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Nathan Latka
What if you knew data behind the fastest growing SaaS companies today? Each morning join Nathan Latka as he spends 15 minutes interviewing SaaS founders. You'll learn how SaaS CEO's launched their startup and grew it into a real SaaS business. SaaS Founders range from bootstrapped to funded, MVP to 10,000 customers, pre revenue to pre IPO.
803: SaaS: Email He Used To Get From $0 to $10k MRR
Spencer Coon. He’s the co-founder of HiBox.co and Joincube. He has over 5 years of experience in enterprise collaboration software and 7 years working internationally. He has managed teams across 3 continents and 5 countries. Previously, he was in investment banking at JP Morgan in New York City. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Black Swan What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — Intercom How many hours of sleep do you get?— 7 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Spencer wished he knew that technology was going to be more of his passion Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:50 – Nathan introduces Spencer to the show 02:20 – HiBox is a collaboration app for teams 02:31 – It has an artificial intelligence to bring everything together and enhance productivity 03:19 – HiBox is a SaaS model with a 14-day free trial 03:30 – It has 3 different versions, including a pro version and an enterprise version 03:57 – ARPU is $32 a month 04:03 – An average account has 7-8 people 04:55 – Spencer wanted to have his own product, so he left JP Morgan 05:13 – He wanted to create something tangible and has been passionate about Latin America 05:39 – Spencer started HiBox in Buenos Aires 05:46 – It’s less competitive to start a business in Latin America with talented people and their rates are more competitive 06:16 – There are 5 people on the tech team and 15 people in total 06:28 – Most of the team is in Barcelona 06:36 – Spencer left JP Morgan in 2012 and went to another company where he met his now business partner 07:28 – First year revenue was less than $10K 07:43 – HiBox is Spencer’s first baby as an entrepreneur 08:00 – Spencer used up his savings to start HiBox 08:41 – HiBox has raised some seed rounds 08:54 – It was more difficult to access VC funds in the USA because HiBox is based in Latin America 09:16 – They had 2 priced rounds with a total of $500K funds raised 10:00 – Spencer is still in the middle of negotiations for their next round 10:20 – Over 10K companies have signed up to HiBox and there are 35K active users 10:38 – HiBox is their main focus at the moment 10:42 – Joincube is an enterprise social network focused on multi-national companies in Latin America 11:13 – There are 300 companies paying for HiBox 11:30 – MRR is around $10K for the pro version 11:54 – Last month’s revenue 13:05 – Joincube will become HiBox corporate 13:34 – Gross monthly churn is 6.2% 15:10 – Spencer shares why their product would still be beneficial for their clients after the upgrade 15:46 – It’s almost similar to Intercom, but better 16:00 – CAC is $233 16:10 – Most are used for online ads 16:26 – It is a fully weighted CAC 16:38 – $3K was spent on paid advertising last month 16:57 – Spencer is hoping that the business will be profitable at the outset 17:32 – They’re doing as many tests as they can 18:05 – ARR target by the end of 2017 19:00 – Weirdest thing we ever did to acquire clients was tell them I lost a bet and would give them a 50% discount forever 20:00 – Gross margin 20:48 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: It’s never too late to start your entrepreneurial journey. Starting your business in a country with less competition is a cost-efficient and wise decision. An upgrade should NOT affect customer loyalty and their experience with your product. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
23:2705/10/2017
802: Crypto VC: After $10m Raised in ICO for Fund 3, Now Demand High for $250m Fund 4
Spencer Bogart. He’s a managing director and the head of research for Blockchain Capital, the premier venture firm for investing directly in the blockchain companies. Prior to joining Blockchain Capital, Spencer was a VP of Equity Research where he covered traditional software and internet stocks. He had his first industry report on blockchain technology and is the most active analyst covering bitcoin. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Zero to One What CEO do you follow? – Balaji Srinivasan Favorite online tool? — Telegram 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 just wish I would have spent more time on bitcoin” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:48 – Nathan introduces Spencer to the show 03:10 – Crypto hedge fund has created a “honey pot” for hackers 03:18 – The “honey pot” is actually bigger on the exchanges 04:23 – Most companies are now making bitcoins more accessible 04:45 – Spencer shares how to use Coinbase 05:00 – Spencer has predicted that there’s a sub 25% chance that the US SEC is approving a bitcoin ETF 05:21 – It is difficult for regulators to get comfortable with bitcoin 05:30 – Spencer shares the pros and cons of approving a bitcoin ETF 06:02 – There has been changes in US SEC’s administration that could be favorable with the approval 06:39 – There’s an ETF that was disapproved, but appealed and it was then granted 07:34 – There are speculators who moved in beforehand 08:03 – Blockchain Capital is a VC firm that has focused on blockchain for the last 4-5 years 08:14 – The last fund they did was their own ICO 08:23 – Their cap was a $10M offering 08:33 – Their offering’s sold out in just 10 minutes 08:50 – They are currently raising their fourth fund 09:10 – The industry has been changing consistently 09:36 – “We’re just all hands on deck” 10:08 – Blockchain Capital’s fund one was $3-5M and fund two was $15M 10:40 – Target fund for the fourth one is $250M 11:12 – Spencer shares about their Civic deal 11:50 – Civic allows you to provide your identity to others without them getting your identity 12:28 – Civic’s ICO 12:50 – Spencer discusses with his team how they handle situations where they had an initial investment of token sales 13:22 – Tokens are not dilutive 13:57 – People who bought into token issuance won’t directly benefit from the acquisition of companies 14:08 – There’s a lot of demand for under-line technology 15:35 – Spencer shares the problems Civic is trying to solve 16:18 – Civic wanted to sell enough tokens to get the attributions abroad to create an initial user base 16:35 – A company won’t sell its equity upfront 17:45 – Spencer made their acquisition and token issuance in two totally different time frames 18:13 – Token offerings have different models 20:19 – Nathan asks Spencer how an entrepreneur can manage his money in order to run the business vs. what to keep 20:31 – Most of the funds that have been raised should be converted to dollars so they can pay the bills 21:05 – Spencer is liquidating usually 80% 21:19 – “Do yourself a favor, convert into a currency that you can actually pay your bills in and pay the developers in” 21:57 – Spencer believes that Coinbase is the biggest brand in the space, especially in exchange 22:38 – Nathan asks Spencer, “what if any government starts normalizing crypto?”— the demand for the exchange would decrease drastically 22:58 – Coinbase was incentivized to not see widespread government adoption of cryptocurrency because they need people to put money into their system 23:20 – Spencer believes that if this happens, this will be a high class problem for Coinbase 23:25 – There are companies who are using Coinbase, not just for exchange 26:24 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Bitcoin is becoming more accessible to people because of the demand. The government’s regulation on cryptocurrency is still in its beginnings. Liquidation of the funds depends on the company’s decisions regarding what they need and their what their goals are. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
28:5304/10/2017
801: The $60M King of Ticket Sales
Jayesh Parmar. He’s a serial entrepreneur with two decades of event industry experience. Currently, he’s the CEO and co-founder of Picatic and is listed as one of the world’s top 10 tech entrepreneurs disrupting the event industry. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos Favorite online tool? — Amy 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? – “Failure is just a data point” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:44 – Nathan introduces Jayesh to the show 02:10 – Picatic brings people together and does things that are absolutely different from others 02:22 – Picatic has given away a product for free 02:55 – Picatic has changed the ballgame with their pro product 03:13 – Picatic offers Picatic Anywhere which is a new ticketing service 04:00 – The bigger stream for Picatic is the commission-based stream 05:00 – Average pay for Picatic varies 05:26 – Picatic has a basic product which is free and the pro product which is commission-based 05:33 – Base rate is a dollar and commission rate is 2.5% per ticket 05:46 – Stripe is on top of Picatic 06:18 – Enterprise API ranges from $5K to $100K depending on the API calls and ticket sales 06:58 – Event businesses are seasonal, but Picatic has partnered with different venues and organizations that aren’t seasonal 08:00 – Picatic was launched in 2008 as a side project 08:20 – Picatic went through Extreme Startup and got $250K with 10% equity 08:33 – Picatic has raised $1.5M as additional capital 09:22 – First year revenue is less than $10K 09:48 – 2015 revenue is less than a $100K 10:05 – As an event organizer, Jayesh wanted to de-risk events 10:31 – Picatic has pivoted from their previous model 11:40 – 2016 revenue 12:22 – The revenue is around $1.2M 12:40 – Team size is 15 based in Vancouver, Canada 13:55 – 2017 goal 14:05 – Picatic grows 100% year over year 14:25 – Jayesh has been going to different events to market his Picatic by being a doorman 16:40 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Don’t stick with your current business model just because—test other models that your company could benefit from. The online ticketing world is consistently improving. The best way to get your business out there is by marketing it yourself. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
19:1303/10/2017
800: Crypto: He's Advisor Behind Worlds Top ICO's
Ransu Salovaara. He’s the CEO of TokenMarket, the leading token sale advisory and information hub based on Gibraltar. He’s also an advisor for numerous blockchain startups. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Digital Gold What CEO do you follow? – Travis Kalanick Favorite online tool? — Coinbase 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? – Don’t be so arrogant, don’t think that you know it all. Listen more, talk less Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:28 – Nathan introduces Ransu to the show 02:00 – In February 2014, Ransu’s friend called him and asked if he knew about bitcoin 02:14 – His friend told him to get into bitcoin 02:50 – Ransu is like the Bloomberg of crypto stuff 03:07 – Ransu gets money from the commission of their services to raise money for startups 03:15 – Ransu is involved in Firstblood 03:55 – Ransu shares what he knows about Joe Zhou of Firstblood 04:21 – Christoph of DAO was in Episode 781 of The Top 04:55 – TokenMarket didn’t exist yet during the DAO 05:15 – Ransu is getting 7% of their deal with the startup 05:52 – Ransu shares how they advise startups who are looking into raising money 06:28 – Ransu believes that startups focus more on building their company 06:46 – TokenMarket markets ICOs by going into different community platforms 06:52 – BitcoinTalk, Twitter, Facebook and Telegram are some of the community platforms 07:33 – There are 5000 investors in the ICO field 08:40 – Ransu shares why startups won’t just use ether 09:38 – Civic is one of the ICOs that TokenMarket just recently advised 09:57 – Civic has a KYC system 10:24 – Civic has raised $33M 11:07 – TokenMarket has advised Edgeless, which is their TokenMarket’s first ICO 11:23 – Edgeless raised $3M 13:25 – For the first time, Ransu feels that the USA is falling behind in the crypto world 13:58 – Ransu’s rule of thumb for startups 14:50 – Nathan shares why he thinks ICOs are a scam, and how they actually are not scams 17:00 – The hype of crypto explained 17:20 – Ransu believes that crypto is the beginning of the new digital assets era 18:48 – Every month, the market gets better 19:15 – Nathan shares what he thinks about Uber’s surge pricing and its relativity with ICOs and the crypto world 20:08 – Modern day businesses and startups are the best concepts to go launch ICOs or token issuance 21:38 – There are ICOs with the same concept as Uber and Airbnb, but are still not at par with the two 22:40 – Ransu often receives different pitches and some have concepts that are difficult to execute 23:00 – An ICO fail because of the team, the market, the demand, their failure to deliver and lack of tokens 24:45 – Transitioning from a regular startup to an ICO is difficult 27:20 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Companies looking into their ICO should focus on building their business and strengthening its foundation and service first and foremost. Not all concepts work for an ICO. Cryptocurrency is the beginning of the new digital asset era. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
29:4502/10/2017
799: SaaS: How He Grew To $200k MRR, $2m Raised at $7m Cap
Olin Hyde. He’s the co-founder and CEO of LeadCrunch.ai, an intelligent demand generation platform that accelerates sales with high precision analytics and content delivery. In less than 10 months since they’ve launched, the company has grown to more than 90 customers and are getting 300% higher sales conversion rates. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Humans What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — Salesloft 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? – Olin hoped he would have known how important linear algebra is Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:38 – Nathan introduces Olin to the show 02:09 – The last exit of Olin was Auto-Semantics that analyzed social media feeds 02:22 – It was sold to ai-one 02:28 – Olin spent 2 years with ai-one 02:38 – LeadCrunch started with healthcare 02:51 – LeadCrunch has beat IBM Watson 02:59 – LeadCrunch is using their targeting technology to help mid-market companies find their next best customers 03:17 – Olin shares why they’re targeting SMBs 03:34 – Olin likes to work with people who help others make their dreams come true 03:43 – LeadCrunch’s first product was Private Alpha with 1,070 small businesses signups 03:56 – LeadCrunch stays away from the enterprise because they like the idea of democratizing the power of AI to enable everyone to achieve their dreams 04:08 – LeadCrunch’s business model is a combination of subscription and on-demand 04:42 – It is still early for LeadCrunch’s SaaS model, so most of their revenue is from on-demand 04:53 – With on-demand, LeadCrunch got 130 rebooks from customers in just 90 days 05:17 – Average customer pay is $20K 06:05 – Olin won’t call their revenue ARR, but on-demand 06:40 – LeadCrunch has a customer success function 06:50 – LeadCrunch was launched in August 2015 07:27 – Trailing 12 months revenue is around a million dollars 07:36 – Monthly revenue is around $200K in bookings 07:46 – The product was launched in September 2016 08:04 – LeadCrunch was initially bootstrapped and has raised about $2M in capital 08:36 – LeadCrunch has kept the cap of $6M 09:33 – LeadCrunch has around 90 lifetime customers and 55 on their current product line 10:50 – Olin shares the weirdest thing he did to get a customer 11:44 – Gross margin 12:03 – LeadCrunch optimizes for growth and not for margins yet 12:48 – Customer payback period is 2.1 months 13:15 – On-demand customers pay as LeadCrunch delivers 13:36 – LeadCrunch’s CAC decreases as they get more customers 13:57 – Paid spent is around $6500 14:41 – LeadCrunch does A/B tests to discover new funnels 14:58 – LeadCrunch is influenced by Traction of Justin Mires 15:18 – LeadCrunch is conservative and capital efficient 15:35 – Team size is 15 16:04 – “We could get cash flow positive in 60 days if we want to” 17:40 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Work with people that you believe in the most. Revenue models vary depending on which model works best for the company. Cash flow positive is great, but you shouldn’t have to sacrifice your people to reach it. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
19:2801/10/2017
798: Mobile Ad Tech Passes $100m in Revenues
Harry Kargman. He’s a passionate entrepreneur who bootstrapped Kargo over 17 years into the leading mobile brand advertising marketplace. He’s obsessed with art, design and New York and has been helping steward the ad council in a partnership for New York. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Only the Paranoid Survive What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — Skype, Slack and other product tools 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? – “It’s going to be okay” Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:08 – Nathan introduces Harry to the show 02:41 – Kargo is the largest brand advertising company for mobile 02:45 – Their focus is on high end brands that are highly creative 03:16 – Kargo is a technology company 03:43 – They built a technology that will make an ad on mobile a high end brand experience 04:12 – The ad renders perfectly on a mobile page 05:52 – Kargo works with around 98% of the major media companies and publishers 06:21 – Most of Kargo’s customers are Fortune 1000 companies 07:13 – Kargo charges as a technology play for publishers, like a SaaS model 07:28 – It is integrated into the media that runs on the platform 07:50 – Kargo also takes a percentage of media that runs through the platform 08:21 – Kargo is focused on quality as they’ve turned down a lot of publishers 08:41 – Kargo only has the best quality for advertisers 09:00 – The average cut Kargo is taking 09:25 – Harry shares how they’re taking the cut with the kind of service that they provide 10:29 – The vision that Kargo has is that they’re on equal partnerships 11:14 – In 2015, Kargo passed $100M in annual revenue 11:18 – The growth, year over year, is around 100% 11:56 – 2017 is a big year for Kargo where they’re building a technology that is new to the market 12:23 – Kargo has an AdLab that they try to bring to advertisers 13:11 – Kargo is 15-20% SaaS and 85% is media 13:22 – The goal for next year 13:58 – Total team size is 270 14:25 – Kargo will have a partnership with NBC in 2018 15:07 – Kargo is completely bootstrapped 15:32 – Before pivoting, Kargo was trying to build software and services for operators 15:38 – However, operators wanted to take 18 months to 2 years for testing which is impossible for startups 16:18 – Kargo just got into the water, expecting major media companies to sell their ads and media properties 17:36 – The Famous Five 19:12 – Harry’s wife, Jill Kargman of Odd Mom Out will be on tour 3 Key Points: Develop a product that will make Fortune 1000 companies need you. Regardless of the size of the deal, maintain equal partnership with your partners. Stay bootstrapped as long as you can and as long as you want. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
21:1830/09/2017
797: SaaS: How He Did $30m 2016 Revenue And Will Hit $40m This Year
Irv Shapiro. He’s responsible for the overall business strategy and corporate leadership as the CEO of DialogTech. DialogTech provides the industry a leading, actionable, marketing analytics platform for businesses that value inbound sales calls. The company was named an Inc 500 company in servicing close to 5000 businesses worldwide—ranging from emerging companies to the world’s largest enterprises. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Purple Cow What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos Favorite online tool? —The Top Inbox 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? – “I should have stayed in architecture school” Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:04 – Nathan introduces Irv to the show 02:51 – DialogTech is Irv’s third rodeo in the industry 03:10 – Metamor Technologies is a system information business that built large office systems 03:35 – It scaled to 500 people and was sold to Corestaff 03:51 – It was sold in 1997 for $38M 04:11 – After Metamor, Irv started Edventions which was in the early days of the internet when schools were concerned about internet safety and its environment 04:40 – Edventions provided a safe internet environment 04:51 – In 2000, everything crashed and it was sold to Edison Schools 05:17 – DialogTech’s team size is 150 05:20 – Current revenue is at $40M 05:25 – 2016 revenue was $35M 05:30 – DialogTech raised a total of $60M 05:45 – DialogTech did their A round in July of 2007 06:15 – DialogTech helps companies who receive inbound calls to become more effective, efficient and close more sales 06:37 – DialogTech does four things technology-wise: 06:59 – It tells the customer’s behavior on your website 07:04 – The data then can be used by the marketing team 07:33 – An example of this is a life insurance call 08:18 – Tracking is by a unique phone number 09:38 – When a website is visited, a unique phone number is shown 10:14 – DialogTech is a SaaS model, but is in essence a cloud model 10:32 – Charges vary if the calls are in a batch or if it is an unlimited plan 10:37 – Customers pay between $150K a month to over $100K a month 10:55 – DialogTech has almost 5K customers 11:19 – Irv shares a growth tactic they tried that didn’t work 12:36 – They sent burner phones to over 200 marketing executives that have videos on them that will play after opening the phone 12:55 – They’ve spent over $20K for the campaign but they were not able to get a single sale 13:20 – Annual logo churn is around 8-9% 13:35 – Monthly revenue churn on the enterprise side is around .4% 13:47 – DialogTech has around 98% revenue retention 14:59 – 3K of their 5K customers are legacy customers who are at a lower price point 15:09 – Irv believes that they will reach $40M in revenue by end of 2017 15:30 – The volume of calls that DialogTech processes requires a technology that needs funds 15:55 – Gross margin is around 65% 16:38 – CAC depends on segment 16:43 – Gross margin payback is 18-24 months 16:59 – Irv explains how they compute it 17:45 – LTV is 5-7 years for enterprise customers 18:13 – DialogTech has around 40 engineers, 50 in sales overall, 12-15 customer support, and the rest in back end 19:50 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Target goals can be reached with a consistent model and growth tactics in play. We learn from our mistakes, so don’t be afraid to make them. Weigh the pros and cons of raising capital; if there is a need, then go for it. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
22:2229/09/2017
796: Crypto: Kim Jong-un Crypto Funded Nukes vs. Billions Out of Poverty
Andreas Antonopoulos. He’s a technologist and serial entrepreneur. He has become one of the most well-known and well respected in bitcoin. He’s the author of Mastering Bitcoin, published by O’Reilly Media. Andreas is also considered the best technical guide in bitcoin and The Internet of Money—another term that he coined—is his book about why bitcoins matter. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Digital Gold What CEO do you follow? – N/A Favorite online tool? — Trello How many hours of sleep do you get?— 8 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “What you’re worrying about is really not worth worrying about, just go for it” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:50 – Nathan introduces Andreas to the show 03:17 – Cryptocurrency is still volatile 03:20 – Most ICOs nowadays still converts 60-80% of funds 04:00 – There’s no single system in crypto 04:21 – Andreas thinks that it isn’t the matter of ideology, but a matter of being a rational actor 04:48 – From a regulatory perspective, Andreas foresees that more than 90% of the ICOs will fail 05:00 – Founders get rich because of the investors not doing much to evaluate the ICOs 05:20 – There’s a lot of immature products coming to ICOs 05:47 – The cycle will just burn through a lot of money 06:12 – Andreas isn’t involved in any ICOs and he’s actually against investing in them 06:50 – ICOs can be seen as another space for crowd funding which bridges the gap between angel investment and VC 07:15 – At this time, there’s a lot of risk in ICO 07:44 – Cryptocurrency is the application of networks and market economics to the flow of money internationally 07:50 – Just like the internet was the application of a flat network system to communication around the world 08:23 – It is a system that doesn’t belong to any company or to any one person 08:27 – It removed intermediaries in banking and finance 09:00 – You don’t have to trust the person you’re dealing with, but just trust the platform 09:32 – It is extremely important for developing nations 10:28 – Andreas shares how cryptocurrency protected his mom’s cash retirement from failing Greek banks because of Greece’s current economy 11:12 – Nathan shares a sample scenario with ISIS using cryptocurrency to attack Greece 11:28 – Andreas shares why the US shouldn’t have spent 20 years bombing them as it led them to acquire weapons 13:30 – If Kim Jong-Un wants to acquire weapons in cryptocurrency, there’s no current way to regulate it 14:42 – The ability of the government to control the money leads to corruption and oppression of people 15:03 – “No, you can’t control money” 15:50 – Andreas is more interested in insuring that people who are trapped in poverty have the means to provide for basic necessities 16:50 – Andreas’ point regarding the future of the world depending on cryptocurrency 17:56 – ICO is a productive application of capital and investment, believing that there will be a return 18:31 – There’s a lot of people speculating about the future 19:11 – The comparisons between different cryptocurrencies and their market capital are not useful 19:24 – It is mostly based on speculation at the moment 20:50 – Andreas’ primary advice is not to buy crypto, but to earn it 20:55 – It is an online visual economy 21:22 – He has been earning his cryptocurrencies for the past 3 years 21:44 – The speaking deal of Andreas is in bitcoin, plus 20% 22:06 – He liquidates his tokens on a monthly basis 23:00 – There are some establishments that receive cryptocurrencies 23:45 – There are also a lot of BTMs or bitcoin automated machines available 24:22 – There are also local traders for cryptocurrencies but you just have to be cautious 25:12 – The questions Nathan should be asking for a pitch of a $5M crypto hedge fund 25:30 – Crypto funds are holding crypto for thousands of investors 25:40 – Their security should be a thousand times better and most companies can’t do that 26:00 – It’s easy to hack on a computer 26:35 – This is very similar to DAO 26:44 – The better way is to hold crypto funds individually by putting them into a wallet 27:24 – “You can’t keep information securely concentrated in one place” 28:57 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: As of this moment, it is not that wise to invest in an ICO. The future of cryptocurrency can have both a positive or negative effect on people. Don’t buy cryptocurrency, earn it. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
30:5328/09/2017
795: SaaS: With $117m Raised, Google Tried to Kill Him But He's Winning App Deeplinking Wars
Alex Austin. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Branch, a leading mobile deep linking platform with solutions that unify mobile user experience and measurement across devices, platforms and channels. He founded Branch back in 2014 while attending Stanford Graduate School of Business. Before founding Branch, Ale founded Kindred Prints, had engineering roles at NASA and holds many research papers under his name. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Mistborn Trilogy What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos Favorite online tool? — JMP Statistical Analysis 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 have to start your own company, don't wait. There is never the right time. Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:04 – Nathan introduces Alex to the show 02:46 – Alex shares how he moved from NASA to a deep linking platform 03:33 – Alex realized that he hated school and loves building instead 03:57 – Alex still does building projects on his free time 04:33 – Alex started Branch when they were building the Kindred app 04:46 – The problem they faced was discovery as it was hard for people to find the app 05:36 – The only way people find Kindred is through the app store 05:48 – Alex created an ability to link to their photobooks with the ideal model 06:00 – They were able to do deep linking which is the ability to link to a page inside an app and have people discover the app for the content inside 06:12 – Branch was then able to solve a general problem 06:28 – Alex then decided to sell Kindred 07:34 – They didn’t see Kindred as a billion dollar company 07:47 – When they started Branch, people were already asking them about the technology 08:30 – Currently, 40% of the app ecosystem is using Branch today 08:42 – Airbnb is one of the apps that uses Branch—if you use it to find a property, then send a link to a friend, that link would be a branch link 09:05 – The goal is to get 90% of the app ecosystem to use Branch 09:26 – Google will allow you to search data on the web and Branch will search through all the pages 09:37 – Branch charges through the usage of the link 09:41 – The ultimate goal is to build a discovery platform 09:47 – Branch is a SaaS business 10:19 – For big companies, the charge is actually by tier 10:47 – Average deal size for enterprise client is $55-60K annually 10:57 – Branch just started selling to enterprise 11:03 – Branch was launched in 2014 11:09 – The platform was initially being given away 11:33 – They only turned on their paywall more than 7 months ago 11:39 – Branch raised $117M 11:57 – It was a priced seed round and a carryover from Kindred 12:38 – Team size is around 120 with 65 engineers 13:40 – The weirdest marketing tactic they did was they went to Stack Overflow and answered questions back linking to their product 14:38 – Branch just started a meetup group where people can talk about mobile growth 15:22 – Over 26K developers are using the SDKs 15:33 – When they first started, they’ve worked on different series of ideas that failed to work 15:51 – It took a couple of months for them to gain momentum 16:40 – Number of paying customers 17:18 – 99% of the revenue comes from enterprise customers 18:35 – The app ecosystem is like Yahoo, in 1995 18:53 – Google allowed the access to the information on the web 19:19 – Branch is built as SaaS because it keeps the lifeline long 19:55 – How Alex delivers his pitch 20:18 – Alex doesn’t want to have competition and they always make sure to kill off those who start to compete 20:57 – The platform is designed to have a network effect 21:36 – EOCO is the company that closed after competing with Branch 22:20 – Alex’s wife is a VC but she’s not invested in Branch 24:28 – Alex isn’t really doing Branch for the money alone 24:58 – Alex sees Branch as his contribution to make a great impact 26:00 – “There’s always a big company to go after” 26:13 – Google launched a product last year which is a direct replica of Branch 29:00 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Develop a solution to a problem and customers will flock to you. As shady as your tactic may be, organic traffic is still the best source of traffic. There will always be bigger companies than yours; don’t let it stop you from improving and growing. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
34:2227/09/2017
794: SaaS: How He Used Pizza to Hit $7.5m in ARR and $18m Raised for his Lead Scoring Tool
Evan Liang. He’s the CEO and co-founder of LeanData which he founded after managing a data cleanup project at his first company and felt the pain of cleaning Salesforce data by hand. Prior to LeanData, he was the GM and VP of products at Caring.com where he grew a small acquisition within the company’s main business. Generally, he owned 50% of the company’s revenue over 2 years. Before Caring.com, Evan worked at Shasta Ventures, a leading venture capital firm focused on end-user driven businesses. Before that, he worked in project management at eBay and business development at Microsoft where he helped launched the Xbox 360. Evan started his career at Battery Ventures where he specialized in software and ecommerce investments. He holds his MBA from Kellogg and BS in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things What CEO do you follow? – Rich Hagberg Favorite online tool? — Slack 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 want to be an entrepreneur and not a VC first” Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:03 – Nathan introduces Evan to the show 03:04 – LeanData helps marketing and sales scale their lead management processes 03:11 – They’re focused on two business processes: lead routing and marketing attribution 03:20 – Cloudera is one of their customers 03:30 – With all the leads that are coming into Cloudera’s system, LeanData will figure out which sales rep should follow up 03:43 – LeanData works well with lead scoring predictive vendors 04:30 – LeanData is a SaaS business 04:36 – Average customer pays $20-30K a year 04:42 – Large enterprises are paying 6 figures 04:54 – The pricing depends on the number of seats 05:24 – Marketing attribution is an upsell from the product 05:34 – LeanData was launched in 2012 05:46 – Evan has always been passionate with startups and he was just waiting for the right idea to come along 06:18 – Evan was at Caring when he saw the problem that LeanData was able to solve 06:40 – They had a large amount of data in Salesforce that was a big mess 07:25 – First year revenue of LeanData was $200K 08:08 – LeanData raised $1.3M from their seed round 08:19 – Total funds raised $18M 08:28 – The seed round was a priced round 09:12 – Current team size is 50 09:28 – 15 are engineers, 15 in sales, 5 in marketing, 8 in CS 09:48 – LeanData currently has 250 enterprise customers 10:13 – MRR is around $600K and ARR is around $7.5M 10:34 – The weirdest marketing strategy of LeanData’s was sending pizzas to people 11:00 – It was a marketing campaign and the customers picked the pizza place where they wanted their pizzas from 11:27 – The problem was some chosen pizza places wouldn’t deliver so one of the SDRs would have to buy the pizza and deliver it 11:56 – They were still able to get some sales from that campaign 12:08 – The primary CAC is for events 12:32 – One event is the Lunch and Learn Event 13:05 – They spent around 600K in strategizing conferences over a year 13:17 – Paid advertising spend is less than 10K 14:04 – Annual logo churn is 15% 14:13 – LeanData is currently net negative revenue churn 14:30 – ARPU expansion is between 5-10% 14:48 – LTV is around 5 years 15:35 – LeanData’s competitors in the ABM lead scoring space 16:27 – Gross margin is 80% 16:42 – LeanData benefits from Salesforce 17:16 – LeanData doesn’t need backend servers 17:30 – Evan answers about their exit strategy since it seems like Salesforce is the only one who can acquire them 18:30 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Organizing your data is crucial for the company’s operations. The weirdest marketing strategy can take people aback and still win business for you. The exit of a company depends upon the possibility of an acquisition; however, there will always be other options. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
21:2026/09/2017
793: Will This Funded Event Ticketing Company ICO?
Sandy Khaund. He’s the CEO of Upgraded, a platform for tickets using blockchain technologies. Previously, he was the CTO at InStadium, a sports venue ad network and senior director at Turner Broadcasting along with CEO of Iryrnsoft, a video-based learning for mobile devices. He was also the COO of teen social network at Piczo and director at Microsoft. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The World is Flat What CEO do you follow? – Reed Hastings and Mark Zuckerberg Favorite online tool? — OneNote 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? – “The secret of life is doing what you do for free and getting someone to pay you for it” Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:02 – Nathan introduces Sandy to the show 02:37 – Upgraded has a solution widget that addresses the problem of event tickets 02:52 – Alot of the tickets are fake and being sold on Craigslist 03:31 – The Cryptography has worked so well that there’s only one bitcoin 03:54 – Upgraded has a tokenization aspect which converts tickets into a blockchain ticket 04:02 – Another revenue model as an alternative to Stubhub 05:04 – Upgraded has already made less than $50K in revenue 05:11 – Sandy started Upgraded last March 05:30 – There are 4 full-time people on the team 05:45 – The cofounder was initially a consultant and Sandy has more in equity 06:07 – The initial fund was from Sandy’s personal savings 06:14 – Sandy took an Angel investment of $300K on a convertible note 06:33 – With 4% interest and $7M cap 07:11 – Sandy and the team are still talking about the ICO 09:00 – Right now, cryptocurrency relates to the currency valuation 09:12 – For Sandy, he’s more about the technology rather than the currency 11:10 – Sandy wants to make sure that what he will do what is right for the business 11:50 – Nathan talks about the regulations in ICOs 12:11 – Sandy had a talk with his attorney about ICOs and blockchain 12:40 – As of the moment, anything can happen 13:30 – There was also some acquisition talks with Upgraded but Sandy turned it down 14:03 – Sandy didn’t build Upgraded for the money 14:20 – “I just want to keep creating” 15:16 – Sandy thinks it is still too early for the company to do ICOs 15:45 – Nathan talks about the issue DAO had 17:41 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: While ICO is one of the hottest topics in blockchains, some companies would rather not delve into it at this time. Create a utility that can solve one of the most taken for granted problems. Do the work that you would do for free and then get someone to pay you for it. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
20:3825/09/2017
792: SaaS: $7m ARR Founder Used Ice Cream To Get Customers, How?
C. Lee Smith. He’s the CEO of SalesFuel, a multi-million dollar sales enablement firm he founded in Columbus, Ohio in 1989. SalesFuel leverages critical insights that enables its clients to acquire, develop and retain their best employees and customers. The company is launching a brand new product called TeamKeeper that will revolutionize the way managers manage and develop their people which leads to a happy, business culture and a reduction in turnover. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Sales Bible What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk and Tim Cook Favorite online tool? — LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator and Lynda How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Relax man, you’re going to make it” Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:02 – Nathan introduces Lee to the show 02:42 – SalesFuel does sales enablement 02:48 – It helps salespeople to sell better, close more deals and be the trusted advisors for their client 03:23 – SalesFuel leverages critical insights for both sales prospects and employees 03:35 – SalesFuel has 3 SaaS products: AdMall, TeamKeeper and one still in the works 03:59 – TeamKeeper is already up and working 04:13 – AdMall is for media companies 04:22 – When Lee started the company, the idea was to provide business intelligence based on business type 04:35 – SalesFuel currently has over 450 types of businesses that they’re researching 04:41 – The research team is the second largest team in SalesFuel with 10-15 people 04:57 – Total team size is 30-40 05:08 – 2016 total sales is $6-10M 05:30 – SalesFuel was on the internet in 1995 with a few companies still new to the web when they had their first product 05:56 – It was in 1997 when SalesFuel built their first web application 06:25 – An AdMall customer pays an average of $500-1K a month 06:51 – AdMall’s pricing model is based on the size of the sales team 07:41 – The price depends on the range of the number of employees 07:59 – For a digital agency, they have a different price because of the numbers of tools that they use 08:21 – SalesFuel currently has 1500 customers 09:21 – Columbus is a foodie town 10:03 – Lee sent packs of dry ice cream from a local artisan to their potential clients 10:09 – Lee had calls returned to him—he thinks it was the weirdest marketing strategy he ever used 11:10 – Lee closed a deal from that marketing strategy 12:06 – SalesFuel is 100% bootstrapped 12:38 – First year revenue is around $100K 12:50 – Revenue in 2000 was around a million 13:45 – 2010 revenue is close to $3M 14:40 – SalesFuel’s retention rate year over year is above 98% 15:20 – SalesFuel has client and revenue growth year over year 15:54 – Logo churn is equal to revenue churn 16:34 – CAC 16:48 – SalesFuel gets their leads from thought leadership and business development 17:23 – For research and blog, SalesFuel spends a little over $250K annually 17:45 – SalesFuel currently has 2 SDRs 18:02 – Product team has close to 18 people 18:15 – Sales and marketing team has 10 people and the rest are in operation 19:23 – SalesFuel has around 100 new customers every year 20:52 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: A slow hustle is never a bad strategy— grow slowly and consistently. There are tons of new ways to gain customers; be creative, bold and just go for it. Believe that you can and will make it! Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
23:3924/09/2017
791: BrightFunnel Marketing Tech Passes $3m ARR, 70 Customers
Chris Mann. He has over 25 years of experience in product management and strategy. In 2010, he joined Bizo and created a marketing automation system for B2B paid advertising and led the company through its $175M acquisition by LinkedIn. He was also involved in LinkedIn’s advertising business. Prior to Bizo, Chris held product leadership role in IBM and Coremetrics. Today, he is the CEO leading Brightfunnel. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Hard Thing About Hard Things and High Output Management What CEO do you follow? – Russ Glass Favorite online tool? — LinkedIn 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? – “Come from the heart” Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:00 – Nathan introduces Chris to the show 02:53 – Chris was the head of product at Bizo when they were just starting with 15 people 03:31 – Chris began advising for Brightfunnel when there were only 18 people in the company 03:41 – He was still at LinkedIn at the time and the previous CEO told Chris to join them 03:58 – Chris joined as head of product and the transition was planned for him to take the CEO seat 04:06 – Chris took the CEO seat in April 04:30 – Chris had to stay with LinkedIn after the acquisition 04:55 – Chris thinks LinkedIn won’t have a mature and dominant advertising platform from a scale standpoint 05:22 – “The scale would never get to Facebook” 06:20 – Chris has been in the advertising game for 8 years 06:35 – Back at Bizo, Chris built something like Brightfunnel 06:49 – When Bizo came to LinkedIn, they acquired Fliptop 07:18 – LinkedIn isn’t the company you should go to when you want to improve your advertising 07:39 – Chris solved the problem and he knows B2B marketing well 08:24 – Chris talks about the transition 08:46 – The transition has been smooth 08:53 – Chris has built great credibility and relationships within the company 09:13 – The company just had a record quarter where new ARR was three times more than last year 10:33 – In B2B marketing today, there isn’t a measurement platform that can see every single marketing activity 10:49 – Brightfunnel puts the data together in a way that it is understandable for the marketers to optimize 11:55 – Brightfunnel is SaaS-based with an annual subscription 12:08 – ASP last quarter was $93K which is great for a cloud company 12:35 – 150 marketers have touched Brightfunnel 13:33 – Brightfunnel doesn’t take any deal less than $30K 13:44 – Average ARR per customer is around $50K 13:53 – Team size is 45, 1/3 engineers with 8 in marketing and 6 in sales 15:00 – When Brightfunnel was at a Marketo’s conference, the head of marketing brought in puppies 15:30 – There were a lot of people who came to their booth 15:57 – Cost per lead has been around $59 across all programs 16:10 – Conversion is 30% of their pipeline 17:38 – For $1M a quarter for a new ARR, Chris wants to have 5M pipeline 18:00 – Team is based in San Francisco with 2 remote 18:24 – Brightfunnel just crossed the 70-customer mark 19:09 – Average ARR 19:50 – Logo churn is around 10% annual 20:20 – RPU expansion is around 20-25% 21:41 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: The transition from one company to another is always a learning experience. LinkedIn won’t have a mature and dominant advertising platform. Marketers need a platform like Brightfunnel that will help them become more effective with their campaigns. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
25:5223/09/2017
790: Book in a Box Passes $11.3m in Revenue, 500+ Authors
JT McCormick. He’s an American businessman, author and speaker. Most recently, he served as President of Technology company HeadSpring before his current role as president & CEO at Book in a Box. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Cyrus the Great What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos Favorite online tool? — Slack 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? – It’s not about the high school diploma. It’s about the work ethic and the sacrifice you’re willing to put in to achieve greatness Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:47 – Nathan introduces JT to the show 02:08 – It is possible to buy a bestseller from Book in a Box 02:23 – The cost will depend on many factors 02:40 – One of Nathan’s friends spent almost $250K on Book in a Box because he wanted to put out a book and increase his speaking fee 03:15 – There are many people who paid more than $250K to get a book out 03:21 – Nathan read his friend’s book and thought it was trash, but his friend’s speaking fee increased 03:33 – It’s still a positive ROI 04:02 – Book in a Box specializes in ensuring the books are filled with valuable and meaningful content 05:11 – Book in a Box has made it possible for authors to publish their book 05:27 – JT just met a professional speaker who has been in the business for 22 years, but never had a book 05:34 – He never got the time to write a book 05:41 – Book in a Box will just interview him and write the book for him 05:52 – “Your book written in your tone, your voice” 06:09 – Nathan shares how Book in a Box makes you spill the beans 06:41 – Cost is $25K which is $5K a month for five months 06:58 – The quality of the books are the same as the ones from Barnes and Noble 07:13 – Nathan got a deal from Portfolio Random House 07:37 – Book in a Box provides proposals and manuscripts for their clients to bring to publishing houses 08:00 – Book in a Box has worked with a total of 500 authors 08:31 – Book in a Box launched in 2015 09:00 – Book in a Box is one of the unicorn companies in the startup world 09:13 – “We, as Book in a Box, have no debt, no private equity, no VC money and we are extremely profitable” 09:27 – Book in a Box has changed pricing a couple of times 09:38 – When JT met Tucker and Zach, the co-founders, he was actually looking for someone to write his book 10:14 – Tucker offered JT three pricing models, $10K, $18K and $30K and JT chose the latter because he wanted a high-quality book 10:51 – JT explained how the pricing turned out to be just one pricing model which is $25K 11:33 – Total revenue since 2015 is $11.3M 12:07 – Book in a Box currently averages 25-30 books a month which has continuously grown to 50-75 a month 12:29 – Team size is 30 full-timers with over 100 freelancers 13:13 – “We’re a relationship company” 14:17 – Book in a Box treats their freelancers with respect and pays them on time 15:05 – Book in a Box helps with marketing and book sales 15:14 – Customers go to Book in a Box for one of three reasons; credibility, thought leadership or lead generation 15:48 – Book in a Box created Thought Leader Media 16:01 – Pricing starts at $15K to up to $75K yearly 16:17 – The pricing varies depending on the author needs 16:51 – Thought Leader Media just rolled out in Q1 16:58 – 35 out of 250 published books are in Thought Leader Media 17:10 – Total book sales from Book in a Box authors 18:50 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Those who want to have a book written, but can’t manage to start can simply utilize companies such as Book in a Box. Pricing is crucial in every business—it’s either you make it big or lose everything. Respect and an excellent work ethic are keys to success. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
20:5922/09/2017
789: Google Bought Their Beacons to Distribute Free Wifi in India
Sharat Potharaju and Ravi Pratap Maddimsetty, co-founders of MobStac. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Traction What CEO do you follow? – Ed Catmull who wrote Creativity Inc for Ravi Favorite online tool? — Rapportive How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “That entrepreneurship is a very, very painful journey” Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:07 – Nathan introduces Sharat and Ravi to the show 02:23 – Sharat and Ravi were classmates since fifth grade and were roommates in college 02:53 – MobStac is trying to solve the problem of online to offline device connections 03:04 – They use the technology of WiFi, bluetooth and beacons in mobile devices 03:17 – Beaconstac is one of MobStac’s products 03:22 – It is a SaaS-based product that uses Bluetooth beacon technology 03:29 – It allows businesses to gather analytics 03:34 – It charges monthly 03:47 – Beaconstac is MobStac’s main revenue stream 04:08 – Businesses use bluetooth beacons that can be deployed to physical stores 04:18 – Beaconstac’s platform can then be used to track marketing and analytics 04:27 – Pricing starts at $49 to $99 monthly 04:34 – The price will vary depending on the number of beacons deployed in any physical location 04:45 – Average cost per beacon is $5 monthly which is on top of the starting price 05:25 – Beaconstac has a mixed group of customers, from mom and pop stores to enterprises 05:57 – Some would pay $50 a month and $5000 a month for others 06:04 – There are currently around 10K beacons deployed in total 06:27 – MobStac is a software company 07:03 – MobStac has partnered with a Chinese OEM who makes the hardware 07:35 – The pay for the hardware is a one-time cost 07:40 – “You own the beacons once you pay for the beacons” 07:43 – Charge per beacon is $22 07:50 – The margin is very small 08:07 – They make revenue mostly from the software and not from the hardware 08:15 – MobStac was launched in 2010 08:24 – It was focused in building products in the mobile space 09:20 – After pivoting, first year revenue was not zero but it was small 09:35 – 2014 revenue was less than $250K with 10-15 people on the team 09:54 – Current team size is 20 10:00 – The company is based in Bangalore, India but Sharat goes to New York as well 10:17 – Last month total MRR is close to $25K 10:22 – Target ARR by the end of 2017 is 500K 10:37 – Which was only from the Beaconstac product 10:56 – Beaconstac currently has 100 customers 11:12 – One of Beaconstac’s biggest customer is Google India 11:14 – Google has deployed over 2000 beacons at 117 train stations 11:28 – It is the largest public Wi-Fi project in the world 11:32 – The beacons are used to send notifications and awareness to people who are waiting at the stations 11:46 – Sample notification 12:20 – MobStac has raised $3.5M 13:07 – The strangest customer acquisition strategy they’ve done 14:10 – Google has made the beacon technology compliant with the chrome browser 14:23 – Someone who is near a beacon can receive a notification as long as he has a chrome browser and bluetooth on; no need to download an app 15:15 – One of their customers is a freelancer who bought a beacon so whenever he goes to an event, the beacon will send a notification to other attendees to market his services 15:56 – MobStac isn’t spending anything on paid marketing 16:01 – Ravi does some content marketing for the company 16:37 – Cap table 17:31 – Sharat and Ravi still own more than half of the company 19:00 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Don’t be scared to pivot if it is for the betterment of your company. The easiest and cheapest way to market your product is by using it. Entrepreneurship is definitely not an easy route—prepare your mindset for a rough (but worth it) journey. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
21:5321/09/2017
788: Ad Tech Agency Does $17m Gross Profit 2016, $30m VC Raised
Patrik Fagerlund. He’s been working with mobile internet since the 90s. He’s an engineer by training and now, he’s the CEO and founder of Widespace, a mobile adtech company. Outside of work, he loves spending time with his family with his four kids and his wife along with many activities and sports. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Business Insider What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — Slack and Flatly 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? – “Be what you want to be” Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:00 – Nathan introduces Patrik to the show 02:36 – Widespace is a mobile advertising campaign 02:40 – It was spun out in 2007 from what Patrik thought was a great media channel 03:04 – Patrik sold media fueled by their technology 03:10 – Selling media per CPM which is $10 per impression 03:31 – This was the business model in 2009 04:00 – $2M was the total ad spend for the previous model and 40% went to the company 04:26 – Team size was 9 04:38 – Widespace's current business model spent $30M for ads 04:40 – Team size is 130 04:41 – “We’re moving into selling technology at a rapid space” 04:49 – Widespace extends their tools and technology for both the supply and demand 05:09 – Widespace focuses more on selling their technology 05:28 – The model is close to SaaS, but the pricing depends on the volume and usage 06:11 – Of the top 50 global advertisers, Widespace serves 70% of them 06:24 – Widespace works with most of the umbrella agency companies in the world 06:51 – The tech of Widespace is a full-stack offering 07:01 – The algorithm is based on interests 07:18 – If Widespace goes against other legacy technologies in adtech, Widespace will outperform them 07:46 – A customer pays 50% of their ad spend to make use of Widespace’s technology 07:54 – It’s a volume game, the more a customer pays, the less Widespace charges 08:04 – If a customer puts $20M into Widespace’s system, it will go down to below $10M 08:53 – Average ARR is around $4M 09:06 – Since Widespace is a full-stack, they service both demand and supply 09:11 – There’s a cap on the demand side and a supply cap to serve the supply 09:26 – The suppliers are the top publishers in the world 09:45 – Widespace takes a cut from the demand and supply side 09:56 – Widespace charges on the extended version of the algorithm as well 10:11 – Last year’s processed ad spend is shy of $40M 10:49 – 2016 total revenue is around $17M 11:04 – Widespace was initially bootstrapped 11:16 – Widespace has raised close to $30M 11:33 – Over the years, Widespace had propositions from strategics but they turned them down 12:08 –Widespace is currently working with 500 suppliers/publications 12:17 – Widespace keeps control of their supply and has deeper integration 13:07 – A few years ago, Widespace was the only one who was servicing the publishers 13:40 – Widespace doesn’t have any exclusivity 15:02 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Adjust your technology depending on the needs of your target market. Find the right partners with whom you can grow your business. Be what you want to be! Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
18:0120/09/2017
787: Crypto: With $163m Raised, He Launched the #1 ICO
Eyal Hertzog. He’s been a venture-backed technology entrepreneur for over 20 years. He’s the founder of Metacafe, Israel’s fastest growing video sharing site which has reached over 15M uniques at its peak. Previously, he founded Contact Networks which was one of the first social networks in 1999. He’s now at Bancor Network and has been an outspoken thought leader on cryptocurrency in Israel and is a talented piano and bass musician. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Spider and the Starfish What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — Google Keep 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? – “You never stop evolving” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:49 – Nathan introduces Eyal to the show 02:40 – Bancor is a non-profit organization which is in a new model that has been rising recently 03:36 – Similarly to Etherium, Bancor is also a token that is solving the problem of liquidity 04:00 – Eyal talks about any kind of liquidity that works today with crypto tokens 04:14 – There is a token that represents gold and a token that represents a dollar which you can convert back to gold and dollars 04:24 – “Real assets from the real world are already represented in the blockchain” 04:47 – Bancor provides a different way that doesn’t require traders to bid for an asset; it automatically finds a market trait according to a certain formula 05:09 – Nathan shares about his interview with Joe Zhou who is the founder of Firstblood 05:56 – The pricing of ether and other cryptocurrencies is always changing 06:25 – Bancor provides a much better solution than cryptocurrencies exchanges, like what Coinbase is doing, for liquidity 06:46 – Bancor is an alternative way to convert cryptocurrencies 06:52 – The exchanges that are based on smart contracts are automated so they won’t require central services 07:14 – Bancor did their own ICO for their token which is BNT or banking network token that will be used in Bancor’s network of token conversion 07:26 – Within three hours, Bancor raised $153M 07:44 – It was in June 12, 2017 08:03 – Bancor was very open during their ICO and told people that everyone who will invest in 2 hours will have an opportunity and they will get exactly the same rate 09:11 – There are currently 20 people involved in Bancor’s operation 09:31 – Bancor liquidates as little as possible which is less than 10% 10:11 – Bancor currently has 12445 token holders 10:22 – Eyal has worked with VCs for a long time prior to Bancor 12:05 – People who hold a lot of cryptocurrencies are called “whales” 12:29 – The goal of people in the crypto world is to build a new financial ecosystem 13:14 – The foundation where the proceeds from the crowdsale go is called V Protocol 13:27 – The foundation sold 50% of the tokens and the other 50% went to different buckets 14:07 – Bancor runs on the ethereum blockchain so they already have miners and won’t need miners for their own tokens 15:18 – Nathan summarizes Bancor’s figures 16:40 – Eyal had a dream to build something that will have a cultural effect or something that will change how we do things 17:07 – When Eyal learned about bitcoin, he thought that it would be a huge, cultural evolution one day 17:55 – In terms of completed ICOs, Bancor ranks number one 18:28 – Eyal shares where the demand for Bancor came from 20:34 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: There are better ways to do cryptocurrency exchanges that benefit the token holder more. Be open to your investors, so you can earn their trust. You are always learning and evolving. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
23:0919/09/2017
786: How This Ad Tech Company Used $1m+ In Mezzanine Debt to Grow Profitably
Mitchell Reichgut. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Jun Group. Prior to founding Jun Group in 2005, he led Bates Interactive, the online unit of Bates Worldwide Advertising which is now owned by WPP. As general manager and creative director, he helped grow Bates Interactive into a 70-person integrated unit with clients such as EDS, Warner-Lambert and many others. Before joining Bates, he was the creative director at Think New Ideas. He began his career as Art Director at Grey Advertising where he created print and TV ads for clients. Throughout his career, he’s worked with major brands in the industry including Procter and Gamble, Parker Brothers, Reebok and others. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Anything written by Seth Godin What CEO do you follow? – Jack Welch Favorite online tool? — Google Calendar How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Mitchell wished he knew the kind of discipline it took to make things work Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:05 – Nathan introduces Mitchell to the show 03:08 – The “Jun” in Jun Group means truth 03:11 – Mitchell founded his company believing that advertising can be transparent, honest and deliver tangible results 03:19 – Jun Group’s job is to get millions of people to engage with videos and visit websites of the Fortune 500 brands 03:38 – Nathan reads Jun Group’s website line 03:52 – Mitchell gives an example of a spaghetti sauce brand that targets Hispanic mothers who are 35 and up, in the USA 04:01 – Jun Group will use the video of the brand to connect with their target market on their phone, tablets and computers 04:16 – Customers can opt-in in exchange for something like rewards points 04:38 – Jun Group is an in-app solution 05:37 – Jun Group only charges when someone chooses to engage and the client gets the value of what they’re paying for 06:06 – When you don’t interrupt people, they tend to watch to the end 06:08 – Jun Group gets 90% of people to watch a 30-second ad until the very end 06:13 – 3-5% of the viewers are visiting the brand’s website 06:50 – From the publisher, the brand will appear in a mobile app 07:29 – Each app integration creates an interaction depending on the app user’s behavior 07:46 – In web environment, app developers pay CPI 07:52 – Jun Group never had a pop-up and they never interrupt 08:14 – Jun Group has a sophisticated tech platform that works well with app developers 08:21 – “Apps are complex business” 08:41 – Jun Group was bootstrapped until 2015 08:47 – Then they had a private equity deal with Howard Capital 08:58 – They’ve raised $28M 09:09 – They’ve decided to raise because they found the right partner 09:55 – Growing an adtech business is quite unusual and requires hard work 10:02 – Jun Group has brands, app publishers and consumers that they need to take care of 10:27 – Jun Group is an adtech platform and not really an agency 10:30 – Most adtech platforms lose money and want to grow fast 10:49 – Jun Group has been growing slowly, but steadily and profitably 11:13 – The revenue comes from commitments from brands and media buying platforms, some are per project and some are per annual commitment 12:00 – Jun Group’s pricing model varies depending on what the ad is 12:34 – A CPM (cost per thousand) in the industry usually costs $8 up 12:40 – Jun Group charges cost per engagement which is more than the average CPM 13:22 – Mitchell left Bates and started Jun Group at home 13:31 – Mitchell didn’t really plan to be an entrepreneur 13:53 – Mitchell get into the adtech industry with his partner when it was just starting 14:12 – By 2008 and 2009, Jun Group was earning $1-2M in revenue 15:08 – Jun Group usually take a percentage from the sales they make 15:39 – Most of the money goes back to the campaign 16:05 – Jun Group had debt with WTI or Western Technology Investment that helped the company grow 16:34 – The debt was in millions 17:05 – The media spent through Jun Group’s system 17:18 – Jun Group is still cash flow positive 17:53 – Jun Group really had a strategic partnership with their seed round 18:44 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Have the right partners who will not just provide the funds but help the company grow. Adtech isn’t an easy industry with fast growth; it takes time and the right model to thrive in it. It takes firm, hard discipline to make things work. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
20:5218/09/2017
785: He Makes $500k+ From Udemy Helping You Code
Evan Leong. He’s the VP of Product at Devslopes, a learn-to-code platform focused on taking beginners to paid professionals to curated project-based videos. He’s always been involved with startups since 2015, when he took the leap from a corporate job to join the startup world full-time. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Good to Great What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos Favorite online tool? — Trello How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Follow your instincts, follow your gut, and don’t let age stop you from what you want to do Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:05 – Nathan introduces Evan to the show 02:31 – Devslopes is a learn-to-code platform for iOs, MacOS and TvOs 02:39 – A version for Windows will be available soon too 02:48 – Devslopes is similar to Treehouse 03:00 – Devslopes has been around for a year and a half 03:10 – Devslopes has just converted to SaaS 03:22 – They garnered 130 subscriptions just after the launch 03:33 – Average pay per customer is a little over $20 a month 04:05 – Devslopes was funded through Kickstarter and an investor 04:15 – They raised $190K in Kickstarter 04:35 – Devslopes’ CEO is a good salesperson and they had a strong community even before Kickstarter 05:04 – The Kickstarter campaign was blasted around 05:11 – The community size is around 10K 05:22 – Devslopes has raised an additional of $300K from Redfoo of LMFAO 05:42 – Devslopes was launched in March 2016 05:53 – First year revenue was $600K 06:04 – 2017 goal is to reach a million 06:39 – Devslopes has large courses that will take people more time to stick with them 06:48 – Devslopes is pumping out target topics which are 2-3 hour courses 07:13 – Team size is 8 07:48 – The CEO started in e-learning marketplaces 08:05 – By the time Devslopes started, the CEO already had 40K students on Udemy 08:33 – Devslopes gets students from affiliates too 09:12 – Devslopes want to fully dive into the learning experience 09:32 – They liked the idea of having everything in one program so they created the SaaS model 10:17 – Devslopes publishes to affiliates the content that the affiliates want to promote 10:26 – Udemy likes to promote 30-60 hour courses 10:43 – Devslopes is also on Skillshare, Learnability and Inkydeals 10:58 – 90% of the content goes to Udemy and the rest are spread out to the rest 11:08 – 90% of the revenue is from Udemy, too 11:30 – Devslopes is just starting to use Facebook ads which is their only paid marketing 12:05 – CAC 12:11 – Most of what Devslopes gets from Facebook ads is social presence but no paid leads yet 12:44 – The charge of Udemy fluctuates depending on how they promote their content 13:21 – Evan focuses on the product and handles the team 13:37 – Devslopes currently have 5K iOs downloads and a couple of thousand from Mac 15:30 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: With the advancement in technology, more people are opting to learn from the comfort of their own home. Target your market so it will be easier for the company to adapt a new business model. Customers will stick with your product if it is of value to them. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
17:3717/09/2017
784: Crypto: How ICO Companies Turn Money Raised Into Cash-In-Bank To Fund Growth
Joe Zhou. He’s the founder and CEO of FirstBlood, an eSports startup that recently broke the speed record for crowdfunding, specifically in the crypto world. Prior to founding FirstBlood, Joe co-founded Alt-Options, a Boston based fintech or financial technology startup that built the first American style option trading platform for digital currencies. Joe holds a BSBA from Boston University Questrom School of Business and an entrepreneur residence at Babson College. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Lean Startup What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk 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? – Joe wished he was less concerned about how he was perceived in school Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:11 – Nathan introduces Joe to the show 03:00 – FirstBlood is a platform that allows players to play games, not just for fun but for money 03:23 – FirstBlood charges money for each game or tournament played 03:49 – FirstBlood was launched in April 2016 03:55 – Joe’s co-founder, Anik, is also a big gamer 04:08 – They were both fans of League of Legends 04:14 – They attended a Hackathon where they were challenged to build an application that has never existed before 05:00 – Joe co-founded Alt-Options while he was still in college 05:15 – The technology was built from scratch 05:18 – There were about 2K users during the testing phase 05:50 – It was bootstrapped and $50K was raised from families and friends 06:02 – There were a group people who wanted to get into the space and Joe worked with them as a consultant for half a year 06:44 – Joe decided to do the token issuance because of the support they were getting 06:55 – DAO was successful until hackers were able to get into it due to a bug 07:19 – FirstBlood was one of the most promising projects that was going to DAO 07:26 – DAO or Decentralized Autonomous Organization is like a decentralized venture capital firm; it was managed by every person who has a token in it 07:52 – FirstBlood was operating under Project Tron in the DAO community 08:15 – After the bug, FirstBlood started building what was needed to run a successful crowdfunding campaign 08:52 – Joe and Anik gave talks and presented multiple ethereum meetups regarding their project 09:37 – Joe came home with a budget of 3-5 years runway for the entire team 09:46 – They’ve raised $5M in funding 09:52 – Team had 6 people and now they have 15 people 11:14 – They’ve calculated the ethereum’s pricing and deployed the contract to the network 11:51 – FirstBlood raised the money in just the first four blocks and processed in just 7 minutes 12:41 – FirstBlood has sold 465,313 ether tokens 13:10 – Joe shares why they released their own FirstBlood tokens 13:16 – Ethereum has some limitations 13:34 – The FirstBlood tokens are given unique utilities that are crucial to making the network work 13:42 – First layer is the transactional level utility where both ether and FirstBlood tokens work 14:20 – Witness program utility can only be run by FirstBlood tokens 14:52 – DotA is the first mobile strategy game and now is a stand alone 15:53 – When a game is settled, a set of information is sent to a network of witness nodes 16:02 – Witness nodes will then run tests using computational power to fetch the data and cross reference the data to make sure that it is valid 16:14 – The data then gets published into the blockchain and smart contract 16:32 – The winner of the games will pay a small percentage fee to the network 17:40 – The token price isn’t that important for the team 18:14 – The ratio of the token is arbitrary 19:24 – A lot of Dapps don’t have a real money function yet 19:39 – FirstBlood is closed to launching the beta 19:59 – Currently, there are 1592 people who have FirstBlood tokens 20:51 – Joe doesn’t think that it’s risky for them to have a lot of people handling the network 21:06 – The selection process has a cap rate on how one will get selected 21:19 – “We did cap at 1% for a maximum impact” 22:20 – Joe can’t disclose the amount he owns from FirstBlood tokens 22:50 – The allocation for founders is around 10% of the tokens 23:24 – Nathan asks Joe if it’s possible to cash out a million tokens into real dollars if he ever needs it 24:35 – FirstBlood made the headlines because they raised a $5M equivalent to ether 26:38 – The fund is owned by the project 27:08 – The ether can be used to keep buying the project 27:30 – Some of the money from the funds are used to pay the team 28:03 – FirstBlood liquidates 80% of the ether post cross-sales and 20% remains in the smart contract 28:39 – FirstBlood has around $4M in the bank that pays salaries and other company expenses 29:55 – The technology of FirstBlood has made people more interested in the project 31:00 – The decision to raise $5M was from the advice they’ve received regarding what it takes to increase network profitability 31:51 – Ether was valued when Joe liquidated the 372K shares at $11 per share 32:38 – Joe didn’t wait for the share value to increase because they needed the money to get the project running 34:25 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: In crypto, startups create their own currency if they think their network will be better of with it. Listen to your advisory board—if it’s time to raise for specific purpose, your business might be better of because of that decision. People will become interested in your project if it’s first in the space and they believe in your technology. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
37:0816/09/2017
783: SaaS: Here's How RFP Scout 3x YoY to $1.2m+ in MRR
Alex Yakubovich. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Scout RFP. Prior to Scout, he was a co-founder of another startup which was acquired by LivingSocial in 2012. At that company, he led the operations team and helped the company become the largest online ordering providers in the country. He attended Case Western Reserve University where he studied mechanical engineering. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Shoe Dog What CEO do you follow? – Marc Benioff Favorite online tool? — Salesforce 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? – Take big risks Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:25 – Nathan introduces Alex to the show 02:58 – Scout RFP helps companies make online purchases by finding suppliers and the best deals 03:14 – One of their newest customer’s is Beam Suntory who makes Jim Beam bourbon 03:56 – They use Scout RFP to source for the best deals on raw materials that they use to make their liquor 04:15 – Scout RFP is a SaaS model 04:20 – Scout RFP charges per user basis 04:47 – They charge only the buyers who are making the purchase and not the suppliers 05:00 – Scout RFP also has different tools that they offer depending on the plans 05:34 – Average per seat is $5K annually 05:53 – All contracts are annual contract 05:59 – Scout RFP has raised capital: $27.5M in total 06:27 – Alex’s last company just raised $500K and it had a great exit 07:00 – Alex has thought about what it’s like to have big companies involved in your company 07:30 – The capital allowed them to not skim and invest on growth upfront 07:49 – Current team size is 50 07:59 – Half is the engineering and product side and half is for the sales side 08:29 – The exit price of the first company was in the tens of millions 09:37 – Alex has co-founders who were with him in the first company 10:43 – There are over 100 companies that use the platform 11:10 – The number of seats per company depends on the company 11:54 – Scout RFP has overall users and paid users 12:12 – Paid users is more than 3K 13:05 – Scout RFP is part of Silicon Valley Sourcing Leaders Group 13:31 – The group is about networking and sharing information and knowledge 13:49 – There are now sourcing leaders programs in New York 14:00 – The group helped Scout RFP to acquire new customers 14:30 – The organization hosts their companies 15:18 – Gross customer churn 15:31 – Logo churn is not that high 16:00 – Scout RFP has 17% net negative churn 16:58 – Scout RFP has a customer success team, a sales team, ADPR team and management team 17:38 – As a business grows with Scout RFP, the LTV grows as well 18:22 – The average deal size per business is quite consistent, about 10 19:09 – CAC to LTV ratio is 3 19:25 – Payback period is around 15 months 20:17 – Paid acquisition costs are around $40K a month 20:49 – They do LinkedIn ads, some Facebook and Google, and a lot of tradeshows 21:23 – Gross margin is 85-90% 21:44 – Target ARR this 2017 22:14 – Scout RFP is currently over $1.2M in MRR 23:54 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: An acquisition is an opportunity to build a bigger and better business. Being in a group with your target market is a big opportunity for you to acquire new leads. Let your big questions guide you in growing your business. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
26:1515/09/2017
782: Crypto: With $50k MRR, He's Buildling Crypto Database To Track Accuracy
Bruce Pon. He’s the CEO and founder of BigchainDB and he’s been playing in the crypto world. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Mungerisms by Charlie Munger What CEO do you follow? – Vitalik Buterin Favorite online tool? — Streak CRM How many hours of sleep do you get?— At least 8 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Buy bitcoin earlier” Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:03 – Nathan introduces Bruce to the show 02:44 – Bruce built BigchainDB to manage data 02:55 – Bitcoin is a payments cryptocurrency in a global network while Ethereum is a business logic in a global network 03:11 – People pass trusted data over the blockchain network for enterprise use cases and consumer applications 03:32 – From the business logic, you can exchange bitcoin and other types of value 03:42 – The problem with the use case on top of the bitcoin blockchain 3 years ago was it didn’t scale 04:04 – Bruce was building io which is putting intellectual property into the blockchain 04:25 – You can sell your intellectual property over the network 04:48 – It was built over the bitcoin blockchain and got difficult to develop over time 04:54 – Ascribe.io needed meta data about the creative work, author and licensing model 05:04 - Ascribe.io isn’t just built for bitcoin—it’s like trying to using a Lamborghini to move your house 05:49 - Ascribe.io had AI, scientists and other PhDs who told them that building Ascribe.io wasn’t worth it 06:09 – Team size is around 20 and is based in Berlin 06:24 – BigchainDB has raised $6M in price round series A 06:41 – Open source software is traditionally a dual license model 06:53 – BigchainDB is looking at an enterprise model 07:00 – They’re looking into the ICO craze too 07:21 – BigchainDB is like a SaaS model 07:27 – They’re looking at per transaction charges but it may not work for the long-run 07:54 – BigchainDB just released their 1.0 08:08 – They give premium support 08:27 – Bruce is looking into 5-6 figures per month for their starting price point 08:58 – One-third of the work in businesses happen in the back office 09:13 – Blockchain allows you to have a single source of truth 09:29 – BigchainDB unlocks the opportunity for different organizations to have a single source of truth 09:48 – When you can make IoT, AI and blockchain tools, you can track the product from the inception until it gets to the customer’s hand 10:01 – The customer will now understand how the product is made 10:03 – The regulators will know that the product followed the guideline 10:07 – The company will know if there’s a recall or quality issue and they will know where exactly the product is 10:40 – BigchainDB can work with different kinds of products 11:20 – Blockchain is definitely auditable 11:30 – Before the product comes to you, it will be signed by entities with a cryptographic key in every process 12:00 – With AI, you can also see who is in the very process of making your product 12:34 – The key metric Bruce is measuring is the number of people that are building upon them 12:56 – Target MRR is $100K by end of 2017 13:03 – BigchainDB is currently at $50-60K MRR 13:19 – Number of customers 13:44 – There are 300 developers in BigchainDB’s channels and there are 5K clones of their software 13:54 – BigchainDB has 1K monthly downloads of their whitepaper 14:45 – The ratio of developer to clone is the 300 developers to 5K clone requests 16:05 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Data that is passed over the blockchain network can be used for enterprise use case and consumer applications. The beauty of blockchain is that it is auditable and has accountability capabilities. Some tools that are built over the bitcoin network won’t always work; even if you have the best people in the industry. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
19:1414/09/2017
781: Crypto: What AirBnB Looks Like In Digital Currency World
Christoph Jentzsch. His background is in Theoretical Physics and he’s been part of the Ethereum project since 2014 as a lead tester. At the end of 2015, he co-founded Slock.it, working on decentralized sharing economy through the connection of blockchain and IoT (Internet of Things). One of the more famous projects that he was part of was the DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Zero to One What CEO do you follow? – God Favorite online tool? — GIthub 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? – “Avoid the bug in the DAO” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:50 – Nathan introduces Christoph to the show 02:20 – DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization 02:26 – It is a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain which aims at connecting people to pull their funds together and run small contracts 02:45 – It failed and all the people got refunded 03:10 – Christoph believes that Anthony Di Iorio is one of the founders of Ethereum 03:24 – As a lead tester for Ethereum in 2014, Christoph was responsible for driving tests 03:39 – Consensus tests are for client implementation 04:10 – Nathan’s analogy of cryptocurrency using railroad tracks 04:55 – Augur has launched their own token on top of Ethereum 05:18 – They created their own token of value in exchange of the virtual currency of ether 05:47 – There has been a lot of ICOs (Initial Coin Offering) lately and there has been opinions around them 06:03 – Bitcoin was always meant for virtual currency 06:09 – While Etherium has a virtual currency too called ether, its actual purpose is to be an open source platform to build decentralized applications or Dapps 06:22 – People now create simple Dapps issuing a token on the Ethereum blockchain to fund Dapps projects 06:32 – People thought DAO was an ICO but it wasn’t 06:35 – DAO has collected a hundred million dollars in ether 06:44 – After that, many ICOs have gone out 07:40 – There are only a few hundred people who send ether into their contract 08:11 – There was an article Nathan had read regarding Bitcoin’s current problem 08:28 – The main problem is public blockchains are not scaling 08:38 – In the protocol, one blockchain can only have 1 megabyte 09:04 – There is now a high demand that leads to a higher price 10:33 – Everybody can take part in the cryptocurrency game 11:45 – People can create their own blockchain but they’re missing the network effect 12:18 – There are some minors who control the network 12:48 – As long as there are users in the system, they don’t mind the minors 12:54 – Minors serve the blockchain, but Christoph believes the users are the ones in-charge 13:21 – After the DAO failed, there was a discussion of how things should be done 13:27 – Some are saying to split the blockchain into 2 versions: the new version is where people get refunded and the old version is the hackers who have the money 14:58 – There are now 2 Ethereum classes: ethereum classic and ethereum 15:19 – Christoph’s focus is now on Slock.it where they’ve built a decentralized sharing economy 16:02 – It is built over the public ethereum and they don’t have tokens 16:17 – They’re using ether as a payment 16:33 – Most startups are called ICOs and make their own tokens to fund themselves 16:40 – Slock.it is VC funded with a seed funding of $2M 18:06 – Slock.it isn’t currently getting any payment but they will in the future 18:38 – Slock.it collaborates with Innogy 18:51 – Innogy allows electric charging stations to connect with smart contracts in the blockchain 19:00 – A user can charge his car, making him enter the smart contract 19:10 – If you’re the owner of a charging station and you have an electric car, you can set the price for the station and offer it to public 20:05 – Noke padlocks can now be open and closed through Bluetooth and Slock.it has added a payment option where it can be opened by paying 20:34 – Slock.it can be integrated into the device and it is different from Airbnb 21:28 – As long as the ethereum blockchain is alive, the Noke padlock can be used through Slock.it 22:10 – Christoph currently resides in Germany 22:45 – “As of now, crypto is not a very good currency” 23:23 – Ether is as volatile as bitcoin 23:45 – You can definitely exchange your tokens for real dollars, but it’s not an efficient system 24:03 – Paying people with ether isn’t that easy at the moment 24:12 – Currency is the least interesting aspect 24:19 – There’s a limitation in scalability and in privacy 24:40 – Christoph thinks ethereum, smart contracts and blockchains own up as programmable money 25:55 – Slock.it is currently integrated into an existing hardware 26:20 – There are currently thousands of charging stations under Slock.it 26:36 – Team member is currently 14 26:48 – The seed round was in February 2017 28:02 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Some startups are coming out as an ICO to fund themselves, but not all of them are legal. Cryptocurrency still isn’t very stable so as a business owner, paying your people with this currency isn’t efficient. Public blockchains are not scaling and there’s a protocol that needs to be followed. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
30:0213/09/2017
780: SaaS: How Did He 2x ARR In Last 12 Months from $6m to $12m?
Brandon Bruce. He’s the COO and co-founder of Cirrus Insights, the sales plugin for Gmail and Outlook. The company is number 41 on the Inc. 5000 and the fastest growing company in Tennessee. Brandon once raced his bicycle 508 miles across Death Valley in 35 hours and 7 minutes. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Energy Bus What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Favorite online tool? — Google Drive and 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? – “I would’ve tried to start a full-fledged company earlier” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:50 – Nathan introduces Brandon to the show 02:25 – Brandon was in Episode 226 of The Top 02:38 – They had $550K in funding 02:48 – The team back then was 55-60 and now it’s 70 02:59 – No additional funding has been raised 03:16 – Cirrus Insights is a fast-growing company that didn’t rely too much on VC 03:35 – 5 years ago, Cirrus Insights wanted to solve the problem of going back and forth between Gmail and Salesforce 03:53 – Cirrus Insights brings Salesforce into the inbox 04:05 – They also help sales reps to seamlessly update Salesforce from the back end 04:13 – Salesforce isn’t actually a CRM 04:38 – Cirrus Insights just launched Flight Plans, which is an extension of their philosophy 04:42 – It is fully built-in to Outlook and Gmail 04:44 – It allows people to setup a sequence of sales touches 04:58 – It’s personalized and low scale 05:51 – Cirrus Insights’ growth is mostly from the Salesforce app exchange 06:00 – Continued growth is still from word-of-mouth 06:31 – Cirrus Insights has passed 100K seats with an average seat price of $6 06:53 – The average seat price has gone up now 07:19 – Flight Plans is a new tier 07:24 – Cirrus Insights is the product name and Flight Plans is going to be an addition 07:27 – There are now 3 additions to the product 08:18 – Cirrus Insights has just passed $1M in MRR 09:00 – Customers are choosing Cirrus Insights over others because some are overpaying and underutilizing marketing operations 09:29 – Marketing and sales are now working as a team with Cirrus Insights 09:58 – Cirrus Insights now charges $8 per seat 10:32 – Marketing operation has 4 big, unicorn companies 10:49 – There are now hundreds of tools in marketing operation and it will be interesting to see a consolidation 11:04 – Brandon is thinking customers will just utilize the best tools for the job 11:33 – Cirrus Insights is trying to position themselves to be the best at what they do 11:43 – They’re also continuing to offer more in the future 13:00 – Gross customer churn: 15-20% annually, but they’re targeting to lower it down to 10% 13:30 – There’s a lot less churn in the enterprise 14:17 – Net annual revenue churn is still negative and net seat churn is below 10% 15:16 – Most of the new leads are from word-of-mouth, with some small scale paid acquisition 15:22 – They’re more focused on the content that can drive more people 15:25 – Brandon has read The Slow Sale which is about how slowing down can win more deals 16:30 – Budget for paid marketing is $25-50K 16:43 – They’ve done sponsorship for conferences, but the ROI is getting low 17:25 – Check out their podcast: Our Love Hate Relationship with Sales, which drives sales as well 18:22 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: As saturated as the market is, there’s still a way for your business to stand out. Marketing and sales teams are looking for tools that will not just help them with their workload, but encourage them to work together. If your company constantly adds value, word-of-mouth will be your driver of sales. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
21:5612/09/2017
779: Foursquare CEO on Transition From Consumer Social Network to B2B Enterprise Data Company
Jeff Glueck. He became the CEO of Foursquare in January of 2016 after 18 months as the COO of the company. Prior to that, he was the CEO of Skyfire Labs, co-founder of Site59.com and CMO of Travelocity. Previously, he was a strategy consultant at Monitor Company and served as a White House Fellow in the Clinton Administration. He holds a master’s degree from Oxford as a Marshall Scholar and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Good to Great What CEO do you follow? – Adam Neumann Favorite online tool? — Stitcher 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? – “It’s going to be okay when you take a risk” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:46 – Nathan introduces Jeff to the show 02:53 – Jeff has been with Foursquare for 3 years 02:55 – Jeff joined the company while it was evolving into a hot social network in 2012 03:10 – Foursquare developed the technology of Pilgrim that turned it into a powerful enterprise business 03:19 – Foursquare’s early valuation was based on the fact that it would be the next big social media network 03:51 – The valuation was only made up because it wasn’t based on revenue 03:57 – When Jeff entered, they raised a round and they’re now growing over 60% in the past 3 years 04:13 – Foursquare is now more rationally valued 04:55 – Foursquare has a powerful community of people mapping the world 06:05 – Pilgrim is based on Foursquare’s nearly 12B check-ins 06:13 – Foursquare is having more check-ins today than it did 2 years ago 06:30 – The check-ins are called explicit ground trips 06:55 – Everytime someone check-in, they’re mapping the business for Foursquare 07:15 – The explicit ground trip makes the program powerful 08:06 – Foursquare launched the Pilgrim SDK which is a white label way for their developers to add in background content and give users a better experience 08:24 – Using the Pilgrim technology, Capital One can ask its user if they want to opt-in for being informed about how to receive rewards points 08:36 – People overwhelmingly opting-in 09:08 – The notification from Capital One encourages people to actually use their mobile wallet 09:18 – TouchTunes uses the Pilgrim technology 09:25 – TouchTunes runs 65K jukeboxes through mobile app 10:37 – Pilgrim technology has learned when to send notifications 10:47 – Pilgrim technology also informs their developers of the best time to send notifications 12:08 – When Jeff joined, he saw how everyone, including Fortune 500 companies, was using them for free 12:15 – Jeff told their CEO that they’re actually losing money and that they needed to start charging customers 12:42 – Foursquare didn’t lose even a single developer after putting up a paywall 12:49 – The model was licensed-based depending on the usage 14:15 – Three of the largest headphones in the world are Foursquare’s customers 14:40 – Jeff understands how the market changes 14:55 – 92% of the consumer spending is far from the 8% they spend on e-commerce like amazon 15:10 – Foursquare has predicted how Chipotle’s sales will go down by 30% 15:20 – “We’re not investors, we’re technologists” 16:16 – Jeff believes that Foursquare’s mission is to be a location intelligence company 16:34 – Jeff is proud of Foursquare’s technology; they can build tools that help companies 17:07 – Foursquare started out as a consumer company but now, more and more apps are using them for their applications 17:51 – Jeff believes that in the future, they can also make real estate better 18:45 – 90% of Foursquare’s revenue is from B2B 19:34 – Foursquare’s paying customers are some of the biggest brands in the world who want a company that is as good as Google Maps 19:58 – People don’t want to be dependent on Google in the future 20:18 – “A lot of smart companies want to build differentiated mobile experiences in the future and we’re helping them do that, that is our business” 21:48 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Even if your company can go IPO, it doesn’t mean that it should. Offering your services or products for free may work for the short-term, but if your service adds value to your customers, they WILL pay. Focus on what your company is good at. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
24:3211/09/2017
778: SaaS: With $80M Raised, He Left Salesforce to Bring Finance Departments to The Cloud
Dave Kellogg. Dave has more than 20 years of experience in high growth companies. Dave has been CEO of MarkLogic, CMO of Business Objects and member of Aster Data board of directors. Dave steered MarkLogic to $80 million in revenues. Business Objects witnessed equally impressive growth as it reached a revenue of billion dollars under his able guidance. Tune in and listen to Dave as he discusses various financial metrics of Hostanalytics. Targeting small businesses and enterprise level businesses, this company has grown 4x over the past 3 years. Read on and find out what makes this SAAS business tick. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Chaos Monkeys What CEO do you follow? – Marc Benioff Favorite online tool? — WordPress How many hours of sleep do you get?— 8 hours If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Go read Power: Why Some People Have It and Some Don't by Geoffrey Pfeffer Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:14 – Nathan introduces Dave to the show 03:19 – Host Analytics is a SAAS company that is disrupting the space for enterprise performance management 03:58 – Not dabbling in premise products at all 04:28 – Corporate finance does not scale up with growing company size; number of users for such a software is dependent on the centralization philosophy 04:42 – A big company might be heavily centralized with only a sprinkling of users, whereas a little company might have hundreds of users 04:52 – Pricing model is a combination of a fixed based fee and a user fee 05:00 – Fixed fee varies from 25k to 50k—both fixed fee and user fee are recurring 05:25 – User fee depends on the user type and to which extent the software features are being used 05:45 – Fixed fee per user per month may vary from a couple of hundred dollars to a thousand dollars 06:10 – Re-entered the startup world once he quit Salesforce and joined Hostanalytics 06:24 – Passed on the reigns at Mark Logic to Gary Bloom—Mark Logic is still doing very well 07:05 – Best strategy to exit a startup is to exercise 83B options 08:00 – Exercising all options results in FMP (Fair Market Value) equaling strike price 08:07 – You lose the optionality—shares might not increase in value at a later date 09:00 – Met VC’s, entrepreneurs and angels while looking for a new opportunity after quitting MarkLogic 09:16 – Dave’s buddies coaxed him to join Salesforce as CMO 09:39 – Learnt a lot about SAAS at Salesforce. However, he found out that he was more comfortable running smaller companies 09:58 – Dave met the founders of Host Analytics through a common friend who was on their board 10:31 – HostAnalytics was clocking revenues of $10 million when Dave joined them in 2014; a great board and a proven SAAS model are the other factors which compelled Dave to join the firm 11:20 – Revenues have grown 4x since 2014 11:42 – Founded in 2001, HostAnalytics grew via bootstrapping for seven years. They finally secured VC funding in 2008 12:01 – Raised $85 million to date 12:32 – Used 75 cent “I love EBITA” stickers and funnily enough, won customers due to that 13:47 – Servicing 700 customers, as of today 13:50 – Pareto’s 80/20 principle is not applicable to them; they are bimodal with a dual focus on smaller businesses as well as enterprise businesses 14:20 – Both of them are run as different cohorts by different salesforces; revenues are split equally between small business and enterprise 14:50 – Each client is aggregating revenues of $70,000 per annum 15:13 – Payment terms are a tricky issue in SAAS 15:18 – While other SAAS players go for monthly and quarterly payments, HostAnalytics opts for annual payment 15:34 – If you are giving a discount smaller than your churn rate, then everybody wins 16:15 – Customer churn and revenue churn are surprisingly equal 16:25 – Spending on an average $1.5 to $ 2 for a dollar of AR to acquire a customer 17:16 – A team of 300 people out of which 100 are located in India, entire sales force of 60 is located in the US 17:23 – Company co-founded in US and India 18:10 – Average lifetime value of a client varies from 6x to 7x or half a million dollars 19:39 – Cloud penetration of this market is just 5% 19:57 – Finance department is 10 to 15 years behind sales in adoption of cloud 20:17 – 9.5 out of 10 people would say “Not now” 20:56 – Blended Gross Margin is lower since they have a slightly bigger services business than most SAAS companies 21:10 – ERP is a heart transplant. EPM is a knee transplant 21:20 – Services business helps reduce churn and create cash flow 22:57 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: A big company might be heavily centralized with few SAAS users, whereas a small company might have hundreds of SAAS users. Focusing on services reduces churn and creates cash flow; however, gross margins are less compared to other SAAS companies due to this. Focusing on small businesses as well as enterprise businesses is important—at HostAnalytics, revenue is split equally between these two models. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
27:1910/09/2017
777: Will Masterclass Win Online Course Wars?
David Rogier. He’s the CEO of MasterClass where he leads the company’s vision of redefining digital learning by leveraging the expertise of world-class experts with the cutting-edge technology platform. David created MasterClass after seeing how the online education space was offering low-quality content and an unfair advantage of students. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Science of Shopping What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos Favorite online tool? — Doodle How many hours of sleep do you get?— Average 6 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – David would tell himself that entrepreneurship will be the hardest thing he’ll ever do Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:05 – Nathan introduces David to the show 03:05 – MasterClass offers classes from the absolute best in the world 03:14 – Online classes are offered both pre-recorded and live, both price at $90 03:31 – Students can study anytime they want and they have access forever 04:04 – Prior to MasterClass, David worked for a VC fund in the Bay area 04:21 – David worked for Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal 04:50 – Michael wrote David a check for $500K to start his idea for his business 05:03 – David tried almost everything to get an idea until he remembered his grandmother’s story 05:49 – His grandmother applied for medical school while working in a factory 05:55 – She was rejected by almost 50 medical schools 06:20 – The reason she was rejected was because she was a woman, foreigner and Jewish 06:27 – One school accepted her and she became a doctor 06:53 – She told David that education is the only thing that people can’t take away from him 07:04 – David thought of getting into the education space and studied it 07:53 – MasterClass was launched in May of 2015 08:00 – Total capital raised was around $50M 08:35 – The fund goes to expanding the team as well as production so they can shoot more classes 08:42 – Team size is currently 68 and will be 100 at the end of 2017 09:04 – Year One: number of students 10:13 – When they started, David was expecting a 10X increase in sales daily 10:38 – David cried after their first day of sales 11:18 – Reid Benson who is part of David’s sales team and was formerly with Netflix, wasn’t even scared after the launch 11:58 – Reid told David that their CAC was amazingly low 12:34 – The first 3 classes were led by Dustin Hoffman, James Patterson and Serena Williams 13:06 – The CAC for different subjects was actually close to each other 13:43 – Paid ads spent on Day 1 were less than $100K 14:14 – Paid advertising on different channels works well for MasterClass 14:22 – Instructors are also promoting their classes 15:00 – David can’t disclose the deal they have with the instructors 15:13 – Most instructors teach because they really want to teach and not just to earn from it 15:51 – David shares how they handle instructors who don’t want to teach, but want to share their knowledge 16:10 – Classes are designed by how instructors want to share their own craft 16:14 – Instructors have complete control over their class 16:28 – David shares what a class looks like for Serena Williams 17:24 – MasterClass partners with the instructors in their classes 18:17 – David shares why he won’t share the deal with the instructors 18:38 – James Patterson teaches with MasterClass because of his own reasons 21:00 – David shares why instructors pick MasterClass over LinkedIn, which is more popular 21:50 – There are now 20 classes in MasterClass 22:07 – The number of classes should double, year over year 22:52 – Half to 80% of their first students haven’t taken any online classes before 23:10 – Not all students are fans of the instructors 23:43 – David won’t sell MasterClass for $300M 25:15 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Never miss an opportunity being offered to you, it was offered to you for a reason; so trust yourself and go for it. Most successful people in their field want to share their craft through any way possible. Education is one thing that people can’t take away from you. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
27:1809/09/2017
776: TextingBase Shares Margins, Cap Table, Valuation, More
Eric Beans. He’s the CEO of Texting Base and before that, he was the CEO of Appuix. He was also the former co-founder of Premier Mortgage Capital and the author of Changing the World Through Texting Software. He was in the production as the producer and writer of LA Style Magazine and he’s “Chef Beans” on Daytime. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Steve Jobs What CEO do you follow? – Brett Kingstone Favorite online tool? — Gusto 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? – “Make better choices on who I surround myself with” Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:00 – Nathan introduces Eric to the show 02:43 – Eric wasn’t really a chef and he made food for the person who was running the show 03:01 – Texting Base is a personalized, mass communication platform for texting which is similar to email 03:17 – It looks like it is personally written 03:23 – Texting Base charges monthly depending on the quantity of the messages 03:33 – Texting Base is a SaaS business 03:38 – Minimum charge which is also the average is $50 and will go up depending on the number of messages 03:55 – Customer number is almost 500 04:09 – Average MRR 04:21 – Texting Base was bootstrapped and raised $262K 04:47 – They had investors like Kimberly Partoll and Brett Kingstone who was a former CEO of an IPO company 05:29 – Gross margin is 566% 06:33 – 14% of the cost structure is Texting Base’s messaging fee 06:52 – Server costs is around $900 a month 07:14 – Processing fee is 2.5% 07:47 – Gross margin is around 79% 08:05 – The higher the volume, the lower the charge Texting Base gets from the provider 08:09 – They had a contract for volume 08:23 – They negotiated with Twilio directly 08:35 – Volume should be at least 100K a month 09:18 – Eric started Texting Base in 2012 09:21 – Eric needed the product—no one had it so he left banking and started the business 09:37 – It took 3.5 years to launch 09:49 – Team size is 5 10:12 – Target customers for Texting Base are real estate and mortgage providers 10:21 – Texting Base uses email blasts to reach their clients 10:56 – Eric has used email providers until they started building their own list 11:24 – CAC was $28 and now it’s around $18 11:47 – Current churn is about 2.87% monthly 12:23 – LTV is still a bit early 12:57 – Texting Base doesn’t have contracts with customers 13:08 – Last month, $850 was spent on PPC 13:32 – Eric gave some equity of the company to the investors 13:53 – The people who are building the product also have equity 15:25 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: It takes time and patience to build a business, be sure that you’re prepared for it. Create your own solution to the problem and don’t be surprised if you end up solving multiple problems along the way. Your network can bring you places; nurture your relationships. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
18:4108/09/2017
775: FinTech Founder: I'll Never Raise Capital Again!
Andy Swan. He’s the founder of LikeFolio. The company uses social data to determine shifts in consumer behavior on Main Street before it becomes use for Wall Street. This is his third financial technology company. The second, MyTrade, was acquired by TD Ameritrade in 2007. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Think and Grow Rich What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos Favorite online tool? — Gmail 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? – “A little bit more about patience” Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:07 – Nathan introduces Andy to the show 02:37 – MyTrade was geared directly towards option traders and active stock traders 02:50 – The technology allowed traders to copy someone’s option trade which is very complicated 03:09 – It was sold because it was useless without a brokerage backend 03:48 – MyTrade had raised $500-600K and was sold just 3-4 months after the round 04:19 – Andy thought they had a good partnership with Ameritrade and that there was no plan of acquisition 05:06 – Andy stayed with Ameritrade for 3-4 years after the acquisition 05:30 – After 4 years, Andy and his brother spun off and created their own company 06:09 – Andy developed LikeFolio’s technology after leaving Ameritrade 06:26 – LikeFolio sells insights on consumer behavior to professional investors and companies 06:35 – LikeFolio has a partnership with Twitter where they take every tweet and analyze it 06:54 – LikeFolio can map the trends in tweets and alert their clients about the shifts in behavior 07:40 – LikeFolio has different subscription plans 07:47 – LikeFolio’s on-demand plan is $2K a month 07:56 – For extreme computing power and robust API, the plan costs $100-300K 08:11 – Most of the revenue is from the API plan 08:40 – LikeFolio On-Demand has just been launched 09:20 – Every contract of LikeFolio’s is secure and LikeFolio isn’t allowed to disclose anything 09:59 – Andy can’t disclose the number of customers they have 11:18 – LikeFolio hasn’t raised capital and Andy isn’t planning on raising a round 11:38 – “I want to own it all” 12:02 – Andy doesn’t want other people to have a say in his company and wants to be the decision maker in everything 12:36 – Andy’s first company was Daytrade which was sold to a private equity 12:55 – It helped Andy to understand how to run a business in fintech 13:13 – Andy didn’t raise money for Daytrade 14:03 – Team size is five; one in Louisville and four in Argentina 14:36 – One of toughest things LikeFolio faces is determining a tweet with the word “never”—it negates anything else in that tweet 15:01 – “I could NEVER live without weightwatcher” is missed by LikeFolio because it’s a positive-negative sentiment 15:28 – LikeFolio takes a thousand tweets per month, per company so there will always be missed tweets 17:05 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: With technology today, consumers’ behavior can now be tracked on different online platforms—this can help businesses provide the right product or service for you. It’s OK to be the only person responsible for your business; however, there’s still a possibility that you may need help in the future. Be patient! Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
19:4107/09/2017
774: CreativeLive's Chase Jarvis: If Linkedin Offered You $200m Do You Take It?
Chase Jarvis. He’s one of the most influential photographers in the last 20 years. He’s also the creator and CEO of CreativeLive. He’s won awards for his images on six different continents, including his contributions to the Pulitzer Prize winning story Snow Fall—the acclaimed New York Times interactive story heralded as the “future of journalistic storytelling” and Emmy nominated for his work documenting the music scene in Seattle. In 2009, he created the Best Camera app which was the first photo app that shared images directly to social networks. It was #1 on iTunes, App of the Year on Wired and got many other awards. He's currently focused on his work as the founder and CEO of CreativeLive, the world's largest online education platform for creatives and entrepreneurs with over a thousand teachers, 1500 classes and 10K hours of classes. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Weiner Favorite online tool? — Evernote How many hours of sleep do you get?— 7.5 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Chase would tell himself that mental health is the most important thing Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:48 – Nathan introduces Chase to the show 02:48 – Nathan describes his experience with New York Times 03:11 – We are now in a weird and modern era of journalism and media 03:20 – “If you’re really focused on innovating and breaking out of the norm, you can do it” 03:35 – Snow Fall is a story of an avalanche 03:40 – Chase’s friend was a victim in an avalanche so the story was extra special to him 04:01 – Feature storytelling is continuing to grow and evolve 04:10 – Physical newspaper is dying and has becoming uninteresting 04:23 – Chase believes that there will be platforms in the future that are embedded with native bells and whistles that will continue to evolve 04:45 – “Journalism is moving in the same direction as tech” 05:02 – As platforms become more templated, we’ll become more interactive and have exciting experience with our news 05:24 – “Timing is everything” 05:30 – Chase shares his experience with his Best Camera app 05:38 – Being the first was challenging 05:43 – The developer was in a legal snafu which slowed down the creation of the app and paralyzed Chase’s business 05:57 – Companies had already asked Chase if they could buy his app 06:13 – Chase has spent 10 years identifying himself as an artist and entrepreneur 06:30 – Chase was struggling with his overall identity 07:30 – Chase just shut down his app; moved on and learned from it 08:11 – “I got more juice to go help other people break through some of those problems” 08:40 – Specifically, Chase owns all the intellectual property of his app 09:39 – “We need to overcome the psychology of being stuck in paralysis and analysis” 10:05 – Chase was in his late 30s in 2009 10:27 – Chase thinks that humans are generally resilient so he didn’t dwell much on what happened 10:34 – 5 years later, Chase wrote about his failure on his blog 10:59 – It’s more about having an impact on the world rather than just getting money 11:25 – Chase got into Instagram only a year and a half ago 11:35 – Chase was trying to preserve a legal position 11:53 – CreativeLive sells content that are created by the top experts in the world 12:01 – There’s a premium model where customers can see how things are done 12:07 – There are channels that can be watched for free 12:33 – CreativeLive has a total of 10M students, paid and free users 13:12 – CreativeLive has a high conversion rate relative to peers and commerce 13:31 – Average conversion rate is 1-2% 13:39 – CreativeLive is curated to creators by creators 13:51 – It is more community focused and is not a two-sided marketplace 14:00 – Competitors’ classes can be created by anyone which is very different from CreativeLive 15:07 – Chase has no desire to limit the creators in CreativeLive 15:29 – CreativeLive designs their contract and relationship with their creators 15:50 – Chase is confident in CreativeLive and the value it brings to people 16:58 – “We make you look great” 17:05 – CreativeLive only makes the extraordinary 17:24 – The challenge that Masterclass is facing 18:44 – CreativeLive was bootstrapped for the first 2 years 18:56 – CreativeLive has raised $58.8 M in total 19:30 – Chase won’t sell CreativeLive for $200M, even if it’s from LinkedIn 20:06 – CreativeLive’s mission is for people to educate themselves and make a living 20:26 – Chase would only sell if the vision of the buyer aligned with them 22:00 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Don’t dwell on your past mistakes, use them as motivation to move on and create better. Contracts are made for a reason; study and check thoroughly before agreeing to one. Stay aligned with your mission and vision. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
25:0106/09/2017
773: Can $1m MRR Company Grow Into $10m Post Money Valuation?
Venkat Nagaswamy. He’s the CEO of Mariana IQ. He brings a long and diverse background in high technology to apply artificial intelligence and deep learning to help marketers make account-based marketing at scale a reality. "Big Kat," as he was nicknamed by friends and colleagues, has led teams in creating analytics, technology and business development solutions at McKinsey, Juniper Networks and GE Plastics, among others. He's worked in enterprise and digital consumer hardware, SaaS, corporate and business unit strategy, market entry strategy, and product development. He's a proud graduate of the University of Michigan and the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds an MBA and a Master's in Aerospace Engineering. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Good to Great What CEO do you follow? – Marc Benioff and Mark Zuckerberg Favorite online tool? — Calendly and Feedly 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? – “Being diligent and hard-working counts for a lot more than being smart and clever” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:54 – Nathan introduces Venkat to the show 02:54 – Venkat was in Juniper trying to implement account-based marketing 03:14 – Venkat is trying to solve the problems in account-based marketing 03:27 – People buy a monthly subscription to Mariana IQ which will allow them to run campaigns targeting the same audience across different platforms 03:37 – Mariana IQ is a SaaS business 03:43 – Average pay is $4K a month per customer 03:55 – Venkat started Mariana IQ three years ago with his three co-founders 04:02 – Venkat also uses their technology 04:16 – Venkat and his co-founders felt that marketers need more tools to be successful in the field 04:36 – First year revenue was zero 04:45 – Late 2015, Mariana IQ made $155K and $550K in 2016 04:59 – Venkat is expecting to get 5x more in annual revenue this year 05:17 – MRR in June was $70-80K 05:45 – Mariana IQ has around 20 customers 06:00 – Zendesk is one of Mariana IQ’s clients 06:13 – Zendesk wanted to target larger companies and so they gave Mariana IQ their data 06:30 – Mariana IQ used their API to find the targeted companies for Zendesk 06:54 – Venkat shares their success rate at Mariana IQ 07:27 – “We got better quality, 4x the volume while keeping the cost the same” 07:36 – Mariana IQ has raised capital 07:39 – First seed round was in 2014 which was led by Blumberg Capital 07:58 – David Blumberg owns Blumberg Capital and Bruce Taragin is who is on Mariana IQ’s board 08:05 – Blumberg Capital has been around for 34 years 08:19 – The first round was a convertible note round with $6M capital 08:47 – Mariana IQ did another round in 2016 which was a priced round 09:10 – Mariana IQ has raised a total of $4M 09:48 – Venkat doesn’t worry about growing into their valuation 12:00 – In Mariana IQ’s first year, they were only getting beta customers 12:41 – Venkat shares the unconventional way he attracted more customers; a video of him in the shower, singing 13:05 –The video was posted on Twitter and got a million views 13:38 – “I’m the worst singer on the planet” 13:57 – Gross margin is around 80% 14:10 – Gross customer churn is quite high, at 3% 14:22 – Revenue churn 14:55 – Full weighted CAC is $22K per customer 15:06 – Customer LTV is $200-250K 15:40 – Venkat is looking at increasing their CAC by spending more on sales and marketing to increase their volume 15:54 – They will add two more salespeople 16:23 – Last month, they spent $2k on marketing alone 17:20 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Marketers are constantly looking for alternative ways to become more effective and successful in their industry. A business shouldn’t worry about its valuation—as long as their confident with their product and continue to add value to their customers; it will work out in the end. It’s necessary for companies today to invest in their sales and marketing to increase that engagement with their audience. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
19:2905/09/2017
772: How Grant Cardone, Others Spend $25k To Get 100m Person Social Media Blasts
Jeremy Haynes whose company is Megalodon Marketing. He’s building all kinds of personal brands for celebrities and entrepreneurs alike. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – 48 Laws of Power What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — Infusionsoft, ClickFunnels and Stripe How many hours of sleep do you get? — 5 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Speed is power, but power is nothing without control” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:55 – Nathan introduces Jeremy to the show 02:28 – “Real results in real life” 02:33 – Jeremy’s real life experiences have driven millions of dollars in infoproducts 02:43 – Jeremy only gives actionable advice 03:00 – Armando Montelongo is one of Jeremy’s clients 03:02 – Armando had a show that ran from 2006-2009 which was called Flip This House, by A&E 03:10 – Jeremy brands himself as the largest go-to personality in digital agency 03:20 – 16 months after Megalodon’s launch, Jeremy met Armando 03:28 – Armando explained to Jeremy how his TV show led to a business with $200M annual revenue in 2017 03:57 – $200M doesn’t include any online revenue 04:05 – The entirety of its revenue came from selling event tickets to people over the phone and up-selling them 04:18 – There were 22K customers between 2006-2009 and the majority of customers have an average transaction value of $20K or more 05:18 – At first, Jeremy couldn’t believe Armando’s story because 2017 is the year of online advertising 05:35 – Armando paid Jeremy $5K per day to come in for 3 days in total 05:48 – Armando’s business was built up on traditional media 06:05 – Jeremy did an assessment on Armando‘s business during his visit 06:15 – The business made 6-figures the first month of the launch after spending a mid 5-figures 06:30 – Armando is making a 7-figure revenue in the succeeding months 06:40 – Jeremy made 3 deals with Armando 06:48 – There was a monthly payment of $70K to pay for their social media partners 07:08 – Brandon Carter, Tai Lopez and Big Mike were some of his social media partners 07:14 – Dan Fleyshman and Branden Hampton from Elevator Studios have partnerships with big, social media brands 07:48 – $25K pays for 50 accounts to post to 100M people within 48 hours 08:38 – 33% of the social media activities is on Instagram as it’s a powerful platform 09:00 – An account with 60K views in an hour can have 2% of that traffic go to the product 10:20 – There’s a chrome plugin that helps you filter all Facebook posts 11:11 – Grant Cardone is the Number 1 sales trainer in the world 11:30 – Jeremy became a part of Grant’s business as an email marketing manager; he trained 50 of his people to use Infusionsoft 11:46 – Jeremy ended up as a digital marketing specialist 11:50 – By Jeremy’s sixth month, Grant’s business was making a million dollars in digital revenue 12:28 – Jeremy started with $50K a year to $60K a year with a bonus 13:54 – Jeremy created an omnipresent advertising model for marketing automation 14:05 – Jeremy categorizes Grant’s buyers 14:50 – Jeremy shows the buyers the ads they would want to see depending on their behavior and interests 15:21 – Jeremy shares an actual example using lead forms 15:43 – Jeremy tracks the leads from their customized URL and ads 16:29 – PlusThis is an Infusionsoft plugin where you can connect Facebook to Infusionsoft and generate an http post 16:47 – When a lead fills out a form, it will be generated to a campaign 16:51 – The first step in an marketing automation sequence will be an http post pushing the lead’s data to the target audience where the lead should be 17:03 – Then, the audience will be connected to the ad that is made for them 17:10 – The sequence won’t always be perfect 19:00 – Jeremy shares why people like him are needed to do this job 19:17 – People can hire from com 19:35 – Jeremy stayed with Grant for 13 months, then left to start his own agency 21:40 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Digital marketing is one of best ways to grow your revenue as a business. Know your worth and show people why you’re worth it. Leave when you think it is the best time and/or option you have; then, continue to pursue your dreams. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
23:0904/09/2017
771: $320M King of Mobile App Installs
Moshe Vaknin. He’s been dreaming about his company YouAPPi since he bought his first iPhone 3. After a long and successful career working in a variety of positions, Moshe founded 3 successful startups before finally starting YouAPPi. As the CEO of the company, he brings vast experience in the fields of advertising, publishing and affiliate marketing, making him adept at identify opportunities that can be transformed into profitable realities. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – My Journey to Justice by Moshe Vankin What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos Favorite online tool? — Whatsapp 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? – “Never give up” Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:41 – YouAPPi is a platform that enables users, publishers and developers to solve growing challenges related to mobile app development 03:19 – As an example, King, the maker of Candy Crush, is always looking for high-quality users for candy crush 03:30 – High-quality users are the ones who play and purchase virtual items 03:45 – YouAPPi will find these high-quality users 03:53 – The process of finding high-quality users is complicated 04:12 – King will have a better ROI to optimize their investment by partnering with a company like YouAPPi 04:47 – YouAPPi has an agreement with 4500 developers and publishers 05:13 – YouAPPi knows users behavior better than anyone else 05:21 – Moshe explains how YouAPPi learns the shopping behavior of each user 05:44 – By learning what to recommend to certain users, YouAPPI can better drive sales 06:50 – YouAPPi can’t track the users and other private data 07:30 – As long as the user is within YouAPPi’s publishers’ network they can identify your device ID and recommend apps 07:56 – YouAPPi is getting paid per app installation and usage 10:52 – YouAPPi pays 70% of their revenue to their publishers 10:56 – From $20, the publisher gets $14 and YouAPPi gets $6 11:05 – YouAPPi was launched in 2011 11:15 – First year revenue was $250K which is the total cut from $1M 11:44 – 2016 total cut was $80M 12:05 – YouAPPi has raised closed to $20M 12:17 – “We have to invest building the platform” 12:19 – Total number of employees is around 130 with 10 offices globally 13:05 – YouAPPi’s platform is for their own consumption 13:24 – “Our business model is our platform” 13:44 – YouAPPi is currently running hot on momentum and Moshe won’t probably sell YouAPPi before 2019 14:10 – IPO recommendations 15:04 – HQ is in the Bay Area and Moshe is currently in Israel 15:33 – Top 2 competitors are Aerosource and AppLovin 17:07 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: As long as you’re on the right path, you can reach your dream. A good relationship the people in your network can exponentially expand your business. Never sell too early—if you’ve got a furnace full of momentum, to cash in. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
19:5003/09/2017
770: Crypto: He Has Third Largest ICO Ever With $53m Raised
Sergey Sholom. As a teenager, he was a championship-level gamer and created the first large gamer group called S-port Tournaments in Russia for Quake. After getting his PhD in mathematical modeling, Sergey founded Datcroft Games LTD in 2004. Over the past 13 years, the company has developed multiple worldwide popular games with millions of users. He continues to oversee a company with over a hundred employees and continues to bring new cutting edge games to the market. Their latest game called Pixel Wars which will be released in the summer of 2017, has already received critical acclaim and will become the game changer in mobile eSport. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Richard Branson’s What CEO do you follow? – N/A Favorite online tool? — N/A 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? – “Push more” Time Stamped Show Notes: 04:03 – The company was launched in 2004 04:29 – The make free games that sell virtual items—that’s where the company gets it’s revenue 04:43 – Around 5% of players buy virtual items 05:20 – Sergey had no revenue for the first 2 years of his company 05:58 – Sergey supported himself from other businesses 06:01 – His newest game has been in development for more than 2 years 06:13 – The team has 150 people with offices in 4 countries 07:34 – Datcroft Games had an 8-digit revenue in 2016 09:00 – Cryptocurrency helped Gamecredits to monetize their audience 09:20 – Sergey wants to prove game developers that more revenue can come from crypto 10:05 – Gamecredits is preparing to enter the Indian market 10:46 – Sergey believes that Apple promoting your game is just an extra advantage 11:35 – The number of followers that the Gamecredits store has 12:05 – Gamecredits is using its existing coin which has been on the market for 3 years already 12:34 – Gamecredits has been running the most successful crowd sale in the market 13:19 – Gamecredits will put 26.5 M crypto in marketing 14:17 – Sergey will have a way to exchange their coin in dollars 14:43 – Different cryptocurrencies are being put in Gamecredits 15:11 – Sergey is proud that they’re able to run a real crowd sale with almost 10K crypto investors 15:23 – Not all ICOs are able to do that 15:34 – Gamecredits was able to raise capital from 4 tokens including bitcoin, ethereum, waves and gamecredits 16:05 – Gamecredits current tokens are mobilego tokens and their own gamecredits token 16:51 – The market is tremendous and the future community will be much bigger 17:46 – Apple and Google are for profit companies and Gamecredits is a non-profit 20:00 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: It’s possible for a gaming platform to penetrate the cryptocurrency market. The cryptocurrency market has been growing significantly, increasing opportunities for different investments. As a non-profit business, your focus needs to be on the change you can create, not the contributions you can earn. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
22:0502/09/2017
769: Do This To Use Your Crypto Coins to Shop At Walmart
Tran Hung. He’s one of the founders of Uquid which is the world’s first service offering debit card solutions for cryptocurrency holders. They currently support 79 of the biggest digi-coins including bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin, ripple, etc. They also offer worldwide mobile recharge support, bills payment services, grocery and pharmacy vouchers, ticketing services, and many other benefits. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Secrets of Building Multi-Million Dollar Businesses by Adam Khoo What CEO do you follow? – Richard Branson Favorite online tool? — Google Translate 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? – Tran wished he would have started studying code earlier Time Stamped Show Notes: 03:00 – Uquid is a debit card for 79 cryptocurrencies 03:10 – Customers can get the physical card with a Visa logo that they can use to withdraw money 03:28 – The card can be loaded with cryptocurrencies 03:43 – Before getting the card, you need to have cryptocurrency 03:49 – Signup at Uquid’s website to get a card 04:04 – There’s a fee of $1 for 1 virtual card but you need the physical card to use in ATMs which is $16 04:20 – After getting the card, you can reload it anytime you want with cryptocurrency 05:10 – Uquid is using the market price of cryptocurrency 05:42 – Uquid takes 0.5% of everything spent using the card 05:53 – If Nathan spent $100 on groceries using the card Uquid will take .50₵ 07:34 – Last year, customers spent $1.6M in total transaction volume 08:09 – Uquid is growing fast in 2017 08:30 – In July, Uquid processed $900K in total transaction volume 08:50 – Uquid has already passed $3M total transaction volume on the first half of 2017 10:45 – The process of exchanging bitcoin to other currencies was complicated 11:19 – Uquid is doing $5K a month in service charges 11:30 – Uquid also offers other services where they charge 10-15% 12:05 – Uquid charges 3% from the vouchers 12:20 – In May, Tran thinks they’ll make around $50K in total transaction charges 12:58 – Team size is 5 and they’re based in UK 13;15 – Uquid is planning to release their own token 13:29 – Tran is looking to raise $4-5M 13:44 – Tran is thinking of selling 15% of Uquid to be able to raise $4M 14:35 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: The market for cryptocurrencies is rapidly expanding. People are now finding more and more ways to mine coins. No matter what service you use, the charges can differ drastically depending on the type of transaction you’re engaging in. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
17:3301/09/2017
768: In Mature Crypto Market, Who Gets Rich?
Martin Koppelmann. He is the co-founder and CEO of Gnosis, the decentralized platform for prediction markets. He has been an entrepreneur and thought leader in the blockchain space for more than 4 years. He is closely related to prediction markets and has worked on decentralized, market-driven, governance mechanisms. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Martin does not read books, but considers Reddit a good resource What CEO do you follow? – some VCs, but no specific CEO Favorite online tool? — Slack, Trello How many hours of sleep do you get?— Less than 6 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – He wished he looked earlier into game theory and economics Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:07 – Nathan introduces Martin to the show 01:43 – Bitcoin was the reason Martin got into the crypto and blockchain space 01:58 – This was during the time the Euro was having problems 02:09 – Martin started to evaluate how he looked at money; he learned about bitcoin and the possibility of creating different forms of money 02:35 – Gnosis has evolved 03:04 – They are assuming that Gnosis will be a decentralized platform for prediction markets; for betting, auctions and insurances 04:32 – Martin says companies like eBay, Uber and AirBnB will be replaced by a decentralized platform 04:51 – They may replace companies that go into information aggregation 05:02 – Instead of having different analysts determine the revenue of a company, markets and forecasts will be aggregated to one number 05:15 – Gnosis has zero customers and zero in revenue, but they have a team and have raised capital thru selling GNO tokens; they raised $12.5 million 06:14 – The tokens were sold for 250,000 ether, a blockchain currency, and at the time the tokens were sold, the ether was worth $12.5 million 06:55 – The token has its own value and is currently trading at $240 a piece 07:04 – Gnosis collects ether and pays their employees with it 07:33 – To convert ether into real dollars, Martin uses Kraken, Coinbase and Poloniex 08:40 – The foundation of crypto is its big vision and the vision to create something as big as the internet; however, currently, it is still just speculation 09:31 – The token itself is almost always issued in Ethereum; the consumer creates the rules so the first set of rules they made involved organizing the token sales 10:03 – Martin did the token auction and was completely controlled by the blockchain 10:40 – Compared to Bitcoin, Ethereum was easier to use for developers 11:10 – If crypto becomes the currency of the future, Martin says he hopes that people will become equally rich. He is currently working on a project where each person can issue their own currency and others would agree to accept each other’s currencies 11:37 – They are trying to democratize money 12:27 – Nathan says there is a limited supply of ethereum in the blockchain 12:46 – Personally, Martin does not follow the bitcoin model 13:02 – Martin is thinking of a new world where people are part of a new economy; each one gets to issue their own tokens and the tokens have value 13:50 – Inflation can be used to finance a public good 14:11 – For example, let’s say you want to create a platform like Uber, Uber is made to serve the public 14:35 – The operating cost is not what made Uber expensive to build, it was the spend on marketing and buying everyone on the platform 14:57 – Martin says there can be a new model where people can create value by joining the same platform 15:13 – The value creation happens when people join the platform, this is where tokens are useful and can be used as incentives 15:58 – The early adopters get more and those who join later will have to pay fees 16:12 – Nathan says this sounds like a network marketing scheme 16:25 – Martin says this is how Uber found success – in the beginning someone paid $2 billion and in the end, it’s the users that pay; but, the curve can be much flatter 17:02 – Nathan asks Martin how values go up in crypto 17:42 – Martin says value creation is made when everyone agrees on something 18:15 – The thing about competing token issuances is that people need to find a way to combine their different tokens onto one platform 18:44 – Nathan says he can see the good intentions of the people who are in the crypto space, but he is trying to figure out who will win or lose when the crypto marketplace is more mature and established 19:28 – Martin says assuming there will be a winner and loser, the difference is found in people who have control over a platform 19:49 – For example, in Uber they can change rules and raise fees, but on a decentralized platform, you can structure it in a way that makes restrictions on yourself 20:16 – If you monopolize the platform, you can still get the fee but you have no control in changing it 21:02 – Martin says there is power in making your governance mechanism into something that does not allow you to change anything 23:31 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Crypto and blockchain can be the currency of the future. You create value when people agree to join a platform together. A future where people can have their own currency may be the way to democratize our use of money. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
26:3231/08/2017
767: With $10M Raised Will They Be Sytem of Record for Your COO?
Nick Candito. He is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of the company called Progressly, championing the company’s mission towards becoming the new standard for how teams find and execute business processes. He previously served as Relate IQ’s head of user success and business operations which was acquired by Salesforce, the first automatic and intelligent CRM solution. Nick founded Progressly to address how large industries operate, innovate and share around core business processes. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Weiner, Satya Nadella, Dick Costolo, Jeff Bezos Favorite online tool? — Hubspot tools for email, Pocket How many hours of sleep do you get?— less than 8 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – be patient, ask more questions and optimize by being around the best people Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:07 – Nathan introduces Nick to the show 01:49 – Nick thinks Salesforce will win the CRM space, as well as Microsoft and LinkedIn 02:25 – Nick is impressed by Base CRM and Social Capital 02:57 – Nick stumbled into tech as he was originally a finance major 03:15 – He started by joining a small software team building technology for the pharmaceutical industry and learned about the manual system of the tech industry 04:04 – Nick then joined Crimson Hexagon and he learned how to take a company to the next level using tools like Salesforce 04:38 – With RelateIQ, Nick learned how to create a sales system of engagement 05:18 – Nick thinks the best founding duo he has ever encountered is Adam Evans and Steve Loughlin 06:29 – Progressly is the operational system of records with a focus on the Fortune 1000 CROs or contract research organizations 07:24 – The company has a mobile first strategy (people who are working outside of office) 08:01 – Progressly works with a variety of companies; big companies that include Shell Oil and those in the mid-market segment 08:25 – The highest price is $49 per user, with the IT Group of Chevron they have 60,000 employees within the company 09:31 – The company was founded in 2014 and started to fundraise aggressively in 2015; they were able to raise $10 million in the seed, series A and after 10:22 – They had a very specific profile for their seed round and focused on a large institutional investor, a micro VC, and some high value angels—it played out the way they planned 11:17 – They are looking at getting a positive net churn and at how they can accelerate the growth of their accounts; for example, from site-wide deployment to regional deployment to enterprise deployment 13:28 – They are now in the hundreds in terms of customers; the energy and utilities sector has a high network effect 14:05 – Nathan just interviewed Geoff Moore who said the more specific or weirder the sector, the better 15:24 – The utility metric depends on what the user is running on operationally 16:03 – The active number of seats are in the thousands 16:46 – The first year revenue was pretty low because they did a paid pilot offering 17:10 – They were looking into the pilot to use case expansion 17:55 – They want to have a 100% growth, year over year 18:10 – It is easier to drive a high growth rate rather than have customers who can refer you to others 19:41 – Nick will celebrate when he gets to $5 million in ARR or accounting rate of return 20:40 – Currently, they are doing less than 300 grand per month 21:16 – Having an enterprise cycle in your business is slower upfront, but has the ability to experience significant growth in the long run 21:31 – They have 30 employees with some in product design and engineering 22:31 – The payback period is significantly lower than 12 months 24:38 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Target a specific group for your customer base to increase the chances of referrals. An enterprise account may prove to be slow at first, but it will pay off in the long run. Ask your customers to promote your business to other people. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
27:3630/08/2017
766: This Company Used Evangelical Christian Mobile Data to Influence US Elections
Anindya Datta. He is the CEO and Chairman of a company called Mobilewalla, a mobile consumer, audience platform company. Before Mobilewalla, he founded a company called Chutney Technologies where he was backed by Kleiner Perkins which was eventually acquired by Cisco Systems. He has been on the faculties of Georgia Tech, The University of Arizona and The National University of Singapore. He obtained his undergraduate degree many years ago and his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Maryland College Park. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The New New Thing by Michael Lewis What CEO do you follow? – Jose Mourinho Favorite online tool? — Outlook and Gmail How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5 ½ hours If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Drink less and study harder Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:26 – Nathan introduces Anindya to the show 02:21 – Mobilewalla collects data for how consumers behave on mobile and processes it for mobile marketers—they have two products: mobile audience and raw mobile data 03:38 – When companies buy the audience, Mobilewalla provides the IDs and it is a one-time deal; the raw data is given on a subscription-basis which is paid monthly 04:28 – Right now the SaaS model is earning more in terms of revenue, but Anindya thinks this will change in December 04:57 – They are currently modifying the audience pricing to become a recurring stream 05:10 – They are planning to offer the data segments needed by a company and get a monthly payment for it 06:07 – Mobilewalla gets their data from different sources including the ad request system in mobile, they barter with the ad company in exchange for data 06:54 – They also put a pixel in an ad and obtain data from you as you browse 07:23 – This includes your location 07:57 – The company started with buying the information they can collect from other companies’ ads and then moved on to trading 08:32 – 2014 is their first revenue year where they got $1 million from the cut of the media buy 09:10 – 2015 was also all media buys where they got $4 million 10:18 – They stopped media buying in June 2016 and played a key role in the US presidential election—the revenue generated was $4 million: $750,000 in data and $3.25 million was from media 11:33 – The projection for this year is $5.1 million (all coming from data), but they have deals with companies that include media work 12:21 – Mobilewalla was one of the key data arms for a major party 12:33 – They created segments for evangelical Christians 13:31 – Anindya cannot share who they worked for but they can say the client was very happy with their work 14:10 – They raised their capital thru venture funding which are convertible notes worth $4 million; they have not yet raised a series B 15:50 – In May 2016, all the revenue was from data and they got $12,000. In June of this year, they hit $250,000—this is a 20x growth in 13 months 16:32 – In May 2017, they made $172,000 17:05 – On SaaS, they have 9 customers with subscription accounts and they pay from $8,500 to $41,000 a month 17:21 – The biggest chunk of audience revenue comes from Oracle, they get paid based on the segments that were sold 18:10 – In June, they were close to $100,000 from their mobile audience; there are over 250 organizations buying from them including Unilever and Procter and Gamble 19:12 – Ever since they started there are only two companies who have not continued working with them 20:01 – The company has two sellers – one in New York and one in Singapore 20:27 – The total team size is 38 with 3 focused on sales acquiring new clients; the average sales cycle for a SaaS client is 45 days 21:21 – There is zero variable marketing spend for the company 21:51 – The company headquarters is in New York and the US team is located in New York and Atlanta where the US engineering team is based 22:12 – The US team size is 10, the Singapore team size is 12, and the rest is based in Calcutta, India 24:21 – The biggest amount of money they generated during the election was the “get out to vote or GOTV” – they monitored every polling booth in a certain number of states and they were able to tell the ground team who voted and who did not 25:04 – During the election their data was acquired in real time 27:15 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Invest in a business that can bring in profit; this will give you the capital you need for your other businesses. Data is king. You CAN barter with other companies to reduce your spend on marketing. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
30:4629/08/2017
765: How This Coach Can Charge $80k+ per Year for One Gig
Cameron Herold. He’s known as the business growth guru. He’s the mastermind behind hundreds of companies’ exponential growth. He’s built a dynamic consultancy whose current clients include the big 4 wireless carriers. His clients like that Cameron only speaks from experience. He’s earned his reputation as the business growth guru by guiding clients to double their profit and revenue in just 3 years or less. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Good to Great What CEO do you follow? – Travis Kalanick Favorite online tool? — CommitTo3 How many hours of sleep do you get?— 9 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Everybody’s insecure, everybody’s nervous and just suck it up and run with it, because everybody’s more worried about themselves and never about me” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:16 – Nathan introduces Cameron to the show 02:04 – Cameron was featured on TED Talks’ Raising Kids as Entrepreneurs and that’s where his career got started 02:13 – Cameron got into College Pro Painters 02:24 – Cameron was the COO at 1-800-GOT-JUNK 02:29 – Cameron grew the company from 14 employees to 3100 employees in 6 years 02:33 – Cameron started coaching CEOs 10 years ago 02:48 – Brian Scudamore who was in Episode 409 and he is Cameron’s friend 03:20 – Cameron shares why he chose the consultancy path 03:43 – “I don’t need to build another company to feel good” 03:50 – Cameron likes doing what he does 04:02 – Cameron shares what happened in cryptocurrency in 2000 04:04 – There were 15K companies using currencies 04:14 – Electronic currency was tied to US dollars in terms of valuation but it was backed by nothing 04:27 – They took a percentage of every transaction 05:06 – One of the companies that Cameron helped was BlueGrace Logistics 05:18 – Cameron coached the CEO, Bobby Harris, and 5 other executives 05:21 – Form $80M top line revenue, they grew to $250M 05:33 – The company is all about culture and that is Bobby’s focus 05:47 – Cameron does two 90-minute video calls with all of his clients 05:56 – It’s mostly mentoring 06:08 – Cameron teaches how to put the right systems and processes in place 06:25 – Most entrepreneurs just wake up one day with the realization that they’re clueless about what they’re doing 06:44 – After experiencing substantial growth, a company has no idea what to do next 07:04 – There are a couple of companies that Cameron has equity in 07:30 – Cameron has a couple of groups on the investment side 07:43 – Cameron’s two books, Double Double and Meetings Suck, speak to the core of what Cameron is doing 07:55 – Cameron wrote a book because he’s a paid speaker and speaker bureaus want to put out more content 08:04 – Cameron is an advisor and investor for Tucker Max’s Book in a Box 08:16 – Book in a Box does an 8-hour interview and strips the content from your head 08:40 – It costs $25K to pull the content out of your head and put it into print 08:44 – Thought leaders and CEOs need to have a book in this day and age 09:10 – Cameron shares how great Book in a Box is at what they do 09:24 – They also pulled some content from Cameron’s previous speaking events and used the copy of his first book 09:29 – They provide a format for our thoughts and they ask the right questions 09:49 – Cameron has sold around 50K copies of Meetings Suck 10:03 – Cameron targets the leaders of the meetings, participants and discusses how the meeting should proceed 10:30 – Cameron wrote Double Double 6 years ago 10:52 – Cameron’s speaking fee was $7500 before he had published his books, now it is $35K 11:11 – Cameron is one of the best speakers that we’ve had in a long time now 11:51 – “I think we’re at the very, very peak of a market right now” 12:34 – Some of Cameron’s clients have been with him for 3-4 years, some just a year and others 3-6 months 12:51 – Cameron’s starting fee is $80K annually and goes up depending on the client’s needs 13:20 – Cameron shares how he talked with Sprint’s Jaime Jones 13:46 – “I don’t understand their business and I don’t need to” 14:35 – Cameron focuses on the people side of the business 15:16 – Cameron shares where he puts his money to increase his revenue stream 15:42 – Everything is a little overpriced now in real estate 16:04 – Cameron shares where his property is and how he is managing them 19:25 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Some entrepreneurs get overwhelmed by their company’s incredibly, fast-paced growth and they need support in learning how to sustain that growth. Have the right systems and processes in place to carry the momentum of your business. Invest your money after you’ve done the research yourself and know exactly what you’re getting into. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
21:4128/08/2017
764: He Raised $5.3m in Token Offering on Etherum Blockchain to help you bet on future events
Jack Peterson. He’s the co-founder of Augur which is a decentralized, prediction market platform that runs on the ethereum decentralized network. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Handbook of Applied Cryptography What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — Ethereum 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? – “Don’t spend too much time on impractical things” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:10 – Nathan introduces Jack to the show 01:28 – Augur is a decentralized prediction market platform 01:34 – The platform exists on a ethereum decentralized network 02:09 – Bitcoin is the first blockchain which was initially intended for payment 02:19 – Ethereum is a blockchain that is flexible, you can upload programs where people can execute their programs 02:38 – Augur is a set of programs that run on the network of ethereum 02:54 – The founder of ethereum was on Episode 758 03:11 – Augur has a set of smart contracts on ethereum that people run 03:57 – Augur is currently finishing their beta test and it is not yet live 04:02 – Their smart contract code is undergoing security audits 04:12 – Jack shares how to use Augur 04:27 – The aim is to make the experience similar to accessing a regular website 04:40 – Augur is a venue to bet on any world event 04:49 – For example, making predictions with politics 05:40 – The market you create is where you can buy and sell shares of the event 06:25 – An example scenario: the Super Bowl 06:40 – A market is where someone can place their bet 07:10 – In a normal sportsbook, people can bet on the winner 07:19 – Who will win the Super Bowl? This is the market on Augur and people can place their bets 07:37 – You can buy and sell shares of any of the outcomes 08:17 – The people in the market set the price of the shares 09:06 – With the Super Bowl, there will be multiple outcomes 09:28 – When you set-up the market, you set-up the order book for each of the outcome 10:05 – You could place a bet by buying shares of the outcome 10:41 – When your bet wins, the value of the shares go up and if you lose, it will be zero 10:59 – “You’re betting on how likely the outcome is to happen” 11:27 – Jack shares how someone who doesn’t have any experience in crypto can participate in Augur 11:35 – First thing you need to do is get the crypto currency (you can use your credit card) 12:01 – Augur isn’t involved with any platform that exchanges dollars to crypto, so you have to get it from third-parties 12:30 – You can buy ether from Coinbase and use the ether to place bets on Augur 13:10 – If you already have ether, you can already participate in a market 13:55 – Augur has an embedded plugin similarly to Paypal which is for Coinbase and ShapeShift 14:25 – If you signed in, you will have the ether to bet 15:05 – You can create a market on the trading page 15:37 – You’re betting with whomever wants to participate in the market 15:48 – The person who creates the market will set-up an order book with actions 16:51 – Jack did a Token share 17:07 – “Our token is called rep” 17:58 – Token has raised $5.3M in August and September of 2015 18:10 – It was a $5.3M equivalent in crypto 20:30 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Ethereum is a blockchain that Augur uses to run its programs. There are multiple platforms available for dollar to crypto currency exchange. Maintain your focus on what’s important. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
22:3027/08/2017
763: He's Raised $18.5m To Help Banks Use Open API's, Makes Money From # of API Calls
Steve Kirsh. He’s the CEO of Token, a Silicon Valley startup company developing a modern platform for open banking. He’s pioneered several computer core technologies like optical mouse, Internet search, spam filtering, and secure identity and founded 7 high tech companies—two with billion dollar market caps such as Infoseek and Frame Technology. He received his BS and MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1980. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Like A Virgin What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — SimplyFile 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? – “Just hire good, strong and experienced people” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:25 – Nathan introduces Steve to the show 02:04 – Token supplies open banking software to banks 02:24 – There’s no real API that works with banks and this is the problem 03:00 – One of Token’s customers is Fidor Bank 03:02 – The problem is most banks don’t have an open API where you can do things like move money 03:19 – Token can get into Fidor’s API to drive its API 04:13 – Token has spent time creating an end-to-end secure architecture that is based on digital cryptography 05:24 – Steve thinks that there’s no real need for blockchain for a lot of financial applications 05:38 – “The technology for blockchain is just not appropriate” 05:48 – The Bank of England did an experiment with etherium 06:24 – Token was launched in 2015 06:50 – Steve shares how Token came to life 07:15 – Token raised $18.5M in a series A 07:26 – There’s legislation in Europe that requires banks to open their APIs and that’s when Token came in 08:07 – Token charges per API calls 08:10 – Token gets the calls for free from the banks 08:50 – The charge depends on the API calls 09:18 – Nathan simplifies how the model works 10:05 – There’s no equivalent to PSD 2 in the USA and it’s only for banks in Europe 10:20 – This can only happen in the USA if people want to be compatible with the banks in Europe 11:33 – Token’s first bank 12:11 – There are currently around 5 banks that are integrated with Token 12:25 – Team size is 25, split between San Francisco and London 14:20 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Find the perfect timing and opportunity to pitch your business. It is easier and more secure for banks to adapt a technology that has been tested than it is for them to create their own. Hire good, strong and experienced people for your business—it just makes like easier. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
17:1926/08/2017
762: 4000 Developers Pay Them To Catch Bugs, $9.5m Raised
James Smith. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Bugsnag, the leading crash monitoring platform for web and mobile applications. The company helps companies like Airbnb, Lyft, Cisco, Pandora and Yelp catch and fix errors on their applications. Originally from London, James moved to the Bay area in 2009, leading the product team as the CTO of Heyzap. In his spare time, he likes hacking open source software, eating junk food and practicing his American accent. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Radical Focus What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos Favorite online tool? — eShares 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? – “If you don’t ask, you don’t get, apply it to your life” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:11 – Nathan introduces James to the show 02:00 – If a company has a software, Bugsnag detects when the software is broken 02:22 – Bugsnag charges monthly 02:28 – The price varies depending on the company’s needs 02:36 – Price starts at $29 a month to tens of thousands a month depending on the scale of the business 03:17 – Customer cohorts 03:57 – Team size is 35 and will be 45 at the end of the year 04:30 – James and his co-founder quit their job in 2012 and started Bugsnag in 2013 04:40 – James was the CTO for Heyzap which was a Y combinator company in the gaming space 04:59 – Heyzap wasn’t able to solve the problem James had with Bloomberg 05:59 – James invested in Heyzap and learned a lot from his time with them 06:40 – Heyzap was acquired by the German company Fyber 07:06 – James’ experience entering the startup world 08:30 – With Heyzap, James had to decide whether or not he’d buy his shares before the acquisition 09:43 – James’ price was low because he was an early employee of Heyzap 10:41 – James was 29 when he left Heyzap 10:50 – Bugsnag was initially bootstrapped, then raised in 2013 11:08 – Bugsnag went with Matrix Partners 11:32 – Bugsnag raised a total of $9.5M 11:49 – Customer number is around 4000 companies 12:04 – Bugsnag has a free and premium model 12:14 – There are 60K software engineers who are using Bugsnag 12:21 – One third are organizations and the rest are using it for free 13:00 – First year revenue was $4.5K in ARR 13:27 – Bugsnag has broken $2M ARR already 13:47 – “The expansion revenue is really, really strong” 13:50 – Bugsnag is constantly in a net negative churn 14:06 – Logo churn is around 1% 14:40 – Bugsnag started with low deal sizes and grew them slowly 15:05 – People try Bugsnag for free and see its value 15:45 – Healthy net negative churn in the industry is around mid-single digit to low double digit negative churn 16:41 – The best driver of growth for Bugsnag is word of mouth 17:01 – Bugsnag also does conferences and had 18 conferences last year 17:10 – Sponsorship price per conference can go up to $10K 17:28 – Large companies go to conferences as well 17:35 – Payback period is the 12-month which is the rule of thumb 18:17 – Bugsnag is in a typical SaaS gross margin 20:25 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: If you don’t ask, you won’t receive; therefore, just get out there and ask for what you want. Small deal sizes can grow and expand to large ones once people see your value. Consider owning a part of a company—especially if it’s a company that you truly believe in. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
23:2025/08/2017
761: With $63m Raised, 20% of Top 200 Companies Use This To Communicate With Employees
Jim Larrison. He’s the co-founder and president of Dynamic Signal, the leading, customer-employee, advocacy engagement platform. Jim has been involved in a handful of startups that were successful from within big companies to venture-funded businesses. With a couple of sold businesses and an IPO, he is set to come forward with Dynamic Signal which has already raised over $68M in funding. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Business Adventures and Into Thin Air What CEO do you follow? – Tony Hsieh Favorite online tool? — Owler How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “It’s important to fail and not to be scared of failing” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:12 – Nathan introduces Jim to the show 01:53 – Dynamic Signal was founded 7 years ago with the mission to revolutionize how to communicate with your employee 02:03 – Big companies struggle to communicate with their employees 02:23 – Dynamic Signal focuses on simplifying this communication 02:34 – Some large companies don’t use the internet to communicate—they send snail mail, newsletters or magazines 03:09 – Dynamic Signal works with Slack which is a collaboration tool 03:20 – Dynamic Signal is a top-down communication tool 03:43 – Dynamic Signal is a SaaS business with monthly subscription plans 03:59 – Dynamic Signal goes after global businesses, enterprises and corporate businesses 04:40 – Dynamic Signal charges by number of employees 05:36 – Big companies grow faster than the small companies 05:56 – Dynamic Signal segment customers depending on the number of employees and where the employees are based 06:20 – Nestle is a global business with hundreds of companies under their brand 06:43 – Dynamic Signal has no cap in the number of employees 06:57 – Global 50 companies have 23K to millions of employees 07:11 – Global 1000 companies have 5K to 25K employees and 5K employees below are for corporate businesses 07:26 – Dynamic Signal was launched in 2010 07:30 – Jim and his co-founder sold their previous company Adify to Cox 07:43 – It was for $350M 07:52 – It was a quick exit and they’ve raised $20-30M 08:06 – The original idea for Dynamic Signal was to go after advocates and influencers 08:25 – Jim saw that the biggest advocates for businesses like Oakley and Nike are their employees 09:30 – Jim and his co-founder built Dynamic Signal because they like working together, even after their successful exit 10:06 – When they started the company, they told themselves that they wanted to build the technology the right way 10:32 – Team size is around 200, some are in the field and some are in San Francisco 10:45 – Around 80 people are engineers/technical and 40 are on sales 11:17 – First year revenue 12:10 – 2016 ARR 12:40 – Jim’s vision for the company is to go public 13:00 – Total customers is close to a couple of thousand 13:25 – Dynamic Signal has 20% of the global 200 companies 13:55 – Dynamic Signal’s costs are driven to the technology 14:03 – Gross margin is around 85% 14:23 – Jim and his co-founder had a good relationship with Cox 14:36 – Cox also funded Dynamic Signal 15:52 – Jim hasn’t seen any logo churn since they launched 16:03 – Dynamic Signal has a long sales cycle: from 240 days to years 17:15 – Jim has tried the seat bucket license but it hasn’t worked as well as their previous pricing 18:00 – “The way we drive growth is 100% based on getting more usage and that’s it” 18:35 – After the raise, Dynamic Signal is focused on expanding their business 18:50 – Paid spent is less than $500K 19:03 – Payback period 21:07 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Larger companies struggle to communicate and connect with their employees and oftentimes, need a solution. The biggest supporters and advocates of a brand are the employees. Get used to failing and don’t fear it—it’s part of your path to greater success and understanding. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
23:5824/08/2017
760: This Site Has Sold $3m Worth of Athletes Old Gear
Brendan Candon. He’s the co-founder and CEO of SidelineSwap, an online marketplace for athletes to buy and sell their sports gear. The company has over 100K users, participated in 500 startups and has raised $1.5M in venture funding. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Leaders Eat Last What CEO do you follow? – Jack Ma Favorite online tool? — Slack and Appear 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? – Brendan wished he could have been more active in entrepreneurship while in school Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:20 – Nathan introduces Brendan to the show 01:43 – Brendan was in Episode 359 of The Top 02:33 – Brendan believes that SidelineSwap will make $5-6M in sales by the end of 2017 02:43 – SidelineSwap just launched their iOs app 03:28 – SidelineSwap is where athletes list their items for free 03:35 – You can list any new or used sports equipment 03:43 – SidelineSwap takes a 12% cut 03:49 – Their top KPI is gross merchandise volume 03:53 – They look at the number of sales they drive to the platform 04:51 – SidelineSwap currently has 15K sellers and around 23K buyers 05:22 – There are 2 sides of a marketplace: 05:30 – SidelineSwap gets supplies from the sellers which drive traffic 05:35 – There should be a balance between supply and demand 05:45 – SidelineSwap started by their search to see how many people had sports gear lying around 05:58 – They went to former college athletes, professionals and others in the industry 06:35 – They got some highly desirable gear from former known athletes 06:39 – SidelineSwap started with social media to drive traffic to the website 06:45 – They now have around 70K Instagram and Facebook followers 07:34 – SidelineSwap has marketing ads highlighting some gear that can be considered collector’s items 08:25 – Total transaction volume since the launch of SidelineSwap is around $3.5M 08:35 – 70% happened in just the first 6 months 08:57 – Brendan thinks that getting the right supplies affects their growth significantly 09:08 – SidelineSwap also educates the buyers on the items that they’re getting 09:30 – SidelineSwap tries to avoid jockstraps 09:43 – There are also different accessories that target the younger buyers 10:28 – eBay started in a similar way as SidelineSwap 11:00 – “We want to be the resource for every sports family” 11:21 – SidelineSwap wants to build the best possible shopping experience 11:45 – Average order value is $80 11:56 – SidelineSwap focuses on the number of gear listed 12:23 – In May, there were 3K buyers and 1500 sellers 12:48 – SidelineSwap has recently $1.5M in summer 12:56 – Total will be around $3.5 including a current negotiation 13:23 – Brendan shares how he pitched SidelineSwap as a marketplace 13:45 – Brendan believes there will be a sporting goods marketplace 14:19 – SidelineSwap is currently growing 30%, month over month 14:43 – Current team size is 10, some are in Boston and some are in New York 17:10 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: There will be a marketplace for sports equipment in the near future. For every business, aim to achieve a balance with your supply and demand. Research where you can find the BEST resources for your supply—this will attract your target market. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
19:2623/08/2017
759: He Shares How He Built His Company On Top of Cryptocurrency Ethereum and Why
Eric Tang. He’s a computer programmer and co-founder of Live Peer, a decentralized video live streaming platform incentivized with the blockchain. He was introduced to the blockchain in 2014, and it’s pretty much everything that Eric thinks about now. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things What CEO do you follow? – Jerry Colonna Favorite online tool? — MetaMask 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? – Eric would tell himself to be more focused and worry less Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:06 – Nathan introduces Eric to the show 02:07 – Wowza does video transcoding in a centralized way 02:30 – One of the big CDN players is Akamai 02:59 – There are two different cases for why people would use Live Peer over the other players in the industry 03:05 – Live Peer is in a decentralized world 03:11 – App developers nowadays are building decentralized applications 03:18 – The applications do not have a server 04:13 – They can duplicate their projects over the blockchain 04:17 – Live peer is the only solution for decentralized apps 05:20 – The government wouldn’t be able to figure out the IP of Live Peer 06:06 – The idea of blockchain is the participants are the stakeholders 06:16 – When you use Facebook live, you’re just a user and not actually benefiting from it 06:27 – In a decentralized world, if you’re a participant of Live Peer, you earn tokens which grow and become more valuable 07:07 – From an ecosystem standpoint, the companies building businesses around bitcoin and ethereum are early coin holders 07:28 – Joseph Lubin, Ethereum’s co-founder, is now hiring 400 people for ConsenSys to build applications around the ethereum ecosystem 07:55 – Ethereum provides a smart contract platform which bitcoin doesn’t provide 08:47 – How Ethereum and bitcoin are competitors and how they are not competing explained 09:17 – Anyone can build their own bitcoin blockchain but they won’t be always successful 10:18 – Eric thinks co-blockchains will also exist 10:50 – Eric thinks bitcoin is a great way to hold value as it has a great network now 11:11 – Ethereum has its own value and for a completely different purpose 11:29 – We use the ethereum platform to hold our tokens 11:50 – In the open blockchain world, anyone can be an investor 12:10 – There’s just more risk in investing earlier 12:44 – Can someone cheat the system by having fake miners grow the value earlier? 13:00 – Some are pumping the tokens and selling them 13:13 – When a company comes, Eric would have them hold their tokens at first 13:48 – If you have a lot miners, you’re already contributing a lot to the network 14:00 – The network will leverage the access capacity 14:12 – if you spun out a bunch of miners, Live Peers will have a large capacity in terms of amount of transcoding and live streaming work we can do 14:23 – This creates a cheaper price for the amount of live streaming 14:43 – Nathan makes a comparison using Live Peer 1 and Live Peer 2 as competitors 14:49 – When investors spend money on the 2 companies and contribute more resources, the prices of the service will go down for the consumers 15:07 – The longer they spend money, the more users they can drive 15:55 – If Nathan launches an email marketing tool, how can he create traction if people don’t understand crypto 16:18 – There’s actually a need for people to simplify the complexity of crypto 16:59 – Eric is thinking of providing incentives for individual stakeholders to get new users on board 17:23 – The big investors can put aside a big percentage of tokens and just incentivize it 17:37 – It’s like an employment equity pool 17:54 – The early participants will benefit more from the ecosystem 18:03 – The first bitcoin transaction was 10K bitcoins for a pizza 18:16 – The bitcoin price to buy a pizza is a little over $2500 (a coin) 20:30 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: More developers are building decentralized applications because of the security piece. The participants in the blockchain are the stakeholders as well. The one who will win is those who can spend more money and contribute resources for a longer span of time—this will attract more users and create cheaper prices for the consumers. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
23:2122/08/2017
758: The Ex-Stock Exchange Brain Behind Ethereum Blockchain
Anthony Diiorio. He’s a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, community organizer and thought leader in the field of digital currencies, blockchain technology, and decentralized technology. He’s the founder and CEO of Decentral and Jaxx and co-founder of the Ethereum project. He previously served as the chief digital officer of The Toronto Stock Exchange. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People What CEO do you follow? – N/A Favorite online tool? — LastPass 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? – Anthony wished he didn’t waste his time in university Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:55 – Nathan introduces Anthony to the show 01:38 – Anthony got into the industry in 2012 and thought that crypto was going to be more important than the internet 01:57 – Before, there was disruption in the internet—now, you can send value without third parties getting involved 02:21 – We’re now moving onto the age of the movement of value 02:34 – Some third party disruptions come from banks and credit bank companies 02:53 – You can remove third parties in the value chain and connect more individuals at a lower cost 03:11 – With smart contract, you can now automate on blockchain and see a reduction cost 03:38 – A blockchain is a ledger system or an accounting system that tracks entries using cryptographics 04:20 – Digital currency didn’t work before because there was no technology for it 04:48 – Since you can’t duplicate something digital, you can claim what is yours 05:33 – Decentralized ledgers track what people are sending and receiving 05:57 – The decentralized networks are replacing centralized services 06:14 – Blockchain is the technology, bitcoin is the example of that technology 06:22 – All cryptocurrencies have blockchains below them 06:28 – Bitcoin is the first one to have its blockchain 06:30 – Ethereum has a blockchain behind it 06:39 – Blockchain makes the transactions visible and transparent 06:50 – Blockchain provides trust between two individuals 07:40 – Tokens are coins but are found on other platforms 07:45 – Ethereum is a platform that is made to build other platforms on top of it 07:51 – Ethereum provides the infrastructure layer 08:05 – There are now tons of projects building coins on the ethereum platform 08:38 – Bitcoin has its own coin while ethereum is like a product that incentivizes people to contribute to the network 09:39 – Ethereum is like an SDK depending on the developers 11:03 – Anthony had a talk with someone who's in the cannabis industry 11:06 – Anthony is creating a coin card system where you can buy any coin or currency in convenience stores 11:18 – Banks don’t want to set up accounts for bitcoin companies because they’re scared 11:47 – Anthony sees the same characteristics within the crypto space and cannabis space 12:40 – Ethereum is from Decentral, the hub that Anthony made in 2013 12:55 – Anthony sees people jumping to the crypto space without even researching 13:15 – Look online before investing because scams are everywhere 13:47 – Anything that states there’s a fixed return is fishy so you should seek advice 14:03 – Do your due diligence 14:39 – Decentral is the brand and Jaxx is the product 14:48 – Anthony shares his initial experience with the industry 15:13 – Anthony bootstrapped Etherium 15:23 – Anthony left Etherium in 2015 to focus on the wallet space 15:30 – Anthony realized that the wallet is the browser for the technology 15:51 – The wallet contains the value of movement 15:56 – Anthony developed a multi-chain, multi-platform digital wallet that enables managing and receipt of valuable digital assets 16:23 –When you start your Jaxx, you’re creating a key for your transactions 16:41 – You are in full control of your wallet 16:55 – Jaxx makes money through integration partners like ShapeShift 17:09 – Anthony made $60M from ShapeShift transactions 17:50 – Jax just signed 70 partnerships in the space 18:25 – The fund that Anthony used for Jaxx 18:45 – Jaxx is currently profitable and made $150K last month 19:03 – There are exchanges globally that enable you to buy and sell cryptocurrencies rather than wire transfers to your bank account 19:13 – There’s also a bitcoin ATM and Anthony has it 19:32 – Jaxx’s goal is to become the default interface that the masses can use to understand the power of blockchain 21:46 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: With cryptocurrencies, you can send value without the disruption of third parties. Do your due diligence—while cryptocurrency is a hot space for investors, the chances of getting scammed is also very high. The power of blockchain isn’t only beneficial for those who are already in the space, but for everyone. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
23:5821/08/2017
757: She Launched a $20m Cannabis VC Firm After Her Parents Passed Away
Emily Paxhia. She’s the founder of Poseidon Asset Management and she shifted her focus entirely to the cannabis industry, in 2013. Since that time, she’s taken her experience of researching markets, companies and strategic opportunities and turned them entirely to the world of cannabis. Her focus on understanding where the market is headed rather than where it has been, has been critical to developing a diverse portfolio of companies that span the sector. With over 15 years working with Fortune 500 companies—developing products, resolving strategic errors and addressing new target audiences—her work has been fundamental to stewarding her companies’ portfolios along the paths to success. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things What CEO do you follow? – Mark Zuckerberg Favorite online tool? — Asana How many hours of sleep do you get?— 3-5 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “I wished I had took it easier” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:04 – Nathan introduces Emily to the show 01:53 – Poseidon is a VC firm for cannabis 02:02 – Emily was from an industry where companies were looking to expand their market share 02:09 – Emily saw the cannabis industry as an opportunity—there was a demand for products 02:30 – Emily’s parents passed away from cancer and she was told by some that cannabis could have helped her parents 02:43 – A dying cancer patient is prescribed medication that has side effects, then is issued more meds to handle the side effects—which is a difficult cycle 02:58 – Using cannabis appropriately could actually help with the side effects 03:05 – More and more cancer patients are experiencing relief while using cannabis 03:38 – Emily and her brother were 16 and 21 when their parents passed 04:07 – Prior to Poseidon, Emily was with Miner % Co. Studio 04:44 – As a financial professional, Emily had to assess her risk tolerances 05:04 – It’s important to be mentally and financially invested 05:09 – Emily also had great support to bring Poseidon to life 05:53 – Current fund size is $20M going $25M 06:11 – Emily’s brother is her business partner 06:36 – Emily shares a story when her brother brought in a company that Emily disagreed with at first 06:38 – In 2015, they’ve invested in a company called Surna 06:43 – The company had gone public and was in a lot of trouble 07:00 – Morgan had the idea to buy out the founders of Surna 07:15 – Morgan joined the board and helped the company get on track again 07:40 – Emily shares a time when the reverse happened; she brought in a company that Morgan was hesitant with at first 07:48 – The company was Wurk 08:00 – Emily was interested with Keegan’s presentation 08:35 – Keegan was in Episode 735 of The Top 09:20 – There is an assumption that Emily and Morgan are always high—this is NOT true 09:44 – Emily takes cannabis for stomach pain, but it doesn’t get her high 10:26 – Emily sees the cannabis industry as a wellness industry 10:50 – Emily is interested with business technology solutions that help businesses run smoothly 11:00 – She’s also interested in agricultural technology solutions as well 12:06 – “Honestly, if I could, I would solve the banking issue in California” 12:21 – Banks are still dropping businesses and credit cards 12:35 – It gets challenging when someone loses their banking relationship 13:00 – Emily is currently in San Francisco 13:23 – Poseidon is modest in stating their expected returns 13:31 – Emily wanted to capture the growth of industry 13:59 – Poseidon has been running 40-44% IR 14:13 – Poseidon has 3 phases of diligence: 14:20 – They receive lots of emails and Emily tries to read and respond as much and as quickly as possible 14:56 – Emily meets the founders and the team as part of their due diligence 15:06 – The last phase is from getting into the details of actual financial projections to sourcing potential co-investments 15:25 – Poseidon currently has 30 active companies in their portfolio 15:28 – Over 40 in the lifetime of the portfolio 15:55 – Typical deal size is $500K to a million dollars 17:02 – Emily and her brother are talking about a company they want to launch 17:38 – Emily’s three babies from their portfolio are: 17:42 – Flow Kana: a processing center working with small farmers 18:17 – Headset is a machine-data analytics company 18:37 – Emily really likes Wurk 18:49 – Baker is also exciting because it creates market opportunity 21:40 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: To become successful, one must research the field in question. There’s a great demand for new product and technology in the cannabis industry as the supply is low. Carry your past experience and knowledge into your current and future endeavors—employ the skills that transfer across disciplines. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
23:2220/08/2017
756: Meet The 21 Year Old Who Runs His Own $5m Hedge Fund
Julian Marchese. Julian was introduced to Nathan by a mutual friend and he’s the CEO and portfolio manager at Marchese Investments in New York City. Julian is only 21 and was already featured in Bloomberg, CNBC and Dragon's Den, which is Shark Tank of Canada, where he managed to get 4 out of 5 dragons in the den that showed interest. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Market Wizards What CEO do you follow? – Peter Jones Favorite online tool? — Quantocracy.com 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? – “Multi-strategy” Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:51 – Nathan introduces Julian to the show 01:47 – Going into the hedge fund world has always been Julian’s passion 01:55 – Julian was introduced to the world of investing by his parents when he was 11 years old 02:50 – When Julian turned 18, he decided to start his own firm 02:58 – He waited until he reached the legal age 03:27 – Julian took a course in Toronto and people in press found it fascinating that he was studying trading at a very young age 03:48 – A lady took it upon herself to take Julian’s story and publish it 04:05 – Some of Julian’s first investors saw his story from the media 05:00 – Julian wanted to build a community for young learners like himself 05:10 – A lady emailed Julian because she wanted her daughter to join 05:36 – Julian met the lady and her daughter when they were in Toronto 05:51 – 2 years later, the lady invested $75K for 1% of Julian’s management company 06;11 – The management company has raised $675K with a $4M valuation 06:38 – Hedge funds usually have multiple entities who have different roles 07:28 – Julian also pays himself for personal expenses which is around $25K to $30K 07:53 – The other costs are on the management company side 08:44 – The investors make money from the GP interest accumulated 09:43 – Julian was able to raise the $6M capital through value generation 09:45 – “I’ve been managing money since October 2015” 10:07 – The best months for Julian are the months where the market is down 10:28 – Julian latest deal was an institutional money manager 11:03 – Julian isn’t doing traditional investments 11:42 – Julian explains how he does his investments 11:45 – First, they’re able to trade volatility and how much the market moves up or down 11:59 – Most people invest in the stock market, they want to benefit with the stocks are up, but they also want protection when things go down 12:21 – One of Julian’s strategies is to systematically sell insurance 13:04 – The investment return depends on the investors 13:40 – If you put in a million dollars in October 2015, today you will now have $1.2M 13:50 – You can take it all or leave any amount you want 14:09 – They now cater to different types of clients 14:36 – Julian doesn’t worry too much about what other hedge funds usually worry about 15:10 – Julian worries more about their process and how can they develop more 15:20 – The real risk for Julian is when there’s something wrong with his analysis process 15:45 – Strategies are reciprocal 17:04 – Julian has multiple strategies and none of those strategies are correlated 17:53 – Brexit can affect the volatility strategy but it’s a selective strategy and not always in the market 19:03 – “The main risk to us are not macro events like a stock market crashing” 19:40 – Julian makes money from 53-55% of their trades 19:49 – They try to limit their exposures 20:02 – “The risks are very circumstantial” 21:20 – Julian is unsure of his future positioning, but it’s completely content specific 23:23 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Having multiple strategies can help you stay on track. Start as early as possible—you are building your skills and knowledge base for the future. People desire taking risks in trading and stocks, but they also need the securities in place. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
25:4219/08/2017
755: Want to Invest in BitCoin But Don't Understand It? Listen to This.
Tom Kineshanko. He’s been investing in cryptocurrencies, also called digital assets or tokens, since 2013. He founded and exited the first bitcoin and ethereum fund in Canada, invested in the ethereum cloud sale and has made 10x the returns in bitcoin after ethereum classic, golem and several other tokens. He’s also the founder and general partner at First Block Capital, a digital asset fund manager where Tom leads investments in new token issuance. He’s also the founder and CEO of Walter.ai—a company that is building a distributed Bloomberg terminal—which intends to make the best supplier of market data to the cryptocurrencies market. Famous Five: Favorite crypto-related book? – Introducing Ethereum and Solidity What CEO do you follow? – Brian Armstrong and Olaf Carlson Favorite online tool? — Cryptocurrencies exchanges How many hours of sleep do you get? — 8 plus If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “I wish I understood which industries were sort of young-man game versus old-man game” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:05 – Nathan introduces Tom to the show 02:31 – There’s a market of new old coin tokens and there’s little information about it 03:12 – “This is liquid venture capital” 03:15 – The tokens represent an exposure to startup projects 03:25 – As people know, investing in startups is about qualitative information rather than quantitative 03:45 – Tom decided to apply the distributing models in building companies 04:50 – Tom shares the common way to build companies 05:10 – Blockchain ecosystem has a technology that is a combination of 4 different technologies 05:15 – The technology allows secure transfer of value on the internet even without a third-party approval 05:28 – Blockchain is a secure transfer layer that overlays on your internet 06:06 – You can track the activity on the blockchain because it’s an open source 06:16 – The tricky part is to identify who’s doing what 06:46 – Every time there’s a transaction on bitcoin blockchain, you’re leaving clues to who you are and what you’re up to 07:43 – The best use case of bitcoin blockchain is a stored value 08:22 – The issue with bitcoin blockchain is that it’s not yet as trusted as gold 08:27 – Tom believes though that bitcoin blockchain will be as trustworthy as gold 08:38 – As an investor, you want to be diversified across multiple blockchains 08:56 – Every one of these tokens is the unit of currency within a blockchain 09:32 – Bitcoin is a unit in a chain with 21M units 09:38 – Tom uses the analogy of a train with several carts to explain bitcoin and blockchain 10:08 – Ethereum is a place you can go to build blockchains and host them 10:45 – If bitcoin becomes as trusted as gold, it can be worth billions of dollar 10:55 – “You can never prove that any blockchain is secure because there’s always a bug they might find in the future” 11:03 – The longer you wait to find the bug, the more trusted it becomes 12:07 – Tom believes that the way blockchain is built is the way companies will be built in the future 12:15 – For investors interested in technology, go to Coinbase.com which is a mutual friend of Tom’s 13:01 – Coinbase has different types of cryptocurrencies or tokens 13:05 – Tom recommends buying bitcoins on Coinbase 13:09 – Then open up a Poloniex.com account where you can buy whatever you want using bitcoins 13:54 – The people who took advantage of the gold rush didn’t look for gold, but created something that can be of use for gold 14:50 – In the crypto world, you can design a microeconomy with incentives 14:55 – The people will join your microeconomy and work for you to get the incentives 15:08 – The incentives are the bitcoins 15:51 – Walter is creating an army of people who contribute data in exchange for a reward 15:55 – The people are getting paid with tokens 16:29 – Crypto businesses are difficult 16:52 – The easiest way to get good returns in the space is to buy tokens which are units of currency in micro-economies 17:14 – Tom uses the analogy of buying Facebook IPO 19:20 – There are games where you can earn cryptocurrencies and online casinos for cryptocurrencies 19:53 – When you buy cryptocurrencies, you are already in a crypto economy where you need to do your due diligence 20:33 – Ethereum is one of the currencies that you need to run apps 21:21 – A token is like a packet (in relation to IP protocols) 21:54 – Blockchain is the protocol layer upon which tokens are transferred around 23:33 – Tokens are also called cryptocurrencies 23:15 – A miner is someone who runs an algorithm on his own piece of hardware that checks for activity within a blockchain 24:48 – The ways that you can contribute data varies 25:51 – It’s the first time in history that you can have liquid venture capital in the industry 25:58 – There’s an extreme demand, but with a limited supply 26:44 – Tom believes that now is a good time to participate in cryptocurrencies 27:31 – Tom shares to Nathan the questions that Nathan can ask a guest who is into investing in cryptocurrencies: 27:40 – What are tokens? How do you make a venture capital investment? 28:06 – Do you have a personal relationship with MetaStable and Polychain? 29:35 – What is the history of cryptocurrencies? 30:12 – Another question can be their strategy of trading 31:00 – Why people should use Walter: 31:05 – All of us in the space need to support a good project and invest in the right projects so we can all have a good return 31:21 – Walter is building a global community of contributors who are researching the space and gathering information in exchange for incentives 31:42 – “Get involved and join the conversation” 33:18 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Bitcoin may not be as trusted as gold, but it will be in the future. Building a crypto business isn’t easy, but the demand is here. Study and research an industry before jumping in, and know the RIGHT questions to ask. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
36:2018/08/2017
754: They've Passed $15M in Revenue Using Breakfast Meetups for Growth
Louis Jonckheere. He’s one of the co-founders of Showpad which is the second company that he’s founded. He and his co-founders founded the mobile development agency, In The Pocket, in 2010 where he still is on the board. Prior to In The Pocket, he was a strategic project manager at NetLog where he first met one of his co-founders. He also holds a masters degree in law and business and he’s currently the Chief Product Officer at Showpad. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — Google Apps How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5-6 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “That you should’ve sold your first company sooner” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:21 – Nathan introduces Louis to the show 02:05 – Louis is the one responsible for product design and engineering, and he’s also in charge of the product marketing team 02:36 – Louis collaborates with their sales team 02:50 – Louis asks their sales team about the improvements they could make to the product depending on customer feedback 03:13 – Showpad is a sales enablement platform 03:22 – Showpad creates a content management system for their clients 03:47 – The marketing team uses Showpad to reach salespeople 04:14 – The salespeople are in the same company 04:27 – 90% of what marketing creates never gets used 04:47 – Showpad is used internally in businesses 05:36 – Showpad is a SaaS business 05:51 – Average contract value is $50-60K per land deal 06:46 – A customer that signed-up can grow up to an average of 140% in 12 months 07:04 – The upsell happens gradually 07:43 – Showpad uses Stripe for credit card payments 07:58 – Showpad also uses Salesforce, NetSuite and HubSpot 08:12 – Showpad currently has 997 customers 08:30 – ARR is a bit over $20M 08:35 – Showpad has a big group of SMB customers 09:05 – Showpad only has annual contracts so they’re not focused on MRR 09:15 – ARR goal this year is around $25-28M 09:48 – Team size is 220 with 30 sales people 10:00 – Showpad was launched in 2012 10:11 – Showpad was bootstrapped for 2 years 10:35 – The “bootstrapping mentality doesn’t get you to scale” 10:45 – Paid advertising spend was around $60-70K in a month 10:58 – Consists mostly of AdWords and LinkedIn ads with some Facebook ads 11:25 – Total money raised is $61M and the last round was a series C 12:15 – Showpad has been very lucky with their investors 12:58 – Showpad will be Louis’ first financial win 13:07 – In The Pocket is a profitable mobile agency 13:51 – Gross annual churn in 2016 was 6% 14:15 – As a platform matures, churn risk increases 14:42 – Net churn is around 30-35% in revenue 15:03 – Showpad has lost around 1-2 customers since they started 15:33 – CAC for the key cohort 15:42 – The golden rule for SaaS is for every dollar spent, you should get a quarter in return within 12 months 16:00 – Showpad currently has a 12-month payback 17:02 – LTV is around 5 years 17:28 – LTV in dollars is around $250K over 5 years 17:52 – Showpad is always aggressive with their targets 18:50 – Showpad has been adding dynamic mind maps to their product 19:33 – Most enterprise customers have been spending money on agencies to build a custom navigation presentation 19:48 – This is already a part of what Showpad offers 20:14 – The best marketing strategy for Showpad is events sponsorships 20:40 – Showpad has rented party buses for their customers in Europe 21:12 – Gross margin is 85% 21:25 – Revenue target by the end of 2017 is $28M to 30M 22:30 – 2016 revenue was $16.5M 24:21 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Marketing teams should coordinate with sales teams to find how they can make that successful deal. Don’t discount a marketing strategy that may seem unconventional; it could be the very strategy that works. Reach for the best—set an aggressive target for your company. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
26:4217/08/2017