Top Founders

Latest Episodes:

720: How Wealthy People Put On a Conference Jul 14, 2017

Show notes

Steve Olsher. He's the chairman and founder of Liquor.com. He's a New York Times best-selling author of What Is Your WHAT?: Discover The One Amazing Thing You Were Born To Do. He's also hosted the number 1 radio show, Reinvention Radio, and is a national keynote speaker and creator of the New Media Summit.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The $100 Startup
What CEO do you follow? – Giovanni Marsico
Favorite online tool? — io
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 wished I would have trusted myself more"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:10 – Nathan introduces to the show
01:35 – Steve was in Episode 342
02:02 – Steve is still in the process of selling Liquor.com
02:14 – Liquor.com is on ad revenue but is moving into the monetization strategy in Q3 and Q4
02:20 – Monthly impression is currently $3M
02:32 – There's nothing in the bottom line revenue because it just goes back to the business
02:45 – Gross margin varies
03:51 – The company's valuation
04:07 – Average open rate
- 04:14 – Depending on the promotion, the click rate varies
- 04:41 – People are more interested with contests than new products
05:26 – Steve has been doing events
06:24 – Liquor.com was like a family business
07:04 – New Media Summit does live events for different types of viewers
- 08:00 – The idea is to connect with people who have high-visibility platforms
08:34 – New Media Summit is bringing in icons and influencers to events
- 09:06 – Most people are podcasters
- 09:25 – The people in New Media Summit are focused on understanding the value of teaching and sharing their knowledge
- 09:47 – New Media Summit takes care of the podcasters hotel accommodation and meals
- 09:57 – The event will accommodate only 150 people
- 10:17 – There will be an influencer and mastermind on the last day of the summit
- 10:49 – Attendees can pay in full which is $4997—the early bird price
- 11:10 – The marketing just started and they have sold 2 tickets for the early bird
- 11:17 – There are some who invested in Steve's products and services and paid a seat deposit to attend the summit
- 11:30 – Minimum price to attend is $1300 plus the seat deposit
12:28 – Part of Steve's revenue comes from buying stage time
12:44 – Steve can easily pay $10K for a highly-curated event with 100 people
13:19 – An event should have a revenue model or plan of action in order to recoup
14:44 – There are some events that people don't want to go back to because they are just pitch fests
14:49 – Steve doesn't speak at events where 1-10 people are selling
15:22 – Steve's call-to action during his speaking is to sign-up on an order form which has a lot of bonuses
16:34 – An event venue is quite expensive which can average to about $150K for a whole day event
17:00 – Steve is also making money from the events
- 17:28 – They've got everything covered before the event starts
- 17:38 – There will be services and products offered during the event
- 18:03 – Steve will also pitch to future speakers
19:35 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

An event should be well-planned and have a revenue model where they can recoup expenses.
The main challenges in having an event is ensuring people attend and to have speakers who will NOT just sell during the event.
Ad open rates always vary depending on the promotion.

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

719: Question Based Advertising is The Future, $40M In Sales Doesn't Lie! Jul 13, 2017

Show notes

Stephan Goss. He's the entrepreneur and technology executive behind his first company, Zeeto, which he started at the age of 22 and is still running today. He's led the company in expanding from a team of 3 people to 70 in just under 5 years and with the launch of the ad network, he plans on continuing the company's growth story in 2017. Previously, he founded Samples.com & Getitfree.us, which is the biggest free samples property on the internet.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The Power of Habit
What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
Favorite online tool? — Slack and Gmail
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 8.5-9
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "Keep going for it"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:04 – Nathan introduces Stephan to the show
01:56 – Stephan bought Samples.com 3 years ago and Getitfree.us for 6 figures
02:31 – Everything started with Samples.com
02:48 – Stephan left Switzerland when he was 19 and spent 10 months living in tent
03:31 – Stephan and some of his friends were running ad campaigns on the internet
03:55 – Everything is lead generation with Samples.com
- 04:03 – They acquire users for $1 and they get $1.25 in return
04:30 – Stephan was making a 20-30% margin at first
04:59 – One of their large clients called and asked for more targeted leads who offered $8
05:46 – Stephan came out with a decent approach to find targeted leads
06:22 – Stephan was spending $10K for ads
06:51 – Stephan had a business partner and they had some cash flow to begin with
07:14 – The model of Samples.com was good because they can get their ROI fast
07:34 – Samples.com is still running
07:55 – Stephan continued the question asking model for the targeted market and scaled it
- 08:26 – The lead value is more of a composition of all the answers
08:46 – 2016 total top line revenue was $39M and total ad spend was around $20-25M
09:18 – Samples.com currently has 25 people
09:25 – Stephan spent the bottom line money on investing on the Zeeto site
09:42 – Stephan is currently breaking even with Zeeto
09:55 – Stephan still gets his salary from the company
10:23 – Zeeto's model is taken from Samples.com's question-model
11:10 – Zeeto is similar to Google Adsense
- 11:20 – Regular CPMs from Adsense range from $5-20
- 11:33 – Zeetos' CPMs range from $400-2200
12:00 – From Nathan's research, podcasters earn $15-20 CPMs
12:11 – Nathan shares how he asks his advertisers about their CAC and his audience
12:44 – With Google Adsense, there will be around 3 ads per page
13:27 – The technology around Samples.com and Zeeto is considerably pretty hard
14:43 – Facebook and Google has all this data regarding leads that other big companies don't have
15:13 – Zeeto's goal is to help publishers have a better revenue model
15:21 – Zeeto's product has just been launched
16:32 – Stephan sees Zeeto as an additional feature to the paywall
17:01 – Zeeto is incremental
18:18 – It will be more complicated for Zeeto to write questions for each of the articles rather than by being an addition to the paywall
18:24 – "Questions are built to be more broad"
18:59 – Stephan doesn't know what is really going to work yet
19:25 – Stephan's goal this year is to see where they're going to fit in
19:50 – Anything that will drive people to the web will work well
20:19 – Stephan's sample call-to-action
20:34 – You can make custom questions fitted to the website
- 20:46 – The goal is to optimize questions for the best response rate
21:22 – Zeeto was built from scratch
21:54 – Nathan struggles with which of his advertisement he should show to his new subscribers
- 22:00 – Nathan sends them an email autoresponder
22:27 – Zeeto has a user group that has interesting attributes
23:07 – 3 advertisers are not enough to do it efficiently
23:14 – Zeeto now has 200 advertisers
23:37 – Zeeto is completely free and they'll send a check for the revenue share
25:05 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

It's easier for people to give out their details in exchange for something free.
To collect your targeted leads, you need to have focused questions.
Stay encouraged and Just keep going for 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
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

718: Air Pollution is Deadly, How Isralei Entrepreneur Is Cashing In Jul 12, 2017

Show notes

Ran Korber. He's the CEO and founder of BreezoMeter. His ambition is to improve the health and quality of life for billions of people across the globe by providing accurate and actionable air quality data. It's truly the leading air quality analytic company and one of Israel's top 10 promising startups in 2015 with millions of daily users.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Zero to One
What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
Favorite online tool? — Slack and HubSpot
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? – "Keep going, you're doing well"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:10 – Nathan introduces Ran to the show
01:57 – BreezoMeter helps companies to increase user engagement
02:38 – BreezoMeter makes the invisible visible by providing highly accurate, location-based, air quality which includes data that can be integrated to any device or technology
03:08 – Using BreezoMeter's data, the Dyson air purifier turns on whenever the air quality outside is substandard
- 03:16 – A notification will be sent to the Dyson app as well
03:29 – Dyson is BreezoMeter's customer and BreezoMeter tells Dyson's customers about the air purifier
03:58 – The air purifier turns on automatically and, as an owner, you want to make sure that the product you bought is working
04:37 – BreezoMeter provides a license to their APIs
- 04:53 – Customers pay on a monthly basis
04:58 – BreezoMeter is data as a service
05:14 – All of BreezoMeter's customers are enterprises
- 05:23 – The customers use BreezoMeter's data in big volumes
05:49 – Average monthly RPU is higher than $1K a month
06:04 – Ran just read Jason Lemkin's From Impossible to Inevitable
06:29 – BreezoMeter broke a million in sales last year
06:34 – Ran hopes they'll break $10M in sales this year
06:54 – Ran is an environmental engineer
07:05 – In 2012, Ran was searching to buy a house for his family
- 07:10 – Ran's wife has asthma and Ran knows how air pollution can have severe health effects
- 07:45 – We all want to protect our families
- 07:51 – Ran asks the bureau of protection and environment in Israel about the place with the cleanest air and they don't have any data that can answer the question
- 08:08 – Together with Ran's colleague, they built the app
08:19 – BreezoMeter was founded in 2014
08:26 – Team size
08:39 – BreezoMeter has raised $5M
- 08:48 – The last round was in July 2016
- 08:57 – The first round was a seed round with $2M
09:54 – All of BreezoMeter's investors are approachable and they share the same vision
10:12 – Total number of users
10:46 – Dyson has an air purifier and you can download the Dyson link app that will show the air quality data
12:00 – Customers pay depending on the combination of the features they use and the volume of API calls
- 12:20 – BreezoMeter earns more from their features
13:03 – BreezoMeter doesn't disclose their pricing because of their enterprise clients
- 13:48 – BreezoMeter caters to different industries
14:13 – CAC
15:51 – BreezoMeter raise funds to expand and increase their revenue
16:21 – For every sales rep, the revenue is $500K to $1M in annual revenue
16:37 – BreezoMeter has 4 sales rep
17:01 – The churn is due to some of the companies having medical devices
18:30 – BreezoMeter's customers are paying at least $3K a month
19:32 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Air pollution directly impacts our health—therefore, knowing the air quality around us can inform our decisions regarding what products to use.
A SaaS company that serves mainly enterprise businesses has a possibility of scaling faster.
Keep on going and believe that you're doing well.

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

717: Why Moving Her Team to Brazil Was Genius Jul 11, 2017

Show notes

Emília Chagas. She's the CEO of Contentools.com, a company that helps over 700 companies plan, create, distribute and analyze content. As a content manager for over 8 years, she has led video, book and web-based strategies at both enterprises and SMBs. She's a 500 Startups entrepreneur and part of the Endeavor Promises Program.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Hooked and The Hard Thing About Hard Things
What CEO do you follow? – Eric Santos of Resultados Digitais/RD Station
Favorite online tool? — ProfitWell and ChartMogul
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4-5
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "How great life was"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:20 – Nathan introduces Emília to the show
01:58 – Emília is currently in Florianópolis, Brazil
02:21 – Emília's average salary
02:54 – Emília currently has 30 people
03:03 – Average headcount expenses
03:24 – Contentools is a SaaS model
03:31 – Contentools offers a content marketing platform for companies with marketing teams
04:04 – Everything that a marketing team needs are converged into 1 software
04:13 – Average customer pay per month varies
04:46 – Contentools does scheduling and the processes of the content workflow
05:08 – Contentools has 300 customers, 700 companies are using the platform
- 05:21 – Some pay through their agencies
05:35 – Average MRR
- 05:48 – Around $70K per month
05:58 – Contentools has raised an Angel round and will raise a seed round next year
- 06:08 – Total funds raised was $500K
06:19 – Contentools was launched in 2015
06:30 – Emília has been working with startups and enterprises and they have the same problem dealing with content
06:53 – Contentools went beta in July 2015
07:11 – Emília has a big dream for Contentools
07:24 – SMBs need content solutions but no one is offering them one
07:39 – "Content is the beginning of marketing"
07:55 – The 4 founders still own 80% of the company
08:43 – All of Emília's ideas are currently focused on Contentools
08:55 – Contentools wants to create more business intelligence features and content that are targeted more to the customers' needs
09:42 – Emília won't sell the company at the moment
10:01 – Contentools is growing 10-20%, month over month in revenue
10:13 – Churn is usually around 2% and last month was net negative churn
10:49 – 3% gross churn
11:12 – Contentools is up selling their number of users and projects
11:58 – CAC
- 12:35 – 4 people on the team are focused on inbound marketing and there are also remote people
- 13:08 – Contentools doesn't have paid acquisition
- 13:47 – Contentools is adding 20-30 new customers a month
14:07 – The Angel round was in May 2017
14:24 – Contentools is updating their leads for their fundraising next year
14:40 – Valuation won't be out of the market
16:04 – If you fail updating one status, it'll all be gone
17:13 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Content solutions are often offered to enterprises, but SMBs need them too.
One of the cheapest forms of marketing is your content.
It's not easy for a content manager to handle the processes and workflow, so a good content management tool is necessary.

