Top Founders

Latest Episodes:

741: Exited for $15m, Now Tackling Healthcare Patient Doctor Relationships Aug 04, 2017

Show notes

Todd Johnson, a serial healthcare information technology entrepreneur committed to building great products, teams and companies. Todd has a track record of cultivating great ideas and great business that offer incredible company cultures and attention-grabbing brands. Before his current company, HealthLoop, Todd was the founder and CEO of Salar, a Baltimore, MD-based provider of acute care physician charge capture and documentation solutions.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The E-Myth Revisited
What CEO do you follow? – Donald Trump and Elon Musk
Favorite online tool? — Gmail, Boomerang and Inbox
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? – Todd wished he could have took things less seriously

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:59 – Everyone needs healthcare at some point in their life
02:30 – Salar was able to replace paper processes at hospitals
- 03:08 – Salar was sold to the country's second largest medical transcription company
- 03:16 – It was a $15M exit
03:40 – Todd lives in Silicon Valley
- 03:57 – Todd has a couple of reasons why he chose to rent rather than to buy a property
04:37 – HealthLoop was initiated in 2009 and was an idea for over a year
04:51 – Todd joined HealthLoop in 2013
04:49 – The founder is a doctor from San Francisco
- 05:50 – He's still part of the board
06:28 – HealthLoop is a platform that automatically pushes notifications before and after a diagnosis or surgery
- 06:40 – It connects patients and doctors
07:00 – 5 years ago, there's no model around improving the quality of care
07:38 – Multiple parties benefit from an improvement in health care
08:28 – In order to retain the trust of the patients, you have to gain the doctor's trust as well
08:46 – HealthLoop has an enterprise subscription model
- 09:03 – Average contract is $120K to $150K that can escalate year over year
- 09:21 – They pre-pay the cases that they might have in a year
10:28 – HealthLoop's customers are very targeted
10:35 – The expansion per area depends on how the incentive shakes out
10:50 – HealthLoop is currently working with 70 groups and 20 hospitals
11:13 – HealthLoop has an older subscription model which some of their existing clients have
11:30 – HealthLoop has raised $21M
- 11:44 – HealthLoop is in an attractive space for competition
- 12:20 – They have 90% annual retention
12:43 – The institutional mindset
13:08 – Team size is 40
- 13:18 – 8 are in the sales team
13:53 – HealthLoop's current enterprise sales cycle is around 6-7 months on a 120 ACV
14:16 – CAC is quite high
- 14:55 – There are many competing organizations in the market
15:34 – LTV will depend per organization
16:07 – Todd is seeing a 150% growth from last year in terms of ARR
16:38 – There's so much unpredictability in the space which can be a bad thing
17:31 – Hospitals need to be thoughtful about spending cash
17:49 – HealthLoop will spend more on adapting to a new management
18:17 – HealthLoop's gross margin is around 70%
20:33 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

There's not enough consumer tech that is solely dedicated to healthcare.
At least once in our lifetime, we will need healthcare, and the ability to have a quick, back-and-forth communication with your health provider is powerful.
Because of the aging baby boomer population, healthcare is an incredibly attractive space for investors right now.

Resources Mentioned:

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

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

740: He's Helped 20,000 Land a Job, $4m Raised, $200k MRR Aug 03, 2017

Show notes

Chau Nguyen. He's the founder and CEO of Hirewire, an on-demand hiring app for hourly workers. In his previous venture, Chau hired over 20K people only to realize his hiring process was broken—and that's when he got the idea for Hirewire. To date, Chau has raised $4.1M in funding.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Good to Great
What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
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? – "There is no replacement for hard work"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:14 – Nathan introduces Chau to the show
01:47 – Chau's previous venture was Campus Special
- 01:50 – It's an online platform for college students
- 02:00 – They had 4K sales representatives meeting merchants
- 02:11 – Chau had Campus Special for 8.5 years before selling to a public company a few years back
- 02:28 – Chau was 25 when he launched Campus Special and he's 36 now
- 02:47 – Campus Special was doing $15M in revenue when he sold it for $25M
- 03:45 – The negotiation was just about what the buyers would pay for it
- 03:55 – It was bittersweet for Chau to sell Campus Special but still proud of it
- 04:27 – Chau owned 100% of Campus Special
05:00 – Chau stayed on board with the acquirer for a year
05:30 – Chau thought that he can use his past experience in hiring
06:15 – With Hirewire, Chau saw the need to invest heavily on the product and technology, hence the fund raise
- 06:29 – Initial raised was $2M and the next round was $2M as well
- 06:36 – Both rounds are convertible note
06:47 – Hirewire is a marketplace where employers and job seekers can connect
- 06:52 – It is a mobile app to speed up the process
- 07:00 – There's chatting with images and videos
- 07:06 – Next release will be focused on on-demand hiring
- 07:25 – Hirewire has a monthly subscription for employers and free for applicants
- 08:10 – Hirewire has a pay as you go model for small businesses
- 08:20 – The monthly subscription is usually for big companies like McDonalds
- 08:40 – Hirewire's core customer based are the recurring customers
- 08:48 – Hirewire focuses on the restaurant industry which has the highest turnover
- 09:08 – Hirewire charges per location per month, starting at $50 to $100 depending on usage
09:53 – Hirewire was first launched in Atlanta and was on beta for year
- 10:00 – They launched with nothing
- 10:24 – In one year, Hirewire got 4K employers to sign up, over 100K job seekers with around 1K people hired
10:56 – Hirewire has 2 drivers that allowed them to grow quickly
- 11:00 – First is hitting a pain point
- 11:44 – Second is doing the application online
12:14 – Hirewire is in 4K locations with 5K hiring managers
- 12:30 – Some locations can have at least 2 hiring managers
12:40 – Average MRR is a little over 200K
- 13:06 – Hirewire has been and is still testing pricing
13:31 – Gross customer churn
- 13:40 – A restaurant's churn could be 100-200% like losing an entire team
- 13:56 – Prior to launch, Chau was really afraid of what will happen but still think that they make the hiring process easier and faster
- 14:19 – Ultimately, people will stay where they're happy and making money
- 14:31 – Hirewire is retaining 95% of the employees which makes the churn 5%
14:50 – Team size is around 15 based in Atlanta
15:07 – Hirewire does paid acquisition
- 15:17 – 50% of the job seekers are from organic traffic
- 15:23 – Hirewire also uses social media channels to drive users and has spends $10-25K monthly
15:54 – Freightos has a marketplace model plus SaaS
16:38 – Chau's goal for Hirewire is to be very sticky with high retention on the employer side
17:19 – Hirewire is not making money on the marketplace aspect and just on the SaaS aspect
19:10 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

You can't stay at where you are forever, change is constant so move on and start anew.
Leverage what you've learned in the past to create something that can refine the system.
Always test your product first.

Resources Mentioned:

