve decided to raise because they found the right partner
• 09:55 – Growing an adtech business is quite unusual and requires hard work
• 10:02 – Jun Group has brands, app publishers and consumers that they need to take care of
• 10:27 – Jun Group is an adtech platform and not really an agency
• 10:30 – Most adtech platforms lose money and want to grow fast
• 10:49 – Jun Group has been growing slowly, but steadily and profitably
• 11:13 – The revenue comes from commitments from brands and media buying platforms, some are per project and some are per annual commitment
• 12:00 – Jun Group’s pricing model varies depending on what the ad is
• 12:34 – A CPM (cost per thousand) in the industry usually costs $8 up
• 12:40 – Jun Group charges cost per engagement which is more than the average CPM
• 13:22 – Mitchell left Bates and started Jun Group at home
• 13:31 – Mitchell didn’t really plan to be an entrepreneur
• 13:53 – Mitchell get into the adtech industry with his partner when it was just starting
• 14:12 – By 2008 and 2009, Jun Group was earning $1-2M in revenue
  • 15:08 – Jun Group usually take a percentage from the sales they make
• 15:39 – Most of the money goes back to the campaign
• 16:05 – Jun Group had debt with WTI or Western Technology Investment that helped the company grow
  • 16:34 – The debt was in millions
• 17:05 – The media spent through Jun Group’s system
• 17:18 – Jun Group is still cash flow positive
• 17:53 – Jun Group really had a strategic partnership with their seed round
• 18:44 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Have the right partners who will not just provide the funds but help the company grow.
2. Adtech isn’t an easy industry with fast growth; it takes time and the right model to thrive in it.
3. It takes firm, hard discipline to make things work.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Evan Leong. He’s the VP of Product at Devslopes, a learn-to-code platform focused on taking beginners to paid professionals to curated project-based videos. He’s always been involved with startups since 2015, when he took the leap from a corporate job to join the startup world full-time.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Good to Great
• What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos
• Favorite online tool? — Trello
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Follow your instincts, follow your gut, and don’t let age stop you from what you want to do

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 02:05 – Nathan introduces Evan to the show
• 02:31 – Devslopes is a learn-to-code platform for iOs, MacOS and TvOs
  • 02:39 – A version for Windows will be available soon too
• 02:48 – Devslopes is similar to Treehouse
• 03:00 – Devslopes has been around for a year and a half
• 03:10 – Devslopes has just converted to SaaS
  • 03:22 – They garnered 130 subscriptions just after the launch
• 03:33 – Average pay per customer is a little over $20 a month
• 04:05 – Devslopes was funded through Kickstarter and an investor
  • 04:15 – They raised $190K in Kickstarter
• 04:35 – Devslopes’ CEO is a good salesperson and they had a strong community even before Kickstarter
• 05:04 – The Kickstarter campaign was blasted around
• 05:11 – The community size is around 10K
• 05:22 – Devslopes has raised an additional of $300K from Redfoo of LMFAO
• 05:42 – Devslopes was launched in March 2016
• 05:53 – First year revenue was $600K
• 06:04 – 2017 goal is to reach a million
• 06:39 – Devslopes has large courses that will take people more time to stick with them
• 06:48 – Devslopes is pumping out target topics which are 2-3 hour courses
• 07:13 – Team size is 8
• 07:48 – The CEO started in e-learning marketplaces
• 08:05 – By the time Devslopes started, the CEO already had 40K students on Udemy
• 08:33 – Devslopes gets students from affiliates too
• 09:12 – Devslopes want to fully dive into the learning experience
  • 09:32 – They liked the idea of having everything in one program so they created the SaaS model
• 10:17 – Devslopes publishes to affiliates the content that the affiliates want to promote
• 10:26 – Udemy likes to promote 30-60 hour courses
• 10:43 – Devslopes is also on Skillshare, Learnability and Inkydeals
  • 10:58 – 90% of the content goes to Udemy and the rest are spread out to the rest
• 11:08 – 90% of the revenue is from Udemy, too
• 11:30 – Devslopes is just starting to use Facebook ads which is their only paid marketing
• 12:05 – CAC
  • 12:11 – Most of what Devslopes gets from Facebook ads is social presence but no paid leads yet
• 12:44 – The charge of Udemy fluctuates depending on how they promote their content
• 13:21 – Evan focuses on the product and handles the team
• 13:37 – Devslopes currently have 5K iOs downloads and a couple of thousand from Mac
• 15:30 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. With the advancement in technology, more people are opting to learn from the comfort of their own home.
2. Target your market so it will be easier for the company to adapt a new business model.
3. Customers will stick with your product if it is of value to them.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Joe Zhou. He’s the founder and CEO of FirstBlood, an eSports startup that recently broke the speed record for crowdfunding, specifically in the crypto world. Prior to founding FirstBlood, Joe co-founded Alt-Options, a Boston based fintech or financial technology startup that built the first American style option trading platform for digital currencies. Joe holds a BSBA from Boston University Questrom School of Business and an entrepreneur residence at Babson College.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Lean Startup
• What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
• Favorite online tool? — Slack
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Joe wished he was less concerned about how he was perceived in school

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 02:11 – Nathan introduces Joe to the show
• 03:00 – FirstBlood is a platform that allows players to play games, not just for fun but for money
• 03:23 – FirstBlood charges money for each game or tournament played
• 03:49 – FirstBlood was launched in April 2016
  • 03:55 – Joe’s co-founder, Anik, is also a big gamer
  • 04:08 – They were both fans of League of Legends
  • 04:14 – They attended a Hackathon where they were challenged to build an application that has never existed before
• 05:00 – Joe co-founded Alt-Options while he was still in college
  • 05:15 – The technology was built from scratch
  • 05:18 – There were about 2K users during the testing phase
  • 05:50 – It was bootstrapped and $50K was raised from families and friends
  • 06:02 – There were a group people who wanted to get into the space and Joe worked with them as a consultant for half a year
• 06:44 – Joe decided to do the token issuance because of the support they were getting
  • 06:55 – DAO was successful until hackers were able to get into it due to a bug
  • 07:19 – FirstBlood was one of the most promising projects that was going to DAO
  • 07:26 – DAO or Decentralized Autonomous Organization is like a decentralized venture capital firm; it was managed by every person who has a token in it
  • 07:52 – FirstBlood was operating under Project Tron in the DAO community
  • 08:15 – After the bug, FirstBlood started building what was needed to run a successful crowdfunding campaign
  • 08:52 – Joe and Anik gave talks and presented multiple ethereum meetups regarding their project
  • 09:37 – Joe came home with a budget of 3-5 years runway for the entire team
  • 09:46 – They’ve raised $5M in funding
  • 09:52 – Team had 6 people and now they have 15 people
  • 11:14 – They’ve calculated the ethereum’s pricing and deployed the contract to the network
  • 11:51 – FirstBlood raised the money in just the first four blocks and processed in just 7 minutes
  • 12:41 – FirstBlood has sold 465,313 ether tokens
• 13:10 – Joe shares why they released their own FirstBlood tokens
  • 13:16 – Ethereum has some limitations
  • 13:34 – The FirstBlood tokens are given unique utilities that are crucial to making the network work
  • 13:42 – First layer is the transactional level utility where both ether and FirstBlood tokens work
  • 14:20 – Witness program utility can only be run by FirstBlood tokens
• 14:52 – DotA is the first mobile strategy game and now is a stand alone
  • 15:53 – When a game is settled, a set of information is sent to a network of witness nodes
  • 16:02 – Witness nodes will then run tests using computational power to fetch the data and cross reference the data to make sure that it is valid
  • 16:14 – The data then gets published into the blockchain and smart contract
  • 16:32 – The winner of the games will pay a small percentage fee to the network
• 17:40 – The token price isn’t that important for the team
• 18:14 – The ratio of the token is arbitrary
• 19:24 – A lot of Dapps don’t have a real money function yet
• 19:39 – FirstBlood is closed to launching the beta
• 19:59 – Currently, there are 1592 people who have FirstBlood tokens
• 20:51 – Joe doesn’t think that it’s risky for them to have a lot of people handling the network
  • 21:06 – The selection process has a cap rate on how one will get selected
  • 21:19 – “We did cap at 1% for a maximum impact”
• 22:20 – Joe can’t disclose the amount he owns from FirstBlood tokens
  • 22:50 – The allocation for founders is around 10% of the tokens
• 23:24 – Nathan asks Joe if it’s possible to cash out a million tokens into real dollars if he ever needs it
• 24:35 – FirstBlood made the headlines because they raised a $5M equivalent to ether
  • 26:38 – The fund is owned by the project
  • 27:08 – The ether can be used to keep buying the project
• 27:30 – Some of the money from the funds are used to pay the team
• 28:03 – FirstBlood liquidates 80% of the ether post cross-sales and 20% remains in the smart contract
• 28:39 – FirstBlood has around $4M in the bank that pays salaries and other company expenses
• 29:55 – The technology of FirstBlood has made people more interested in the project
• 31:00 – The decision to raise $5M was from the advice they’ve received regarding what it takes to increase network profitability
• 31:51 – Ether was valued when Joe liquidated the 372K shares at $11 per share
• 32:38 – Joe didn’t wait for the share value to increase because they needed the money to get the project running
• 34:25 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. In crypto, startups create their own currency if they think their network will be better of with it.
2. Listen to your advisory board—if it’s time to raise for specific purpose, your business might be better of because of that decision.
3. People will become interested in your project if it’s first in the space and they believe in your technology.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Alex Yakubovich. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Scout RFP. Prior to Scout, he was a co-founder of another startup which was acquired by LivingSocial in 2012. At that company, he led the operations team and helped the company become the largest online ordering providers in the country. He attended Case Western Reserve University where he studied mechanical engineering.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Shoe Dog
• What CEO do you follow? – Marc Benioff  
• Favorite online tool? — Salesforce
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 7
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Take big risks