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

716: Putin is Making This Man $50 Million Per Year Jul 10, 2017

Show notes

Stu Sjouwerman. He's a serial entrepreneur and currently the founder and CEO of KnowBe4.com. He's a big Shark Tank fan. He's based in Tampa, Florida.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Positioning
What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
Favorite online tool? — SurveyMonkey
How many hours of sleep do you get?—6
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "I wished that my 21 old self knew that Bill Gates was going to go into Windows server, in about 1995"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:21 – Nathan introduces Stu to the show
01:46 – KnowBe4 is a new school IT
- 01:51 – KnowBe4 focuses on modern security and awareness training
02:08 – KnowBe4 is a SaaS company
02:46 – Average pay per user is $15/year
- 03:01 – The charge is annual upfront which is easier and most people prefer that
03:26 – KnowBe4 focuses on organizations with 50 users and up
03:36 – Average seat size varies
- 03:52 – Average seat size for SMBs is 200-300 and for enterprise 1500-3000 seats
04:21 – Stu sold his anti-virus company in 2010
04:35 – It was called Sunbelt and Stu's 4th startup
04:56 – "We are growing like crazy"
05:01 – KnowBe4 did $7M in 2015, $24M in 2016 and is targeting $50M this year
05:26 – KnowBe4 does inbound marketing and they send newsletters to their list of 1.2M people
- 05:40 – The list was built over several years
05:57 – KnowBe4 was bootstrapped for 5 years and Stu spent around a million building the company
06:07 – In December 2015, they took $8M from VC
06:47 – Total fund raised was $13M
07:11 – It was easy for Stu to let go of 20% of the company
07:25 – Stu's told Kevin Mitnick that he would give him 50% of his company in exchange for Kevin's 30-year experience in hacking
08:34 – The cap table
09:10 – Stu is confident that KnowBe4 will earn $50M this year
09:20 – Churn is 15% annually
09:33 – It is relatively easy to predict whether a SaaS model will be profitable
09:43 – KnowBe4 serves 9500 companies
09:55 – Average ARR
10:22 – March revenue
10:58 – Enterprise sales come in March
11:10 – Team size is 290
11:27 – CAC is around $2600
11:39 – CAC to LTV ratio is 7
12:02 – CAC payback is instant
12:17 – Average selling price per year
12:42 – Stu likes Vladimir Putin
14:03 – Eagles programs are state-sponsored programs that are offensive cyberattacks
14:49 – USA also has offensive cyber weapons, same with China and Russia
14:58 – Hackers go after the weak link in IT security, which is the human
- 15:15 – It comes in the form of an email
15:33 – KnowBe4 sends frequent phishing attacks that are similar to legitimate ones
- 15:43 – This will make the team aware and cause them to be on top of their toes in case they receive an attack
16:02 – KnowBe4 has a phish alert button
16:30 – KnowBe4 trains people with the real stuff
16:41 – Stu used to play soccer and is very competitive
16:49 – Stu has 2 reasons why he wants to go public:
- 16:52 – First, because he has never gone public before
- 16:57 – Second is to expand further and faster
17:12 – KnowBe4's biggest competitors are PhishMe and Wombat
17:26 – Stu gets their competitors' information from Owler
17:45 – There's a possibility of Stu acquiring one of their competitors once they go public
18:11 – Stu got $10M from his previous exit and he's NOT doing KnowBe4 for the money
18:57 – The biggest problem Stu had with his previous company was social engineering
19:08 – "Nobody is really taking care of the human IT security"
20:30 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

There's a big gap in human IT security and more and more people aren't even aware they're being hacked.
Going public can help a company expand further and faster, and perhaps even acquire the competition.
There is no such thing as retirement.

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

715: This CEO Doesn't Care That VC Has Him By Throat Jul 09, 2017

Show notes

Ryan Sevey. He's the CEO of Nexosis, an artificial intelligence and machine learning startup focused exclusively on developers.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things
What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
Favorite online tool? — Aha!
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "Learn how to be true to yourself"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:25 – Nathan introduces Ryan to the show
01:55 – Nexosis was launched in 2015
- 01:59 – Nexosis offers a solution that big retailers are forecasting
02:24 – Nexosis has 300 developers who use their APIs
02:56 – Nexosis has developers from the retail space who have their point-of-sale data
- 03:11 – Nexosis will take the developers data and give out a result
- 04:13 – This result can help in the decision making for the future
04:34 – Nexosis gets people to be more proactive than reactive
04:52 – Nexosis found out how companies are using their historical data
05:14 – Nexosis adds more features to training
05:23 – Nexosis's add-on layers
05:41 – With sentiment analysis, one good example is Wendy's Twitter account
- 06:00 – You can use the number of tweets as a numerical value that can go back to your data
06:39 – One huge case involves a Wendy's beside a convention center; Nexosis can predict future revenues
06:51 – Nexosis can predict future revenues and can understand the real impact of an event
07:23 – Nexosis focuses on the developer ecosystem
07:38 – Nexosis charges .10₵ per 1000 predictions
08:17 – Nexosis makes money once the developer talks to the enterprise and shows the API
08:43 – Nexosis charges the developers by consumption
09:24 – Average pay per customer depends on the data that they have which usually starts at $10K
09:42 – Nexosis was founded in 2015
09:53 – Ryan and his co-founder have been looking at machine learning since 2012
10:09 – Nexosis was originally considered an information security company
10:21 – Team size is 15 and they're based in Ohio
10:38 – Nexosis has millions of API calls per month but their focus is on the number of developers
11:30 – Ryan's vision is for developers to enjoy Nexosis, be it as a hobby or use in a professional way
11:55 – Nexosis is currently serving 100 different enterprise type of developers
12:26 – What Ryan sees is when a developer signs up, he'll make 1-2 projects then invite his friend to try Nexosis
12:57 – Most of the developers are already in a company
13:10 – MRR
13:20 – Nexosis has raised a little less than $7M
13:39 – The long term goal for Nexosis is to raise more
13:56 – Twilio has survived their early days with VC funding
14:26 – Nexosis measures expansion rate rather than the churn
15:37 – Nexosis aims for 100% month over month growth and at the moment, they're hitting it
16:30 – Consumption in terms of the number of predictions is over a million
17:55 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

There are companies who rely mostly on raising funds to scale.
Knowing the data for your FUTURE can help in your decision making TODAY.
No matter what—be true to yourself!

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

714: You Won't Believe What This Divorced Mom Raised $7 Million For Jul 08, 2017

Show notes

Sheri Atwood. She's the founder and CEO of SupportPay. She's also a former Silicon Valley executive and a child of a bitter divorce who also went through her own divorce a few years ago. She's created SupportPay when a search for a better way communicate about child support systems with her ex-husband proved totally fruitless. SupportPay is the first-ever automated child support payment platform poised to transform the complex, time-consuming & stressful process that impacts nearly 300M parents exchanging more than $900B in child support & child expenses worldwide. With SupportPay, today's modern families can spend less time managing and arguing about child support, and more time focused on raising happy, healthy children. Prior to starting SupportPay, she was a former vice-president at Symantec and also has been named #5 of 50 Women in Tech Dominating Silicon Valley and Top 40 Under 40 Executives in Silicon Valley. She's energetic, resourceful and lives by the motto "don't talk about it, be about it."

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – What Got You Here Won't Get You There
What CEO do you follow? – Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Marc Benioff
Favorite online tool? — Stack Exchange
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "Enjoy the path, enjoy the lessons as you go"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:23 – Nathan introduces Sheri to the show
02:37 – Sheri is going to lower the divorce rate by showing people that divorce just gets worst
02:49 – Millennials aren't getting married but are having babies
03:10 – Sheri uses SupportPay and invented it because she didn't have a solution
03:16 – Child support is made up of 2 things: a base payment that covers basic daily living expenses and then there's other additional expenses
03:34 – The argument is about where the money is going and if it is enough to raise a kid
03:46 – While doing an expense report in Symantec, Sheri thought of the idea of SupportPay
04:04 – SupportPay started in 2011
04:38 – Sheri was raised by her single mom who was an alcoholic
04:48 – Sheri was one of the youngest VPs in Symantec and she was able to save money from her salary
- 04:57 – Sheri had multiple houses, cars, boats, gave his ex-husband a house and 2 years worth of salary in the bank
05:24 – Sheri bootstrapped SupportPay at first and she learned to code
05:40 – SupportPay has raised $7.1M total
- 05:49 – The series A was for $4.1M
05:59 – Sheri has talked to people and there was nothing to support parents
06:13 – Sheri also received calls from vendors thanking her
06:35 – SupportPay is a SaaS business
06:40 – Pricing starts at $9.99 a month
- 06:51 – There's also a free version
- 06:55 – Each parent pays independently
- 07:05 – Average pay is $10 a month
07:28 – Sheri started hiring people in 2013
07:39 – Sheri learned to code the basic html, css and php by starting her own website
- 07:50 – Sheri self-studied from books that she found in Barnes and Nobles
08:08 – Team size is 25 and they just relocated to Sacramento, California from Silicon Valley
08:30 – Team has 14 engineers
08:39 – After raising $3M, Sheri realized she couldn't sustain a business in Silicon Valley
- 08:45 – Sheri was burning $95K a month
- 09:08 – Sheri's equity table is a mess now because of her tech people switching to another company for a better offer
- 09:16 – Sheri would have focused on revenue a little bit earlier
- 09:48 – Sheri didn't have revenue until July of 2016
- 10:08 – SupportPay was processing $3M in child support
10:19 – SupportPay currently looks at processing $4M a month in child support
10:30 – SupportPay has over 43K customers with 2K paying customers
11:03 – MRR is close to $100K
12:12 – SupportPay has a free 30 day trial
12:27 – The value of the product is the history, which can be used in court
12:46 – SupportPay also provides certified report records
13:31 – Churn on active users is 3% annually
13:57 – Conversion rate from visitor to paid user is 12%
14:50 – The bigger valuation for SupportPay is how it solves the problem of child support
16:00 – After getting into fundraising, SupportPay focused on their revenue
16:25 – 2016 revenue
16:41 – Sheri has talked to Salesforce to get them involved in SupportPay
- 17:10 – Salesforce is trying to move government applications into the cloud
- 17:15 – SupportPay will get Salesforce into the government space quickly
- 17:30 – SupportPay is built on the salesforce platform
18:00 – Tim Draper invested in SupportPay as he saw the value
18:17 – Sheri's goal for building SupportPay
20:20 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

More millennials are having babies, but are not getting married—this leads to more parents having problems with child support.
Having one less argument regarding child support will alleviate stress for the whole family unit.
The divorce rate isn't getting any better, it's just getting worst.

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

713: You'll Never Guess What Salary They Gave Up To Launch Their Startup Jul 07, 2017

Show notes

Ryan Hungate. He's the co-founder of Simplifeye, it's the number one technology experience for healthcare providers, patients and their businesses. The company's platform of software solution health care providers improve productivity, efficiency and profitability. Ryan is an orthodontist and previous Apple retail strategist and Zach is a previous founder and Wall Street alum with a background in Tech MNA.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The Lean Startup (Zach)
What CEO do you follow? – N/A
Favorite online tool? — Calendly
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5 (Zach) 3 (Ryan)
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "How difficult business can actually be"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:11 – Nathan introduces Ryan and Zach to the show
01:54 – Ryan's dad was a doctor
03:00 – Simplifeye tries to make doctors' lives easier
03:28 – Simplifeye provides the patients' information before they walk in during checkups
04:03 – Ryan and Zach are VC buddies
- 04:07 – They've raised money from their hedge fund friends
- 04:12 – They applied at AngelPad
- 04:35 – Simplifeye was a halfway project and they thought it would be big
- 04:52 – it was in 2015 when they got into AngelPad
05:02 – Zach gave up hundreds of thousands in a salary when he joined Simplifeye
05:14 – Ryan gave up his $500K salary
05:34 – They rationalize building a startup by getting validation from different capital companies
- 06:01 – They also know that they can be in every doctor's office
06:17 – Simplifeye has raised $3.5M
06:24 – Angelpad's terms
06:50 – It was September 2015 when Ryan and Zach came out to NY and ended up coming out with AngelPad strong
07:21 – Simplifeye's customers are healthcare practitioners who pay on a monthly basis
07:25 – Simplifeye tries to involve everybody—to teams of doctors, nurses, dentists and others
08:18 – Average pay is $2400 a year
08:39 – Expansion revenue is based on the size of the practice
09:08 – Simplifeye is also HIPAA compliant chat
09:28 – Simplifeye started with the Apple watch
10:00 – Nathan had Laurence Girard on Episode 575 who talked about the HIPAA compliant chat
- 10:16 – Being HIPAA compliant is a huge advantage for you
10:20 – Doctors communicate with each other in an insecure manner
- 10:35 – The limited standard
- 10:56 – Doctors will pay a fee if they break the standard
- 11:29 – Simplifeye always tries to be transparent
- 11:46 – Having Simplifeye can make doctors feel better in their daily processes
11:53 – Simplifeye just passed 1000 office signups
12:03 – MRR
12:44 – Simplifeye has 90% annual retention
13:24 – Team size is 13
14:42 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Doctors feel more comfortable using HIPAA compliant products and services.
You have to trust your product in order to take that leap from the corporate world.
Enjoy what you're doing and believe that you WILL be successful.

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

712: How To Use a Distribution Channel to Get 200 Customers Paying $15k per Year Jul 06, 2017

Show notes

Seymour Duncker. He's the co-founder and CEO of a company called iCharts, the leader in cloud business intelligence and analytics and a seasoned entrepreneur who has been both a consumer and developer of visual analytics. Before founding iCharts, Seymour assisted SAP's senior management in driving the company's product strategy and was an early team member at 2 enterprise software startups before that.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The Inevitable
What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
Favorite online tool? — NetSuite and Salesforce
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6-7
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "Spend a little more time outdoors"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

02:26 – Nathan introduces Seymour to the show
03:12 – iCharts is a cloud-based business and intelligence analytics solution platform
03:24 – iCharts is a SaaS model
03:36 – iCharts partners with NetSuite which is a cloud-based EOP
- 03:48 – NetSuite uses iCharts as an embed BI (Business Intelligence) engine that powers iCharts for NetSuite's customers
- 04:05 – iCharts is like an app inside NetSuite
04:55 – iCharts can take any kind of data and visually represent it so that people can interact and analyze the data
05:16 – The analogy of iCharts is like the car's' navigation system which is separated from the car's build
05:55 – iCharts considers SaaS businesses as an ecosystem and NetSuite is a large ecosystem
06:05 – iCharts has a mixed business model
06:24 – iCharts is also looking into exclusive partnerships with a SaaS platform to distribute iCharts
06:55 – Pricing starts at $15K per annum depending on the number of users on a platform
07:54 – Seymour arrived in the USA, in 2010
08:10 – Seymour is from Germany
08:50 – When Seymour had an idea for a cloud-based business intelligence platform, he was thinking about where to build it
09:27 – Back then, it was easier to sell in the USA than in Germany
10:10 – Being in California was also a great idea for Seymour's wife, so they built iCharts in the USA
10:37 – Team size is 60
- 10:56 – Sales team has 20 people
11:35 – The majority of iCharts' market
11:49 – iCharts will know the pain points of the users of NetSuite
12:53 – iCharts will already have an idea of the customer's needs
13:45 – iCharts has around 200 customers
14:04 – iCharts started focusing on various markets
14:25 – iCharts has raised $23M to date but they were initially bootstrapped
15:07 – Churn is around 5-7%
16:20 – CAC
16:32 – iCharts is highly profitable from the initial time they closed a deal
17:04 – There's an advantage of growing faster and burning yourself as you grow too fast
17:44 – At the end of the day, it's all about having a high-functioning team that produces quality
18:04 – Average ARR
18:21 – iCharts also offers additional services for their larger customers
20:13 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Build your business wherever you'd like to—even if it means leaving your home country.
Having a well-functioning team that produces QUALITY will drive your revenue and contribute to the success of your business.
Make time for rest and vacations; this will relax and regenerate you.

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

711: Bootrapping into Silicon Valley Jul 05, 2017

Show notes

Daniel Fagella. He started a mixed martial arts gym when he was an undergrad and sold it after getting a UPenn graduate degree in cognitive science. He did turn his grad school thesis on skill development into an ecommerce business that grew for 4 years, reaching $4.2M in top line sales and recently sold it for a million dollars with 90% paid upfront. He's now using his funds for TechEmergence.com in order to influence global AI policy for the better.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Plutarch's Lives
What CEO do you follow? – Last bio he read was Marcus Aurelius'
Favorite online tool? — Asana
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6-7
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Daniel would tell himself that dealing with the existential human condition could be done by contributing to a much bigger world

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:20 – Nathan introduces Dan to the show
02:08 – Dan was studying skill development and goal setting science in psychology for his undergrad
02:17 – Schooling was expensive; Dan decided that he'd rather use himself as a skill development guinea pig than a pizza deliverer
02:40 – Dan started teaching and making money at the back of a carpet store
- 03:11 – Dan's jiujitsu gym was the smallest business back then
- 04:03 – Dan sold the gym after 3-4 years with $250K ARR
- 04:14 – Dan was 25 when he sold the gym
- 04:41 – The membership fee was $157
- 05:07 – Dan sold it for over $100K with 10% upfront to his right-hand and friend
- 05:45 – The business ran for over 2-3 years after that
- 06:05 – Dan took $30K from the $113K
06:36 – Dan was also making $20K a month selling martial arts instructional resources online
07:09 – Dan was using Infusionsoft for his e-commerce business, Science of Skill
07:56 – The e-commerce was doing around $200K top line
08:42 – The biggest cost for Science of Skill was on merchant processing, customer acquisition, advertising and affiliates
09:26 – Dan likes to spend half of his CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) on acquisition
09:42 – The CLV for membership programs were around $100 and affiliates $50-60
10:00 – One of the affiliates was Survival Frog of Byron
10:23 – Byron drove Science of Skill into 6-figures
10:44 – Dan was paying affiliates upfront
11:15 – Byron of Survival Frog was on Episode 395
11:44 – There are agencies who get onto their email list by paying
- 12:14 – One of the agencies is com
13:02 – Finding the right people to advertise and won't tag you as spam
13:11 – Dan will find firearm sites in com—go through the website owners and email them to find the right people to target
14:11 – Dan sold Science of Skill in February 2017 for a little over a million dollars
14:22 – Science of Skill was valued by the multiple of net
15:11 – Science of Skill revenue in 2016
16:27 – Dan's ultimate goal
16:31 – The buyers are a private group of 2 buyers in Ohio who previously ran SaaS businesses then sold them to the government
17:05 – Science of Skill should be at Inc 500 for 2016
17:13 – Dan sold Science of Skill because he believed he has better and bigger things to do in life
17:25 – Dan's core objective involves the global conversation of neuroscience and AI
17:48 – TechEmergence focuses on the business applications of AI
18:08 – TechEmergence is not making money, but will make money primarily through advertising
19:09 – The goal now is to scale and make traction
19:21 – Current cash burn
20:05 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

You can start your business literally anywhere.
Focus on your goals and objectives, even if it means having to burn cash.
The future will probably evolve around n_euroscience and AI.

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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