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

739: How Has She Has 3x'd Revenue to $700k MRR in Just 11 Months? Aug 02, 2017

Show notes

Mathilde Collin. She's the CEO of Front, a SaaS company working on redesigning email for teams. She started with Y Combinator in the summer of 2014, and today has 20 employees and 1700 customers.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Zero to One
What CEO do you follow? – Patrick Collison
Favorite online tool? — Slack
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 8 and a half
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "People that are struggling should be super motivated because that's what everyone go through"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:04 – Nathan introduces Mathilde to the show
01:33 – Mathilde was in Episode 413 of The Top
- 01:43 – Back then, they had 1200 customers, $13M raised, around a million in revenue in 2015
- 01:53 – An average customer pays 200 a month leading to an MRR of $240K
- 01:58 – Gross churn was 3%
02:10 – Front now has 40 team members
02:13 – "We tripled our revenue"
02:15 – The number of customers didn't triple because they had bigger companies using Front
02:43 – Current MRR is around $750K
03:02 – Front still has 80% of what they've raised last year
- 03:13 – Total capital raised was $14M
03:45 – Front is burning $250K a month
- 03:50 – Mostly from head count
04:29 – Churn has always been low
- 04:35 – Net churn has always been negative which -10% monthly
- 04:50 – User churn is around 3.5 - 4%
- 05:04 – MRR churn is low
05:30 – The teams that are paying Front more per month tend to be very sticky
06:10 – Gross margin is 88%
06:22 – Front APP is the easiest way to manage a shared inbox as a team
- 06:29 – A sample of shared inbox is support@contact or a social media account
- 06:37 – Front simplifies everything in one place
06:54 – For Front's growth, they lend it and extend it
- 07:00 – Net negative churn is coming from existing customers
- 07:04 – Existing customers have been upgraded to new plans or added teams
- 07:10 – HubSpot started with 1 team and now they have 13 teams with Front
- 07:26 – Front now has a marketing team with 3 people
- 07:35 – Front has now done more advertising and content
- 07:41 – The most effective for Front is AdWords
07:52 – Monthly CAC is around $15K
- 08:03 – Front tracks sales qualified leads
- 08:26 – It takes 7 trials to get 1 new paying customer
08:38 – After the trial, the customer will be categorized as an enterprise or SMB and mid-market companies
- 08:50 – The goal is for the sales people to get the trial set up
- 09:02 – The sales cycle is 3 weeks
- 09:20 – 95% of the customer is going through 3 weeks than the offered 2 weeks
09:26 – People are using Front than Slack because Slack is usually for before synchronous communication
- 09:34 – Front is for a synchronous communication
- 09:40 – A synchronous is every communication that is done externally should have an upfront
- 09:49 – Slack messages can also be distracting with the team
10:13 – Front competes more with Intercom than with Slack
10:25 – Intercom is usually better for customer communication while Front is for general communication
10:43 – Front is an email client
11:40 – Customers are buying Front to replace email
- 11:46 – In other cases, Front replaces helpdesk solutions like Desk, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Help Scout, etc
12:12 – Mathilde won't sell Front now even for $95M
- 12:25 – "I think I will sell when I'm not as confident as today"
- 12:37 – Front makes Mathilde happy
13:04 – Mathilde is now 28
13:15 – Front was launched in early 2015
13:29 – Mathilde wanted people to be happy at work so she made Front
15:07 – Mathilde has always been happy and confident that they can do a series B
- 15:56 - "I do have some inbound"
16:30 – Mathilde was part of an article in Entrepreneur.com
19:10 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Growth can be measured by several different metrics—the important thing isn't the metric, it's the important thing is consistency.
Stay with what makes you and other people happy.
People love reliability—if you can deliver that in a product or service you're on to something.

Resources Mentioned:

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

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

738: Is He The Future of Design Collaboartion? 1200 Customers and $3m in Revenues Say Yes! Aug 01, 2017

Show notes

Mariano Suarez-Battan. He's the founder and CEO of MURAL, a digital whiteboard for exploring complex challenges visually. Global 2000 companies like IBM, Intuit, Steelcase, and Autodesk have deployed MURAL at scale to enhance collaboration in their digital workplace. A former startup in residence at IDEO, Mariano also founded Three Melons, a game studio that designed and published online games like Bola, which was acquired by Playdom and Disney in 2010.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Purple Cow
What CEO do you follow? – Aaron Lewis
Favorite online tool? — LinkedIn
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? – To trust in your gut always

Time Stamped Show Notes:

02:12 – Bola has created games for large brands like Lego
02:23 – Back then, the social games industry was moving fast with Zynga, Playfirst and Playdom
- 02:31 – Mariano thought that, strategically, it made sense to grow bigger with those companies
- 02:45 – It was also a great decision, financially and professionally
03:00 – Mariano started Bola in Argentina
03:24 – Acquisition price was with stock and equity
- 04:12 – The cash was $4-5M
- 04:26 – $600K was the payback for the investors
04:44 – MURAL was a startup in residence in IDEO
- 05:03 – IDEO brought in Collaborative Fund as a funder for MURAL
- 05:10 – MURAL's vision is to make every designer share their design thinking globally
- 05:36 – IDEO was like an incubator
- 05:49 – Prior to IDEO, MURAL has raised closed to $1M
- 05:59 – Collaborative Fund invested money on MURAL while IDEO made MURAL known to big companies like IBM
- 06:33 – Some of IDEO's DNA are in MURAL
07:00 – MURAL's pricing
- 07:02 – $12 per member per month and billed annually, $16 billed monthly
- 07:10 – The pricing on the website is for online customers
07:23 – A quarter of their customers are online and the rest are enterprise costumers
07:46 – MURAL is a SaaS business
08:22 – MURAL has over 40K active users monthly
08:58 – MURAL has no free plan but has introduced a free education plan to help kids
11:00 – MRR is around $280K
11:11 – Average ARR
12:06 – Currently, MURAL has raised a total of $2.4M
12:16 – Team size is 35
- 12:45 – Most are in product development and engineering
- 12:55 – Office is located in San Francisco
13:30 – Gross monthly churn
14:17 – Some of the customers are entrepreneurs selling to multiple departments
15:23 – MURAL churn on online customers is quite high
15:38 – Average cost per new customer
- 15:55 – One of MURAL's new customer is from an event they've sponsored
- 16:04 – The cost of the sponsorship with other expenses was $3K
- 16:29 – What Mariano does is split up general cost with the number of new customers
16:50 – Gross margin is around 85%
18:45 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

The investment in your company doesn't always need to be cash.
Before going into an acquisition or partnership, go on a vacation and think about it with a clear head.
Having different revenue sources leads to different churn sources—focus on where churn is the least.

Resources Mentioned:

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

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

737: 3000 Hotels Are Paying Them to Optimize Pricing, Investors Put in $50m Jul 31, 2017

Show notes

Patrick Bosworth. They launched in 2012 with 3 co-founders and are now at 105 people. They help hotels—specifically, they help hotel locations better optimize their pricing. They raised $51 million serving over 3000 individual hotel locations paying on average 17 grand per year. They will very soon be doing about a $50 million run rate, 75% gross margin which they tripled over the recent future. This is incredible how they worked that fixed cause structure to drive more growth and bring the margin up over time. They spend about $20,000 on CAC; so there is a super healthy payback period at about 14 months. They are based in San Francisco and Las Vegas.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Crossing the Chasm
What CEO do you follow? – Matthew Prince
Favorite online tool? — Gnome
How many hours of sleep do you get?— trying to get 8, but is getting 7 hours
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – I wish that I had believed that it was okay for me to be happy back then

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:44 – Nathan introduces Patrick Bosworth to the show
01:23 – Patrick is the co-founder and CEO of Duetto Research, his focus is driving vision and growth at a company
01:50 – Patrick thinks his MBA from Harvard is crucial in the building of the company; a friend of Patrick's convinced him of the opportunity to build a tech business and introduced him to co-founder Craig Weissman, who was at Sales Force at the time
02:15 – In the fundraising process, his MBA created credibility as well as his co-founder's MBA from Cornell. Another co-founder also went to Harvard and they were all able to maximize their networks
03:01 – Patrick did the two-year program and it helped him get a grounding in business terminology considering his background was in the arts and in politics
03:37 – If the network is the main concern, there are short term programs, but they are expensive
04:02 – Nathan says he is willing to spend money for people who enter the program to get access to the network
04:23 – Duetto is a hotel software company leveraging on medium data to help hotel managers make smarter decisions on pricing optimization
04:47 – Duetto gets the demand from a particular hotel and picks the price for each customer segment, channel and room type for the next 13 months
04:57 – This has increased the revenue of the hotels from 6.5 to 8.5% which increases their profit from 75 to 100%
05:15 – Duetto gets revenue from the subscription payment that is paid annually based on the product they are buying and number of rooms in the hotel
05:42 – Patrick is surprised that companies are not taking advantage of the performance kicker
06:41 – Last month, 5% of the revenue came from the flat SaaS model
07:10 – The target customer varies – if it is a strong brand like the Marriott, they need to go directly to them rather than the real estate owner; in smaller brands including independent hotels, they need to go to the management company
08:32 – On a per property basis, they are getting $17,000 to $18,000 per hotel per year and it varies according to the number of rooms and products they are buying
08:50 – The company was founded in 2012
09:17 – Patrick and Marco worked on the business idea for about a year and met with Craig in September 2011; it took them 5 months to court him
09:52 – While Patrick and Marco were fundraising, they were only getting $1 - $2 million valuations but when Craig joined, it jumped up to $10 million
10:49 – Craig has more equity than Patrick
10:58 – They have raised four rounds of capital amounting to $58.3 million
11:33 – The payback period is 14 months and they are spending around $20,000 to acquire new customers
11:51 – They have literally not lost a customer in 5 years
12:55 – Selling to the lodging market is difficult because it is an old school industry that does not embrace technology quickly
13:17 – The company tried to spend more on additional sales reps or demand gen but the cash got spent inefficiently
14:12 – Duetto can grow by expanding their reach geographically
14:31 – By the end of the quarter, they are close to 3000 hotels in 98 countries
15:04 – There is a lag in gross and deferred bookings, but the current run rate is a fraction of Nathan's calculation of $50 million
16:10 – The company has a larger services organization than most and they grew from 30% to 70% gross margin in the past year
17:06 – They staffed up sales globally and the services organization with the platform growth margin north of 95%, but the blended gross margin including the onboarding services dips down in the 70s
18:26 – They had a fixed cost structure
18:41 – Patrick says they did spend a million bucks a month during the early years and it was partly due to naiveté
19:56 – The investors have big expectations and they were the ones that reassured Patrick of the capital and growth
20:34 – In the last round in 2015, they were able to raise $30 million
21:55 – The investors changed their mindset in 2015 and in 2017
22:06 – They currently have 105 people based in San Francisco and Las Vegas
23:14 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

An MBA degree can give you a leg up in terms of the network it provides you.
Know your market well, including all its idiosyncrasies.
Study the changes in your investors' expectations and work with them.

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

736: How Mobile Analytics Company Went $0 to $4 Million in 12 Months Jul 30, 2017

Show notes

Sunil Thomas. He's had a ton of experience working in tech companies and decided in 2013 to take the plunge himself and go all in with his 2 co-founders. They've since raised a total of $9.6 million – $1.6 million seed and $8 million in series A. They launched revenue in 2016, broke $1.5 million in total sales and this May 2017, broke $400,000 in MRR out of about $5 million ARR. He wants to double that by the end of the year, amounting to $800,000. They have a team of 45 based between California, New York and India—again, making it easier for mobile applications to understand what the heck users are doing in their apps.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Play Bigger
What CEO do you follow? – Satya Nadella of Microsoft
Favorite online tool? — Slack
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 7-8 hours
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – I wish I knew as much as my kids knew at 13, I had no clue what I was doing at 20

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:44 – Nathan introduces Sunil Thomas to the show
01:32 – Sunil Thomas is the co-founder and CEO of CleverTap
01:46 – CleverTap combines people-based analytics with user engagement, it can be used in your mobile app and website and you get to understand what they are doing
02:23 – It is like a combination of Mix Panel plus App Boy for mobile apps and websites
03:17 – The average customer pays them $2500 – $3000 a month based on event data
03:37 – The top cohorts pay $10,000 to $20,000 a month
04:21 – CleverTap is one of the few companies that has both Accel and Sequoia as their funders and they have raised a total of $9.6 million dollars with a seed of $1.6 million and $8 million in series A
05:18 – CleverTap started in 2013 and has 3 co-founders—Suyin has had various work experiences in the tech industry
05:56 – CleverTap came about because of the need to engage users
06:47 – Nathan says there are only a limited number of apps a person engages with on a daily basis
- 07:02 – Sunil says their business is targeted on the companies and not the consumers
- 07:28 – There are more than 10,000 apps that go into the app stores every day
- 07:53 – The pricing starts at $1000 a month
08:23 – An average monthly active user does 15 to 20 events in your app
08:54 – They currently have 200 paying customers and 2000 apps that are sending them live data
09:13 – A plan of the company is to cover 10 million events a month for their free plan in 3 years
09:31 – The conversion rate is 30% for those who are using the free plan to a paid plan
09:44 – Nathan computes the revenue is at least $400,000 a month
10:05 – In terms of competition, there are three sets of apps: apps that get app data for sales, attribution provider apps and the one about user engagement and app analytics where CleverTap is
11:19 – Their growth churn is very low with everyone on the less than 1,000 plan who are still sticking around
11:51 – The company started to monetize just a year ago and has a 400,000 growth rate
12:15 – They have 45 people globally – 11 are in the US and 32 are in India with the core engineering team in India
13:10 – To acquire new customers, they have marketing qualified leads from websites and they hit bigger accounts on the outbound, focusing on direct sales rather than marketing and advertising
14:41 – The biggest expense is in the hosting
15:18 – It was hard during the early days, but it has now come to a point where they are benefitting
15:55 – In 2016, they broke $1.5 million in revenue and are targeting to get to $10 million by the end of the year
17:04 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Look for a need and fill the gap in today's current technology.
Know your target market well!
You may start slowly at first, but it will pay off in the end.

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

735: Sell Cannabis? He's Raised $3m To Be Your Payroll Management System Jul 29, 2017

Show notes

Keegan Peterson. Keegan is a technology entrepreneur blazing a trail in the legal cannabis industry. He has worked for many software and services companies. He founded Wurk which helps cannabis businesses pay their employees while adhering to the Federal and State Regulations. Keegan is also a former division one athlete from Florida Atlantic University.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Stealing Fire
What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
Favorite online tool? — Asana
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5 to 6 hours
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "I wish I would have started something earlier in my lifetime"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:19 – Nathan introduces Keegan to the show
01:53 – Cannabis is a fascinating industry that is a great place for technology to play a big part in it
02:31 – For a year, Keegan financed Wurk but they've now raised $3M from venture capital (VC)
03:09 – Cannabis businesses include growing, selling, and extracting the plant
03:29 – "Marijuana" and "Weed" have a negative stigma, unlike "Cannabis"
03:46 – Wurk makes profit by selling a service to their clients
03:56 – Wurk ensures cannabis businesses' taxes are paid correctly and calculated correctly
04:33 – Payroll companies being backed by national banks cannot touch cash made from cannabis
04:54 – Wurk is a SaaS company and is in 17 legal cannabis states
05:17 – They sell their services directly to business owners
05:30 – They have hundreds of users on their platform
05:39 – Keegan launched Wurk 2 years ago, in August 2015
06:10 – They currently have 18 employees in 3 offices
06:28 – It's NOT a requirement to smoke cannabis to work for Wurk
06:40 – They do look for people who believe in cannabis as a progressing industry
07:13 – Wurk provides a whole difference face to the industry
07:30 – "We are not the traditional cannabis business"
07:45 – A large portion of Wurk's clients are in cannabis, but there are some clients that are not
08:12 – Most business owners in the business pay their employees in cash
08:27 – "We're trying to help solve that issue"
08:42 – The average client payment per month ranges from $10 to $30
09:03 – Number of employees and number of states the business is in are factors in a client's metrics that determine how much they pay to Wurk
09:55 – Wurk doesn't charge per customer; they charge per employee
11:00 – They don't have a lot of competition
11:16 – They have a low churn of 2 customers in 2 years
11:41 – Currently, they don't have an average Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) because they mostly get referrals
12:01 – They have 5 full-time sales reps with 1 chief revenue officer and other employees are on implementation
12:18 – Their sales reps earn through salaries and incentives
13:40 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

There are still industries that are not saturated.
If there's hole in an industry, there's a market for a business that can fill that hole.
Referrals or word of mouth is still one of the best ways to get a customer.

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

734: Ex Finance Dad of 3 Wants to Own Your Home Jul 28, 2017

Show notes

Tye Schlegelmilch to the show. Tye is the founder of Hinged following a 16-year career in finance, and most recently as co-CIO for Fortress Investment Group which has about 70B assets in their management. Prior to that, Tye was with a variety of different finance firms including Goldman Sachs.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The Snowball
What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezo s
Favorite online tool? — Skype and GoToMeeting
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5 to 6 hours
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "I wish I've been more measured with certain things in my life"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:08 – Nathan introduces Tye to the show
01:48 – Tye has a lot of friends who entered the entrepreneurial space
01:58 – As an engineer, he's always been curious about how he can make things work better
02:13 – He moved out to Connecticut and bought a house
02:17 – Tye saw an opportunity in being able to get things done, understanding what needed to be done, and when it needed to be done in a home
02:37 – Diving into entrepreneurship was just a result of his curiosity
02:55 – Hinged is a holistic online platform for homeowners to better understand, manage, and control all aspects of home ownership
03:43 – Hinged's business model is providing a full software solution for the service providers
04:05 – Hinged is highly selective with who they want (service providers) on their platform
04:20 – They take 5% of the revenue that goes through the platform to the provider that's providing the maintenance or repair
04:39 – Hinged is a marketplace
05:23 – They have several hundred homeowners on the platform
05:43 – Across Fairfield and Westchester Country, they have a few hundred service providers in 50 different categories
06:57 – On an average user basis, there are 20%-40% who have spent money on the platform
07:31 – Hinged launched in Feb 2017
08:32 – Appliance repairs are the hottest category on their platform
09:40 – The average price of services done on Hinged is about $1500
10:19 – Tye funded everything on Hinged
10:54 – Internally, they just discussed capital-raising
11:13 – The industry Hinged is in is a "land-grab" so they're looking into raising capital to expand
11:47 – Today there are 5 full-time employees and a development team from Cogniance
12:48 – They started with a sales team for service providers
13:02 – Teams are continuing to ramp on Hinged
13:35 – Hinged was very well thought out before Tye put money into it
14:05 – Tye's salary in finance ranged from back office administration to major league baseball players
16:06 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

There will always be better ways to do things—keep on brainstorming.
Don't hold yourself back from your own curiosity.
Be selective with who you work with; this will affect the quality of 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

733: With $50M Raised, He's Leading Cargo Container Software Space Jul 27, 2017

Show notes

Zvi Schreiber, founder and CEO of Freightos – the internet marketplace for the trillion-dollar international freight industry. Zvi was previously the CEO for Lightech which was acquired by G.E., and was also the founder and CEO of Unicorn Solutions which was acquired by IBM. Additionally, Zvi was the founder of G.ho.st, a predecessor of DropBox, which ended in a fire sale. He's spoken widely and was in many articles and patents. He has a PhD in Computer Science and he's the author of Fizz: Nothing Is as It Seems, which tells the history of physics as a novel.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Crossing the Chasm
What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos
Favorite online tool? — Mixmax
How many hours of sleep do you get? — 7 hours
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "It's okay for startups to take on a big conservative industry"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:08 – Nathan introduces Zvi to the show
02:23 – Freightos is targeting the world of international freight
02:45 – 90% of the products sold in the West are imported – the entire lifestyle is dependent on international freight
03:18 – The biggest cost components in the freight industry is the trucking, ocean liners, port handling, and airlines
04:38 – "This big industry is very inefficient"
04:52 – Asking for a quote from a big freight forwarding company can take about 3 days
05:45 – Freightos is the "Expedia" for freight
06:09 – Freightos makes money by taking a cut of the transaction
06:24 – They basically do the marketing for the seller
06:40 – Freight forwarders are companies that arrange freight like Expeditors and H. Robinson
06:59 – Some more known forwarders are UPS and FedEx
07:24 – The buyers in this marketplace are the import/export companies
08:46 – Freightos helps with importing/exporting and not door-to-door deliveries
09:15 – Freightos only takes 2% from the freight forwarders' transactions
09:35 – They don't take any percentage from the buyer's end
10:02 – Many freight forwarders are using Freightos' software to automate their own pricing
10:23 – Freightos is a SaaS business
10:33 – They've recently raised $25M from an investment round led by G.E.
11:21 – In 2016, 90% of their revenue came from SaaS because they've just launched the marketplace that year
11:35 – Without the SaaS, freight forwarders are not able to do instant pricing
11:54 – The SaaS platform is serving about 1,000 freight forwarders all around the world
12:04 – Freightos is the market leader for the SaaS
12:22 – There are only a few thousand freight forwarders that matter and Freightos has 1,000 of them as customers
12:35 – January 2012 was the launch date of Freightos
12:43 – Freightos' team size is about 150 people across the world
13:17 – Every shipment involves 2 countries
13:26 – Their biggest office is in Jerusalem and Barcelona
14:07 – Their customers pay less than $1K/month to tens of thousands per month for the subscription
14:43 – The reason why most marketplace startups fail is because of the chicken-and-egg problem
15:06 – Freightos spent 4 years selling SaaS to companies
15:40 – Freightos' first year revenue was 0
15:45 – Their first revenue came in 2013
16:25 – It was in 2015 when Freightos earned their first million
16:56 – Each month, there are about several hundreds to a thousand transactions in their marketplace
17:33 – Freightos is starting to educate freight forwarders and importers/exporters that they don't need to wait anymore for pricing
18:16 – There are thousands of buyers already using their software
20:03 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Our lifestyle is heavily dependent on imported goods.
Find an industry's pain point and start from there.
Don't be afraid to create a startup in a big and conservative industry.

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

732: Why AirBnB Is Using Jumio Along With Many Other Unicorns Jul 26, 2017

Show notes

Stephen Stuut. He's the CEO of Jumio.com. He brings more than 25 years of experience fueling corporate growth and leading technology businesses. Before Jumio, he served as a CEO of TruePosition, a leader in location-based service technology. Prior to that, he was a president and CEO of Broadband Innovations delivering digital interactivity services to cable TV providers. During his 10 years, he has raised over $30M in equity from venture capital firms and strategic investors and ultimately sold the company to Motorola in December of 2005.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – A Book from McKinsey
What CEO do you follow? – John Mallone and Greg Maffei
Favorite online tool? — Outlook
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? – "Travel just a little bit less when your kids are young"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:28 – Nathan introduces Stephen to the show
02:10 – Jumio is a SaaS business, particularly, trusted identity as a service
- 02:18 – Jumio does identity verification and document verification
- 02:35 – Jumio will validate the ID, making sure it isn't fraudulent
- 02:40 – Jumio does biometric facial comparisons from the selfie picture and ID picture for identity verification
03:11 – Jumio's customers are merchants who need to know the identity of a person
03:19 – Airbnb is one of Jumio's customers
03:29 – Jumio caters to airlines, bitcoin companies and banks that have money-laundering requirements
04:13 – "The world is moving to the internet online clamors"
04:17 – Walking into a building and flashing your ID is quite inconvenient
04:58 – Some, like Nathan, don't bother to change their license ID even if it's unrecognizable
05:35 – Customers typically pay 1 year worth of transactions in advance
05:49 – Average contract price
07:17 – Stephen isn't the founder but is a CEO who came in later
07:23 – The founder started Jumio after he argued with a credit card about his identification
08:15 – Jumio was founded in 2014 and Stephen came in 2 years after they launched
08:32 – Stephen was brought in by the investors
08:48 – Jumio has raised $60M to date
09:14 – Jumio just broke in 150K identity verifications in a single day
10:02 – The investors of Jumio
10:48 – Jumio has processed 26M verifications in 2016
10:55 – 2017 verification number
11:21 – The team in 2015 was around 90 and now it's around 110 in the west and a thousand in India
12:01 – Jumio is a hybrid blend of computer vision, facial recognition and human integration into one
12:27 – Stephen is an optical engineer and has designed laser weapons
13:14 – Jumio is well-known in the fintech and economy space
13:25 – Jumio has a sales force direct with a team of around 20
13:50 – Jumio does trade shows in the marketplace
14:28 – Jumio has the top 4 unicorns as customers
15:34 – Different markets have different value that they see from the pricing activity
16:51 – "This is very much a grab the market share and its transactions"
17:40 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

It's a relief to know that verifying your identification can be easily done.
Pricing value affects different markets greatly.
Spend more time with your kids while they're young.

Resources Mentioned:

The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

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