Top Founders

Latest Episodes:

680: How to Start SaaS Company with Very little Savings, with Reply.io CEO Oleg Campbell Jun 04, 2017

Show notes

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:

If you want to put your money to use, you can continue to invest in different businesses.
Outsourcing developers from other countries is more cost-efficient.
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

679: Mobile Majority $25M raised, Acquires Qualcomm's Gimbal To Lead Mobile Ad Attribution Using Beacons w/ CEO Rob Emrich Jun 03, 2017

Show notes

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:

There's a lot of missed data in the offline world that is still not easy to track.
Knowing and understanding your target audience is more effective and cost-efficient for you.
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

678: Creative who needs work? Try Zooppa with $8m Raised and $4m+ In Creative Projects in 2016 with CEO Alessandro Biggi Jun 02, 2017

Show notes

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:

Don't stick with a company where you don't see growth happening—sell it and move on.
You can always learn something from someone who is older much more experienced.
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

677: Talkdesk Passes 50,000 Seats, $25M Raised To Be Your More Efficient Call Center with COO Gadi Shamia Jun 01, 2017

Show notes

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:

When a cofounder leaves, it means he's done his job and the company is healthy
Be in a company where you believe in the product and know that you can accelerate its growth.
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

676: $30M raised, will DroneDeploy create first Trillionaires w/ Drones + AI and Machine Learning? w/ CEO Mike Winn May 31, 2017

Show notes

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:

The drone market is still very young, but is growing rapidly.
The future of the AI industry is promising and it's very likely that the first trillionaire will be from the AI space.
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

675: Would you acquire Mattermark? Artesian $700k MRR, $40M Raised w/ CEO Andrew Yates May 30, 2017

Show notes

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:

Companies in the same space should talk more—they can find out how they're different and how they complement each other.
Being transparent shows that you want people to see your value and learn from it.
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

674: Sumo Logic Passes 1300 Customers, $140M+ Raised, Flirting W/ $100M ARR with CEO Ramin Sayar May 29, 2017

Show notes

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:

Create guidelines when it comes to looking for your CEOs—they should align with the company's cultures, beliefs, and goals.
SaaS companies often have to prove their value and are constantly fighting to earn business.
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

673: Getting Your First 100 Customers with Salesflare CEO Jeroen Corthout May 28, 2017

Show notes

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:

If you're still unsure of starting a new business, find other ways to get involved in that space to understand how it works.
Some businesses offer a free product to show their value to the customer right away.
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

672: How to Use Your Agency to Launch a SaaS Product with Leadberry CEO Adam Jankovits May 27, 2017

Show notes

Adam Jankovits and his goal is to become an outstanding marketing technologist. He is a person who brings together strengths in marketing, technology and social interaction. He's got an MBA and consultancy background, but also has a strong interest in technology and social-networking skills. His focus right now is on his company, LeadBerry.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Founders at Work
What CEO do you follow? – N/A
Favorite online tool? — Slack
How many hours of sleep do you get?— Currently 6
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Adam would tell himself to take networking very seriously

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:10 – Nathan introduces Adam to the show
01:45 – LeadBerry is a B2B lead generation software that converts website visitors to sales leads
- 01:58 – The basic idea is that there's no code needed and you just connect LeadBerry to Google Analytics
- 02:09 – LeadBerry does 2 things: aims to identify B2B visitors and provides real-time valuable data
02:50 – LeadBerry is still currently on pre-revenue
03:05 – LeadBerry's free beta was launched in October 2016
03:15 – LeadBerry just recently removed the free beta and launched the paid version on the third week of April
04:10 – LeadBerry's idea
- 04:31 – LeadBerry was first built in-house
04:40 – Since October, LeadBerry already had over 2K subscribers
- 04:47 – Most of them are companies
04:59 – LeadBerry has generated over 2M leads
05:03 – "The numbers and the feedback kept us pushing"
05:17 – LeadBerry doesn't have a guarantee that their customers will convert to the paid version
- 05:36 – Adam has a plan on how they can possibly convert their customers to paying ones
06:16 – Adam is the CEO and founder of the agency, Brandlift
- 06:26 – Brandlift generates signups through PR, marketing and performance campaigns
07:00 – The amount Adam and Brandlift have invested in LeadBerry
07:17 – LeadBerry currently has 3 people in the team who are also working Brandlift
- 07:24 – Brandlift agency has 20 people
07:36 – LeadBerry currently spends $3-4K a month into their performance channel
08:25 – Adam is spending around $50K total in pre-revenue
09:04 – Nathan talked to a lot of agencies where they build solutions in their agency and spin out the solution as a SaaS business
09:25 – Adam has used LeadBerry in Brandlift
09:35 – LeadBerry is completely bootstrapped
09:52 – Brandlift was launched in 2010
- 10:00 – Brandlift is a full-service digital agency
10:45 – LeadBerry is using different sources like FullContact, Hunter and Clearbit to generate leads
- 10:56 – LeadBerry always tries to explore new and unexplored options in generating leads
11:10 – Brandlift's first year revenue
- 11:29 – Adam was 28 when he launched Brandlift
- 12:25 – Net revenue is around $150K
- 12:41 – Topline revenue is around $1M
- 12:51 – Brandlift is based in Hungary and Los Angeles
13:36 – Adam shares how LeadBerry is different from other lead generation software
- 14:00 – LeadBerry has absolutely no development work that needs to be done if you want to get started with LeadBerry
- 14:28 – LeadBerry integrates with Google Analytics
15:10 – LeadBerry won't need the Google Analytics code
- 15:32 – You can connect your Google Analytics' profile with just 2 clicks
- 15:48 – Google Analytics helps in the identification part
- 16:34 – LeadBerry pulls out the leads for you which saves you time
17:10 – You can use LeadBerry's online interface on a daily basis or connect your CRM and it will automatically sync data
17:36 – Adam won't sell LeadBerry for $100K and is not currently thinking about it
18:57 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Most lead generation businesses made the software for their own use, saw its value, and then spun it out as a SaaS business.
Lead sources often verify their leads with each other.
Starting as a free software for a couple of months may lead customers to see the value in your product and convert into paid customers.

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

671: Predicting The Future of FInTech with Steve McLaughlin, CEO at FT Partners May 26, 2017

Show notes

Steve McLaughlin. He's one of the founders and CEO of Financial Technology Partners. He is a former senior banker at Goldman Sachs, covering fintech for over 20 years. He was recently named Investment Banker of the Year, ranked number 2 banker in Silicon Valley by The Information, and he's top ranked on Institutional Investors. Online Finance 35 listed him as one of the most influential people in fintech.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Jack: Straight from the Gut
What CEO do you follow? – Jack Dorsey
Favorite online tool? — Uber
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? – "I wished I knew where all the stocks are going"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:40 – Nathan introduces Steve to the show
02:27 – Steve's company advises firms across the entire fintech landscape on raising capital and M&A—they're on the sales side helping people figure out where to get money, how to get money, what the valuation is, what the structure is
02:53 – Total transaction volume you were involved with last year
- 02:58 – Financial Technology Partners transaction volume was around $10-15B
03:09 – Which of these 3 industries are you most excited about, like where your most interesting deals would be in?
- 03:34 – It's really across the board, anywhere from the B2B payments to consumer payments to online lending companies like Prosper or GreenSky and the payment space like Marketo
04:08 – Any other players you see in the space besides those two, Betterment and Wealthfront?
- 04:11 – Steve appreciates Riskalyze who are behind the scenes providing the same kind of technology to RAAs and other advisors or someone like BlackRock who he advised last year
04:45 – FutureAdvisor is a startup going initially after the consumer side, they pivoted a little bit to be a B2B player
05:23 – Blackrock acquired FutureAdvisor for a $150M back in August 27, 2015
06:32 – FTP generally gives advice for doing large transactions and are paid on success
- 06:47 – It's either commission or a percentage based on the value of the deal
- 07:38 – Deal size varies. On a multi-million dollar deal, it can be a percent and a $100M deal, it can be 7% depending on the scale and deal size
08:02 – Nathan asks: How do you value a wealth technology company like Betterment?
- 08:29 – Steve looks at start the factors affecting Wealthfront or Betterment and what they think the companies will look like in 7 or 10 years
10:08 – Andy of Wealthfront was in Episode 498
10:20 – The growth of Wealthfront and Betterment are the ETFs in their assets and management
- 10:37 – Steve would use ETFs as a metric to try to predict what Wealthfront and Betterment are going to look like in 5 to 10 years
11:03 – Steve personally thinks that they can have a lot of winners—there are a lot of companies in the mutual funds industry that didn't win and a lot that are dead
- 11:15 – So there's no saying that the guys who invented the popularized robo advisors are going to be the winners
- 11:28 – Steve also thinks that Wealthfront and Betterment are going to do quite well and he sees them from afar, he's a big fan and he anticipates they're going to be winner
- 11:34 – Wealthfront and Betterment have already proven that at some extent, they've outlasted lots of other guys
- 11:55 – Steve thinks Wealthfront and Betterment care a lot about the consumers behind the platform and they realized that their people actually manage their money correctly over the course of time
13:05 – Riskalyze has various risks tools and robo advisor tools that they sell into RIAs
- 13:15 – RIA stands for Registered Investment Advisor
13:55 – All the models could succeed, there's hundreds of mutual fund companies that did incredibly well
- 14:17 – These are fintech companies
14:59 – Nathan is a big fan of Warren Buffett who goes to all the annual meetups and just sticks to his advice
- 15:09 – "I'm not going to be active. I'm never going to beat the market. I'm never going to do this stuff and just going to put it in a passive, low exchange ratio, Vanguard, SMP and 500 index and that's what I do"
- 15:19 – Nathan was hoping that Andy or Jon could convince him to take a shot at one of them, throw $10K in both rooms, see what happens over a few years and do a comparison
- 15:45 – Why isn't Warren Buffett recommending Betterment and Wealthfront?
15:47 – Steve thinks that Warren Buffett probably doesn't know much about Betterment and Wealthfront
- 15:52 – What Steve likes about Betterment and Wealthfront is they're going to have really forensic case studies on stats of the population
- 16:21 – There will be perfect comparable data on which is better
18:36 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Wealth tech companies are becoming more difficult to valuate, thus a need for case studies and empirical data.
Empirical data can help inform your decisions, but the FINAL decision rests on your judgment.
How do you value a company? Look at the factors affecting their growth over a period of 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
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

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