SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Deidre Paknad is the CEO and co-founder of Workboard (https://www.workboard.com/) 🕒 Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 – Nathan's introduction to today's show 0:25 – How Workboard has been built to help companies acheive their stragtegic priorities faster 1:20 – Why the average customer is around $125k annually 1:45 – How they launched the company in 2014 2:45 – Why they've raised $12M in total capital thus far 4:45 – How they've landed 50 enterprise customers 5:15 – How they are doing around $520k in MRR today 6:30 – Why they decided to upsell based on number of seats 7:30 – How they are aiming for a 6 month payback period going forward 8:45 – Why they are hitting 140% net revenue retention 11:0 – How they are professional services and coaching to drive stickiness 12:20 – Why they are landing deals for around $17k with payback right away 13:35 – How their team of 55 is based in the Bay Area 14:15 – Why they aren't looking to raised until April 2019 15:00 – How she would view a $100M acquisition right now 15:50 – Why they are looking for a four month ramp period on their sales team 16:50 – The Famous Five

Michael Kamleitner is the CEO of Walls.io (https://walls.io/) 🕒 Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 – Nathan's introduction to today's show 0:40 – How he runs two companies of roughly the same size 1:00 – Why they've built Walls.io as a social media marketing tool 1:45 – How the average customer pays around $225 today 2:20 – Why they launched the company in 2014 and bootstrapped thus far 2:40 – How 500 customers are using their product today 3:50 – Why they are doing around $110k in MRR 4:05 – How they've grown 70% from around $70k in MRR twelve months ago 4:45 – Why churn is naturally high 6:55 – How he made the decision to run two companies in parallel 8:55 – Why their other product is an enterprise social media scheduling tool 9:15 – "Would you sell for $3M today?" 9:45 – How he is interested in spliting the company and raising capital 10:25 – Why they are having success in content marketing and paid advertising 11:45 – How they are paying around 100 euros to land a new customer 12:20 – Why they aren't spending more money on paid acquisition 12:55 – How their team is headquartered in Vienna 13:30 – The Famous Five

Scott Shatford is the CEO of AirDNA (https://www.airdna.co/) 🕒 Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 – Nathan's introduction to today's show 0:30 – How Scott built AirDNA to fill his own need 1:10 – Why they are pulling in data from property managers and individual users 2:05 – How Scott used corporate leases to his advantage 3:15 – Why he launched AirDNA in 2014 3:50 – How he makes the decision to purchase or lease 5:20 – Why he factors in regulation risk and seasonality demand when making decisions 7:00 – How AirBnB is maximizing experiences for customers 8:00 – Why the average customer pays $50 per month 8:10 – How he founded the company with his dad 8:20 – Why their team of 34 is spread between Denver and Barcelona 9:00 – How they've bootstrapped the company to 5k active paid subscribers 9:30 – Why they are doing around $375k in MRR right now 10:00 – How they've more than doubled year over year 10:40 – Why they've struggled with retention to date 11:20 – How they are churning 20% of logos each month 12:45 – Why they don't spend anything on customer acquisition 14:10 – How to get smarter around pricing your property 15:10 – Why they are scraping 10M properties every single day 16:10 – How AirBnB is approaching $100M in transcation volume per day 16:30 – The Famous Five

JP Narowski is the CEO of KarmaCRM (https://www.karmacrm.com/) 🕒 Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 – Nathan's introduction to today's show 0:25 – How KarmaCRM has been built as a niche CRM for professional speakers 0:45 – Why the average customer pays around $50 per month 1:20 – How he launched the company in 2011 1:30 – Why they are doing around $30k in MRR right now 1:45 – How they've grown 50% year over year 1:55 – Why they've grown with just $100k in outside funding 3:20 – How they've scaled to a team of 4 full-time employees 4:00 – Why they landed their first customers through organic channels 4:40 – How they target a CAC of $300 with payback in 6 months 5:30 – Why speakers love their pre-populated email templates and language within the product 6:15 – How they've gotten to 5% gross logo churn per month 7:10 – Why they assume an LTV of $1k over 20 months 7:35 – How they are looking to scale their business with partnerships 9:15 – Why they are looking to publish more content around the speaking niche 9:55 – How he views the future of the company 10:40 – Why he is using his free time to run a family eCommerce business 11:20 – How he would view a $500k acquisition offer 11:55 – The Famous 5

Greg Soper is the CEO of SalesAgility (https://www.salesagility.com/) 🕒 Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 – Nathan's introduction to today's show 0:30 – Why IT is heavily constrained with delivering value 2:00 – How competitive businesses leverage open source software 3:15 – Why some companies don't have enough capital to optimize out of the box software 3:55 – How they have built their business on top of an open source CRM 4:30 – Why they've had 1M downloads in the last 5 years 5:00 – How they make money doing consulting for their open source platform 5:45 – Why SalesAgility charges for hosting and usage 7:00 – How they are enabling businesses to own their data 7:30 – Why they are providing an alternative to cloud solutions 8:25 – How consulting is a large part of their business 9:50 – Why the average customer is paying them $10-15 per seat monthly 11:50 – How they are planning to launch a new SaaS product soon 12:30 – Why their SaaS product is subsidizing development 13:00 – How they've grown to serve 100 companies today 13:20 – Why they don't make their SaaS offering free 14:30 – How they are doing $5M in annual revenue overall 14:45 – Why their team of 40 full-time employees are based in Scotland 15:30 – How they've grown to scale by bootstrapping 16:00 – Why they are focusing on both SaaS and consulting 19:00 – The Famous 5

Richard Jones is the CEO of The Wayin Platform (https://www.wayin.com/) 🕒 Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 – Nathan's introduction to today's show 0:25 – How Wayin helps 150+ enterprise customers create interactice experiences 1:20 – Why they collect explicitly shared data 2:40 – How they provide many different mechanisms for engagement 5:25 – Why they don't own or share the data they collect 5:45 – How the average customer pays them $65k annually 7:10 – Why they are doing $10M+ in ARR right now 7:30 – How he launched the company in 2011 8:20 – Why he still has meaningful equity after merging and becoming CEO 8:55 – How they've grown to 72 full-time employees internationally and in the U.S. 9:25 – Why they are growing 62% year over year 9:50 – How their growth is coming from both new customers and expansion 10:30 – Why they are driving 125% net revenue retention annually 12:45 – How they are spending 2% of their revenue on marketing

Max Israel is Founder & CEO of Customerville (https://www.customerville.com/) 🕒 Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 – Nathan's introduction to today's show 0:30 – Why Max founded the company 15 years ago to scratch his own itch 1:30 – How he grew the business without venture capital 2:20 – Why they made the decision to pivot eight years ago 3:05 – How the average customer pays them $250k annually 4:05 – Why they decided to maintain bootstrapped 4:30 – How they funded the business with a small retail chain 5:30 – Why they serve more than 50 customers globally 6:00 – How they are doing around $1M in MRR right now 7:30 – Why they are growing 50%+ year over year 8:50 – How they've kept gross logo churn below 10% annually 10:00 – Why they are focusing on driving expansion revenue with new features going forward 10:15 – How their team has grown to around 40 full-time employees 10:45 – Why they spent up to $400k on Google AdWords in the past 12:10 – How they are evaluating new plans for growing their sales team 13:00 – Why they aren't in acquisition talks right now 14:00 – The Famous Five

Alex Raymond is the co-founder and CEO of Kapta (https://kapta.com/) 🕒 Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 – Nathan's introduction to today's show 0:25 – How Kapta helps account management teams get increase visibility 1:20 – Why companies pay them between $25k and $100k annually 2:05 – How they launched the company in 2016 as an employee engagement platform 3:35 – Why 30 customers are using Kapta right now 4:45 – How they are connecting directly into CRMs and financial systems 5:20 – Why they are doing north of $60k in MRR 6:10 – How they've more than doubled revenue year over year 7:20 – Why they've raised $1.5M in total capital 8:00 – How they've gotten to 110% net revenue retention annually 9:30 – Why they are starting to get annual payment upfront 10:00 – How they are spending less than $10k to land a new deal 10:50 – Why Kapta has scaled to three full-time employees in Boulder 11:45 – How they would look to raise $3-5M in a Series A in 2019 13:15 – The Famous Five

Michael Beebe is CEO of Dstillery (https://dstillery.com/) 🕒 Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 – Nathan's introduction to today's show 00:20 – Why they help unlock brand's growth potential through data science and insights 01:20 – How they are fueling their offering with top advertising performers 02:10 – Why they are creating unique audiences based on limited information 03:20 – How they have created a competitive advantage with behavioral data 04:30 – Why they are still selling a data product on a CPM basis 05:20 – How they spend on revenue share or CPM model 06:00 – Why they are charging 20% regardless of the advertising platform 08:45 – How they have raised $60M with the most round coming in 2018 10:00 – Why they are building a pure-play SaaS product right now 10:45 – How starting out on a consulting basis can have a massive impact on launching a SaaS business 11:50 – Why they are taking up to 50% for every dollar spent on their platform 12:30 – How they have process $50M+ in transaction volume this year 12:50 – The Famous Five

Mickey Patton is President and CEO of Clear C2 (https://www.clearc2.com/) 🕒 Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 – Nathan's introduction to today's show 0:30 – How they launched the company as an electronic rolodex 0:55 – Why they are built as a CRM for manufacturers 1:35 – How they average customer pays them $60 per seat monthly 2:20 – Why Mickey joined the company to launch the software division 3:00 – How they've scaled to 50 full-time employees 3:40 – Why they are working with 450 total customers today 4:30 – How they are serving around 100,00 total seats 5:20 – Why they put their sales teams on annual quotas 6:15 – How they exhibiting less than 10% gross logo churn annually 7:25 – Why they are transitioning to a more user-friendly model 8:55 – How they are paying around $10k to land a new customer right now 11:25 – How they are doing more than $3M in ARR 12:30 – Why they are growing 60% year over year 13:00 – Why they are past $5M in ARR 13:20 – The Famous Five