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SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

What if you knew data behind the fastest growing SaaS companies today? Each morning join Nathan Latka as he spends 15 minutes interviewing SaaS founders. You'll learn how SaaS CEO's launched their startup and grew it into a business. SaaS Founders range from bootstrapped to funded, MVP to 10,000 customers, pre revenue to pre IPO.
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SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
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Now displaying: December, 2017
Dec 31, 2017

Eugene Woo is the CEO of Venngage, an infographic design tool. His mission is to help businesses tell their stories with compelling and memorable visuals. He enjoys reading and writing about content marketing, entrepreneurship, and data visualization. You can read more of his articles on the Venngage blog.

Dec 30, 2017

David Erickson is the Founder and CEO of FreeConferenceCall.com. His simple ideas and deft execution have transformed the telecommunications industry to better suit the needs of consumers and businesses worldwide. Dave founded FreeConferenceCall.com on the simple principle that collaborative communication should be available to everyone, both affordably and efficiently. He purchased a $10 URL, which sparked the first viral movement in the telecommunications industry to support free conferencing around the globe.

Dec 29, 2017

Unite and automate all the moving parts of your business so that you can do the work you love from one smart platfrom.

Dec 28, 2017

Victor Ricci has always loved the Internet and creating things. He had experimented in different areas of technology and business to find what he was passionate about. During this process he started a half dozen web companies before founding one he loved, TrendPie.com.

Dec 27, 2017

Segment's co-founder and CEO; He studied Aerospace Engineering at MIT and fell into the world of customer data and analysis when he and three of his college friends started Segment in 2011 as part of Y Combinator. He and his wife Erika, who he met at MIT, live together in San Francisco.

Dec 26, 2017

Andrew Blachman is the COO of Tophatter, the world's fastest, most entertaining marketplace for mobile shoppers, where he oversees ongoing business operations within the company. Previously, he was the CEO of GET ME IN! Blachman has both a B.A. and M.S. degree from Stanford University.

Dec 24, 2017

25 years-old French entrepreneur. Turned a grad-school side-hustle into a +$20K monthly recurring business in a few months. I founded LeadGuru.io to stop B2B companies from spending hours building bad, boring, low-yielding cold-emailing campaigns. We come in and pump their cold-emailing capacities to the next level. They just sit and watch hot leads flooding their inbox.

Dec 23, 2017

Joe Prusz is Global Head of Revenue at Rubicon Project, responsible for all revenue-related activities across Publishers, Demand-side Platforms, and Global Agency Relationships, tasked with the goal of continuing the adoption and growth of automated advertising across all screens and devices, driving more than $1B in advertising spend.

Formerly he was Head of Seller, Americas, responsible for Rubicon Project's largest revenue region for publishers across North America and LATAM.

Prior to that, he was the Head of Mobile globally, where he was responsible for general management and strategic oversight of the Mobile business, the fastest growing division of the company. Charged with building the Mobile revenue team and product, analyzing M&A opportunities for both Mobile and the company at large, and overall was an evangelist for both the company and the mobile advertising technology industry. Under his leadership, the Mobile business unit grew from $0 to over $325M in Managed Revenue globally, catapulting Rubicon Project to become the world's largest independent mobile advertising marketplace in less than four years.

His greatest joys are his wife and two children.

Dec 21, 2017

Building social media automation and more for SMB's around the world. Jack of all trades, master of some. Lean startup enthusiast. Strong opinions weakly (& weekly) held.

Dec 20, 2017

Gal Dubinski and Tomer Aharon: We're both 28 years old. Co-founders of Poptin (SaaS) and Ecpm (a digital agency). We met in a gifted class in high school and have been best friends since then. Started our business as university students while living together in the same apartment with our girlfriends (today wives).

Dec 19, 2017

Founder of Vuture, the 16th fastest SAAS business in the world (2017) Finalist of the Shell Livewire Young Entrepreneur of the year.

London based entrepreneur, who has lived and worked in New York and Sydney. A bootstrap expert, with a strong belief in the fundamentals of underpinning profitability with growth.

Dec 18, 2017

Ulrik is GenieBelts Chief Genie, and part of the coolest start up team in Copenhagen. With a long commercial background and experience with various startups, he's bringing GenieBelt to a construction site near you.

Ulrik's favourite tool: nail gun

Dec 17, 2017

Daniel is a father of 2 and has been married to his wife Samantha for almost 10 years.

Daniel left school at 15 to work full-time. From there, he learned design and started freelancing. Marriage life and children meant focusing on a more secure method of employment, so he secured a Telecoms & Networks Engineer role. After 5 years, he knew that working for somebody else wasn't his calling. With his co-founder Matthew Spurr, they started a branding agency using Daniel's skill of design and Matt's skill of sales and marketing. This venture was cut short though because of Quuu.

The rest is history :-)

Dec 16, 2017

Aaron Bird is the full-stack CEO at Bizible, a venture-backed startup that makes marketing measurement and planning software for B2B companies. He holds an MBA from Pepperdine University and a B.S. in Computer Science from UCSB. Previously, Aaron worked at Microsoft on Bing Ads.

Dec 15, 2017

Bob Gilbreath is Co-Founder and CEO of Ahalogy, a data-driven social and influencer marketing company with clients such as Nestle, Kraft and Costco. He is the author of The Next Evolution of Marketing (McGraw-Hill) and was named an Advertising Age Top 50 Marketer. Bob has degrees from NYU and Duke.

Dec 13, 2017

JazzHR CEO Pete Lamson explains how the company uses $25 Amazon giftcards to drive customer conversions. It's working. The company has over 3000 paying customers today and $6m in ARR. 

Dec 12, 2017

JD Graffam makes an interesting argument for buying companies instead of starting new ones. 

Dec 8, 2017

After receiving his MBA from Stanford, Steven Benson worked in Sales at IBM, HP and Google where he was Google Enterprise's Top Sales Executive in 2009. In 2012 Steven founded Badger Maps, the #1 Sales App in the Apple App Store, which helps Field Sales People be more successful.

How do you put touch on such a low price point?

The sales cycle is quick, about 3 weeks, so we're able to put touch on most free trials even though starting price point is $35 a seat. 

Marketing, Sales, and customer success all tied together but manage themselves in pods. There is no variable comp, including the sales roles. Everyone is on salary and everyone owns equity so they can take part in upside. 

What is revenue growth?

Back in December 2016 we were doing $130k, now in August 2017 we're at about $180k in MRR so about 80% yoy growth rate. 

We're using bank debt, 19% interest rate with LighterCapital, to fund growth because its non dilutive. 

In July 2017 spent about $15k on paid marketing. Has sales team of 30 that works those leads and makes up larger part of cost structure. 

Are you cash flow positive? (Minute 17)

Yes because we're pulling cash forward in the form of multi year deals. We incentivize this by giving customers a 20% discount. 

Favorite business book is Predictable Revenue. 

I'm following Jason Lempkin at SaaStr.

My favorite online tool is gmail.

Steven has no kids, gets 7 hours of sleep and is currently 39. He wishes his 20 year old self would choose a career path that he enjoyed, that their are jobs in, and that he was good at. 

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Dec 7, 2017

I really enjoyed this interview with Dave for two big reasons:

  1. He’s playing in a space that is not typical for B2B SaaS
  2. He’s using freemium consumer adoption to drive enterprise leads at a very low CAC of $80 which he makes back in well under 12 months.

Dave is the CEO of TeamSnap. He has more than 20 years of experience in technology leadership positions. He was previously CEO of SANRAD, a venture-funded storage networking company, which he joined in 2006.

He also helped found LeftHand Networks, a Boulder-based company sold to Hewlett Packard. Prior to that, Dave was with Hewlett-Packard. An avid skier and wannabe competitive cyclist, Dave lives in Boulder with wife Deb and two children, Mariel and Gabe. He enjoys reading, cooking and microbreweries

Revenue Model:

Over 1m teams use TeamSnap and 250,000 of those teams pay Dave $80 per year to use TeamSnap to manage team communication, logistics, and more.

The average team has 30 people ranging from coaches, to players, to players parents.

TeamSnap leverages 3 revenue streams with the SaaS component making up 40% of the total revenue mix. SaaS revenues are about $20m in ARR from 250k teams paying $80 per year.

Total revenue is approaching $50m which Dave expects the company will cross in Q1 2018.

Overall the business is growing over 100% year over year.

On Launching in 2009 in poor economy:

Dave: 2009 was best time for us to launch. The trough of a recessions is best time to get company going due to low opportunity cost. In recession there are talented people available for hire.

2009 revenue was less than $100,000.  It took Dave just 3 years to break $1m in ARR which happened in 2012.

Fundraising

First 5 years from 2009 to 2014 the company was bootstrapped. Dupont funded the company with his own capital and local area angels. He put a couple hundred thousand in himself in early days.

In 2014 they took their first institutional capital and have sense raised a total of $43.7m.

On seasonal users and how that affects TeamSnap gross logo churn monthly:

Teams pay $15 during the season then stop paying us off-season. We don’t look at this as churn because we know they come back next season. They are simply “in-active”.

The company looks at revenue per customer on an annual basis which averages about $80.

On customer acquisition:

We use our consumer app which people use for free to drive enterprise sales in a land and expand strategy.

30% of new consumer customers come through referrals. We’ve boosted that up by spending about $500k per month on Google and FB ads mostly. Payback is pretty strong, under 12 months.

They’ll pay $80 to acquire a customer that is worth about $280 over their lifetime which puts LTV to CAC ratio at about 3.5.

Cash Flow:

Net burn is really close to our discretionary marketing budget of $500k/mo. We are in good shape cash wise. Near September of next year (2018) we’ll be cash flow breakeven at much higher revenue level. We’ll figure out then what to do strategy wise.

We are on the path to being a billion dollar company. I have no desire to sell out quickly to anybody. Build as big as can, shoot for IPO, create fantastic product over long haul.

Strategy towards IPO:

Large competitors like Comcast compete with us with their subsidiary called SportsEngine. Dicks sporting goods has a competitor in space called BlueSombrero and AffinitySports. Lastly, a private equity funded company called BlueStar Sports compete with us.

Many of our competitors are purchasing small players and just aggregating. A short term private equity play versus a long term 20+ year deal.

Would you accept $400m offer from Comcast? (minute 22)

Well it would depend on the moment in time. In 2016 probably, in 2017 maybe, next year when revenue is higher, no way in hell!

What is your favorite business book?

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Is there a CEO you’re following or studying right now?

Samir, SendGrid CEO

Whats your favorite online tool?

Apple pencil to evernote.

How many hours of sleep do you get every night?

7

What would you tell your 20 year old self?

I’m married with 2 kids, married for 30 years, and I’m “approaching a milestone birthday”. I wish my 20 year old self knew that “nobody does it alone”.

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