SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders 845: SaaS: 2014 $1.4m, Now $30m ARR how BirdEye Aiming To Be Hubspot 2.0
Nov 16, 2017
24:27
Naveen Gupta. He's an entrepreneur with experience building startups and growing a hundred million dollar profit and loss statements. Before cofounding BirdEye, which is his current company, he held executive positions at RingCentral, Monster and Yahoo. He's launched industry-leading products across advertising, consumer search, social media and monetization. He lives in Sunnyvale, California with his wife and two kids.
Famous Five:
- Favorite Book? – Predictable Revenue
- What CEO do you follow? – Brian Halligan
- Favorite online tool? — Outreach and ZoomInfo
- 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? – Naveen wished he would have taken more risks and pursued his dreams of starting a company
Time Stamped Show Notes:
- 01:40 – Nathan introduces Naveen to the show
- 02:19 – BirdEye is the leading SaaS product that helps businesses on their customer journey
- 02:54 – The two things that drive purchases are customer experience and business ratings
- 03:20 – BirdEye grows 160%, year-over-year in revenue
- 03:33 – BirdEye has 25K paying customers
- 04:40 – Business model is based on location and not per seat
- 05:20 – On average, a business would have 2-3 locations
- 05:47 – BirdEye caters from SMBs to enterprise businesses
- 06:07 – BirdEye has a broad platform which has different functionalities
- 07:42 – Pricing on SMBs start at $3K and $100K for enterprise per year
- 08:12 – ACV is around $5K
- 08:33 – 50% of the revenue is SMB, 30% mid-market enterprise and 20% for channels
- 09:00 – ACV is per location
- 09:24 – MRR is close to $2M
- 10:43 – BirdEye was launched in 2012
- 10:55 – They came up with the idea after looking for a surgeon with great reviews to take care of their mother
- 12:07 – BirdEye was initially bootstrapped
- 12:33 – BirdEye has raised a total of $33M
- 13:16 – Team size is 170 globally
- 13:48 – Around 60 are on engineering, 70 on the sales sides and the rest are in different departments
- 14:30 – BirdEye is investing heavily on hiring the best people
- 14:45 – CAC is around $1K for a new business
- 15:05 – Payback period is 3-4 months
- 15:21 – 60-70% of their contracts are paid up-front, annually
- 16:00 – Revenue churn
- 16:11 – Net churn is close to 0.5%
- 16:28 – BirdEye is still too young to calculate LTV
- 16:48 – Naveen's estimate is 3-5 years
- 17:05 – Paid ads spent annually is $200K
- 17:55 – Gross margin is 85-90%
- 18:43 – To acquire new customers, they email potential clients and ask them if they want to know their competitors' reputations and how they compare to them
- 19:24 – 2016 ARR was close to $13M and 2017 will be close to $30M
- 19:37 – 2015 ARR was $5M and 2014 was $1.5M
- 21:10 – The Famous Five
3 Key Points:
- Have a business model that will benefit not just your own company but your customers as well.
- Most people rely on business reviews before trying out a product or service.
- Hire the best people and you'll have the best product and provide the best customer experience.
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