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 02:25 – Nathan introduces Alex to the show
• 02:58 – Scout RFP helps companies make online purchases by finding suppliers and the best deals
• 03:14 – One of their newest customer’s is Beam Suntory who makes Jim Beam bourbon
  • 03:56 – They use Scout RFP to source for the best deals on raw materials that they use to make their liquor
• 04:15 – Scout RFP is a SaaS model
• 04:20 – Scout RFP charges per user basis
  • 04:47 – They charge only the buyers who are making the purchase and not the suppliers
• 05:00 – Scout RFP also has different tools that they offer depending on the plans
• 05:34 – Average per seat is $5K annually
  • 05:53 – All contracts are annual contract
• 05:59 – Scout RFP has raised capital: $27.5M in total
• 06:27 – Alex’s last company just raised $500K and it had a great exit
• 07:00 – Alex has thought about what it’s like to have big companies involved in your company
• 07:30 – The capital allowed them to not skim and invest on growth upfront
• 07:49 – Current team size is 50
  • 07:59 – Half is the engineering and product side and half is for the sales side
• 08:29 – The exit price of the first company was in the tens of millions
• 09:37 – Alex has co-founders who were with him in the first company
• 10:43 – There are over 100 companies that use the platform
• 11:10 – The number of seats per company depends on the company
• 11:54 – Scout RFP has overall users and paid users
  • 12:12 – Paid users is more than 3K
• 13:05 – Scout RFP is part of Silicon Valley Sourcing Leaders Group
  • 13:31 – The group is about networking and sharing information and knowledge
  • 13:49 – There are now sourcing leaders programs in New York
  • 14:00 – The group helped Scout RFP to acquire new customers
  • 14:30 – The organization hosts their companies
• 15:18 – Gross customer churn
• 15:31 – Logo churn is not that high
• 16:00 – Scout RFP has 17% net negative churn
• 16:58 – Scout RFP has a customer success team, a sales team, ADPR team and management team
• 17:38 – As a business grows with Scout RFP, the LTV grows as well
  • 18:22 – The average deal size per business is quite consistent, about 10
• 19:09 – CAC to LTV ratio is 3
• 19:25 – Payback period is around 15 months
• 20:17 – Paid acquisition costs are around $40K a month
  • 20:49 – They do LinkedIn ads, some Facebook and Google, and a lot of tradeshows
• 21:23 – Gross margin is 85-90%
• 21:44 – Target ARR this 2017
  • 22:14 – Scout RFP is currently over $1.2M in MRR
• 23:54 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. An acquisition is an opportunity to build a bigger and better business.
2. Being in a group with your target market is a big opportunity for you to acquire new leads.
3. Let your big questions guide you in growing your business.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Bruce Pon. He’s the CEO and founder of BigchainDB and he’s been playing in the crypto world.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Mungerisms by Charlie Munger
• What CEO do you follow? – Vitalik Buterin
• Favorite online tool? — Streak CRM
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— At least 8
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Buy bitcoin earlier”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 02:03 – Nathan introduces Bruce to the show
• 02:44 – Bruce built BigchainDB to manage data
• 02:55 – Bitcoin is a payments cryptocurrency in a global network while Ethereum is a business logic in a global network
• 03:11 – People pass trusted data over the blockchain network for enterprise use cases and consumer applications
  • 03:32 – From the business logic, you can exchange bitcoin and other types of value
• 03:42 – The problem with the use case on top of the bitcoin blockchain 3 years ago was it didn’t scale
• 04:04 – Bruce was building io which is putting intellectual property into the blockchain
  • 04:25 – You can sell your intellectual property over the network
  • 04:48 – It was built over the bitcoin blockchain and got difficult to develop over time
  • 04:54 – Ascribe.io needed meta data about the creative work, author and licensing model
  • 05:04 - Ascribe.io isn’t just built for bitcoin—it’s like trying to using a Lamborghini to move your house
  • 05:49 - Ascribe.io had AI, scientists and other PhDs who told them that building Ascribe.io wasn’t worth it
• 06:09 – Team size is around 20 and is based in Berlin
• 06:24 – BigchainDB has raised $6M in price round series A
• 06:41 – Open source software is traditionally a dual license model
• 06:53 – BigchainDB is looking at an enterprise model
  • 07:00 – They’re looking into the ICO craze too
• 07:21 – BigchainDB is like a SaaS model
  • 07:27 – They’re looking at per transaction charges but it may not work for the long-run
• 07:54 – BigchainDB just released their 1.0
  • 08:08 – They give premium support
• 08:27 – Bruce is looking into 5-6 figures per month for their starting price point
• 08:58 – One-third of the work in businesses happen in the back office
• 09:13 – Blockchain allows you to have a single source of truth
• 09:29 – BigchainDB unlocks the opportunity for different organizations to have a single source of truth
• 09:48 – When you can make IoT, AI and blockchain tools, you can track the product from the inception until it gets to the customer’s hand
  • 10:01 – The customer will now understand how the product is made
  • 10:03 – The regulators will know that the product followed the guideline
  • 10:07 – The company will know if there’s a recall or quality issue and they will know where exactly the product is
• 10:40 – BigchainDB can work with different kinds of products
• 11:20 – Blockchain is definitely auditable
  • 11:30 – Before the product comes to you, it will be signed by entities with a cryptographic key in every process
  • 12:00 – With AI, you can also see who is in the very process of making your product
• 12:34 – The key metric Bruce is measuring is the number of people that are building upon them
• 12:56 – Target MRR is $100K by end of 2017
• 13:03 – BigchainDB is currently at $50-60K MRR
• 13:19 – Number of customers
• 13:44 – There are 300 developers in BigchainDB’s channels and there are 5K clones of their software
• 13:54 – BigchainDB has 1K monthly downloads of their whitepaper
• 14:45 – The ratio of developer to clone is the 300 developers to 5K clone requests
• 16:05 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Data that is passed over the blockchain network can be used for enterprise use case and consumer applications.
2. The beauty of blockchain is that it is auditable and has accountability capabilities.
3. Some tools that are built over the bitcoin network won’t always work; even if you have the best people in the industry.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Christoph Jentzsch. His background is in Theoretical Physics and he’s been part of the Ethereum project since 2014 as a lead tester. At the end of 2015, he co-founded Slock.it, working on decentralized sharing economy through the connection of blockchain and IoT (Internet of Things). One of the more famous projects that he was part of was the DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization).

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Zero to One
• What CEO do you follow? – God
• Favorite online tool? — GIthub
• How many hours of sleep do you get? — 8
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Avoid the bug in the DAO”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:50 – Nathan introduces Christoph to the show
• 02:20 – DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization
  • 02:26 – It is a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain which aims at connecting people to pull their funds together and run small contracts
  • 02:45 – It failed and all the people got refunded
• 03:10 – Christoph believes that Anthony Di Iorio is one of the founders of Ethereum
• 03:24 – As a lead tester for Ethereum in 2014, Christoph was responsible for driving tests
  • 03:39 – Consensus tests are for client implementation
• 04:10 – Nathan’s analogy of cryptocurrency using railroad tracks
• 04:55 – Augur has launched their own token on top of Ethereum
  • 05:18 – They created their own token of value in exchange of the virtual currency of ether
• 05:47 – There has been a lot of ICOs (Initial Coin Offering) lately and there has been opinions around them
• 06:03 – Bitcoin was always meant for virtual currency
  • 06:09 – While Etherium has a virtual currency too called ether, its actual purpose is to be an open source platform to build decentralized applications or Dapps
  • 06:22 – People now create simple Dapps issuing a token on the Ethereum blockchain to fund Dapps projects
  • 06:32 – People thought DAO was an ICO but it wasn’t
  • 06:35 – DAO has collected a hundred million dollars in ether
  • 06:44 – After that, many ICOs have gone out
• 07:40 – There are only a few hundred people who send ether into their contract
• 08:11 – There was an article Nathan had read regarding Bitcoin’s current problem
  • 08:28 – The main problem is public blockchains are not scaling
  • 08:38 – In the protocol, one blockchain can only have 1 megabyte
  • 09:04 – There is now a high demand that leads to a higher price
• 10:33 – Everybody can take part in the cryptocurrency game
  • 11:45 – People can create their own blockchain but they’re missing the network effect
  • 12:18 – There are some minors who control the network
  • 12:48 – As long as there are users in the system, they don’t mind the minors
  • 12:54 – Minors serve the blockchain, but Christoph believes the users are the ones in-charge
  • 13:21 – After the DAO failed, there was a discussion of how things should be done
  • 13:27 – Some are saying to split the blockchain into 2 versions: the new version is where people get refunded and the old version is the hackers who have the money
  • 14:58 – There are now 2 Ethereum classes: ethereum classic and ethereum
• 15:19 – Christoph’s focus is now on Slock.it where they’ve built a decentralized sharing economy
  • 16:02 – It is built over the public ethereum and they don’t have tokens
  • 16:17 – They’re using ether as a payment
  • 16:33 – Most startups are called ICOs and make their own tokens to fund themselves
• 16:40 – Slock.it is VC funded with a seed funding of $2M
• 18:06 – Slock.it isn’t currently getting any payment but they will in the future
• 18:38 – Slock.it collaborates with Innogy
  • 18:51 – Innogy allows electric charging stations to connect with smart contracts in the blockchain
  • 19:00 – A user can charge his car, making him enter the smart contract
  • 19:10 – If you’re the owner of a charging station and you have an electric car, you can set the price for the station and offer it to public
• 20:05 – Noke padlocks can now be open and closed through Bluetooth and Slock.it has added a payment option where it can be opened by paying
• 20:34 – Slock.it can be integrated into the device and it is different from Airbnb
  • 21:28 – As long as the ethereum blockchain is alive, the Noke padlock can be used through Slock.it
• 22:10 – Christoph currently resides in Germany
• 22:45 – “As of now, crypto is not a very good currency”
• 23:23 – Ether is as volatile as bitcoin
• 23:45 – You can definitely exchange your tokens for real dollars, but it’s not an efficient system
• 24:03 – Paying people with ether isn’t that easy at the moment
• 24:12 – Currency is the least interesting aspect
  • 24:19 – There’s a limitation in scalability and in privacy
• 24:40 – Christoph thinks ethereum, smart contracts and blockchains own up as programmable money
• 25:55 – Slock.it is currently integrated into an existing hardware
  • 26:20 – There are currently thousands of charging stations under Slock.it
• 26:36 – Team member is currently 14
• 26:48 – The seed round was in February 2017
• 28:02 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Some startups are coming out as an ICO to fund themselves, but not all of them are legal.
2. Cryptocurrency still isn’t very stable so as a business owner, paying your people with this currency isn’t efficient.
3. Public blockchains are not scaling and there’s a protocol that needs to be followed.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Brandon Bruce. He’s the COO and co-founder of Cirrus Insights, the sales plugin for Gmail and Outlook. The company is number 41 on the Inc. 5000 and the fastest growing company in Tennessee. Brandon once raced his bicycle 508 miles across Death Valley in 35 hours and 7 minutes.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Energy Bus
• What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos
• Favorite online tool? — Google Drive and Slack
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “I would’ve tried to start a full-fledged company earlier”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:50 – Nathan introduces Brandon to the show
• 02:25 – Brandon was in Episode 226 of The Top
  • 02:38 – They had $550K in funding
• 02:48 – The team back then was 55-60 and now it’s 70
• 02:59 – No additional funding has been raised
• 03:16 – Cirrus Insights is a fast-growing company that didn’t rely too much on VC
• 03:35 – 5 years ago, Cirrus Insights wanted to solve the problem of going back and forth between Gmail and Salesforce
• 03:53 – Cirrus Insights brings Salesforce into the inbox
  • 04:05 – They also help sales reps to seamlessly update Salesforce from the back end
  • 04:13 – Salesforce isn’t actually a CRM
• 04:38 – Cirrus Insights just launched Flight Plans, which is an extension of their philosophy
  • 04:42 – It is fully built-in to Outlook and Gmail
  • 04:44 – It allows people to setup a sequence of sales touches
  • 04:58 – It’s personalized and low scale
• 05:51 – Cirrus Insights’ growth is mostly from the Salesforce app exchange
  • 06:00 – Continued growth is still from word-of-mouth
• 06:31 – Cirrus Insights has passed 100K seats with an average seat price of $6
  • 06:53 – The average seat price has gone up now
• 07:19 – Flight Plans is a new tier
  • 07:24 – Cirrus Insights is the product name and Flight Plans is going to be an addition
  • 07:27 – There are now 3 additions to the product
• 08:18 – Cirrus Insights has just passed $1M in MRR
• 09:00 – Customers are choosing Cirrus Insights over others because some are overpaying and underutilizing marketing operations
• 09:29 – Marketing and sales are now working as a team with Cirrus Insights
• 09:58 – Cirrus Insights now charges $8 per seat
• 10:32 – Marketing operation has 4 big, unicorn companies
• 10:49 – There are now hundreds of tools in marketing operation and it will be interesting to see a consolidation
• 11:04 – Brandon is thinking customers will just utilize the best tools for the job
• 11:33 – Cirrus Insights is trying to position themselves to be the best at what they do
  • 11:43 – They’re also continuing to offer more in the future
• 13:00 – Gross customer churn: 15-20% annually, but they’re targeting to lower it down to 10%
  • 13:30 – There’s a lot less churn in the enterprise
• 14:17 – Net annual revenue churn is still negative and net seat churn is below 10%
• 15:16 – Most of the new leads are from word-of-mouth, with some small scale paid acquisition
  • 15:22 – They’re more focused on the content that can drive more people
  • 15:25 – Brandon has read The Slow Sale which is about how slowing down can win more deals
• 16:30 – Budget for paid marketing is $25-50K
  • 16:43 – They’ve done sponsorship for conferences, but the ROI is getting low
  • 17:25 – Check out their podcast: Our Love Hate Relationship with Sales, which drives sales as well
• 18:22 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. As saturated as the market is, there’s still a way for your business to stand out.
2. Marketing and sales teams are looking for tools that will not just help them with their workload, but encourage them to work together.
3. If your company constantly adds value, word-of-mouth will be your driver of sales.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Jeff Glueck. He became the CEO of Foursquare in January of 2016 after 18 months as the COO of the company. Prior to that, he was the CEO of Skyfire Labs, co-founder of Site59.com and CMO of Travelocity. Previously, he was a strategy consultant at Monitor Company and served as a White House Fellow in the Clinton Administration. He holds a master’s degree from Oxford as a Marshall Scholar and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Good to Great
• What CEO do you follow? – Adam Neumann
• Favorite online tool? — Stitcher
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 7
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “It’s going to be okay when you take a risk”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:46 – Nathan introduces Jeff to the show
• 02:53 – Jeff has been with Foursquare for 3 years
  • 02:55 – Jeff joined the company while it was evolving into a hot social network in 2012
• 03:10 – Foursquare developed the technology of Pilgrim that turned it into a powerful enterprise business
• 03:19 – Foursquare’s early valuation was based on the fact that it would be the next big social media network
  • 03:51 – The valuation was only made up because it wasn’t based on revenue
• 03:57 – When Jeff entered, they raised a round and they’re now growing over 60% in the past 3 years
• 04:13 – Foursquare is now more rationally valued
• 04:55 – Foursquare has a powerful community of people mapping the world
• 06:05 – Pilgrim is based on Foursquare’s nearly 12B check-ins
• 06:13 – Foursquare is having more check-ins today than it did 2 years ago
  • 06:30 – The check-ins are called explicit ground trips
  • 06:55 – Everytime someone check-in, they’re mapping the business for Foursquare
  • 07:15 – The explicit ground trip makes the program powerful
• 08:06 – Foursquare launched the Pilgrim SDK which is a white label way for their developers to add in background content and give users a better experience
• 08:24 – Using the Pilgrim technology, Capital One can ask its user if they want to opt-in for being informed about how to receive rewards points
  • 08:36 – People overwhelmingly opting-in
  • 09:08 – The notification from Capital One encourages people to actually use their mobile wallet
• 09:18 – TouchTunes uses the Pilgrim technology
  • 09:25 – TouchTunes runs 65K jukeboxes through mobile app
• 10:37 – Pilgrim technology has learned when to send notifications
  • 10:47 – Pilgrim technology also informs their developers of the best time to send notifications
• 12:08 – When Jeff joined, he saw how everyone, including Fortune 500 companies, was using them for free
  • 12:15 – Jeff told their CEO that they’re actually losing money and that they needed to start charging customers
• 12:42 – Foursquare didn’t lose even a single developer after putting up a paywall
• 12:49 – The model was licensed-based depending on the usage
• 14:15 – Three of the largest headphones in the world are Foursquare’s customers
• 14:40 – Jeff understands how the market changes
  • 14:55 – 92% of the consumer spending is far from the 8% they spend on e-commerce like amazon
  • 15:10 – Foursquare has predicted how Chipotle’s sales will go down by 30%
• 15:20 – “We’re not investors, we’re technologists”
• 16:16 – Jeff believes that Foursquare’s mission is to be a location intelligence company
• 16:34 – Jeff is proud of Foursquare’s technology; they can build tools that help companies
• 17:07 – Foursquare started out as a consumer company but now, more and more apps are using them for their applications
• 17:51 – Jeff believes that in the future, they can also make real estate better
• 18:45 – 90% of Foursquare’s revenue is from B2B
• 19:34 – Foursquare’s paying customers are some of the biggest brands in the world who want a company that is as good as Google Maps
• 19:58 – People don’t want to be dependent on Google in the future
• 20:18 – “A lot of smart companies want to build differentiated mobile experiences in the future and we’re helping them do that, that is our business”
• 21:48 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Even if your company can go IPO, it doesn’t mean that it should.
2. Offering your services or products for free may work for the short-term, but if your service adds value to your customers, they WILL pay.
3. Focus on what your company is good at.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Dave Kellogg.  Dave has more than 20 years of experience in high growth companies. Dave has been CEO of MarkLogic, CMO of Business Objects and member of Aster Data board of directors. Dave steered MarkLogic to $80 million in revenues. Business Objects witnessed equally impressive growth as it reached a revenue of billion dollars under his able guidance. Tune in and listen to Dave as he discusses various financial metrics of Hostanalytics. Targeting small businesses and enterprise level businesses, this company has grown 4x over the past 3 years. Read on and find out what makes this SAAS business tick.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Chaos Monkeys
• What CEO do you follow? – Marc Benioff
• Favorite online tool? — WordPress
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 8 hours
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Go read Power: Why Some People Have It and Some Don't by Geoffrey Pfeffer

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 02:14 – Nathan introduces Dave to the show
• 03:19 – Host Analytics is a SAAS company that is disrupting the space for enterprise performance management
• 03:58 – Not dabbling in premise products at all
• 04:28 – Corporate finance does not scale up with growing company size; number of users for such a software is dependent on the centralization philosophy
• 04:42 – A big company might be heavily centralized with only a sprinkling of users, whereas a little company might have hundreds of users
• 04:52 – Pricing model is a combination of a fixed based fee and a user fee
• 05:00 – Fixed fee varies from 25k to 50k—both fixed fee and user fee are recurring
• 05:25 – User fee depends on the user type and to which extent the software features are being used
• 05:45 – Fixed fee per user per month may vary from a couple of hundred dollars to a thousand dollars
• 06:10 – Re-entered the startup world once he quit Salesforce and joined Hostanalytics
• 06:24 – Passed on the reigns at Mark Logic to Gary Bloom—Mark Logic is still doing very well
• 07:05 – Best strategy to exit a startup is to exercise 83B options
• 08:00 – Exercising all options results in FMP (Fair Market Value) equaling strike price
• 08:07 – You lose the optionality—shares might not increase in value at a later date
• 09:00 – Met VC’s, entrepreneurs and angels while looking for a new opportunity after quitting MarkLogic
• 09:16 – Dave’s buddies coaxed him to join Salesforce as CMO
• 09:39 – Learnt a lot about SAAS at Salesforce. However, he found out that he was more comfortable running smaller companies
• 09:58 – Dave met the founders of Host Analytics through a common friend who was on their board
• 10:31 – HostAnalytics was clocking revenues of $10 million when Dave joined them in 2014; a great board and a proven SAAS model are the other factors which compelled Dave to join the firm
• 11:20 – Revenues have grown 4x since 2014
• 11:42 – Founded in 2001, HostAnalytics grew via bootstrapping for seven years. They finally secured VC funding in 2008
• 12:01 – Raised $85 million to date
• 12:32 – Used 75 cent “I love EBITA” stickers and funnily enough, won customers due to that
• 13:47 – Servicing 700 customers, as of today
• 13:50 – Pareto’s 80/20 principle is not applicable to them; they are bimodal with a dual focus on smaller businesses as well as enterprise businesses
• 14:20 – Both of them are run as different cohorts by different salesforces; revenues are split equally between small business and enterprise
• 14:50 – Each client is aggregating revenues of $70,000 per annum
• 15:13 – Payment terms are a tricky issue in SAAS
• 15:18 – While other SAAS players go for monthly and quarterly payments, HostAnalytics opts for annual payment
• 15:34 – If you are giving a discount smaller than your churn rate, then everybody wins
• 16:15 – Customer churn and revenue churn are surprisingly equal
• 16:25 – Spending on an average $1.5 to $ 2 for a dollar of AR to acquire a customer
• 17:16 – A team of 300 people out of which 100 are located in India, entire sales force of 60 is located in the US
• 17:23 – Company co-founded in US and India
• 18:10 – Average lifetime value of a client varies from 6x to 7x or half a million dollars
• 19:39 – Cloud penetration of this market is just 5%
• 19:57 – Finance department is 10 to 15 years behind sales in adoption of cloud
• 20:17 – 9.5 out of 10 people would say “Not now”
• 20:56 – Blended Gross Margin is lower since they have a slightly bigger services business than most SAAS companies
• 21:10 – ERP is a heart transplant. EPM is a knee transplant
• 21:20 – Services business helps reduce churn and create cash flow
• 22:57 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. A big company might be heavily centralized with few SAAS users, whereas a small company might have hundreds of SAAS users.
2. Focusing on services reduces churn and creates cash flow; however, gross margins are less compared to other SAAS companies due to this.
3. Focusing on small businesses as well as enterprise businesses is important—at HostAnalytics, revenue is split equally between these two models.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

David Rogier. He’s the CEO of MasterClass where he leads the company’s vision of redefining digital learning by leveraging the expertise of world-class experts with the cutting-edge technology platform. David created MasterClass after seeing how the online education space was offering low-quality content and an unfair advantage of students.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Science of Shopping
• What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos
• Favorite online tool? — Doodle
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— Average 6
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – David would tell himself that entrepreneurship will be the hardest thing he’ll ever do

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 02:05 – Nathan introduces David to the show
• 03:05 – MasterClass offers classes from the absolute best in the world
  • 03:14 – Online classes are offered both pre-recorded and live, both price at $90
• 03:31 – Students can study anytime they want and they have access forever
• 04:04 – Prior to MasterClass, David worked for a VC fund in the Bay area
  • 04:21 – David worked for Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal
  • 04:50 – Michael wrote David a check for $500K to start his idea for his business
  • 05:03 – David tried almost everything to get an idea until he remembered his grandmother’s story
  • 05:49 – His grandmother applied for medical school while working in a factory
  • 05:55 – She was rejected by almost 50 medical schools
  • 06:20 – The reason she was rejected was because she was a woman, foreigner and Jewish
  • 06:27 – One school accepted her and she became a doctor
  • 06:53 – She told David that education is the only thing that people can’t take away from him
• 07:04 – David thought of getting into the education space and studied it
• 07:53 – MasterClass was launched in May of 2015
• 08:00 – Total capital raised was around $50M
• 08:35 – The fund goes to expanding the team as well as production so they can shoot more classes
• 08:42 – Team size is currently 68 and will be 100 at the end of 2017
• 09:04 – Year One: number of students
• 10:13 – When they started, David was expecting a 10X increase in sales daily
  • 10:38 – David cried after their first day of sales
• 11:18 – Reid Benson who is part of David’s sales team and was formerly with Netflix, wasn’t even scared after the launch
  • 11:58 – Reid told David that their CAC was amazingly low
• 12:34 – The first 3 classes were led by Dustin Hoffman, James Patterson and Serena Williams
• 13:06 – The CAC for different subjects was actually close to each other
• 13:43 – Paid ads spent on Day 1 were less than $100K
• 14:14 – Paid advertising on different channels works well for MasterClass
  • 14:22 – Instructors are also promoting their classes
• 15:00 – David can’t disclose the deal they have with the instructors
  • 15:13 – Most instructors teach because they really want to teach and not just to earn from it
• 15:51 – David shares how they handle instructors who don’t want to teach, but want to share their knowledge
  • 16:10 – Classes are designed by how instructors want to share their own craft
  • 16:14 – Instructors have complete control over their class
  • 16:28 – David shares what a class looks like for Serena Williams
• 17:24 – MasterClass partners with the instructors in their classes
• 18:17 – David shares why he won’t share the deal with the instructors
  • 18:38 – James Patterson teaches with MasterClass because of his own reasons
• 21:00 – David shares why instructors pick MasterClass over LinkedIn, which is more popular
• 21:50 – There are now 20 classes in MasterClass
• 22:07 – The number of classes should double, year over year
• 22:52 – Half to 80% of their first students haven’t taken any online classes before
• 23:10 – Not all students are fans of the instructors
• 23:43 – David won’t sell MasterClass for $300M
• 25:15 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Never miss an opportunity being offered to you, it was offered to you for a reason; so trust yourself and go for it.
2. Most successful people in their field want to share their craft through any way possible.
3. Education is one thing that people can’t take away from you.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
• Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Eric Beans. He’s the CEO of Texting Base and before that, he was the CEO of Appuix. He was also the former co-founder of Premier Mortgage Capital and the author of Changing the World Through Texting Software. He was in the production as the producer and writer of LA Style Magazine and he’s “Chef Beans” on Daytime.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Steve Jobs
• What CEO do you follow? – Brett Kingstone
• Favorite online tool? — Gusto
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Make better choices on who I surround myself with”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 02:00 – Nathan introduces Eric to the show
• 02:43 – Eric wasn’t really a chef and he made food for the person who was running the show
• 03:01 – Texting Base is a personalized, mass communication platform for texting which is similar to email
  • 03:17 – It looks like it is personally written
• 03:23 – Texting Base charges monthly depending on the quantity of the messages
• 03:33 – Texting Base is a SaaS business
• 03:38 – Minimum charge which is also the average is $50 and will go up depending on the number of messages
• 03:55 – Customer number is almost 500
• 04:09 – Average MRR
• 04:21 – Texting Base was bootstrapped and raised $262K
  • 04:47 – They had investors like Kimberly Partoll and Brett Kingstone who was a former CEO of an IPO company
• 05:29 – Gross margin is 566%
• 06:33 – 14% of the cost structure is Texting Base’s messaging fee
• 06:52 – Server costs is around $900 a month
• 07:14 – Processing fee is 2.5%
• 07:47 – Gross margin is around 79%
• 08:05 – The higher the volume, the lower the charge Texting Base gets from the provider
  • 08:09 – They had a contract for volume
  • 08:23 – They negotiated with Twilio directly
  • 08:35 – Volume should be at least 100K a month
• 09:18 – Eric started Texting Base in 2012
  • 09:21 – Eric needed the product—no one had it so he left banking and started the business
  • 09:37 – It took 3.5 years to launch
• 09:49 – Team size is 5
• 10:12 – Target customers for Texting Base are real estate and mortgage providers
• 10:21 – Texting Base uses email blasts to reach their clients
• 10:56 – Eric has used email providers until they started building their own list
• 11:24 – CAC was $28 and now it’s around $18
• 11:47 – Current churn is about 2.87% monthly
• 12:23 – LTV is still a bit early
• 12:57 – Texting Base doesn’t have contracts with customers
• 13:08 – Last month, $850 was spent on PPC
• 13:32 – Eric gave some equity of the company to the investors
  • 13:53 – The people who are building the product also have equity
• 15:25 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. It takes time and patience to build a business, be sure that you’re prepared for it.
2. Create your own solution to the problem and don’t be surprised if you end up solving multiple problems along the way.
3. Your network can bring you places; nurture your relationships.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Andy Swan. He’s the founder of LikeFolio. The company uses social data to determine shifts in consumer behavior on Main Street before it becomes use for Wall Street. This is his third financial technology company. The second, MyTrade, was acquired by TD Ameritrade in 2007.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Think and Grow Rich
• What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos
• Favorite online tool? — Gmail
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “A little bit more about patience”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 02:07 – Nathan introduces Andy to the show
• 02:37 – MyTrade was geared directly towards option traders and active stock traders
  • 02:50 – The technology allowed traders to copy someone’s option trade which is very complicated
  • 03:09 – It was sold because it was useless without a brokerage backend
  • 03:48 – MyTrade had raised $500-600K and was sold just 3-4 months after the round
  • 04:19 – Andy thought they had a good partnership with Ameritrade and that there was no plan of acquisition
  • 05:06 – Andy stayed with Ameritrade for 3-4 years after the acquisition
  • 05:30 – After 4 years, Andy and his brother spun off and created their own company
• 06:09 – Andy developed LikeFolio’s technology after leaving Ameritrade
• 06:26 – LikeFolio sells insights on consumer behavior to professional investors and companies
• 06:35 – LikeFolio has a partnership with Twitter where they take every tweet and analyze it
  • 06:54 – LikeFolio can map the trends in tweets and alert their clients about the shifts in behavior
• 07:40 – LikeFolio has different subscription plans
  • 07:47 – LikeFolio’s on-demand plan is $2K a month
  • 07:56 – For extreme computing power and robust API, the plan costs $100-300K
• 08:11 – Most of the revenue is from the API plan
• 08:40 – LikeFolio On-Demand has just been launched
• 09:20 – Every contract of LikeFolio’s is secure and LikeFolio isn’t allowed to disclose anything
• 09:59 – Andy can’t disclose the number of customers they have
• 11:18 – LikeFolio hasn’t raised capital and Andy isn’t planning on raising a round
  • 11:38 – “I want to own it all”
• 12:02 – Andy doesn’t want other people to have a say in his company and wants to be the decision maker in everything
• 12:36 – Andy’s first company was Daytrade which was sold to a private equity
  • 12:55 – It helped Andy to understand how to run a business in fintech
  • 13:13 – Andy didn’t raise money for Daytrade
• 14:03 – Team size is five; one in Louisville and four in Argentina
• 14:36 – One of toughest things LikeFolio faces is determining a tweet with the word “never”—it negates anything else in that tweet
  • 15:01 – “I could NEVER live without weightwatcher” is missed by LikeFolio because it’s a positive-negative sentiment
• 15:28 – LikeFolio takes a thousand tweets per month, per company so there will always be missed tweets
• 17:05 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. With technology today, consumers’ behavior can now be tracked on different online platforms—this can help businesses provide the right product or service for you.
2. It’s OK to be the only person responsible for your business; however, there’s still a possibility that you may need help in the future.
3. Be patient!

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Chase Jarvis. He’s one of the most influential photographers in the last 20 years. He’s also the creator and CEO of CreativeLive. He’s won awards for his images on six different continents, including his contributions to the Pulitzer Prize winning story Snow Fall—the acclaimed New York Times interactive story heralded as the “future of journalistic storytelling” and  Emmy nominated for his work documenting the music scene in Seattle. In 2009, he created the Best Camera app which was the first photo app that shared images directly to social networks. It was #1 on iTunes, App of the Year on Wired and got many other awards. He's currently focused on his work as the founder and CEO of CreativeLive, the world's largest online education platform for creatives and entrepreneurs with over a thousand teachers, 1500 classes and 10K hours of classes.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday
• What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Weiner
• Favorite online tool? — Evernote
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 7.5
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Chase would tell himself that mental health is the most important thing

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:48 – Nathan introduces Chase to the show
• 02:48 – Nathan describes his experience with New York Times
• 03:11 – We are now in a weird and modern era of journalism and media
• 03:20 – “If you’re really focused on innovating and breaking out of the norm, you can do it”
• 03:35 – Snow Fall is a story of an avalanche
  • 03:40 – Chase’s friend was a victim in an avalanche so the story was extra special to him
• 04:01 – Feature storytelling is continuing to grow and evolve
• 04:10 – Physical newspaper is dying and has becoming uninteresting
• 04:23 – Chase believes that there will be platforms in the future that are embedded with native bells and whistles that will continue to evolve
• 04:45 – “Journalism is moving in the same direction as tech”
• 05:02 – As platforms become more templated, we’ll become more interactive and have exciting experience with our news
• 05:24 – “Timing is everything”
• 05:30 – Chase shares his experience with his Best Camera app
  • 05:38 – Being the first was challenging
  • 05:43 – The developer was in a legal snafu which slowed down the creation of the app and paralyzed Chase’s business
  • 05:57 – Companies had already asked Chase if they could buy his app
  • 06:13 – Chase has spent 10 years identifying himself as an artist and entrepreneur
  • 06:30 – Chase was struggling with his overall identity
  • 07:30 – Chase just shut down his app; moved on and learned from it
• 08:11 – “I got more juice to go help other people break through some of those problems”
• 08:40 – Specifically, Chase owns all the intellectual property of his app
• 09:39 – “We need to overcome the psychology of being stuck in paralysis and analysis”
• 10:05 – Chase was in his late 30s in 2009
• 10:27 – Chase thinks that humans are generally resilient so he didn’t dwell much on what happened
• 10:34 – 5 years later, Chase wrote about his failure on his blog
  • 10:59 – It’s more about having an impact on the world rather than just getting money
• 11:25 – Chase got into Instagram only a year and a half ago
  • 11:35 – Chase was trying to preserve a legal position
• 11:53 – CreativeLive sells content that are created by the top experts in the world
  • 12:01 – There’s a premium model where customers can see how things are done
  • 12:07 – There are channels that can be watched for free
• 12:33 – CreativeLive has a total of 10M students, paid and free users
• 13:12 – CreativeLive has a high conversion rate relative to peers and commerce
  • 13:31 – Average conversion rate is 1-2%
• 13:39 – CreativeLive is curated to creators by creators
  • 13:51 – It is more community focused and is not a two-sided marketplace
• 14:00 – Competitors’ classes can be created by anyone which is very different from CreativeLive
• 15:07 – Chase has no desire to limit the creators in CreativeLive
• 15:29 – CreativeLive designs their contract and relationship with their creators
• 15:50 – Chase is confident in CreativeLive and the value it brings to people
• 16:58 – “We make you look great”
• 17:05 – CreativeLive only makes the extraordinary
• 17:24 – The challenge that Masterclass is facing
• 18:44 – CreativeLive was bootstrapped for the first 2 years
• 18:56 – CreativeLive has raised $58.8 M in total
• 19:30 – Chase won’t sell CreativeLive for $200M, even if it’s from LinkedIn
• 20:06 – CreativeLive’s mission is for people to educate themselves and make a living
• 20:26 – Chase would only sell if the vision of the buyer aligned with them
• 22:00 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Don’t dwell on your past mistakes, use them as motivation to move on and create better.
2. Contracts are made for a reason; study and check thoroughly before agreeing to one.
3. Stay aligned with your mission and vision.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Venkat Nagaswamy. He’s the CEO of Mariana IQ. He brings a long and diverse background in high technology to apply artificial intelligence and deep learning to help marketers make account-based marketing at scale a reality. "Big Kat," as he was nicknamed by friends and colleagues, has led teams in creating analytics, technology and business development solutions at McKinsey, Juniper Networks and GE Plastics, among others. He's worked in enterprise and digital consumer hardware, SaaS, corporate and business unit strategy, market entry strategy, and product development. He's a proud graduate of the University of Michigan and the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds an MBA and a Master's in Aerospace Engineering.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Good to Great
• What CEO do you follow? – Marc Benioff and Mark Zuckerberg
• Favorite online tool? — Calendly and Feedly
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Being diligent and hard-working counts for a lot more than being smart and clever”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:54 – Nathan introduces Venkat to the show
• 02:54 – Venkat was in Juniper trying to implement account-based marketing
• 03:14 – Venkat is trying to solve the problems in account-based marketing
• 03:27 – People buy a monthly subscription to Mariana IQ which will allow them to run campaigns targeting the same audience across different platforms
• 03:37 – Mariana IQ is a SaaS business
• 03:43 – Average pay is $4K a month per customer
• 03:55 – Venkat started Mariana IQ three years ago with his three co-founders
• 04:02 – Venkat also uses their technology
• 04:16 – Venkat and his co-founders felt that marketers need more tools to be successful in the field
• 04:36 – First year revenue was zero
• 04:45 – Late 2015, Mariana IQ made $155K and $550K in 2016
• 04:59 – Venkat is expecting to get 5x more in annual revenue this year
• 05:17 – MRR in June was $70-80K
• 05:45 – Mariana IQ has around 20 customers
• 06:00 – Zendesk is one of Mariana IQ’s clients
  • 06:13 – Zendesk wanted to target larger companies and so they gave Mariana IQ their data
  • 06:30 – Mariana IQ used their API to find the targeted companies for Zendesk
• 06:54 – Venkat shares their success rate at Mariana IQ
  • 07:27 – “We got better quality, 4x the volume while keeping the cost the same”
• 07:36 – Mariana IQ has raised capital
  • 07:39 – First seed round was in 2014 which was led by Blumberg Capital
  • 07:58 – David Blumberg owns Blumberg Capital and Bruce Taragin is who is on Mariana IQ’s board
  • 08:05 – Blumberg Capital has been around for 34 years
  • 08:19 – The first round was a convertible note round with $6M capital
  • 08:47 – Mariana IQ did another round in 2016 which was a priced round
  • 09:10 – Mariana IQ has raised a total of $4M
• 09:48 – Venkat doesn’t worry about growing into their valuation
• 12:00 – In Mariana IQ’s first year, they were only getting beta customers
• 12:41 – Venkat shares the unconventional way he attracted more customers; a video of him in the shower, singing
  • 13:05 –The video was posted on Twitter and got a million views
  • 13:38 – “I’m the worst singer on the planet”
• 13:57 – Gross margin is around 80%
• 14:10 – Gross customer churn is quite high, at 3%
• 14:22 – Revenue churn
• 14:55 – Full weighted CAC is $22K per customer
• 15:06 – Customer LTV is $200-250K
• 15:40 – Venkat is looking at increasing their CAC by spending more on sales and marketing to increase their volume
  • 15:54 – They will add two more salespeople
• 16:23 – Last month, they spent $2k on marketing alone
• 17:20 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Marketers are constantly looking for alternative ways to become more effective and successful in their industry.
2. A business shouldn’t worry about its valuation—as long as their confident with their product and continue to add value to their customers; it will work out in the end.
3. It’s necessary for companies today to invest in their sales and marketing to increase that engagement with their audience.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Jeremy Haynes whose company is Megalodon Marketing. He’s building all kinds of personal brands for celebrities and entrepreneurs alike.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – 48 Laws of Power
• What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
• Favorite online tool? — Infusionsoft, ClickFunnels and Stripe
• How many hours of sleep do you get? — 5
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Speed is power, but power is nothing without control”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:55 – Nathan introduces Jeremy to the show
• 02:28 – “Real results in real life”
• 02:33 – Jeremy’s real life experiences have driven millions of dollars in infoproducts
• 02:43 – Jeremy only gives actionable advice
• 03:00 – Armando Montelongo is one of Jeremy’s clients
  • 03:02 – Armando had a show that ran from 2006-2009 which was called Flip This House, by A&E
• 03:10 – Jeremy brands himself as the largest go-to personality in digital agency
• 03:20 – 16 months after Megalodon’s launch, Jeremy met Armando
  • 03:28 – Armando explained to Jeremy how his TV show led to a business with $200M annual revenue in 2017
  • 03:57 – $200M doesn’t include any online revenue
  • 04:05 – The entirety of its revenue came from selling event tickets to people over the phone and up-selling them
  • 04:18 – There were 22K customers between 2006-2009 and the majority of customers have an average transaction value of $20K or more
  • 05:18 – At first, Jeremy couldn’t believe Armando’s story because 2017 is the year of online advertising
  • 05:35 – Armando paid Jeremy $5K per day to come in for 3 days in total
  • 05:48 – Armando’s business was built up on traditional media
  • 06:05 – Jeremy did an assessment on Armando‘s business during his visit
  • 06:15 – The business made 6-figures the first month of the launch after spending a mid 5-figures
  • 06:30 – Armando is making a 7-figure revenue in the succeeding months
• 06:40 – Jeremy made 3 deals with Armando
  • 06:48 – There was a monthly payment of $70K to pay for their social media partners
  • 07:08 – Brandon Carter, Tai Lopez and Big Mike were some of his social media partners
  • 07:14 – Dan Fleyshman and Branden Hampton from Elevator Studios have partnerships with big, social media brands
  • 07:48 – $25K pays for 50 accounts to post to 100M people within 48 hours
• 08:38 – 33% of the social media activities is on Instagram as it’s a powerful platform
  • 09:00 – An account with 60K views in an hour can have 2% of that traffic go to the product
  • 10:20 – There’s a chrome plugin that helps you filter all Facebook posts
• 11:11 – Grant Cardone is the Number 1 sales trainer in the world
  • 11:30 – Jeremy became a part of Grant’s business as an email marketing manager; he trained 50 of his people to use Infusionsoft
  • 11:46 – Jeremy ended up as a digital marketing specialist
  • 11:50 – By Jeremy’s sixth month, Grant’s business was making a million dollars in digital revenue
  • 12:28 – Jeremy started with $50K a year to $60K a year with a bonus
• 13:54 – Jeremy created an omnipresent advertising model for marketing automation
  • 14:05 – Jeremy categorizes Grant’s buyers
  • 14:50 – Jeremy shows the buyers the ads they would want to see depending on their behavior and interests
  • 15:21 – Jeremy shares an actual example using lead forms
  • 15:43 – Jeremy tracks the leads from their customized URL and ads
  • 16:29 – PlusThis is an Infusionsoft plugin where you can connect Facebook to Infusionsoft and generate an http post
  • 16:47 – When a lead fills out a form, it will be generated to a campaign
  • 16:51 – The first step in an marketing automation sequence will be an http post pushing the lead’s data to the target audience where the lead should be
  • 17:03 – Then, the audience will be connected to the ad that is made for them
  • 17:10 – The sequence won’t always be perfect
• 19:00 – Jeremy shares why people like him are needed to do this job
• 19:17 – People can hire from com
• 19:35 – Jeremy stayed with Grant for 13 months, then left to start his own agency
• 21:40 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Digital marketing is one of best ways to grow your revenue as a business.
2. Know your worth and show people why you’re worth it.
3. Leave when you think it is the best time and/or option you have; then, continue to pursue your dreams.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
• Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Moshe Vaknin. He’s been dreaming about his company YouAPPi since he bought his first iPhone 3. After a long and successful career working in a variety of positions, Moshe founded 3 successful startups before finally starting YouAPPi. As the CEO of the company, he brings vast experience in the fields of advertising, publishing and affiliate marketing, making him adept at identify opportunities that can be transformed into profitable realities. 

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – My Journey to Justice by Moshe Vankin
• What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos
• Favorite online tool? — Whatsapp
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Never give up”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 02:41 – YouAPPi is a platform that enables users, publishers and developers to solve growing challenges related to mobile app development
• 03:19 – As an example, King, the maker of Candy Crush, is always looking for high-quality users for candy crush
  • 03:30 – High-quality users are the ones who play and purchase virtual items
  • 03:45 – YouAPPi will find these high-quality users
  • 03:53 – The process of finding high-quality users is complicated
  • 04:12 – King will have a better ROI to optimize their investment by partnering with a company like YouAPPi
• 04:47 – YouAPPi has an agreement with 4500 developers and publishers
• 05:13 – YouAPPi knows users behavior better than anyone else
  • 05:21 – Moshe explains how YouAPPi learns the shopping behavior of each user
  • 05:44 – By learning what to recommend to certain users, YouAPPI can better drive sales
• 06:50 – YouAPPi can’t track the users and other private data
• 07:30 – As long as the user is within YouAPPi’s publishers’ network they can identify your device ID and recommend apps
• 07:56 – YouAPPi is getting paid per app installation and usage
• 10:52 – YouAPPi pays 70% of their revenue to their publishers
  • 10:56 – From $20, the publisher gets $14 and YouAPPi gets $6
• 11:05 – YouAPPi was launched in 2011
• 11:15 – First year revenue was $250K which is the total cut from $1M
  • 11:44 – 2016 total cut was $80M
• 12:05 – YouAPPi has raised closed to $20M
  • 12:17 – “We have to invest building the platform”
• 12:19 – Total number of employees is around 130 with 10 offices globally
• 13:05 – YouAPPi’s platform is for their own consumption
  • 13:24 – “Our business model is our platform”
• 13:44 – YouAPPi is currently running hot on momentum and Moshe won’t probably sell YouAPPi before 2019
  • 14:10 – IPO recommendations
• 15:04 – HQ is in the Bay Area and Moshe is currently in Israel
• 15:33 – Top 2 competitors are Aerosource and AppLovin
• 17:07 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. As long as you’re on the right path, you can reach your dream.
2. A good relationship the people in your network can exponentially expand your business.
3. Never sell too early—if you’ve got a furnace full of momentum, to cash in.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
• Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Sergey Sholom. As a teenager, he was a championship-level gamer and created the first large gamer group called S-port Tournaments in Russia for Quake. After getting his PhD in mathematical modeling, Sergey founded Datcroft Games LTD in 2004. Over the past 13 years, the company has developed multiple worldwide popular games with millions of users. He continues to oversee a company with over a hundred employees and continues to bring new cutting edge games to the market. Their latest game called Pixel Wars which will be released in the summer of 2017, has already received critical acclaim and will become the game changer in mobile eSport.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Richard Branson’s
• What CEO do you follow? – N/A
• Favorite online tool? — N/A
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4-5
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Push more”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 04:03 – The company was launched in 2004
• 04:29 – The make free games that sell virtual items—that’s where the company gets it’s revenue
  • 04:43 – Around 5% of players buy virtual items
  • 05:20 – Sergey had no revenue for the first 2 years of his company
  • 05:58 – Sergey supported himself from other businesses
• 06:01 – His newest game has been in development for more than 2 years
• 06:13 – The team has 150 people with offices in 4 countries
  • 07:34 – Datcroft Games had an 8-digit revenue in 2016
• 09:00 – Cryptocurrency helped Gamecredits to monetize their audience
  • 09:20 – Sergey wants to prove game developers that more revenue can come from crypto
• 10:05 – Gamecredits is preparing to enter the Indian market
• 10:46 – Sergey believes that Apple promoting your game is just an extra advantage
• 11:35 – The number of followers that the Gamecredits store has
• 12:05 – Gamecredits is using its existing coin which has been on the market for 3 years already
  • 12:34 – Gamecredits has been running the most successful crowd sale in the market
  • 13:19 – Gamecredits will put 26.5 M crypto in marketing
• 14:17 – Sergey will have a way to exchange their coin in dollars
• 14:43 – Different cryptocurrencies are being put in Gamecredits
• 15:11 – Sergey is proud that they’re able to run a real crowd sale with almost 10K crypto investors
  • 15:23 – Not all ICOs are able to do that
• 15:34 – Gamecredits was able to raise capital from 4 tokens including bitcoin, ethereum, waves and gamecredits
• 16:05 – Gamecredits current tokens are mobilego tokens and their own gamecredits token
• 16:51 – The market is tremendous and the future community will be much bigger
  • 17:46 – Apple and Google are for profit companies and Gamecredits is a non-profit
• 20:00 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. It’s possible for a gaming platform to penetrate the cryptocurrency market.
2. The cryptocurrency market has been growing significantly, increasing opportunities for different investments.
3. As a non-profit business, your focus needs to be on the change you can create, not the contributions you can earn.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Tran Hung. He’s one of the founders of Uquid which is the world’s first service offering debit card solutions for cryptocurrency holders. They currently support 79 of the biggest digi-coins including bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin, ripple, etc. They also offer worldwide mobile recharge support, bills payment services, grocery and pharmacy vouchers, ticketing services, and many other benefits.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Secrets of Building Multi-Million Dollar Businesses by Adam Khoo
• What CEO do you follow? – Richard Branson
• Favorite online tool? — Google Translate
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6-7
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Tran wished he would have started studying code earlier

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 03:00 – Uquid is a debit card for 79 cryptocurrencies
  • 03:10 – Customers can get the physical card with a Visa logo that they can use to withdraw money
  • 03:28 – The card can be loaded with cryptocurrencies
• 03:43 – Before getting the card, you need to have cryptocurrency
  • 03:49 – Signup at Uquid’s website to get a card
  • 04:04 – There’s a fee of $1 for 1 virtual card but you need the physical card to use in ATMs which is $16
  • 04:20 – After getting the card, you can reload it anytime you want with cryptocurrency
• 05:10 – Uquid is using the market price of cryptocurrency
• 05:42 – Uquid takes 0.5% of everything spent using the card
  • 05:53 – If Nathan spent $100 on groceries using the card Uquid will take .50₵
• 07:34 – Last year, customers spent $1.6M in total transaction volume
• 08:09 – Uquid is growing fast in 2017
  • 08:30 – In July, Uquid processed $900K in total transaction volume
  • 08:50 – Uquid has already passed $3M total transaction volume on the first half of 2017
• 10:45 – The process of exchanging bitcoin to other currencies was complicated
  • 11:19 – Uquid is doing $5K a month in service charges
  • 11:30 – Uquid also offers other services where they charge 10-15%
  • 12:05 – Uquid charges 3% from the vouchers
• 12:20 – In May, Tran thinks they’ll make around $50K in total transaction charges
• 12:58 – Team size is 5 and they’re based in UK
• 13;15 – Uquid is planning to release their own token
• 13:29 – Tran is looking to raise $4-5M
  • 13:44 – Tran is thinking of selling 15% of Uquid to be able to raise $4M
• 14:35 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. The market for cryptocurrencies is rapidly expanding.
2. People are now finding more and more ways to mine coins.
3. No matter what service you use, the charges can differ drastically depending on the type of transaction you’re engaging in.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Martin Koppelmann. He is the co-founder and CEO of Gnosis, the decentralized platform for prediction markets. He has been an entrepreneur and thought leader in the blockchain space for more than 4 years. He is closely related to prediction markets and has worked on decentralized, market-driven, governance mechanisms.

Famous Five:
Favorite Book? – Martin does not read books, but considers Reddit a good resource
What CEO do you follow? – some VCs, but no specific CEO
Favorite online tool? — Slack, Trello
How many hours of sleep do you get?— Less than 6
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – He wished he looked earlier into game theory and economics

Time Stamped Show Notes:
01:07 – Nathan introduces Martin to the show
01:43 – Bitcoin was the reason Martin got into the crypto and blockchain space
01:58 – This was during the time the Euro was having problems
02:09 – Martin started to evaluate how he looked at money; he learned about bitcoin and the possibility of creating different forms of money
02:35 – Gnosis has evolved
03:04 – They are assuming that Gnosis will be a decentralized platform for prediction markets; for betting, auctions and insurances
04:32 – Martin says companies like eBay, Uber and AirBnB will be replaced by a decentralized platform
04:51 – They may replace companies that go into information aggregation
05:02 – Instead of having different analysts determine the revenue of a company, markets and forecasts will be aggregated to one number
05:15 – Gnosis has zero customers and zero in revenue, but they have a team and have raised capital thru selling GNO tokens; they raised $12.5 million
06:14 – The tokens were sold for 250,000 ether, a blockchain currency, and at the time the tokens were sold, the ether was worth $12.5 million
06:55 – The token has its own value and is currently trading at $240 a piece
07:04 – Gnosis collects ether and pays their employees with it
07:33 – To convert ether into real dollars, Martin uses Kraken, Coinbase and Poloniex
08:40 – The foundation of crypto is its big vision and the vision to create something as big as the internet; however, currently, it is still just speculation
09:31 – The token itself is almost always issued in Ethereum; the consumer creates the rules so the first set of rules they made involved organizing the token sales
10:03 – Martin did the token auction and was completely controlled by the blockchain
10:40 – Compared to Bitcoin, Ethereum was easier to use for developers
11:10 – If crypto becomes the currency of the future, Martin says he hopes that people will become equally rich. He is currently working on a project where each person can issue their own currency and others would agree to accept each other’s currencies
11:37 – They are trying to democratize money
12:27 – Nathan says there is a limited supply of ethereum in the blockchain
12:46 – Personally, Martin does not follow the bitcoin model
13:02 – Martin is thinking of a new world where people are part of a new economy; each one gets to issue their own tokens and the tokens have value
13:50 – Inflation can be used to finance a public good
14:11 – For example, let’s say you want to create a platform like Uber, Uber is made to serve the public
14:35 – The operating cost is not what made Uber expensive to build, it was the spend on marketing and buying everyone on the platform
14:57 – Martin says there can be a new model where people can create value by joining the same platform
15:13 – The value creation happens when people join the platform, this is where tokens are useful and can be used as incentives
15:58 – The early adopters get more and those who join later will have to pay fees
16:12 – Nathan says this sounds like a network marketing scheme
16:25 – Martin says this is how Uber found success – in the beginning someone paid $2 billion and in the end, it’s the users that pay; but, the curve can be much flatter
17:02 – Nathan asks Martin how values go up in crypto
17:42 – Martin says value creation is made when everyone agrees on something
18:15 – The thing about competing token issuances is that people need to find a way to combine their different tokens onto one platform
18:44 – Nathan says he can see the good intentions of the people who are in the crypto space, but he is trying to figure out who will win or lose when the crypto marketplace is more mature and established
19:28 – Martin says assuming there will be a winner and loser, the difference is found in people who have control over a platform
19:49 – For example, in Uber they can change rules and raise fees, but on a decentralized platform, you can structure it in a way that makes restrictions on yourself
20:16 – If you monopolize the platform, you can still get the fee but you have no control in changing it
21:02 – Martin says there is power in making your governance mechanism into something that does not allow you to change anything
23:31 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:
Crypto and blockchain can be the currency of the future.
You create value when people agree to join a platform together.
A future where people can have their own currency may be the way to democratize our use of money.

Resources Mentioned:
The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Nick Candito. He is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of the company called Progressly, championing the company’s mission towards becoming the new standard for how teams find and execute business processes. He previously served as Relate IQ’s head of user success and business operations which was acquired by Salesforce, the first automatic and intelligent CRM solution. Nick founded Progressly to address how large industries operate, innovate and share around core business processes.

Famous Five:
Favorite Book? – Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek
What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Weiner, Satya Nadella, Dick Costolo, Jeff Bezos
Favorite online tool? — Hubspot tools for email, Pocket
How many hours of sleep do you get?— less than 8
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – be patient, ask more questions and optimize by being around the best people

Time Stamped Show Notes:
01:07 – Nathan introduces Nick to the show
01:49 – Nick thinks Salesforce will win the CRM space, as well as Microsoft and LinkedIn
02:25 – Nick is impressed by Base CRM and Social Capital
02:57 – Nick stumbled into tech as he was originally a finance major
03:15 – He started by joining a small software team building technology for the pharmaceutical industry and learned about the manual system of the tech industry
04:04 – Nick then joined Crimson Hexagon and he learned how to take a company to the next level using tools like Salesforce
04:38 – With RelateIQ, Nick learned how to create a sales system of engagement
05:18 – Nick thinks the best founding duo he has ever encountered is Adam Evans and Steve Loughlin
06:29 – Progressly is the operational system of records with a focus on the Fortune 1000 CROs or contract research organizations
07:24 – The company has a mobile first strategy (people who are working outside of office)
08:01 – Progressly works with a variety of companies; big companies that include Shell Oil and those in the mid-market segment
08:25 – The highest price is $49 per user, with the IT Group of Chevron they have 60,000 employees within the company
09:31 – The company was founded in 2014 and started to fundraise aggressively in 2015; they were able to raise $10 million in the seed, series A and after
10:22 – They had a very specific profile for their seed round and focused on a large institutional investor, a micro VC, and some high value angels—it played out the way they planned
11:17 – They are looking at getting a positive net churn and at how they can accelerate the growth of their accounts; for example, from site-wide deployment to regional deployment to enterprise deployment
13:28 – They are now in the hundreds in terms of customers; the energy and utilities sector has a high network effect
14:05 – Nathan just interviewed Geoff Moore who said the more specific or weirder the sector, the better
15:24 – The utility metric depends on what the user is running on operationally
16:03 – The active number of seats are in the thousands
16:46 – The first year revenue was pretty low because they did a paid pilot offering
17:10 – They were looking into the pilot to use case expansion
17:55 – They want to have a 100% growth, year over year
18:10 – It is easier to drive a high growth rate rather than have customers who can refer you to others
19:41 – Nick will celebrate when he gets to $5 million in ARR or accounting rate of return
20:40 – Currently, they are doing less than 300 grand per month
21:16 – Having an enterprise cycle in your business is slower upfront, but has the ability to experience significant growth in the long run
21:31 – They have 30 employees with some in product design and engineering
22:31 – The payback period is significantly lower than 12 months
24:38 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:
Target a specific group for your customer base to increase the chances of referrals.
An enterprise account may prove to be slow at first, but it will pay off in the long run.
Ask your customers to promote your business to other people.

Resources Mentioned:
The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Anindya Datta. He is the CEO and Chairman of a company called Mobilewalla, a mobile consumer, audience platform company. Before Mobilewalla, he founded a company called Chutney Technologies where he was backed by Kleiner Perkins which was eventually acquired by Cisco Systems. He has been on the faculties of Georgia Tech, The University of Arizona and The National University of Singapore. He obtained his undergraduate degree many years ago and his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Maryland College Park.

Famous Five:
Favorite Book? – The New New Thing by Michael Lewis
What CEO do you follow? – Jose Mourinho
Favorite online tool? — Outlook and Gmail
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5 ½ hours
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Drink less and study harder

Time Stamped Show Notes:
01:26 – Nathan introduces Anindya to the show
02:21 – Mobilewalla collects data for how consumers behave on mobile and processes it for mobile marketers—they have two products: mobile audience and raw mobile data
03:38 – When companies buy the audience, Mobilewalla provides the IDs and it is a one-time deal; the raw data is given on a subscription-basis which is paid monthly
04:28 – Right now the SaaS model is earning more in terms of revenue, but Anindya thinks this will change in December
04:57 – They are currently modifying the audience pricing to become a recurring stream
05:10 – They are planning to offer the data segments needed by a company and get a monthly payment for it
06:07 – Mobilewalla gets their data from different sources including the ad request system in mobile, they barter with the ad company in exchange for data
06:54 – They also put a pixel in an ad and obtain data from you as you browse
07:23 – This includes your location
07:57 – The company started with buying the information they can collect from other companies’ ads and then moved on to trading
08:32 – 2014 is their first revenue year where they got $1 million from the cut of the media buy
09:10 – 2015 was also all media buys where they got $4 million
10:18 – They stopped media buying in June 2016 and played a key role in the US presidential election—the revenue generated was $4 million: $750,000 in data and $3.25 million was from media
11:33 – The projection for this year is $5.1 million (all coming from data), but they have deals with companies that include media work
12:21 – Mobilewalla was one of the key data arms for a major party
12:33 – They created segments for evangelical Christians
13:31 – Anindya cannot share who they worked for but they can say the client was very happy with their work
14:10 – They raised their capital thru venture funding which are convertible notes worth $4 million; they have not yet raised a series B
15:50 – In May 2016, all the revenue was from data and they got $12,000. In June of this year, they hit $250,000—this is a 20x growth in 13 months
16:32 – In May 2017, they made $172,000
17:05 – On SaaS, they have 9 customers with subscription accounts and they pay from $8,500 to $41,000 a month
17:21 – The biggest chunk of audience revenue comes from Oracle, they get paid based on the segments that were sold
18:10 – In June, they were close to $100,000 from their mobile audience; there are over 250 organizations buying from them including Unilever and Procter and Gamble
19:12 – Ever since they started there are only two companies who have not continued working with them
20:01 – The company has two sellers – one in New York and one in Singapore
20:27 – The total team size is 38 with 3 focused on sales acquiring new clients; the average sales cycle for a SaaS client is 45 days
21:21 – There is zero variable marketing spend for the company
21:51 – The company headquarters is in New York and the US team is located in New York and Atlanta where the US engineering team is based
22:12 – The US team size is 10, the Singapore team size is 12, and the rest is based in Calcutta, India
24:21 – The biggest amount of money they generated during the election was the “get out to vote or GOTV” – they monitored every polling booth in a certain number of states and they were able to tell the ground team who voted and who did not
25:04 – During the election their data was acquired in real time
27:15 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:
Invest in a business that can bring in profit; this will give you the capital you need for your other businesses.
Data is king.
You CAN barter with other companies to reduce your spend on marketing.

Resources Mentioned:
The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives