Scot Wingo. He’s the CEO of Spiffy. He’s also a 4-time serial entrepreneur and industry thought leader in ecommerce and on-demand economy realm. He’s appeared on CNBC’s Today’s Show and contributed his expertise to The Wall Street Journal, New York Times along with many other publications. He previously founded Stingray Software which he sold to Rogue Wave Software, AuctionRover which was sold to GoTo/Overture, and ChannelAdvisor that went public in 2013, under the stock symbol ECOM.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things
• What CEO do you follow? –  Jeff Bezos
• Favorite online tool? — LinkedIn
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4-6
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “To trust your instincts and invest even more in your own companies”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:44 – Nathan introduces Scot to the show
• 01:29 – Spiffy is an on-demand car wash and detail company
• 01:33 – Customers pay for car washes and Spiffy is full-stock
• 01:59 – Spiffy is a pay-as-you-go model
• 02:02 – Some customers would request to have their car cleaned on a regular basis so they’re currently working on a subscription plan
• 02:30 – Having your car cleaned is addicting
• 03:02 – Spiffy started in 2014
• 03:17 – Scot was 46 in 2014
• 03:26 – Scot loves building a company
• 04:00 – In 1999, AuctionRover started
• 04:14 – AuctionRover is a search engine for auction sites
• • 04:16 – Scot always had a plan to develop software for sellers
  • 04:20 – After getting acquired, they developed the software which turned into ChannelAdvisor
• 05:43 – They’ve raised $3M for AuctionRover
• 05:53 – AuctionRover started to get acquisition offers
• 06:16 – Scot was a fan of Goto
• 06:45 – Stingray put Scot in a position where it had to work
• • 07:32 – Scot had accumulated personal debt to run Stingray
  • 07:55 – Scot was 25 when he founded Stingray
  • 08:03 – Scot had Stingray for 3 years before selling it to Rogue
  • 08:11 – Acquisition price was around $7M
  • 08:27 – It was software and Scot had a 30% margin
• 09:07 – Scot added $3M through fundraising
• • 09:55 – Tim Draper was on Episode 129
  • 10:17 – AuctionRover’s acquisition price was $20-50M
• 10:43 – The negotiation with Goto to buy back AuctionRover
• 11:18 – Scot bought back AuctionRover for around $1M
• • 11:37 – They bought it back in 2001
• 12:00 – When Scot IPOd ChannelAdvisor, everything was new to him and he had never taken a company that big before
• 12:07 – Scot’s dad was a business person and was on Fortune Magazine
• 12:58 – Scot always has a higher goal
• 13:37 – “If you’ve raised a venture capital, you’re going to have an exit”
• 13:47 – Scot wanted to see what an IPO process looked like
• 14:02 – Scot raised capital for ChannelAdvisor
• 14:14 – ChannelAdvisor helps retailers and brands sell on eBay, Amazon and other channels
• 14:26 – ChannelAdvisor raised a total of $90M before the IPO
• 15:08 – ChannelAdvisor’s market price on Day 1
• 16:03 – Scot brought in a COO to help him
• • 16:11 – After going public, the COO was promoted to president
  • 16:20 – Scot felt he wasn’t learning much more and the president wanted to step into the CEO role
  • 16:27 – Scot felt it was a great time for the president to mature and take on the CEO position
  • 16:47 – Scot just simply sent a letter to the board about him leaving
• 17:35 – Scot is more of a tactical entrepreneur
• 17:47 – “I just really like solving hard problems and scaling businesses”
• 17:55 – Everytime Scot would have a career change, it was in a different space
• 18:05 – Since Spiffy is consumer oriented, Scot believes he can scale it faster than ChannelAdvisor
• 18:27 – Scot’s goal for Spiffy
• 19:35 – Scot had 2 physical car washes after selling his 2^nd company
• 19:44 – Spiffy was an MVP in 2014 when it was launched
• 20:09 – There are reasons why customers don’t like detailing
• 20:40 – 70% of Spiffy’s revenue is from out-work consumers
• 21:11 – Spiffy just crossed the $200M runaway and is growing annually north of 100%
• 21:33 – Team size in the office is around 20 and around 60 technicians
• 22:06 – Spiffy has raised $7.5M on their series A
• 22:18 – Scot still gets excited raising funds
• 22:38 – Scot’s aspiration for Spiffy is bigger than his checkbook
• 23:55 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

• Always aim higher when it comes to your goals.
• Going through multiple exits boosts your learning and experience.
• Always trust your instincts.

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

Dimitris Giannoccaro. He founded IAMIP, in 2013, after an extensive career in engineering and intellectual property together with some of the strongest leaders and inventors at ABB. The urgent need for digitizing an intellectual property world and maximizing the potential of intellectual property successfully has been felt during his work at his company.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – n/a
• What CEO do you follow? – Björn Lilja of Kundo
• Favorite online tool? — Slack
• 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? – “I would never do this again”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:44 – Nathan introduces Dimitris to the show
• 01:31 – IAMIP is a typical SaaS company
• 01:56 – IAMIP is where users can collaborate in real-time in order to access all the patents
• 02:49 – IAMIP has 3 target groups: small startups, medium-size companies and corporations
• 03:06 – Small startups still need to know how to protect their solution
• 03:22 – Medium and corporations are big companies and they want to make sure no one is infringing on their rights
• 04:12 – If you want to get acquired later on, you want to make sure you don’t infringe on other’s rights
• 04:42 – Patents are important for product
• 04:58 – Patents are also filed on services
• 05:32 – As a consumer, the focus is on the usability of the product or service
• 05:40 – If you want to make money right and keep growing, you want to have your IP
• 06:08 – Team size is 14
• 06:19 – IAMIP was launched 3 years
• 06:23 – Average MRR is $60K
• 06:38 – IAMIP currently has 500 users
• • 06:54 – There are 62 paying customers
• 07:18 – IAMIP raised 2 years ago, but it was initially bootstrapped
• 07:34 – Dimitris was 37 when he launched IAMIP
• 08:05 – IAMIP managed to have their first client after a few months
• 08:22 – IAMIP has 2 founders and the split is 50/50
• 08:59 – Dimitris regretted not inviting more people
• 09:55 – IAMIP has raised $1M on the first round
• 10:01 – IAMIP is in the process of raising an equity round
• 10:27 – Dimitris based the valuation on the future number of customers
• 11:08 – IAMIP didn’t give a discount on their first round which is an equity round
• 11:44 – Gross customer churn
• 12:16 – Dimitris’ tactic on having 0 churn
• 12:46 – 2016 revenue
• 13:08 – 2017 goal
• 13:16 – IAMIP has recently been accepted by the UCLA Amazon program
• 13:33 – CAC
• 13:59 – Everybody is part of the sales team
• • 14:30 – All of the people on the team are engineers and the 7 spend additional time in sales
• 14:51 – LTV
• 16:17 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

• Patents are important for growing businesses in order to protect your solutions.
• Having co-founders has its advantages and can be much better than doing it solo.
• You CAN acquire new customers without an expert salesperson.

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

Rickard Carlsson. He’s the CEO of Detectify, a Stockholm-based security startup selected as one of Sweden’s super talents, in 2015, by the Swedish business publication, Veckans Affärer. He has lived and worked in Sweden, USA and India and holds an MSc of applied physics and electrical engineering.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Home Improvement Books
• What CEO do you follow? – N/A 
• Favorite online tool? — Google Calendar
• 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? – “Know more about how to build a great team”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:43 – Nathan introduces Rickard to the show
• 01:35 – Detectify integrates security testing into the development workflow
• • 01:49 – Detectify makes sure that the safety testing is brought to development
• 02:08 – Pipedrive uses Detectify as a part of their security
• • 02:25 – Security is important for Pipedrive so they use Detectify to automate a large part of their security detecting
• 02:54 – Average pay per customer is €80
• 03:10 – Detectify was launched in 2014
• 03:50 – Rickard’s co-founders who worked for the biggest tech companies had the idea of Detectify
• 04:44 – Rickard met his co-founders at his previous job and they were Angel investors to Detectify
• 04:58 – Rickard was a business consultant for McKinsey
• 05:54 – Rickard started a startup to learn new things
• 06:21 – Detectify has 4 founders and the split is not the usual 25% each
• 06:41 – Detectify has now raised €2.5M
• 06:49 – The last round was a priced equity round
• 07:13 – Rickard does everything except coding including sales
• 07:42 – Detectify managed to get 1-2 important Angels on board
• 08:09 – Detectify is currently serving 350 customers
• 08:20 – Majority of the customers are the long-paying customers
• 08:45 – There’s an increasing number of larger customers
• 08:55 – MRR is around $30K
• 09:10 – Nathan has released interview videos on Youtube
• 09:45 – Team size is around 25
• • 10:09 – Salaries in Europe are much smaller than in the USA
  • 10:18 – 2/3 of the team are full-time engineers
• 11:17 – Gross customer churn
• 11:26 – Detectify has no paid acquisition
• 11:30 – Detectify has 2 outbound sales people who just started
• 12:00 – The team is based in Sweden
• 12:17 – LTV
• 12:47 – Detectify has a few enterprise customers
• • 13:00 – Deals are usually a year contract with an upfront payment
• 13:25 – Rickard won’t disclose what the salespeople get for every $10K deal they close
• 15:36 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

• An eagerness to learn new things is a great motivator to start one’s own business.
• Security is simply a necessity.
• Having different brackets of customers allows for more growth.

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

Don Mal. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Vena Solutions which was established in 2011 and is the fastest growing provider of cloud-based corporate performance management software. Prior to Vena, he’s owned several executive tech positions along the way with companies like Clarity Systems and IBM.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Who Moved My Cheese
• What CEO do you follow? –  Satya Nadella
• Favorite online tool? — Dropbox
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 7-8
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “I wish I knew that sales cures all”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:44 – Nathan introduces Don to the show
• 01:21 – Vena was the fastest company to acquire a hundred customers
• 01:29 – Vena is growing a 100%, year over year
• 02:05 – CPM or corporate performance management is budgeting, planning and forecasting financial performance
• 02:28 – A fastfood chain can use Vena’s service to capture the sales of their burger
• 02:55 – CPM is about measuring results in a couple of different dimensions
• 03:16 – The Top had Glen Coates of Handshake and they’re an inventory management
• 03:31 – Vena is more horizontal based and vertical industry based
• 04:20 – Vena doesn’t compete with Bill.com and Expensify.com
• 04:31 – Annual RPU is $50K
• 04:53 – Vena was launched in 2011
• 05:02 – Team size is almost 200
• 05:18 – Vena has raised capital with equity rounds
• 05:49 – Don was running sales for a company in the same space that Don sold
• 06:02 – Don has already built credibility, so he was able to convince families and friends to invest
• 06:21 – Don has raised over a million to launch the business
• 06:50 – Don’s process of closing
• 07:06 – Don was able to raise $3M from other sources
• 07:30 – If your friends and families can’t write a $25K check, a $1k check will do
• 07:42 – Don has now raised a total of $50M
• 08:35 – Having the right kind of partner is important in raising a round
• 09:17 – Vena is approaching 350 paying customers
• 09:38 – Average MRR is $1.4M
• 09:47 – Vena finds new customers with a combination of inbound and outbound marketing
• • 10:04 – Vena also nurtures their prospects through drip campaigns
• 10:22 – Total spend on paid acquisition is a couple of hundred grand a month
• 10:40 – Vena has a team that does the testing for new channels
• 11:05 – Don wants to keep their CAC below a 12-month cost of the revenue
• 11:38 – Don is looking at a 12-month payback
• 11:55 – LTV
• • 12:05 – A customer stays with Vena up to 10 years
• 12:48 – Don sees the significant expansion of their platform
• 12:55 – Client starts with 2 user cases and can end up having more than 20
• 13:28 – Gross churn
• 13:39 – Vena has hit their net negative revenue churn
• 14:05 – Vena’s dollar will turn into $1.20 with their current system
• 15:15 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

• Before a big round of fundraising, master your pitch and start with your friends and families.
• Make your product stick to your customers and you’ll experience amazing growth.
• Have experts in your sales and marketing team; trust and release them to do their job.

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

Victor Levitin. He’s the CEO of CrazyLister and last time he was at The Top was in late 2016. His company, Crazy Lister, has passed 2K customers, about 600K raised and about 30K in 2015 revenue. Each customer pays about $15 in monthly revenue. They’ve passed 25K in MRR with about 3% gross customer churn each month. They are based mainly in Tel Aviv with their team of 8.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About The Hard Things
• What CEO do you follow? –  Jason Lemkin
• Favorite online tool? — Intercom
• 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? – “Start with SaaS, everything else does not compound”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:44 – Nathan introduces Victor to the show
• 01:25 – CrazyLister is the easiest way to create high-converting, mobile-optimized product listings for eBay
• 01:36 – Investors call CrazyLister, the Wix for eBay
• 01:49 – CrazyLister closed the door on their Tel Aviv office and focused on just working
• 02:14 – CrazyLister has recently hit $1M in ARR
• 02:38 – CrazyLister just passed 3.5 paying customers
• 03:13 – CrazyLister’s growth is a combination of several tactics and strategies
• 03:26 – CrazyLister now nailed paid acquisition
• 03:47 – CrazyLister managed to get their CAC to LTV ratio to 1:8
• 04:01 – CrazyLister is spending $15K a month for paid acquisition
• • 04:10 – To acquire a new customer costs $80
• 04:29 – CrazyLister is trying every paid acquisition
• • 04:41 – CrazyLister is now focused on Google AdWords which is working quite well for them
• 04:58 – CrazyLister couldn’t make it on Facebook
• 05:31 – CrazyLister targets specific customer needs in retail
• 06:15 – Victor has been in California for 2 months to discuss the future of CrazyLister
• • 06:40 – Victor came to the conclusion that with the growth that they have experienced, raising a big VC round wouldn’t be healthy for them
• 07:06 – Victor now focuses on making e-commerce easier for retailers
• 07:17 – CrazyLister will first prove traction beyond eBay then raise a not-so-big round to sustain growth
• • 07:35 – It will be between $1-2M
• 07:40 – Current team size is 10
• 07:53 – CrazyLister just hit cash flow positive in March
• 08:03 – CrazyLister doesn’t really need capital, but wants to grow beyond eBay
• 08:48 – CrazyLister now has 3 plans: $9/month, $25/month and $45/month
• • 09:04 – The best customers for CrazyLister are the highest paying ones
  • 09:35 – CrazyLister tries to understand their customer even before they upgrade
• 10:24 – As CrazyLister adds more features and updates, they increase their pricing
• 10:56 – CrazyLister has developed a feature that is beneficial for businesses
• 11:37 – Victor has 2 co-founders
• 11:51 – There are 3 main pillars in CrazyLister
• • 11:55 – Victor and Max, the co-founder, are the business pillars
  • 12:06 – The second pillar is the CTO
  • 12:25 – The third pillar is the paid acquisition expert
  • 12:45 – The paid acquisition expert is a full-time employee
• 14:00 – When CrazyLister began with paid acquisition, their budget was only $5K
• • 14:08 – As the data becomes better, they’ve raised their budget as well
• 15:34 – CrazyLister now wants to replicate what they did to eBay to other channels
• 15:50 – 2016 total revenue
• 16:40 – As a seller/business, you constantly need to add listings on eBay, so there’s a considerate need to use CrazyLister
• 17:03 – Gross churn per month
• 18:38 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

• Focus in on your goals, then see if you can raise a bigger round.
• Paid acquisition, if done well, can get you new customers consistently and help grow your company.
• Let your pricing reflect the valuable updates and developments you make to your product.

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

Jon Ferrara. He’s been recognized for pioneering innovation in the customer service management category for many years. Prior to founding Nimble, he was the creator and co-founder of the award-winning customer management product GoldMine. In 1999, Goldmine got acquired by FrontRange and he left to pursue other interests. During those years, he continued to watch the CRM market grow. He saw that most CRMs in the industry that were serving small businesses moved up market and became way more expensive and more complex—leaving the small business market totally underserved. It was at that point that Jon decided to create the next generation CRM product for small businesses called Nimble.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Think and Grow Rich
• What CEO do you follow? –  Marc Benioff
• Favorite online tool? — Buffer App
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— Around 8
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Start a business earlier”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:44 – Nathan introduces Jon to the show
• 01:42 – Jon was on Episode 643 of The Top
• • 01:55 – Nimble has around 10K paying customers with a monthly RPU of $20
  • 02:08 – 3% monthly churn
  • 02:14 – CAC is around $5
  • 02:24 – Team size is 25
• 02:43 – Nimble has recently closed a $9M round
• 03:07 – Acquiring SMBs is the exact same way they’ve scaled Goldmine
• • 03:20 – The problem with most CRMs today is that only sales and marketing people use these systems when in fact, everyone in the company should use it
  • 03:56 – Jon cold called every Novel reseller in the country when Goldmine was just starting
  • 04:00 – “People sell what they know and know what they use”
• 04:15 – When Jon started Nimble, no one knew that social media would be the way to grow a business
• 04:30 – Jon looked around for influencers for Nimble’s launch
• • 04:48 – Nimble is the early pioneer of influencer marketing
  • 05:08 – Nimble was getting 100K website views with 0 marketing spend
• 05:25 – As a company scales up, it should also touch the customers in different ways
• 05:43 – Nimble doesn’t pay influencers
• 05:45 – To find influencers, you have to know the core influencers around your product
• • 06:00 – You find ways on how to build a relationship with influencers
• 06:32 – Nimble will now try to get around with ad spend
• 06:41 – Jon always believed that there was another way to get access to customers
• 06:44 – Jon is going to replicate the strategy they used with Goldmine by partnering with people similar to Microsoft and Google and get their VARs to use Nimble and start recommending it
• 07:01 – Nimble just signed a deal with Microsoft where they can be a reseller of Nimble
• • 07:12 – Microsoft can now give their VARs Nimble so their VARs can be better, smarter and faster in sales and marketing
  • 07:33 – Nimble will work on top of Office 365 as the operating system of a business
• 07:57 – Microsoft is currently passing their revenue to the VARs
• 08:11 – The VARs are the one making the MRR which is 20%
• 08:30 – Nimble’s average RPU is now around $30
• 08:41 – If you can help a business person with their sales and marketing needs, you’re now opening yourself up to other functionalities for that customer
• 08:53 – Every business struggles with sales, marketing and relationship management
• 09:20 – Nimble just rolled out new pricing and marked on automation add-on
• 10:13 – March MRR is around $225K
• 10:25 – Nimble now has around 10.5K customers
• 11:31 – Without relying on the VARs, it’s going to be a long term strategy for Nimble
• 11:48 – Microsoft has bundled Nimble inside of Outlook mobile, Office 365 and Outlook desktop
• • 12:07 – It is like a free acquisition
• 12:32 – Jon won the deal with Microsoft because of their relationship
• 12:42 – In every business relationship, you want to know how the other person answers and what success looks like for that person
• 13:21 – Nimble is now a free plug-in with Office 365
• • 13:37 – Users can use Nimble for free without paying $30 a month
  • 13:42 – Nimble is like Rapportive on steroids
  • 13:48 – Nimble has a limited feature for free users
• 14:14 – Business people are the ones who usually convert to paid users
• 14:33 – The market of Nimble is a very fragmented market
• 14:37 – Nathan mentions the people in the same market that were on The Top:
• • 14:39 – Hatchbuck
  • 14:55 – Pipedrive
  • 15:02 – Close.io
  • 15:08 – Contactually
• 15:29 – In a fragmented market, you need to be top of the line with your customers, influencers and with business products that people use
• 15:52 – Nimble continues to be rated as No. 1
• 17:00 – The way Nimble wins is how it executes the distribution channels
• 17:13 – Team size is currently 32 and based in Santa Monica and Ukraine
• 17:44 – You don’t go to raise with a particular value in mind
• • 17:53 – Let the market determine the value
• 18:06 – The last round raised was a series A
• • 18:22 – Nimble has talked to a number of VCs and with this deal, they’re bringing in a seasoned CEO
• 19:18 – What people are vetting for Nimble is the future
• 19:41 – “We’re definitely going for a large exit with Nimble”
• 20:14 – Office 365 is now dominating the email cloud productivity space and they’re just starting
• 20:48 – “And Nimble, I believe, is positioned today to dominate in this space”
• 22:05 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

• In a fragmented market, you need to be TOP of line—a product that people will always recommend.
• You have to know how a potential client answers a question and how they define success when making a deal.
• Nurture your business relationships—this is KEY to your success.

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

Victor Rosenman. He’s the CEO and founder of Feedvisor. Before founding Feedvisor, he was the founder of an innovative marketing startup and a senior R&D manager at Sun Microsystems. Victor holds a BSc in computer science and an executive MBA from Kellogg Northwestern.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Black Swan
• What CEO do you follow? –  Jeff Bezos
• Favorite online tool? — Whatsapp
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6-8
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Whenever you make a decision, you need to think a little bit longer”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:47 – Nathan introduces Victor to the show
• 01:24 – Feedvisor is a decision support system for large ecommerce vendors that sell through marketplaces
• 02:57 – Most of the e-commerce that joins Feedvisor has significant business on Amazon
• • 03:06 – Before joining Feedvisor, they will be doing marketplace management through Amazon
  • 03:32 – Feedvisor makes the numbers on the marketplace right
• 03:50 – Feedvisor looks into a load of various numbers so they can tell which price is right
• • 04:05 – Stock is almost similar to Amazon where there’s competition in prices
  • 04:20 – To look into the numbers and make decisions is tough
• 04:42 – Feedvisor decides more on pricing, replenishment and assortment
• 05:02 – Feedvisor charges a monthly subscription
• 05:15 – Average customer pay is $2-3K a month
• 06:06 – Undercuts is getting information and automated price adjustments
• 06:20 – For every revenue Undercuts gets through the system, they pay a rev share
• 06:40 – Not going through Feedvisor’s system will not make sense for the clients
• • 06:49 – “There’s no way you’ll be fast by doing things manually”
• 06:55 – The rev share is a portion of the entire fee
• 07:20 – Average rev share percentage
• 07:38 – Majority of Feedvisor’s revenue is coming from their fixed revenue stream
• 07:45 – Feedvisor was founded in 2011
• 07:55 – Feedvisor was initially bootstrapped for a year
• 08:00 – Feedvisor got an initial seat funding in 2012
• • 08:03 – It was for $500K
  • 08:11 – It was all equity
• 08:15 – To date, Feedvisor has raised $33M
• 08:34 – Feedvisor’s funding experience wasn’t easy but it was fair
• 08:46 – Feedvisor was initially from Israel
• 09:12 – Israel has a powerful VC ecosystem
• • 09:18 – It’s not different than Silicon Valley
• 09:48 – Feedvisor’s revenue just before raising a round
• 10:00 – When Feedvisor raised a seed round, Victor didn’t know about the e-commerce business
• • 10:16 – Feedvisor was primarily rev share when they started
  • 10:47 – Feedvisor raised funding in Q4
• 11:45 – Victor pitched to the investors slowly
• 12:00 – In the end, Angel investor is much more of a personal business
• 12:55 – The series B was done with a common valuation
• • 13:09 – The common valuation for series B is 60%-150%
• 13:30 – Team size
• 13:40 – Feedvisor has around 500-600 customers
• 14:12 – Average MRR
• 14:57 – Churn is quite low
• 15:50 – Feedvisor is close to net negative revenue churn
• 16:10 – Feedvisor focuses on value
• 16:57 – By optimizing Feedvisor, they create an ROI
• 17:58 – Feedvisor is charging a fair amount and they understand their customers
• 18:55 – Feedvisor finds customers through brand building initiatives and content marketing
• • 19:02 – Feedvisor invests a lot on brand building
  • 19:10 – “When you think Feedvisor, you think it’s a reliable solution”
  • 19:34 – Feedvisor does their own conferences
  • 19:47 – Feedvisor creates an environment where people can learn
• 20:21 – Feedvisor has paid $3-4K for content marketing
• • 20:57 – It is about investing into everything that can help you position yourself, not just content marketing
• 21:44 – LTV
• 22:23 – CAC
• 23:45 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

• People want their businesses not to just be automated, but also precise at the same time.
• Building your brand creates a great reputation and image for your business.
• Making big decisions requires careful consideration and time.

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

Scott Brinker. He publishes the chief marketing technologist blog known as ChiefMartec.com and is the program chair for Martech Conference Series. He’s the author of the book Hacking Marketing published by Wiley. He’s also the co-founder of Ion Interactive, a provider of interactive content marketing software to many of the world’s leading brands. He has a degree in computer science from Columbia University and Harvard University and an MBA from MIT.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Innovator’s Dilemma
• What CEO do you follow? – Brian Halligan
• Favorite online tool? — Trello
• 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? – “That software can rewrite the rules of the world”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:44 – Nathan introduces Scott to the show
• 01:36 – There are over 3600-3800 B2B SaaS companies that Scott has worked with
• 01:57 – Scott was researching the companies all by himself
• 02:22 – Scott is a co-founder/CTO of B2B SaaS company, Ion Interactive
  • 02:32 – There’s also the ChiefMartec blog that Scott started 8 years ago
  • 03:00 – Scott is into how technology changes the way one manages one’s marketing
  • 03:14 – Scott is also looking at the toolsets that enable the technology in marketing
• 03:35 – Ion Interactive is a SaaS company
• 04:44 – Chief Martec got millions of impressions in 2016
• 05:30 – Chief Martec’s Alexa ranking
• 06:03 – If you can create something of value, you can succeed
• 06:53 – Scott gets paid for most of his speaking gigs
• 07:28 – It’s not an easy path when you’re just starting to pitch to conferences
• 08:08 – Scott started his chart because of a speaking engagement at a conference
• 08:40 – The first significant paying gig that Scott remembered was when a SAS hired him for a Southeast Asian tour to present the hybrid art and science of marketing
  • 09:23 – It was for 2 weeks
• 09:35 – Martech Conference was launched in 2014 in partnership with Third Door Media
  • 09:51 – It was actually Third Door Media’s event and they just contacted Scott for content
  • 10:08 – Scott took care of the speaker side and everything that involved content
• 11:00 – All the sectors in the space excite Scott
• 12:27 – Scott doesn’t agree that the CRM space is going to zero
• 13:15 – There’s so much innovation and value
• 13:30 – The CRM companies who have been in The Top
• 14:00 – The CRM space is still a hot space
• 14:52 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. The marketing space has never been better because of the limitless potential of technology.
2. If you can create something of value, you CAN succeed.
3. Software can rewrite the rules of the world.

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

Phil Nadel. He’s the co-founder and managing director of Barbara Corcoran Venture Partners, one of the largest and most active AngelList syndicates where investors can invest alongside him and Barbara on the same terms in promising high growth startups.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Lean Startup
• What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
• Favorite online tool? — Laughly
• 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? – “Savor the moment, be in the moment”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:55 – Nathan introduces Phil to the show
• 01:24 – Barbara and Phil believe in the syndicate model
  • 01:32 – It is a great opportunity for investors who would like to invest but don’t have a lot of money to put into each deal
• 01:49 – Barbara Corcoran Venture Partners on AngelList
• 02:08 – The syndicate was launched 3 years ago
  • 02:16 – They have syndicated 38 deals
• 02:34 – Barn and Willow is a company they’ve recently syndicated
• 02:51 – Barn and Willow deal with window treatments
  • 03:18 – They have a direct manufacturing supply chain
  • 03:24 – It’s an innovative company
• 03:45 – The companies that Barbara invests on Shark Tank are separate from the companies in the syndicate
• 04:05 – The value of doing the syndicate is the deal flow that Barbara gets from her exposure in Shark Tank
• 04:20 – Each of the syndicate backers have the option to opt in or opt out of any investments
• 04:33 – The most likely exit scenario is an acquisition and that’s how an investor makes money
  • 04:47 – IPO is also another route
• 04:53 – There was no exit yet from the syndicate portfolio
• 05:38 – There is paperwork in backing a syndicate
• 05:45 – The AngelList platform is handling all the investor details
• 05:51 – The structure of the deal can have a few different formats
• 06:04 – It’s either a convertible note that converts into equity or straight equity
• 06:30 – All backers are combined into 1 entity
• 06:56 – The LLC is managed by an independent third party company called Assure Fund Management
  • 07:05 – Assure will consult the syndicate if there will be a major decision
• 07:40 – The AngelList is managing the risks for the syndicate
• 08:00 – The syndicate has put in $7.5M
• 08:28 – The syndicate is very true to Barbara’s mission
• 08:44 – Barbara wants people to invest with her, share their ideas with her, and bring their knowledge
• 08:56 – “Our backers are fantastic in terms of their networks”
• 09:38 – With a VC, what you have is strictly financial investors
• 10:40 – People love Barbara
• 11:15 – The deals are only available to accredited investors
  • 11:23 – To be an accredited investor, you need to meet some of the criteria including net worth or income
  • 12:00 – The syndicate is very clear that there is a chance of losing money for each investment
• 12:06 – The idea is to build a portfolio
• 12:37 – Phil has been to different platforms like FundersClub and OurCrowd
• 12:53 – The reason why Phil and Barbara chose AngelList
• 13:35 – The picture behind Phil was a picture frame from one of their portfolio companies called Meural
  • 13:54 – They have thousands of art pieces from different museums around the world
  • 14:32 – It retails from $600
• 15:27 – The syndicate does equity and note and only invests in post-revenue companies
  • 15:43 – At least $15-20K a month in revenue
  • 15:52 – “We are focused on companies that are capital efficient”
• 17:50 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Syndicates is a great option for small investors and it will help them get into the investing game.
2. Investors need to be responsible with their investments—meaning research the deal and own their decisions and the consequences of saying yea or nay.
3. Savor the moments in life and be IN the moment.

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

Joseph May. He’s the founder of the Breton Company. He launched his company in 2016 by running a Kickstarter campaign for a modern day briefcase. Prior to Breton, he worked as an attorney at a couple of different law firms and was director of operations and in-house counsel at a company called Freshly Picked.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Shoe Dog
• What CEO do you follow? – Steve Jobs
• Favorite online tool? — Grum
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5-6
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Keep going”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:22 – Nathan introduces to the show
• 01:19 – Joseph left the legal company because there was no fun
• 01:23 – When Joseph was at Freshly Picked, he found out that he really liked to create products and be part of the design process
• 01:33 – Joseph had the idea of Breton when he was in Italy
• 01:59 – Joseph was 33 when he left Freshly Picked where he was getting $70-80K
  • 02:28 – Joseph had kids when he started Breton
• 03:28 – Joseph is showing Nathan an example of the briefcase
• 03:45 – On Kickstarter, Joseph did $240K and $280K for Indiegogo
• 03:54 – Kickstarter is the biggest website to start and Indiegogo has Indiegogo on demand
  • 04:29 – The total for both campaigns was 1200 units
• 05:00 – At Freshly Picked, Joseph learned a lot about Instagram marketing
• 05:38 – Zach from Episode 178 had his hand on the Kickstarter campaign and has a network which has done over $60M in funding campaigns
• 06:00 – Zach worked with Joseph
• 06:38 – Joseph had a lot of manufacturing contacts from Freshly Picked
• 06:44 – Joseph got a quote from overseas and moved their manufacturing to Asia, switched up their whole campaign and changed the price point
• 07:14 – Breton is totally bootstrapped
• 07:47 – Total sales as of today is $400K in revenue and 1900 units
• 08:06 – Goal for 2017 is to launch more Kickstarter campaigns
• 08:37 – The bestseller is the modern day briefcase which is $199
• 08:54 – It takes around $65 to produce a bag
  • 09:04 – The leather is from Italy
  • 09:16 – Jeremy really wants to have a high-quality bag
• 09:26 – $20-30 dollars is spent on marketing per bag
• 09:58 – Average profit per bag
• 10:28 – Jeremy had dark traffic on ly
  • 10:42 – There’s no exact influencer who has driven the most sales to Instagram
  • 10:51 – Mollyblogger has sold 17 units within an hour
  • 11:07 – Mollyblogger is Joseph’s friend
• 11:25 – For every $500 per post, Jeremy expects to get 5 sales
• 11:33 – Breton now has 40K followers
• 11:50 – It’s difficult to calculate the return because it takes time before a customer purchases
• 12:21 – Joseph had a campaign in Fall where he had help, but now he’s doing it on his own
• 12:40 – One of Joseph’s growth strategy is to get people on their email list
  • 12:44 – The main focus now is to make people aware of Breton and aggregate the information
• 13:40 – The bags are made with wax cotton which is water-resistant
• 14:03 – Customers often look for the look
• 14:30 – The bags are made to last
• 14:38 – Team size is 2.5
• 14:51 – Joseph won’t give up a part of the company
  • 15:49 – “I don’t know exactly what we’re doing”
• 16:48 – Chubbies Shorts is effectively using Instagram
• 16:55 – Breton’s Instagram
• 17:24 – There’s a big percentage of women buying the Breton bags, too
• 18:58 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Choose a job where you can earn and have fun at the same time.
2. Nurture your connections and network.
3. Don’t give up a part of your company if you’re not confident doing so.

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

Jeremy Ozen. He’s the president and co-founder of Vistar Media. He was previously a Goldman Sachs European Special Situations in London monitoring a portfolio of venture investments. He also has a BS in Material Science Engineering and a BSc in Finance from the University of Pennsylvania. 

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Sam Walton’s Biography
• What CEO do you follow? – 3G Capital Founders
• Favorite online tool? — Gmail Calendar
• 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? – Jeremy wished he had not taken life so seriously and not every day is the end of the world

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:43 – Nathan introduces Jeremy to the show
• 01:15 – Vistar Media connects a technology to a software that runs digital billboard
• 01:35 – Vistar Media makes money by selling the technology or ads to the advertisers or agencies
• 01:52 – Vistar Media pays the media to access the platform then charges advertising agencies to use their technology
• 02:18 – VistarMedia doesn’t have a financial risk because the system is a real-time system
  • 02:28 – There is a real-time buying of ad inventory
• 02:53 – VistarMedia’s technology can adjust to digital ones
  • 03:06 – VistarMedia uses data for telecoms especially the location data of consumers to analyze where the consumers are within a day
• 04:20 – Jeremy started with Goldman Sachs in London
• 04:45 – Goldman had 2 groups, one is in stocks and the other is the special situations
• 05:20 – Jeremy stayed with Goldman for 2 years
• 05:22 – Jeremy then went to a hedge fund based in Monaco
• 06:12 – Jeremy became friends with people in Monaco
  • 06:30 – There was a guy who has a very successful business in Poland
• 07:31 – Jeremy accepted and liked the concept of knowing something that is already working
• 08:10 – Jeremy has a friend who was working for a company that was founded by Google in 2010
  • 08:23 – They’re one of the first to do programmatic advertising
  • 08:59 – Jeremy then realized that what this company was doing for online advertising would eventually be the way for every type of advertising
• 10:54 – When Jeremy started, they knew the out-of-home advertising space was growing in terms of how much is digital
• 11:19 – Vistar Media needed to work with different media outlets explaining to them how to integrate into their system
  • 11:28 – The idea of programmatic advertising was totally foreign to them
• 11:39 – Vistar Media was launched in 2012
• 12:48 – Team size is 55
• 12:52 – Vistar Media raised in 2013 a convertible round
• 13:15 – Vistar Media hasn’t raised a series A and will not raise one
• 14:01 – The biggest expenses of Vistar Media is the cost of media
• 15:20 – Jeremy has thought of buying Upfront
• 16:01 – Vistar Media has a difference in capital with the billboard guys
• 16:43 – Jeremy would describe themselves as the biggest billboard company in the USA
  • 16:46 – They have all these big partners that work with them
• 17:29 – Vistar Media is bringing the billboard companies new money
• 18:02 – Vistar Media is the only player of programmatic advertising out-of-home
• 18:15 – $7B has been spent on billboards annually
• 18:27 – Jeremy is now 31
• 18:51 – Personally, when Jeremy started Vistar Media, they thought they were building a VC tech like business
• 19:12 – Jeremy built a business to have an exit at some point
• 19:48 – The best way to grow your value is by growing your business
• 20:05 – Jeremy is paying himself $50K a year
• 20:35 – Goal for 2017
• 21:45 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Going from one field to another is not that difficult if you really want and need a change.
2. You grow your value by growing your business.
3. There’s a time to work hard and a time to play hard.

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

Dani Golan who oversees strategy, a go-to market, and overall company operations at Kaminario. Previously, Dani served as president and general manager of Performix technology which was acquired by Nice Systems in 2006. Prior to Performix, he served as an executive responsible for leading new ventures at EMC. He holds a BSc of electrical engineering, summa cum laude at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and an MBA from The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Prior to his professional career, Dani served as a fighter pilot and officer in the Israeli Air Force.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Goal
• What CEO do you follow? – N/A
• Favorite online tool? — Skype
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— Quite inconsistent
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Dani would tell himself to focus on what’s important

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:44 – Nathan introduces Dani to the show
• 01:33 – Being a fighter pilot and an entrepreneur are similar things for Dani
• 01:57 – Kaminario is an infrastructure for the cloud
• 02:47 – Kaminario brings efficiency to data sets, data centers and data bases
• 02:50 – Kaminario is the development of net generation data storage infrastructure
• 03:02 – Most of Kaminario’s customers are net generation business models
  • 03:13 – They needed a completely different data infrastructure that can grow with them
  • 03:37 – Legacy enterprises generates more data
• 03:51 – Kaminario has raised a total of $280M including their latest round of $75M
• 04:30 – Kaminario is dealing with 2 of hottest markets in IT: flash and cloud
  • 04:42 – Flash created the opportunity for Kaminario to be in the greatest revolution for IT
• 05:40 – If you’re pushing your valuation to perfection, there is no perfection in IT
• 06:05 – Make sure you have a fair valuation for your company
• 06:24 – The sentiment of investors is that they appreciate the growth in the past but now they’re asking for real businesses, especially when it comes to IT
  • 06:49 – Investors want to see pass the profitability
• 07:09 – Kaminario is closed to profitability
• 07:30 – Kaminario’s past investors have also participated and shared significantly
• 09:00 – Businesses should protect their employees
• 09:44 – When you are getting money for the company, 3 means you have to get $3M to the investors
• 10:40 – “Valuation is bullsh*t if you have crazy terms”
• 10:50 – Employees are far more important than actual valuation
• 11:05 – Kaminario was launched in 2008 on April fools’ day which is the same as Apple
• 11:57 – Kaminario now has thousands of customers
• 12:21 – How fast a specific customer is going to buy more is one of the metrics that Kaminario measures
• 12:51 – Kaminario is doing serve and apply which is software, hardware and service
• 13:30 – Kaminario sells to cloud providers or to the SaaS companies
  • 13:44 – The SaaS is the larger revenue source
• 13:57 – By 2019, the total cloud market will be 175B
  • 14:03 – Around 120B are SaaS companies
• 15:32 – SaaS companies charge their customers monthly
  • 15:37 – SaaS companies pay Kaminario a one-time fee for infrastructure
  • 15:46 – There is an on-going payment for maintenance
• 16:20 – The expansion revenue
  • 16:28 – If a SaaS company started with $300K, they will go over $1M by the end of 12 months
• 17:45 – Team size is 250 but the inside sales team isn’t that big
• 18:17 – Kaminario has a presence in the market
• 18:57 – Data grows exponentially every year
• 19:23 – Normally, customers would start cautiously and would just eventually gain trust in Kaminario
• 19:55 – First metric to measure the 3x growth is by capacity
• 20:45 – Kaminario is the most scalable product in the market
  • 20:50 – Kaminario can fit roughly 12 terabytes of 400K iPhones
• 21:48 – Kaminario has never lost a customer
• 22:00 – Kaminario is a big funnel
• 22:12 – Kaminario’s revenue stream is 50% from new sign-ups and 50% from existing
• 24:04 – Kaminario’s last round was closed in Q4 of 2016
• 24:41 – When you are in Kaminario’s business, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon
• 25:00 – Kaminario’s number one competitor is EMC
• 26:06 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Valuation is useless if you’re aiming for perfection, there will always be flaws.
2. Focus on keeping your employees and customers happy.
3. A customer won’t easily trust a product at first so you have to earn that trust, ensuring they stay longer.

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

Jay Jumper. He’s the founder, CEO and President of SIGNiX. As a highly regarded entrepreneur, Jay has worked to establish the company as the leading cloud-based digital signature solution which is a hot space. He has more than 20 years in financial services and technology management experience. Additionally, Jay graduated from University of Tennessee in 1985 with a BS in marketing.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Trump: The Art of the Deal
• What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Mark Cuban
• Favorite online tool? — Email
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5-7
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Jay would tell himself that hard work and perseverance outdoes anything else

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:45 – Nathan introduces Jay to the show
• 01:33 – SIGNiX is the only cloud-based digital signature company in North America
  • 01:44 – SIGNiX is an independent e-signature solution
• 02:00 – Jay shows Nathan a visual of a cloud-based digital signature
  • 02:08 – Put a signature on the overlight, not on the document
  • 02:48 – You depend on the e-signature vendor to be around forever so they can validate the signature
  • 02:56 – On the overlight is a hyperlink that redirects the person to the e-signature provider
• 03:38 – With SIGNiX, every signature is embedded onto the document
• 03:52 – SIGNiX is a SaaS model
• 04:08 – SIGNiX focuses on security
• 04:32 – 80% of SIGNiX is sold to software partners
  • 04:37 – SIGNiX enables software partners to capture the e-signature market that is sitting on their software
  • 05:05 – Software partners can privately label SIGNiX so they can rebrand it according to whatever the product is
• 05:25 – SIGNiX does a revenue share with their software partners
• 05:32 – SIGNiX gives their software partners a highly robust digital signature solution
• 06:08 – SIGNiX’s pricing on their website
  • 06:10 – $240 per seat equals to 240 transactions a year
• 06:22 – SIGNiX’s emphasis is on supporting their partners
• 06:54 – SIGNiX goes to different industries and tries to match pricing based on the industry
• 07:37 – SIGNiX has very robust APIs which is the core of the business
• 08:11 – The key things that SIGNiX offers: everything is embedded in the document and documents can be deleted from SIGNiX
  • 08:18 – A dependent e-signature always has 2 copies, one for the company and one for the customer
• 09:04 – What SIGNiX is doing is much more difficult
• 09:30 – Team size is 50
• 10:00 – SIGNiX was launched in 2002 and was acquired from another company
• 10:12 – ProNvest is a robo advisor that Jay also owns
• 10:45 – SIGNiX is a bigger revenue stream for Jay
• 10:57 – The market for e-signature is very large
• 11:35 – ProNvest provides management counseling to the 41K marketplace
  • 11:47 – In 2007, more people in 41K are taking their money out rather than contributing
  • 12:06 – Jay really wanted a tool set to work with their 41K providers to help them retain their assets
  • 12:17 – Jay wanted the providers to retain their assets through electronic signatures
• 12:24 – SIGNiX called Jay
  • 12:40 – The company was struggling and Jay became an investor in the company
  • 12:52 – Jay invested around 50% of the company
  • 13:05 – There was an offer from a public company to buy the company after Jay invested
  • 13:22 – The offer was 5x what Jay paid for
  • 14:00 – In 2001, it was good to have a “.com” but in 2002, Jay needed to have revenue
• 14:23 – Jay saw the need for having SIGNiX regardless of its previous company struggles
• 14:33 – Jay really bolted SIGNiX and passed it on an incubator
• 15:04 – The previous company just spent money on the technology and was burning cash
• 15:43 – SIGNiX now has 670K customers
  • 15:52 – It is a combination of seats and customers
• 16:30 – Average MRR
• 16:57 – SIGNiX gives discounts to their partners
• 17:18 – If you’re working with a software company, you have to figure out a number that works for their customers
• 18:02 – The number that Jay gave was an annual number
• 18:20 – SIGNiX does not focus on their competitors because they have a very different product
• 18:48 – SIGNiX wants to go and find the top software developers in every industry and partner with them
  • 19:03 – First thing that SIGNiX looks for in a software partner is their position and role in their particular industry
  • 19:10 – Ziplogix partnered with SIGNiX and named their solution, Digital Ink
  • 19:25 – SIGNiX has a large portion of realtors in their network
  • 19:35 – SIGNiX doesn’t mind being behind the scenes
• 19:55 – SIGNiX is not a reseller and it becomes the key feature of the product
• 20:18 – SIGNiX doesn’t have a standard percentage split because it varies per company
• 20:49 – Jay did a lot of self-funding for SIGNiX, but has also raised capital which is an 8-figure total
• 21:18 – ProNvest is the largest investor in SIGNiX but they needed outside investors to scale
• 21:38 – The funding rounds SIGNiX had in 2016 had a total of around $90M
• 23:30 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Develop and scale your product until you become a totally different product from your competitors.
2. A business that is struggling does NOT mean that it will struggle forever; decide if the company is worth acquiring and if you can grow it into a profitable business.
3. It’s okay if you’re not in the limelight—so long as you’re getting paid and revenue continues to multiply.

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
• Hotjar – Gives Nathan a recording of what is happening on a website or where are people clicking and scrolling on the website
• Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• 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
• Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Niko Skievaski. He’s the co-founder of Redox, a modern API for healthcare. He also used to do some work at Epic.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Moments of Magic
• What CEO do you follow? – Judith Faulkner
• Favorite online tool? — Calendly
• 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? – Niko would have asked himself to start something rather than working in a big bank

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:40 – Nathan introduces Niko to the show
• 00:59 – Redox connects applications to software developers
• 01:04 – Redox’s business model is licensing connections to various healthcare systems
• 01:25 – Niko deals with healthcare because he believes it is important
• 01:33 – Niko has also talked to developers that made an impact on patients’ lives
• 01:46 – “From our perspective, we really see a technology innovation healthcare something that is absolutely needed”
• 02:20 – Redox charges software developers and software developers charge the healthcare system
  • 02:38 – Redox initially becomes a sub-contractor of software vendors
• 03:21 – Redox charges per the number of connections a developer has in the healthcare system which is a monthly model
  • 03:48 – Depending on the interface, the charge changes a bit
  • 03:52 – It is a SaaS model
• 04:08 – Most developers connect to 1-3 healthcare systems
  • 04:15 – Each connection system is around a thousand dollars
• 04:25 – Redox was founded in 2014
• 04:34 – Niko was in the corporate world and was working at Wells Fargo
  • 04:46 – Niko went to Epic to get his hands on data because he studied Economics and wanted to understand what he could do to improve the healthcare data
  • 05:07 – When Niko got to Epic, they didn’t actually have the data
  • 05:17 – Niko learned a lot from Epic about the provider workflow
• 05:29 – Since healthcare is digitized, the challenge is how to get the data out of the cloud to software developers
• 05:43 – Niko’s CTO and co-founder, James, was helping startups hook up with various healthcare systems
• 05:59 – The idea of Redox is to make an engine that can scale across multiple health systems
• 06:16 – Redox was bootstrapped and has raised capital
• 06:30 – Niko and his co-founder have started different companies until they decided to do Redox
  • 06:50 – They brought in another co-founder to round up Redox
• 07:00 – Niko and his co-founders worked in a co-working space and saved some money from their consulting gigs
• 07:21 – Redox raised a small seed round of $350K in 2014, then they hired some developers
• 07:40 – The co-founders were only getting $35K each when they were starting
  • 08:05 – They made sacrifices in order to start Redox
  • 08:51 – They have to convince themselves that if things don’t work, they just have to get a job
• 09:11 – Entrepreneurs can easily get a job
• 09:30 – Redox has raised a couple of rounds
• 09:40 – The first application they had can determine the amount of blood loss by taking a picture
• 10:06 – It took Redox 10 months to get live with their first customer
• 10:17 – Redox raised their round A early
• 10:29 – The developer community was really excited and was supportive of Redox
• 10:52 – Redox was getting 1K MRR from their first customer
• 11:00 – The first round was a priced round
• 11:11 – You can raise based on your traction or based on potential
  • 11:28 – Redox was based on potential
• 11:38 – Redox’s pitch to their investors
  • 11:40 – Digital health is one of the fastest growing spaces for venture capital
  • 11:44 – There are too many companies trying to start something innovative in the healthcare space
  • 11:47 – The common problem that they have is sharing data with the legacy system
  • 12:10 – Redox really has a great team
  • 12:30 – It’s not about the MRR, it’s about the potential of working with the army of software developers who are innovating in this space
  • 12:53 – Redox’s marketing strategy is getting the developers first, then the developers will drag Redox to the healthcare system
• 13:10 – Valuation
• 13:24 – Redox has closed another $9M with their series B round in January
• 13:40 – Total amount raised is $14M
• 13:48 – The new additional investor is Intermountain Healthcare System
• 14:20 – Redox currently has 100 healthcare systems across USA
• 15:13 – Redox has around $400K MRR
• 15:45 – Customer churn
• 16:13 – CAC
• 16:44 – Team size is 35 who are mostly developers
• 16:59 – Redox is a developer platform
  • 17:06 – Most are based in Wisconsin and some are based around USA
• 17:46 – Niko won’t sell Redox even if they already had an acquisition offer before
  • 18:08 – Niko didn’t think that the company acquiring Redox would be able to solve the problem as fast as Niko and the team
• 18:32 – Niko will accept an acquisition offer only if the company will be able to do it faster than Niko and the team
• 19:50 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. The continuous innovation in the healthcare space needs a data source that is stable.
2. Stick with your principles and be focused on where you want the company to go.
3. Raising capital can be based on your traction or the potential of your business.

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
• Hotjar – Gives Nathan a recording of what is happening on a website or where are people clicking and scrolling on the website
• Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• 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
• Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Felix Van de Maele. He’s the CEO and one of the co-founders of Collibra which he took the idea of funding to more than years of record growth and industry leadership. He’s responsible for the company’s global business strategy. Prior to Collibra, Felix served as a researcher at the Semantics of Technology and Applications Research Laboratory at a university in Brussels where he focused on the technology crawlers on the semantic web and semantic data integration. He holds a masters in computer science and software engineering from that university and masters of general management from Vlerick Business School.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Crossing the Chasm
• What CEO do you follow? – n/a
• Favorite online tool? — Evernote
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6-8
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “I won’t change much”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:39 – Nathan introduces Felix to the show
• 01:33 – Collibra is a SaaS company helping larger organizations to better find, understand and control their data
• 01:47 – Collibra started in financial services
  • 01:53 – Every bank needs data governance, which is what Collibra does
  • 01:58 – Data governance is needed for regulatory compliance
• 02:16 – Collibra now covers different industries
• 02:25 – Collibra was launched in 2008
• 02:31 – Collibra raised capital
  • 02:40 – Collibra raised a seed round of €800K as Felix’s first company
  • 02:48 – They bootstrapped after their profitability tripled every year
  • 00:57 – They’ve raised their first bigger round which is a series B of $20M in 2014
  • 03:14 – In December 2016, they did a $50M series C round
• 03:27 – Felix is now 32 and has been focusing on Collibra for almost a decade now
• 04:00 – Felix uses the analogy of the library and the index card that is used in a library to elaborate data governance
  • 04:09 – A library card with all its information is similar to an organization with all its data
  • 04:27 – Collibra wants to get to the Amazon of the notifications of data
• 04:46 – Collibra is similar to a search engine for data sets
  • 04:59 – Now everybody does data and it’s chaos
• 05:14 – Collibra has close to 200 customers
• 05:25 – RPU is $200-250K annually
• 05:41 – Average customer pay per month is 20K
• 05:46 – Collibra has annual plans with cash upfront
• 06:13 – Collibra started with a perpetual model which is a licensing fee upfront, then they have the software
  • 06:29 – There’s an annual maintenance fee which is 20% of the initial fee
• 06:46 – ARR is $10-30M
• 07:00 – The idea of Collibra
  • 07:13 – Felix had 4 options after graduation
  • 07:23 – Felix was inspired by a book he read and thought that he could start his own business
• 07:57 – Collibra has 4 founders
  • 08:25 – The equity is just 25%
• 08:55 – The founders split the shareholders from their management
  • 09:06 – “We try to separate the 2 as much as possible”
• 09:40 – The investors own a different range in Collibra
• 09:55 – The percentage of the company that they give away during the series C depends on the trajectory and how much money is raised
• 10:12 – The biggest round for Collibra is the series B
• 10:39 – Collibra’s trajectory is to have $100M ARR as quickly as possible
• 10:59 – The picking of investors is mostly because of the valuation, but there are other factors involved
• 11:27 – Collibra picked Matthew of Iconic because he clicked well
• 12:00 – Customer churn is 3-4%
• 12:30 – Net revenue expansion
• 12:52 – CAC
  • 13:30 – Some of Collibra’s customers have been with them for several years
• 14:08 – Collibra looks at their sales efficiency and their marketing efficiency
  • 04:13 – The marketing dominance they’re spending to generate $1 of ARR is around 0.8-0.9
  • 14:30 – It costs $1 in sales and marketing to generate $1 in ARR
  • 14:42 – Payback time is around 12 months
• 14:54 – Team size is 210
  • 15:00 – Biggest team is in New York, engineering team is in Brussels and sales and marketing in London
  • 15:30 – The HQ transferred to New York because most of the customers are in USA
• 16:25 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. There are so many data sources available and it’s difficult to know which one has the most accurate data.
2. You need to find a way to govern the data that you have—this helps in regulatory compliance.
3. Sometimes, ignorance IS bliss—it can cause you to take more risks.

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
• Hotjar – Gives Nathan a recording of what is happening on a website or where are people clicking and scrolling on the website
• Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• 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
• Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Vinod Muthukrishnan. He was first a sailor then a strategist and now an entrepreneur. He was fortunate and has worked in diverse and challenging environments starting with the Merchant Navy, a high energy mobile first financial technology startup where he had a strategy and global sales. Now, he currently serves as co-founder and CEO of a company called Cloudcherry, a tech startup based in Pleasanton, California with offices in Singapore, India and a new location Vinod will show.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – High Output Management
• What CEO do you follow? – Nick Mehta
• Favorite online tool? — Trello
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4.5-5
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Vinod wished he knew programming back then

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:46 – Nathan introduces to the show
• 01:22 – The new location is in Salt Lake City
• 01:36 – Cloudcherry has 74 people
  • 01:40 – They are based in India and Singapore
• 01:47 – Cloudcherry has raised $7M with a total of around $9.5M raised
• 01:56 – Cloudcherry is a custom platform for millennials
• 02:13 – Millennials have complicated journeys with the brands they work with
  • 02:21 – In 2017, if you want to understand your customers, you have to be in all the platforms
• 02:47 – Cloudcherry is a feedback platform on speed across all platforms
• 03:07 – Cloudcherry has an inspirational wall in their office where employees can post things they find inspirational
  • 03:18 – “You need to walk into your office every day and be inspired on what you believe in”
  • 03:40 – Whoever visits their office can put their names on the wall
• 03:50 – Cloudcherry has the 6 pillars of their culture: freedom, ownership, smart work, passion and some more
• 04:03 – Vinod introduced Nathan to some of the people in the office
• 04:40 – The office is 2000 sq. ft.
  • 05:05 – Vinod shows Nathan the view from the office
• 05:27 – Cloudcherry was launched in 2014
• 05:34 – Cloudcherry is a SaaS business
• 05:48 – Cloudcherry had their last fund raising September 2016
• 05:58 – Cloudcherry has close to 100 customers
  • 06:05 – “The massive push now is to grow the business in North America”
• 06:37 – The team in America targets mid-market and enterprise businesses
• 06:47 – Average customer pay per month is a couple of hundred from SMBs
  • 06:57 – Mid-market and enterprise average a thousand dollars a month
• 07:23 – Cloudcherry has a complex mix of customers
  • 07:58 – They are doing more than 88K per month
• 08:13 – Cloudcherry has almost zero customer churn with SMB at the moment
• 08:35 – Cloudcherry’s enterprise churn is higher than SMBs
• 09:00 – Most of Cloudcherry’s customers are with them for 18-20 months
• 09:33 – Cloudcherry ran out of the market in 2015
• 09:48 – SMBs are customers whose ARPU is south of 20K
• 10:18 – Cloudcherry currently has 35% of mid-market and enterprise customers and 65% of SMBs
• 11:10 – Cloudcherry ‘s time to recover CAC is around 12 months
  • 12:09 – Average CAC is $7K-12K
• 12:25 – LTV is around $36K
• 12:35 – “Some amount of the optimism needs to be weighed with intellectual honesty”
• 12:45 – The greatest predictor of LTV for Vinod is the churn
• 13:10 – Cloudcherry focuses on customer delight
  • 13:22 – Cloudcherry got feedback on how delighted their customers are
• 13:45 – If a customer stays with you, it will impact your churn and LTV
• 14:11 – Cloudcherry is still burning cash at the moment
  • 14:34 – “We have money to burn from growth”
• 14:47 – December 2017 goal MRR
• 15:32 – SaaS business should continuously grow in numbers
• 16:57 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Make your employees look forward to going to the office every day.
2. When your customers are satisfied with your business, the numbers will just follow.
3. SaaS businesses should constantly track their numbers.

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
• Hotjar – Gives Nathan a recording of what is happening on a website or where are people clicking and scrolling on the website
• Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• 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
• Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Eduardo Gonzales.  Two years ago, he started working on Instagram as a broke college student with a vision to become one of the largest influencers with literally zero dollars in investment. He learned the game and began growth hacking on different Instagram pages. Today, he stands with over 5M followers combined across multiple different niches on Instagram.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Think, Grow, Prosper and The Alchemist
• What CEO do you follow? – Jack Dorsey, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg  
• Favorite online tool? — com
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— At least 4
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “I wished I would have studied more programming”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:40 – Nathan introduces Eduardo to the show
• 01:26 – “The power of social media is absolutely limitless”
  • 01:30 – You can have a more intimate relationship between brands and consumers
• 01:56 – Social media is a great way to target people on mobile devices
  • 02:05 – There’s now a geographical private system where you want your followers to be
• 02:44 – Eduardo helped Tai Lopez with social media marketing
• 02:50 – Eduardo was one of the first people to help Movement Watches
  • 03:00 – Movement Watches approached Eduardo when he was still on Tumblr
  • 03:04 – Eduardo started growing on Tumblr as a luxury blogger and was able to grow a couple hundred thousand followers there
  • 03:13 – Movement Watches was a small startup; Eduardo stayed with them and now they’re at Nordstrom
  • 03:40 – Eduardo was getting 15% for every affiliate
  • 03:50 – When Movement Watches moved to Instagram, they paid Eduardo per post
• 03:59 – Eduardo charges per post depending on the page, the content of the post, and the type of following they want to engage
• 04:20 – For 380K followers in a luxury niche, it will $125-150 per post that will last a day
  • 04:38 – The page’s visual team will create content and then Eduardo will pick the one that matches his page
• 05:03 – One of Tai Lopez’s marketers is Eduardo’s friend and they approached Eduardo
• 05:26 – Tai Lopez did a lot of giveaways and online marketing courses
  • 05:37 – He wanted to add value to people
  • 05:57 – During giveaways, Tai had a large list of influencers that he reached out to
• 06:15 – The marketing team would ask Eduardo for a consultation regarding the strategy
  • 06:32 – Eduardo also has a team who make content so they can make the content and reach out to Eduardo’s influencers
• 06:55 – Tai Lopez does social media growth and he likes to grow his followers
  • 07:00 – Tai targeted to have 10K followers when he came to Eduardo
  • 07:10 – Tai now has around 500K followers
• 07:31 – Eduardo created the visual content for Tai
  • 07:36 – Eduardo figured out the best schedule to post Tai’s content
  • 07:42 – Eduardo was able to track all the analytics
  • 07:46 – As the following grew, Tai was able to know the best time to post, where the followers were coming from and where the most engaging followers come from
  • 07:54 – They weeded out non-performing pages and created a list of pages that performed well until they reached 10K
  • 08:07 – It took Eduardo a week and a half to reach 10K followers
  • 08:10 – Tai paid Eduardo $5K
• 08:24 – The one page Tai is getting more followers is Big Toys
  • 08:39 – The age groups on the page are 18-24 and 25-34 and mostly are in USA
  • 08:54 – Because of the large age group, a lot of them are interested in the online courses that Tai offers
• 09:04 – Sometimes people would actually come to Eduardo and ask him if they should buy a page
  • 09:12 – People do buy pages, but when you rebrand a page, you lose some of the following and it isn’t as organic
  • 09:24 – You can buy a page that is as close or as similar to the message that you want to convey
• 09:45 – Eduardo has worked with Gary V on his social media growth
  • 09:58 – The work was almost similar with what Eduardo did for Tai
• 10:20 – Eduardo has worked with Secret Entourage
  • 10:28 – They wanted to promote their online marketing sources
• 10:46 – Eduardo is also in the process of working with Rolls-Royce
• 11:17 – Eduardo has a lot people who have a large number of followers
  • 11:26 – Eduardo has 5M and with co-founder, Goodlife, they’ll have 10-11M followers combined
  • 11:42 – Dan Fleyshman and Branden Hampton are some of the people they’ve worked for
  • 12:13 – Dan and Brendan grew their own networks and pages and they acquired some
• 12:31 – Eduardo started working with small campaigns
• 13:15 – Eduardo launched his consulting company, Classy Savant, in 2016
• 13:25 – 2016 revenue was around $40K
• 13:30 – 2017 goal is at least $100K
• 14:00 – Eduardo collaborated with Mr. Goodlife and he has another partner
  • 14:12 – Eduardo also has a few interns and photographers
• 14:37 – One of the most well-known tools that Eduardo uses is com
  • 14:48 – You can check a public account’s statistics and what they use for their posting
• 15:02 – com is where you can pull all sorts of information
  • 15:24 – You can know who your top followers are, your most recent, and your first followers
  • 15:55 – It works well too when you switch your Instagram from public to business account
• 16:27 – You can always Google the top hashtags
  • 16:46 – You have to keep your hashtags from 5 to 15
• 18:25 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Dream BIG even if you have to start small.
2. It is now easier for brands to reach out to their target consumers because of social media.
3. Gaining followers in Instagram isn’t that simple—you have to have a goal and a planned strategy to reach that goal.

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
• Hotjar – Gives Nathan a recording of what is happening on a website or where are people clicking and scrolling on the website
• Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• 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
• Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Oleg Campbell. He was born in Ukraine and starting working as a programmer at the age of 19. He moved to Canada when he was 22 and founded his first startup at 24 successfully. Then at 27, he founded Reply.io and he’s currently living between Ukraine and San Francisco building this company.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Losing My Virginity
• What CEO do you follow? – Jason Lemkin
• Favorite online tool? — Chart Model
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6-8
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Be more fearless”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:45 – Nathan introduces Oleg to the show
• 01:28 – Oleg is a programmer and read Kawasaki’s, Rich Dad Poor Dad, and Tim Ferriss’, 4-Hour Work Week, which influenced him to build a software for himself
  • 01:58 – Oleg found out that his first business was a lifestyle business when they failed to grow it
  • 02:02 – The technology was built on top of QR code
  • 02:22 – The highest revenue the company reached was $150K annually
• 02:32 – Oleg put the business in autopilot, took the money and invested in a new venture
• 02:28 – Oleg has never saved any money, but just invested it into businesses
• 03:21 – Oleg founded his first startup while he was working full-time
• 03:37 – With Reply, Oleg invested what he took from his salary from his previous startup
  • 03:45 – Initial investment was around $30K
• 03:55 – Oleg hired 2 developers to build the product and Oleg started working on marketing and sales
• 04:08 – The developers are in Ukraine and it cost Oleg only $2000 per month
• 04:46 – Oleg found the developers through online job postings
  • 04:58 – There are websites in Ukraine where developers hang out
• 05:18 – Reply focuses on replacing routine sales tasks with AI and automation
  • 05:25 – Reply now automates sending emails, follow-ups and initiating phone calls
  • 05:44 – The development team is building more features to automate more sales tasks
• 05:53 – Reply is a SaaS business
  • 05:57 – Plans start from $25 to $120 per user
  • 06:03 – Average pay per user is $90 per month

• 06:14 – Reply was launched in 2015
• 06:18 – Current team size is 34
  • 06:28 – There’s a sales team in Canada and the development and marketing teams are in Ukraine
  • 06:50 – There are 15 developers
  • 07:20 – Reply spends an average of $4K for developers
• 08:04 – Reply has 1000 customers right now
• 08:15 – Average MRR
• 08:21 – Reply just hit $100K in monthly revenue
• 08:42 – Reply raised capital a year ago with a small $400K seed round
  • 08:54 – One of the investors reached out to Reply and to raise a round
  • 09:13 – It was on a convertible note
  • 09:17 – It was in March 2016
  • 09:24 – Reply is now close to closing a big round of funding
• 09:34 – Oleg decided to find out when it would be a good time to raise money
  • 09:42 – Oleg reached out to some investors and used his software called Outreach
  • 10:03 – In 3 weeks, Oleg met 15 investors
  • 10:11 – Oleg then found out that they were still early for a round A
• 10:32 – The sample email Oleg sent to the investors
• 11:26 – Reply has been profitable for the last 4 months
• 11:38 – Oleg has been operating at right around zero
• 12:08 – Most of Reply’s money is spent on headcount and they’re just starting with advertising
  • 12:18 – They are now spending on AdWords
• 12:43 – Churn is, in terms of numbers, would be close to 5% and in terms of revenue sharing, it would be closer to 3%
• 13:12 – Reply’s customers are adding more seats
• 13:39 – CAC would be around $200 but will still varies and organic is definitely lower
• 14:03 – LTV is if you just take all our customers, it would be close to $100
  • 14:19 – But in terms of bigger accounts, it will be much lower to a few grand at least
• 14:36 – Reply launched in Product Hunt some of their free products as lead generation tools
  • 14:59 – They have a great number of fans in Product Hunt
• 15:09 – Reply also creates content and promotes it
  • 15:16 – Reply recently interviewed a lot of sales experts and they created articles
• 15:43 – After the launch in Product Hunt, Reply had 10K visitors and 600 signups
  • 16:02 – In terms of LTV, it will be close to 60K which is added from the Product Hunt launch
• 16:25 – Oleg won’t sell the company for a million
• 16:32 – Oleg’s valuation is around $20-30M
• 16:47 – Oleg has a co-founder and the split is around 60/40
• 17:27 – Reply provides equity to employees who have been with them for a year
• 19:12 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. If you want to put your money to use, you can continue to invest in different businesses.
2. Outsourcing developers from other countries is more cost-efficient.
3. Be more realistic and be fearless.

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
• Hotjar – Gives Nathan a recording of what is happening on a website or where are people clicking and scrolling on the website
• Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• 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
• Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Rob Emrich. He’s a serial entrepreneur, currently involved in his latest venture as the founder and CEO of The Mobile Majority. He’s founded and served as chief executive at 6 startups in social ventures including Road of Life, which distributed as $70M dollar curriculum; BULX, which was acquired by Dealyard in 2011; and Boundaryless Brands, which was acquired in 2011 along with SpeakerSite. Know more about Rob at his website.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Goal
• What CEO do you follow? – N/A
• Favorite online tool? — Spark Email Client
• 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? – “Have fun”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:40 – Nathan introduces Rob to the show
• 01:26 – Rob just bought Gimbal and will use that name
  • 01:55 – They’re taking the name most especially because of the .com in Gimbal’s website
• 02:15 – Rob believes that what drives success in online marketing is data
• 02:58 – Most of Rob’s previous companies were in the ecommerce space
• 03:22 – Mobile phone ends up being the bridge between the online world and the offline world
  • 03:31 – Rob was missing data regarding targeting and attribution
  • 03:46 – There’s no way to know if an offline campaign is effective
• 04:36 – The technology Rob bought that has the data can now run campaigns and know that you were on that campaign
• 05:05 – Offline behavior ends up becoming an incredibly strong signal of intent and is an accurate way to measure attribution
• 05:21 – Gimbal uses Beacon
  • 05:37 – Beacons are usually a 2-flow energy and Qualcomm invested around over a hundred million dollars for the technology
  • 06:01 – Beacons are precise when working with GPS
• 06:53 – Qualcomm spun out beacons in 4 other companies to develop the culture of innovation
  • 07:28 – When they spun out in 2014, it became a challenge for big companies to innovate
• 08:20 – The valuation
• 08:44 – The deal structure that Rob had with Qualcomm was a mix of different things: cash, debt and equity
• 08:57 – Total funding from Mobile Majority was around $25M
• 09:03 – Mobile Majority was launched in 2012
• 09:38 – Rob has gone through things after his first exit
  • 10:05 – “I’m going big at this point”
• 10:16 – Rob is currently 37 and has no kids
• 10:33 – Team size is around 100
• 11:20 – Primary line of business is essentially acting as a media and advertising operating system for large media companies
  • 11:41 – They target individual people
  • 11:44 – “We understand identity very, very well”
  • 13:09 – They were getting revenue share
• 13:42 – When CBS creates content, that content generates users and Mobile Majority exposes them to more user data and will sell their operated properties
• 14:30 – Mobile Majority is different from Outbrain because Mobile Majority’s ads are more targeted
• 15:10 – Mobile Majority now has 10K end customers
  • 16:00 – Total advertising purchase range is between $10M-100M
• 16:15 – Average percentage taken by Mobile Majority varies
  • 17:08 – Instead of charging towards content, Mobile Majority will only hit specific people who are on the list
• 18:46 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. There’s a lot of missed data in the offline world that is still not easy to track.
2. Knowing and understanding your target audience is more effective and cost-efficient for you.
3. Just go on with your life and have fun, create businesses while you still can.

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
• Hotjar – Gives Nathan a recording of what is happening on a website or where are people clicking and scrolling on the website
• Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• 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
• Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Alessandro Biggi. He’s the CEO at Zooppa, the first open-source creative agency. Previously, he was the CEO and founder of a company called 20lines, an app to share leading short stories acquired by HarperCollins Publisher, in January 2016. He’s also worked for JP Morgan, The Boston Consulting Group, and as an adjunct professor in Venice.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Zero to One
• What CEO do you follow? – Ricardo Donadon
• 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? – Alessandro wished he would have studied some hard skills like engineering

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:46 – Nathan introduces Alessandro to the show
• 01:22 – Zooppa relies on technology to engage with over 400K creatives around the world
• 01:58 – Zooppa is like a marketplace, connecting creatives to people who need a project done
• 02:02 – Zooppa has 2 models in creating content
  • 02:07 – First is the open model which is open to everyone to show their creativity
  • 02:18 – The second one is the VIP which is only offered to top producers on the platform to participate and win the project
• 02:46 – Average project size depends on the creation needed
  • 02:56 – An open model can go from $50K-150K
  • 03:12 – Average can be $40K
• 03:18 – Zooppa was launched 10 years ago, in Italy
  • 03:25 – Zooppa expanded to New York, Seattle, Venice, Milan and London
• 03:42 – Alessandro just joined Zooppa 1 month ago after selling 20lines
  • 03:50 – Alessandro was also an investor in Zooppa
• 04:20 – Zooppa was founded by H-Farm’s founders
• 04:41 – Zooppa has raised around $8M
• 04:50 – Alessandro joined Zooppa after the last round
• 04:57 – There’s a plan to develop more revenue streams for Zooppa
• 05:21 – Zooppa’s vision is to inspire people use their creativity for a purpose
• 06:00 – Alessandro accepted Zooppa as a challenge
  • 06:07 – Alessandro feels that there’s more that he can do
• 06:48 – Zooppa is now planning to distribute a big part of their equity to new and old employees
• 07:07 – Alessandro does other things aside from Zooppa like investing in a restaurant
• 07:36 – Alessandro’s first company was inspired by Zooppa
• 08:05 – Zooppa’s average total transaction volume is $4-5M
• 08:14 – Zooppa usually runs 50-60 projects a year
• 08:28 – Zooppa takes care all of the projects and campaigns
• 09:15 – Zooppa takes a percentage for every project
  • 09:43 – It is 50%
• 10:09 – Zooppa just opened their New York office
  • 10:15 – Zooppa still continues to expand
• 10:48 – Creatives can go to Zooppa’s website and see if there are projects that they can take on
• 11:17 – Zooppa works with big brands
• 11:39 – Zooppa has 25 people on the team
• 11:46 – Zooppa is cash-flow positive
• 12:00 – Zooppa currently focuses on sustaining themselves on their own
• 12:30 – Alessandro is now 29 and he was 27 and a half when he sold 20lines
• 12:50 – Alessandro was working at 20lines for a couple of years
  • 13:02 – The publishing space is a hard space to be in
  • 13:05 – The team decided that they’d grow better with a bigger group
  • 13:10 – They had a talk with HarperCollins for about a year
  • 13:33 – It was a soft landing
• 14:54 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Don’t stick with a company where you don’t see growth happening—sell it and move on.
2. You can always learn something from someone who is older much more experienced.
3. If you can sustain your company on what you currently have, don’t raise a round.

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
• Hotjar – Gives Nathan a recording of what is happening on a website or where are people clicking and scrolling on the website
• Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• 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
• Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Gadi Shamia. He’s the chief operating officer at Talkdesk, the world’s leading call center software platform. It’s backed by DFJ, Storm Ventures and Salesforce Venture. Talkdesk has grown 8x over the past 2 years and has over 250 employees along with their thousand customers including Box, Shopify, Dropbox and Weather.com. Prior to Talkdesk, Gadi founded a company that was acquired by SAP and now generates $5M in global business. He was also a senior VP at SAP and a general manager at ReachLocal.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Innovator’s Dilemma
• What CEO do you follow? – Marc Benioff
• Favorite online tool? — Gmail and Slack
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6.5
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Gadi wished he knew that he would be fine so that he could stress less about it

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:44 – Nathan introduces Gadi to the show
• 01:26 – EchoSign was acquired by Adobe
• 01:31 – TopManage was acquired by SAP
• 01:53 – Talkdesk is a cloud-based call center solution
  • 01:58 – It is fully-integrated
• 02:26 – Talkdesk charges users per license fee
• 02:44 – Talkdesk is a SaaS company
• 02:54 – Average pay per customer varies
  • 03:01 – A company with 50 users would pay $5K-7K a month
  • 03:28 – Per seat cost is around $65-125 depending on the subscription
• 04:02 – Gadi joined Talkdesk 3 years ago
• 04:16 – The call center space is an interesting market
  • 04:22 – It is still dominated by all players such as Avaya, Cisco and Genesis
• 04:35 – Talkdesk already has a proven product
  • 04:41 – Talkdesk has a couple of hundred customers who like the product and has been using Talkdesk for years
• 04:53 – Tiago, Talkdesk’s CEO, was one of the reason Gadi joined Talkdesk
  • 05:14 – Tiago is the co-founder and his co-founder left Talkdesk after 4 and a half years
• 05:50 – Gadi believes that co-founders leave because they might not feel as excited as they were in the early stages
  • 06:01 – Co-founders staying is also devastating for the company
  • 06:10 – When a co-founder can say that he’s leaving and he has done his job, it’s a healthy company
• 06:44 – Talkdesk has broken the million ARR
• 06:57 – Talkdesk had 50 people when Gadi came in
• 07:17 – Tiago was the only salesperson at Talkdesk when he started it and he was able to get remarkable brands to use Talkdesk
• 07:43 – Gadi met Tiago through Gadi’s friend from Storm Ventures
  • 08:06 – Gadi and Tiago met in 2014 several times
• 08:38 – Talkdesk currently has 1200 customers
  • 08:48 – There are around 50K seats
• 09:06 – Average MRR
• 09:43 – Alot of Talkdesk customers are e-commerce customers and they are seasonal
• 10:32 – Talkdesk is at a net negative churn
• 11:00 – Talkdesk talks to their customers about their seasonal needs and adjusts the annual licensing fee
• 11:42 – Talkdesk respects Workday, Salesforce and works with ServiceNow
• 12:48 – The best companies will get 110-120 in aiming net revenue expansion
• 13:03 – Most companies that have worked with Talkdesk benefit from it and grow
  • 13:10 – DoorDash grew from 40 seats to 800
• 13:38 – Talkdesk currently has a team of 250 people
• 14:40 – Talkdesk’s growth is mostly from new sign-ups
• 14:56 – Talkdesk has raised a total of $24.5M
  • 15:01 – The last round was in 2015
• 15:15 – Talkdesk is neither raising rounds or talking to Salesforce
• 15:34 – Talkdesk focuses on building a real business
• 16:24 – Talkdesk is still burning cash
• 16:53 – Most of Talkdesk’s customers pay annually upfront
• 18:13 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. When a cofounder leaves, it means he’s done his job and the company is healthy
2. Be in a company where you believe in the product and know that you can accelerate its growth.
3. Building a real business is about the service you provide your customers in helping them achieve growth.

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
• Hotjar – Gives Nathan a recording of what is happening on a website or where people are clicking and scrolling on the website
• Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• 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
• Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Mike Winn. He’s the CEO and founder of the company called DroneDeploy, the leading cloud-software platform for commercial drones and he’s on the mission to make the sky successful and productive for everybody. The company focuses on the agricultural and construction industries, but its large customers are from almost every industry across 130 countries. He has collected more than 8M acres of aerial imagery. Prior to joining Deploy, Mike worked at Google and was a RC helicopters hobbyist.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Effective Executive
• What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
• Favorite online tool? — Gmail
• 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? – “You can pretty much do whatever you set your mind to”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:26 – Nathan introduces Mike to the show
• 02:20 – DroneDeploy has raised $31M from VCs
  • 02:26 – DroneDeploy had 3 rounds and the last one was in July 2016
• 03:00 – DroneDeploy was launched in 2013
  • 03:05 – It stated in Edinburg, UK and was moved to the USA
• 03:25 – Mike got married in the middle of the incubator program
• 04:03 – Mike’s wife, Carrie, has always been supportive
• 04:15 – Mike was an account manager and selling AdWords at Google
  • 04:30 – After 18 months, he moved to another team
• 04:56 – Mike was 27 when he started DroneDeploy
  • 05:24 – Mike had £100K grant money to back him up
  • 05:39 – Mike was paying himself £1500
• 05:53 – DroneDeploy’s Twitter has unbelievable aerial imagery
• 06:05 – DroneDeploy make software for drones
  • 06:13 – Primary industries are agriculture and construction, but they also touch other industries that exist
• 06:43 – DroneDeploy only focuses on software
• 06:56 – DroneDeploy is a SaaS business
  • 07:08 – Customers can try DroneDeploy for free
  • 07:12 – For commercial use, pay is $100 a month
• 07:26 – DroneDeploy has 2 channels
  • 07:34 – To get more accurate data and large 3D plans, try the business plan which is $300 a month
  • 07:44 – The other channel is to expand by the number of seats
  • 08:21 – One seat is $100
• 08:30 – DroneDeploy has over a thousand paying businesses
• 08:56 – The drone market is still young, but growing really fast
• 09:52 – Team size is 60
• 10:15 – Nathan publishes on Youtube—Check it out!
• 10:36 – Mark Cuban predicted that the first trillionaire will be from the AI space
• 11:00 – Mike’s co-founders have PhDs in machine learning
• 11:10 – Mike sees the path of DroneDeploy becoming a trillion dollar business
• 12:03 – In the future, you don’t only want drones to collect data but to take action as well
• 13:07 – DroneDeploy currently works with B2B
• 13:32 – What is interesting about drones is the technology community
• 13:50 – Drone provides the bird’s eye view for the farmers
• 14:23 – One of the farmers who used DroneDeploy found a fungus when he saw that a certain part of the land was different in color
• 15:02 – In construction, it easier to work around with a drone especially when there’s a disaster, like an earthquake
• 15:47 – CAC
  • 15:55 – DroneDeploy has a successful blog
  • 16:17 – DroneDeploy has an NPS of around 40
• 16:52 – 6 people in the team are on sales and the rest are engineers
• 17:15 – Churn
  • 17:45 – The use of a drone is seasonal
• 18:01 – DroneDeploy is looking at what the customers want to do and how they can get consumers to use drones throughout the whole year
• 18:36 – MRR is around $100K
• 18:58 – DroneDeploy still burns cash monthly
  • 19:30 – DroneDeploy can still manage until 2018 without additional capital
• 20:27 – Mike would bet on DJI winning the drone hardware space
• 21:38 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. The drone market is still very young, but is growing rapidly.
2. The future of the AI industry is promising and it’s very likely that the first trillionaire will be from the AI space.
3. You can turn your hobby into a business, just put your mind to it.

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
• Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• 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
• Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Andrew Yates. He’s the CEO and founder of Artesian and they want to make sellers more effective at engaging with buyers using smart data and new techniques to create the right impact. He’s been involved in the sales and marketing for the past 25 years and is aiming to make a difference to people by creating software companies that make a meaningful dent in the universe.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Escape Velocity
• What CEO do you follow? – Godfrey Sullivan
• Favorite online tool? — Microsoft Outlook, GeckoBoard, Salesforce
• 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? – “I wished I knew more how money and leverage finance works”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:13 – Nathan introduces Andrew to the show
• 01:46 – Artesian provides a sales acceleration platform
  • 01:56 – With Artesian, you can track every single customer, prospect and competitor every day and manage your pipeline risk
  • 02:11 – Artesian’s phrase is “customer curious businesses”
• 02:44 – Artesian combines thermographic data with the real-time contextual intelligence
• 02:50 – You can ask Artesian to find you a company that fits a certain profile
• 03:15 – Artesian has natural language processing science that scans over 10M sources of structured and unstructured data
• 03:47 – Artesian started providing their service in 2010
• 03:54 – Artesian currently has 30K paying subscribers with 100 large enterprise customers
  • 04:09 – Artesian covers a broad sector
  • 04:20 – Artesian’s customers are in high value, relationship-oriented, sales engagement
• 04:30 – Team size is 60
• 04:38 – Artesian’s goal is to accelerate more in 2017
• 04:50 – Average pay per customer is $10K to over $2M per year
• 04:59 – Artesian licenses to software per user, per month basis
• 05:04 – 68% of target ARR for 2017 has been contracted
• 05:38 – Before, Artesian’s licenses were cheaper
• 06:08 – The 30K customers are the number of seats from 120 enterprise customers
• 06:43 – Artesian made the decision to take down their cash burn in terms of investment
  • 07:04 – Artesian was burning $300K-400K a month
• 07:15 – Artesian has raised $40M in equity and debt
• 07:50 – MRR is $700K
• 08:24 – Customer retention is around 93 and 120 in terms of net
• 09:10 – Artesian is now number in the GT crowd ranking in terms of the most popular and most intelligent platform
• 09:59 – Artesian uses a team of researchers to build deep and cool data sets
• 10:39 – Artesian also invites users to define their own sales triggers
• 11:40 – Nathan had Danielle in Episode 318
• 12:00 – Andrew thinks that a market consolidation practice is inevitable
  • 12:26 – A scenario where companies could join forces to give broader reach and greater depth—a better customer experience is definitely more valuable
• 12:47 – Andrew also drives growth for Artesian
• 12:58 – It is important to spend time speaking with other companies that are active in the same space
  • 13:14 – The companies can be quite different and quite complementary
• 13:29 – The last round was a bridge round
• 13:49 – Artesian is currently equipped to keep going, without investments, for the next 2 years
• 14:08 – By the middle of 2017, Artesian will be in a cash flow, breakeven profitability state
• 14:40 – CAC
  • 14:41 – Artesian was tracking 1x in Year 1
  • 15:08 – Artesian uses great people to drive adoption
  • 15:13 – Artesian has 5 methods inside the platform
  • 15:25 – Artesian uses customer relationship management and what the system is telling them to do
  • 15:42 – Running 89% daily user engagement
• 16:15 – Artesian launched a way to build a smart calendar for each user every day
  • 16:29 – Artesian is partnered with FullContact and others that provide social profiles
• 16:56 – Artesian is spending $60-70K on acquisition depending on the segment
• 17:20 – LTV is 5.2 years
  • 17:30 – Artesian tracks this by looking at the average of customers they’re holding on to
  • 17:40 – HBC is one of their customers
• 19:28 – Andrew would be interested in talking with Salesforce to share the value
• 19:38 – 50% of Artesian is owned by institutions
• 19:46 – Andrew has 2 co-founders
• 21:27 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Companies in the same space should talk more—they can find out how they’re different and how they complement each other.
2. Being transparent shows that you want people to see your value and learn from it.
3. Handling your finances and controlling what you burn wisely will help your company manage without additional capital.

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
• Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• 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
• Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Ramin Sayar. He’s currently the president and CEO of Sumo Logic, an industry-leading SaaS-based company backed by some great VCs and he has an impressive list of customers and partners. Previously, he was the senior VP and GM at VMware, where he developed the product and business strategy and led the fastest growing aspect of that business. Previously, he had multiple executive roles with leading companies such as HP Software, Mercury Software, Tibco software, iPlanet Software, AOL and Netscape.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Good to Great
• What CEO do you follow? – Tom Reilly
• Favorite online tool? — Twitter and LinkedIn
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— Around 6-7
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Ramin would tell himself that the flow and steady path will pay off in the long run

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 02:22 – Nathan introduces Ramin to the show
• 03:32 – Sumo Logic helps customers build, run and secure modern apps in a simple and easy to consume service of profitability
• 03:57 – Sumo Logic is a SaaS business
  • 04:04 – Priced and licensed depending on the data ingested and the duration of retention
• 04:25 – Average RPU varies
• 05:35 – Sumo Logic has a mass of service for their customers
  • 05:45 – Sumo Logic has some free services
• 06:18 – Customers’ buying pattern is consistent
• 06:43 – $15K-150K is the average contract price
• 07:34 – Sumo Logic has over 1300 paying customers
  • 07:42 – 51% is enterprise and the other half is midmarket and SMBs
• 08:22 – Sumo Logic was capitalized through 5 rounds
  • 08:34 – Total amount raised is over $160M
• 08:52 – Nathan had Tim Draper at Episode 129 from DFJ which Ramin mentioned
• 09:14 – Sumo Logic is 7 years old
• 09:33 – Sumo Logic’s founding roots came from the security roles
  • 09:38 – Not all users have access to data being generated
  • 09:48 – The founders believed that there should be a simpler way for more users to access data
  • 10:32 – The team initially felt that there was a competitive advantage in technology and an innovative way to deliver data analytics as a service
• 11:03 – Sumo Logic currently has 30K users
• 11:17 – Their vision was to democratize machine data
• 11:50 – Visa has been with Sumo Logic for a few years now
  • 12:04 – Visa started with their fraud detection cases
  • 12:23 – A few years ago, Visa launched a service with Apple
  • 12:32 – Visa uses Sumo Logic for business insights such as activation and patterns regarding how users use multiple credit card applications
• 12:58 – Medidata is trying to disrupt the pharmaceutical industry in the clinical trial process
  • 13:23 – Medidata used Sumo and decided they’re going to transfer to the public cloud infrastructure service
  • 13:42 – Medidata is an example of a different, non-tech company using the technology that Sumo Logic provides
• 14:10 – Sumo Logic assimilates, collects, ingests and analyzes different sources of data
  • 14:25 – Sumo Logic then purposely tailors the analysis through their machine learning algorithms to address 3 distinct use cases
  • 14:52 – Sumo Logic helps in continuous development
  • 15:07 – Sumo Logic provides one single platform that analyses information and puts it into context so that developers and other teams can get the 360 degree, holistic view of the information
  • 15:39 – Sumo Logic analyses a lot of patterns
• 16:34 – Ramin joined Sumo Logic 2 years ago
• 17:06 – In choosing a CEO, it comes with understanding the core values and culture of the company and how they relate to what the founders want
  • 17:20 – If there are odds, make sure to address them
  • 17:25 – Second is to make sure that there’s an alignment syndicate in founding members in terms of what the outcomes would be
  • 17:36 – Some CEOs are brought in to scale the company and in other cases, they are brought in to turn over the team or change the company’s direction
• 18:10 – One of the 2-3 founders of Sumo Logic is still on the team
• 19:00 – Average ARR
• 19:30 – “We don’t try to make consumers consume what they can’t initially”
• 19:40 – SaaS companies often have to prove their value and constantly fight to earn the business
• 19:56 – More customers are now signing multimillion year deals with Sumo Logic
  • 20:09 – The customers are seeing Sumo Logic’s value
• 21:12 – The enterprise segment for Sumo Logic is broad
• 21:26 – When Ramin first came to Sumo Logic, the focus was security
  • 21:43 – Ramin realized that most of their customers are development ops, tech ops and liability engineers, so they pivoted a bit
• 22:25 – For a SaaS company, the LTV to CAC that modern investors look for are the payback period and the magic number has to be 3.0 and more
• 22:50 – The other metrics that Sumo Logic tracks
• 24:09 – Sumo Logic’s payback period is between the 1-2 year mark
  • 25:13 – The enterprise, midmarket and SMBs have different payback periods
• 25:39 – Team size is 250
• 27:33 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Create guidelines when it comes to looking for your CEOs—they should align with the company’s cultures, beliefs, and goals.
2. SaaS companies often have to prove their value and are constantly fighting to earn business.
3. Users’ access to data can be very limited and complicated; however, simpler and more innovative ways are being discovered as technology continues to advance.

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
• Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• 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
• Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Jeroen Corthout. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Salesflare, the intelligent CRM that startups and small businesses love to use. Prior to Salesflare, he was helping companies to implement their new CRM, marketing and sales. Salesflare kicked off when he and his co-founder, Lieven, found a way to automate their CRM data. Salesflare’s mission is to automate everything in sales, but the irreplaceable human contact.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Alchemist
• What CEO do you follow? – Jeroen has been reading the biographies of Tony Hsieh, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos
• Favorite online tool? — Zapier
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 7-8
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Jeroen wished he had started these bigger projects earlier

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:38 – Nathan introduces Jeroen to the show
• 02:16 – Salesflare helps mostly startups to make their sales consistently productive, to have the right data, and to communicate and manage the pipeline better
• 02:28 – Salesflare sells licenses
• 02:40 – Salesflare’s price point is $30/month when you pay annually and $35 if monthly
• 02:58 – Salesflare started halfway through 2013
  • 03:04 – Jeroen and Lieven were working in a software company
  • 03:20 – Jeroen knew there was no solution to keep files automatically
• 03:28 – Salesflare basically pulls all the CRM data for you
• 03:49 – On top of a lot of data, Salesflare is building automation and intelligence
  • 03:52 – There’s an automatic to-do list and body temperature indicator
• 04:12 – Salesflare is largely self-funded, some from accelerators
  • 04:24 – Telenet Kickstart and iMinds are the accelerators from Belgium
  • 04:37 – Salesflare got $25K from one accelerator without equity and the other one had a convertible loan of $50K
  • 05:10 – Salesflare has raised a total of $700K
• 05:28 – Jeroen was in the consulting field
• 05:49 – Salesflare is currently building a convertible round with investors and has raised $250K; the target is $350K
• 06:57 – Salesflare has over 100 customers
• 07:14 – Jeroen believes that people don’t usually trust small companies, even if they have great products
• 08:00 – Average revenue
• 08:19 – Salesflare is based in Antwerp, Belgium
• 08:24 – Team size is 6
  • 08:30 – 3 are building the product and the other 3 are sales and customer service
• 08:55 – Jeroen likes people to think that they are bigger than they are
• 09:02 – Nathan believes that some people like small companies because of their flexibility
• 10:40 – Nathan tells Jeroen that his assumption of “it’s not good if it’s free” is a completely false assumption
• 11:28 – Most people stick to Salesflare after the trial period
• 11:40 – There’s currently a big market of CRMs
• 11:46 – Salesflare is aiming at sales automation and there’s very little competition in that space
• 12:12 – Salesflare is moving faster than their competition
• 12:17 – Hubspot's distribution channel is huge and Salesflare won’t be able to compete with that
  • 12:23 – But Salesflare can compete on the profit side
• 12:37 – Salesflare has a low churn
  • 13:12 – Salesflare got their first customer at the end of 2015
• 14:00 – Salesflare has a blog, does outbound emailing and builds their online presence for customer acquisition
• 14:36 – Salesflare does content distribution through Facebook’s paid advertising
• 14:47 – Most of Salesflare’s recent customers are from Product Hunt
• 15:23 – Jeroen has no idea of the number of trials they’ve had since the launch
  • 15:45 – Jeroen tracks the conversion, instead
  • 16:05 – In the past week, there were 250 new trial signups
  • 16:15 – The conversion to paid customer is around 10-15%
• 16:30 – Salesflare tries to show its value as quickly as possible
• 17:10 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. If you’re still unsure of starting a new business, find other ways to get involved in that space to understand how it works.
2. Some businesses offer a free product to show their value to the customer right away.
3. Competing with a free product with a large distribution channel isn’t easy, but you can generate a higher profit margin.

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
• Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• 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
• Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives