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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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Now displaying: Page 1
Jul 4, 2017

Allan Willie. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Klipfolio, a software-as-a-service dashboard company with over 8500 paying customers including Jet.com, Zendesk, Aviva and Ikea. He previously co-founded a company called Espial, an internet device software firm that is now publicly traded on TSX. He lives in Ottawa with his wife and 2 daughters.

Famous Five:

  • Favorite Book? – Lead by Greatness
  • What CEO do you follow? – Tobias Lütke
  • Favorite online tool? — SEO Plus Chrome plug in and Owler
  • How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6.5-7.5
  • If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Listen, build something of value and then see if you could raise money”

 

Time Stamped Show Notes:

  • 01:07 – Nathan introduces Allan to the show
  • 01:50 – All of the meeting rooms in Klipfolio’s office have different wallpaper
  • 02:12 – Klipfolio is an online, cloud-based, dashboard vendor
  • 02:18 – Klipfolio works with mid-sized businesses who use them for everything
  • 02:40 – Nathan uses Klipfolio quite aggressively, especially for his Facebook live streams
  • 04:17 – When Allan was last on The Top, he was passing 7K customers—now he has 8500 customers
  • 04:36 – In January, Klipfolio announced a $12M raise which was an insight round from existing investors
    • 05:14 – The initial round was to raise an external round
    • 05:43 – “We did use market to validate”
  • 06:12 – Klipfolio had verbal offers that were lucrative
    • 06:40 – The valuation were multiples for some of the terms
  • 07:00 – Klipfolio also had some acquisition discussions
  • 08:08 – Allan won’t call the acquisition discussions offers, because it would still have to go through a lot
  • 08:59 – In every acquisition discussion, you want to layer how much information to present to another company
  • 09:35- Customers usually get the $70 plan for the first month, then move up to $150 in a year
  • 10:10 – Some of the customers are partners who can pay directly or pay as a partner
    • 10:24 – 30% of Klipfolio’s income come from their partner channels
  • 10:35 – Last month revenue was $500-600K
  • 11:16 – Klipfolio’s valuation was between $700-800K
  • 11:25 – Some of the VCs that Allan has talked to are putting terms in place with a higher valuation
  • 11:47 – You have to sustain your valuation to get into the next round
  • 12:34 – Anything on Klipfolio is being tracked
  • 13:15 – The weirdest use case
    • 13:25 – There are NGOs who use Klipfolio to push some of their metrics out
    • 13:34 – Red Cross uses Klipfolio for flooding, zika virus and other stuff that is happening in Africa
  • 14:11 – Churn has gone up slightly
  • 14:35 – Klipfolio started paid ads for $120K a month
    • 14:41 – Klipfolio has a blog about the lessons they’ve learned from Facebook Ads
    • 15:24 – One of the cons of ads is that the conversion rate drops and churn goes up—which is normal
  • 15:40 – CAC
  • 15:54 – LTV
  • 16:05 – LTV to CAC is still relatively healthy
  • 16:26 – Team size is around 90
    • 16:47 – The team is moving to a new space in November
  • 18:20 – The Famous Five

 

3 Key Points:

  1. Maintain your valuation in order to get into the next round.
  2. Not all acquisition talks are considered offers.
  3. A company of great value has a better chance of raising money and getting acquired down the road.

 

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
  • 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

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