SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Ran Korber. He's the CEO and founder of BreezoMeter. His ambition is to improve the health and quality of life for billions of people across the globe by providing accurate and actionable air quality data. It's truly the leading air quality analytic company and one of Israel's top 10 promising startups in 2015 with millions of daily users. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Zero to One What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — Slack and HubSpot How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "Keep going, you're doing well" Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:10 – Nathan introduces Ran to the show 01:57 – BreezoMeter helps companies to increase user engagement 02:38 – BreezoMeter makes the invisible visible by providing highly accurate, location-based, air quality which includes data that can be integrated to any device or technology 03:08 – Using BreezoMeter's data, the Dyson air purifier turns on whenever the air quality outside is substandard 03:16 – A notification will be sent to the Dyson app as well 03:29 – Dyson is BreezoMeter's customer and BreezoMeter tells Dyson's customers about the air purifier 03:58 – The air purifier turns on automatically and, as an owner, you want to make sure that the product you bought is working 04:37 – BreezoMeter provides a license to their APIs 04:53 – Customers pay on a monthly basis 04:58 – BreezoMeter is data as a service 05:14 – All of BreezoMeter's customers are enterprises 05:23 – The customers use BreezoMeter's data in big volumes 05:49 – Average monthly RPU is higher than $1K a month 06:04 – Ran just read Jason Lemkin's From Impossible to Inevitable 06:29 – BreezoMeter broke a million in sales last year 06:34 – Ran hopes they'll break $10M in sales this year 06:54 – Ran is an environmental engineer 07:05 – In 2012, Ran was searching to buy a house for his family 07:10 – Ran's wife has asthma and Ran knows how air pollution can have severe health effects 07:45 – We all want to protect our families 07:51 – Ran asks the bureau of protection and environment in Israel about the place with the cleanest air and they don't have any data that can answer the question 08:08 – Together with Ran's colleague, they built the app 08:19 – BreezoMeter was founded in 2014 08:26 – Team size 08:39 – BreezoMeter has raised $5M 08:48 – The last round was in July 2016 08:57 – The first round was a seed round with $2M 09:54 – All of BreezoMeter's investors are approachable and they share the same vision 10:12 – Total number of users 10:46 – Dyson has an air purifier and you can download the Dyson link app that will show the air quality data 12:00 – Customers pay depending on the combination of the features they use and the volume of API calls 12:20 – BreezoMeter earns more from their features 13:03 – BreezoMeter doesn't disclose their pricing because of their enterprise clients 13:48 – BreezoMeter caters to different industries 14:13 – CAC 15:51 – BreezoMeter raise funds to expand and increase their revenue 16:21 – For every sales rep, the revenue is $500K to $1M in annual revenue 16:37 – BreezoMeter has 4 sales rep 17:01 – The churn is due to some of the companies having medical devices 18:30 – BreezoMeter's customers are paying at least $3K a month 19:32 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Air pollution directly impacts our health—therefore, knowing the air quality around us can inform our decisions regarding what products to use. A SaaS company that serves mainly enterprise businesses has a possibility of scaling faster. Keep on going and believe that you're doing well. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Emília Chagas. She's the CEO of Contentools.com, a company that helps over 700 companies plan, create, distribute and analyze content. As a content manager for over 8 years, she has led video, book and web-based strategies at both enterprises and SMBs. She's a 500 Startups entrepreneur and part of the Endeavor Promises Program. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Hooked and The Hard Thing About Hard Things What CEO do you follow? – Eric Santos of Resultados Digitais/RD Station Favorite online tool? — ProfitWell and ChartMogul How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4-5 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "How great life was" Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:20 – Nathan introduces Emília to the show 01:58 – Emília is currently in Florianópolis, Brazil 02:21 – Emília's average salary 02:54 – Emília currently has 30 people 03:03 – Average headcount expenses 03:24 – Contentools is a SaaS model 03:31 – Contentools offers a content marketing platform for companies with marketing teams 04:04 – Everything that a marketing team needs are converged into 1 software 04:13 – Average customer pay per month varies 04:46 – Contentools does scheduling and the processes of the content workflow 05:08 – Contentools has 300 customers, 700 companies are using the platform 05:21 – Some pay through their agencies 05:35 – Average MRR 05:48 – Around $70K per month 05:58 – Contentools has raised an Angel round and will raise a seed round next year 06:08 – Total funds raised was $500K 06:19 – Contentools was launched in 2015 06:30 – Emília has been working with startups and enterprises and they have the same problem dealing with content 06:53 – Contentools went beta in July 2015 07:11 – Emília has a big dream for Contentools 07:24 – SMBs need content solutions but no one is offering them one 07:39 – "Content is the beginning of marketing" 07:55 – The 4 founders still own 80% of the company 08:43 – All of Emília's ideas are currently focused on Contentools 08:55 – Contentools wants to create more business intelligence features and content that are targeted more to the customers' needs 09:42 – Emília won't sell the company at the moment 10:01 – Contentools is growing 10-20%, month over month in revenue 10:13 – Churn is usually around 2% and last month was net negative churn 10:49 – 3% gross churn 11:12 – Contentools is up selling their number of users and projects 11:58 – CAC 12:35 – 4 people on the team are focused on inbound marketing and there are also remote people 13:08 – Contentools doesn't have paid acquisition 13:47 – Contentools is adding 20-30 new customers a month 14:07 – The Angel round was in May 2017 14:24 – Contentools is updating their leads for their fundraising next year 14:40 – Valuation won't be out of the market 16:04 – If you fail updating one status, it'll all be gone 17:13 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Content solutions are often offered to enterprises, but SMBs need them too. One of the cheapest forms of marketing is your content. It's not easy for a content manager to handle the processes and workflow, so a good content management tool is necessary. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Stu Sjouwerman. He's a serial entrepreneur and currently the founder and CEO of KnowBe4.com. He's a big Shark Tank fan. He's based in Tampa, Florida. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Positioning What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — SurveyMonkey How many hours of sleep do you get?—6 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "I wished that my 21 old self knew that Bill Gates was going to go into Windows server, in about 1995" Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:21 – Nathan introduces Stu to the show 01:46 – KnowBe4 is a new school IT 01:51 – KnowBe4 focuses on modern security and awareness training 02:08 – KnowBe4 is a SaaS company 02:46 – Average pay per user is $15/year 03:01 – The charge is annual upfront which is easier and most people prefer that 03:26 – KnowBe4 focuses on organizations with 50 users and up 03:36 – Average seat size varies 03:52 – Average seat size for SMBs is 200-300 and for enterprise 1500-3000 seats 04:21 – Stu sold his anti-virus company in 2010 04:35 – It was called Sunbelt and Stu's 4th startup 04:56 – "We are growing like crazy" 05:01 – KnowBe4 did $7M in 2015, $24M in 2016 and is targeting $50M this year 05:26 – KnowBe4 does inbound marketing and they send newsletters to their list of 1.2M people 05:40 – The list was built over several years 05:57 – KnowBe4 was bootstrapped for 5 years and Stu spent around a million building the company 06:07 – In December 2015, they took $8M from VC 06:47 – Total fund raised was $13M 07:11 – It was easy for Stu to let go of 20% of the company 07:25 – Stu's told Kevin Mitnick that he would give him 50% of his company in exchange for Kevin's 30-year experience in hacking 08:34 – The cap table 09:10 – Stu is confident that KnowBe4 will earn $50M this year 09:20 – Churn is 15% annually 09:33 – It is relatively easy to predict whether a SaaS model will be profitable 09:43 – KnowBe4 serves 9500 companies 09:55 – Average ARR 10:22 – March revenue 10:58 – Enterprise sales come in March 11:10 – Team size is 290 11:27 – CAC is around $2600 11:39 – CAC to LTV ratio is 7 12:02 – CAC payback is instant 12:17 – Average selling price per year 12:42 – Stu likes Vladimir Putin 14:03 – Eagles programs are state-sponsored programs that are offensive cyberattacks 14:49 – USA also has offensive cyber weapons, same with China and Russia 14:58 – Hackers go after the weak link in IT security, which is the human 15:15 – It comes in the form of an email 15:33 – KnowBe4 sends frequent phishing attacks that are similar to legitimate ones 15:43 – This will make the team aware and cause them to be on top of their toes in case they receive an attack 16:02 – KnowBe4 has a phish alert button 16:30 – KnowBe4 trains people with the real stuff 16:41 – Stu used to play soccer and is very competitive 16:49 – Stu has 2 reasons why he wants to go public: 16:52 – First, because he has never gone public before 16:57 – Second is to expand further and faster 17:12 – KnowBe4's biggest competitors are PhishMe and Wombat 17:26 – Stu gets their competitors' information from Owler 17:45 – There's a possibility of Stu acquiring one of their competitors once they go public 18:11 – Stu got $10M from his previous exit and he's NOT doing KnowBe4 for the money 18:57 – The biggest problem Stu had with his previous company was social engineering 19:08 – "Nobody is really taking care of the human IT security" 20:30 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: There's a big gap in human IT security and more and more people aren't even aware they're being hacked. Going public can help a company expand further and faster, and perhaps even acquire the competition. There is no such thing as retirement. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Ryan Sevey. He's the CEO of Nexosis, an artificial intelligence and machine learning startup focused exclusively on developers. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — Aha! How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "Learn how to be true to yourself" Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:25 – Nathan introduces Ryan to the show 01:55 – Nexosis was launched in 2015 01:59 – Nexosis offers a solution that big retailers are forecasting 02:24 – Nexosis has 300 developers who use their APIs 02:56 – Nexosis has developers from the retail space who have their point-of-sale data 03:11 – Nexosis will take the developers data and give out a result 04:13 – This result can help in the decision making for the future 04:34 – Nexosis gets people to be more proactive than reactive 04:52 – Nexosis found out how companies are using their historical data 05:14 – Nexosis adds more features to training 05:23 – Nexosis's add-on layers 05:41 – With sentiment analysis, one good example is Wendy's Twitter account 06:00 – You can use the number of tweets as a numerical value that can go back to your data 06:39 – One huge case involves a Wendy's beside a convention center; Nexosis can predict future revenues 06:51 – Nexosis can predict future revenues and can understand the real impact of an event 07:23 – Nexosis focuses on the developer ecosystem 07:38 – Nexosis charges .10₵ per 1000 predictions 08:17 – Nexosis makes money once the developer talks to the enterprise and shows the API 08:43 – Nexosis charges the developers by consumption 09:24 – Average pay per customer depends on the data that they have which usually starts at $10K 09:42 – Nexosis was founded in 2015 09:53 – Ryan and his co-founder have been looking at machine learning since 2012 10:09 – Nexosis was originally considered an information security company 10:21 – Team size is 15 and they're based in Ohio 10:38 – Nexosis has millions of API calls per month but their focus is on the number of developers 11:30 – Ryan's vision is for developers to enjoy Nexosis, be it as a hobby or use in a professional way 11:55 – Nexosis is currently serving 100 different enterprise type of developers 12:26 – What Ryan sees is when a developer signs up, he'll make 1-2 projects then invite his friend to try Nexosis 12:57 – Most of the developers are already in a company 13:10 – MRR 13:20 – Nexosis has raised a little less than $7M 13:39 – The long term goal for Nexosis is to raise more 13:56 – Twilio has survived their early days with VC funding 14:26 – Nexosis measures expansion rate rather than the churn 15:37 – Nexosis aims for 100% month over month growth and at the moment, they're hitting it 16:30 – Consumption in terms of the number of predictions is over a million 17:55 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: There are companies who rely mostly on raising funds to scale. Knowing the data for your FUTURE can help in your decision making TODAY. No matter what—be true to yourself! Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Sheri Atwood. She's the founder and CEO of SupportPay. She's also a former Silicon Valley executive and a child of a bitter divorce who also went through her own divorce a few years ago. She's created SupportPay when a search for a better way communicate about child support systems with her ex-husband proved totally fruitless. SupportPay is the first-ever automated child support payment platform poised to transform the complex, time-consuming & stressful process that impacts nearly 300M parents exchanging more than $900B in child support & child expenses worldwide. With SupportPay, today's modern families can spend less time managing and arguing about child support, and more time focused on raising happy, healthy children. Prior to starting SupportPay, she was a former vice-president at Symantec and also has been named #5 of 50 Women in Tech Dominating Silicon Valley and Top 40 Under 40 Executives in Silicon Valley. She's energetic, resourceful and lives by the motto "don't talk about it, be about it." Famous Five: Favorite Book? – What Got You Here Won't Get You There What CEO do you follow? – Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Marc Benioff Favorite online tool? — Stack Exchange How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "Enjoy the path, enjoy the lessons as you go" Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:23 – Nathan introduces Sheri to the show 02:37 – Sheri is going to lower the divorce rate by showing people that divorce just gets worst 02:49 – Millennials aren't getting married but are having babies 03:10 – Sheri uses SupportPay and invented it because she didn't have a solution 03:16 – Child support is made up of 2 things: a base payment that covers basic daily living expenses and then there's other additional expenses 03:34 – The argument is about where the money is going and if it is enough to raise a kid 03:46 – While doing an expense report in Symantec, Sheri thought of the idea of SupportPay 04:04 – SupportPay started in 2011 04:38 – Sheri was raised by her single mom who was an alcoholic 04:48 – Sheri was one of the youngest VPs in Symantec and she was able to save money from her salary 04:57 – Sheri had multiple houses, cars, boats, gave his ex-husband a house and 2 years worth of salary in the bank 05:24 – Sheri bootstrapped SupportPay at first and she learned to code 05:40 – SupportPay has raised $7.1M total 05:49 – The series A was for $4.1M 05:59 – Sheri has talked to people and there was nothing to support parents 06:13 – Sheri also received calls from vendors thanking her 06:35 – SupportPay is a SaaS business 06:40 – Pricing starts at $9.99 a month 06:51 – There's also a free version 06:55 – Each parent pays independently 07:05 – Average pay is $10 a month 07:28 – Sheri started hiring people in 2013 07:39 – Sheri learned to code the basic html, css and php by starting her own website 07:50 – Sheri self-studied from books that she found in Barnes and Nobles 08:08 – Team size is 25 and they just relocated to Sacramento, California from Silicon Valley 08:30 – Team has 14 engineers 08:39 – After raising $3M, Sheri realized she couldn't sustain a business in Silicon Valley 08:45 – Sheri was burning $95K a month 09:08 – Sheri's equity table is a mess now because of her tech people switching to another company for a better offer 09:16 – Sheri would have focused on revenue a little bit earlier 09:48 – Sheri didn't have revenue until July of 2016 10:08 – SupportPay was processing $3M in child support 10:19 – SupportPay currently looks at processing $4M a month in child support 10:30 – SupportPay has over 43K customers with 2K paying customers 11:03 – MRR is close to $100K 12:12 – SupportPay has a free 30 day trial 12:27 – The value of the product is the history, which can be used in court 12:46 – SupportPay also provides certified report records 13:31 – Churn on active users is 3% annually 13:57 – Conversion rate from visitor to paid user is 12% 14:50 – The bigger valuation for SupportPay is how it solves the problem of child support 16:00 – After getting into fundraising, SupportPay focused on their revenue 16:25 – 2016 revenue 16:41 – Sheri has talked to Salesforce to get them involved in SupportPay 17:10 – Salesforce is trying to move government applications into the cloud 17:15 – SupportPay will get Salesforce into the government space quickly 17:30 – SupportPay is built on the salesforce platform 18:00 – Tim Draper invested in SupportPay as he saw the value 18:17 – Sheri's goal for building SupportPay 20:20 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: More millennials are having babies, but are not getting married—this leads to more parents having problems with child support. Having one less argument regarding child support will alleviate stress for the whole family unit. The divorce rate isn't getting any better, it's just getting worst. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Ryan Hungate. He's the co-founder of Simplifeye, it's the number one technology experience for healthcare providers, patients and their businesses. The company's platform of software solution health care providers improve productivity, efficiency and profitability. Ryan is an orthodontist and previous Apple retail strategist and Zach is a previous founder and Wall Street alum with a background in Tech MNA. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Lean Startup (Zach) What CEO do you follow? – N/A Favorite online tool? — Calendly How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5 (Zach) 3 (Ryan) If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "How difficult business can actually be" Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:11 – Nathan introduces Ryan and Zach to the show 01:54 – Ryan's dad was a doctor 03:00 – Simplifeye tries to make doctors' lives easier 03:28 – Simplifeye provides the patients' information before they walk in during checkups 04:03 – Ryan and Zach are VC buddies 04:07 – They've raised money from their hedge fund friends 04:12 – They applied at AngelPad 04:35 – Simplifeye was a halfway project and they thought it would be big 04:52 – it was in 2015 when they got into AngelPad 05:02 – Zach gave up hundreds of thousands in a salary when he joined Simplifeye 05:14 – Ryan gave up his $500K salary 05:34 – They rationalize building a startup by getting validation from different capital companies 06:01 – They also know that they can be in every doctor's office 06:17 – Simplifeye has raised $3.5M 06:24 – Angelpad's terms 06:50 – It was September 2015 when Ryan and Zach came out to NY and ended up coming out with AngelPad strong 07:21 – Simplifeye's customers are healthcare practitioners who pay on a monthly basis 07:25 – Simplifeye tries to involve everybody—to teams of doctors, nurses, dentists and others 08:18 – Average pay is $2400 a year 08:39 – Expansion revenue is based on the size of the practice 09:08 – Simplifeye is also HIPAA compliant chat 09:28 – Simplifeye started with the Apple watch 10:00 – Nathan had Laurence Girard on Episode 575 who talked about the HIPAA compliant chat 10:16 – Being HIPAA compliant is a huge advantage for you 10:20 – Doctors communicate with each other in an insecure manner 10:35 – The limited standard 10:56 – Doctors will pay a fee if they break the standard 11:29 – Simplifeye always tries to be transparent 11:46 – Having Simplifeye can make doctors feel better in their daily processes 11:53 – Simplifeye just passed 1000 office signups 12:03 – MRR 12:44 – Simplifeye has 90% annual retention 13:24 – Team size is 13 14:42 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Doctors feel more comfortable using HIPAA compliant products and services. You have to trust your product in order to take that leap from the corporate world. Enjoy what you're doing and believe that you WILL be successful. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Seymour Duncker. He's the co-founder and CEO of a company called iCharts, the leader in cloud business intelligence and analytics and a seasoned entrepreneur who has been both a consumer and developer of visual analytics. Before founding iCharts, Seymour assisted SAP's senior management in driving the company's product strategy and was an early team member at 2 enterprise software startups before that. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Inevitable What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — NetSuite and Salesforce How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6-7 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "Spend a little more time outdoors" Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:26 – Nathan introduces Seymour to the show 03:12 – iCharts is a cloud-based business and intelligence analytics solution platform 03:24 – iCharts is a SaaS model 03:36 – iCharts partners with NetSuite which is a cloud-based EOP 03:48 – NetSuite uses iCharts as an embed BI (Business Intelligence) engine that powers iCharts for NetSuite's customers 04:05 – iCharts is like an app inside NetSuite 04:55 – iCharts can take any kind of data and visually represent it so that people can interact and analyze the data 05:16 – The analogy of iCharts is like the car's' navigation system which is separated from the car's build 05:55 – iCharts considers SaaS businesses as an ecosystem and NetSuite is a large ecosystem 06:05 – iCharts has a mixed business model 06:24 – iCharts is also looking into exclusive partnerships with a SaaS platform to distribute iCharts 06:55 – Pricing starts at $15K per annum depending on the number of users on a platform 07:54 – Seymour arrived in the USA, in 2010 08:10 – Seymour is from Germany 08:50 – When Seymour had an idea for a cloud-based business intelligence platform, he was thinking about where to build it 09:27 – Back then, it was easier to sell in the USA than in Germany 10:10 – Being in California was also a great idea for Seymour's wife, so they built iCharts in the USA 10:37 – Team size is 60 10:56 – Sales team has 20 people 11:35 – The majority of iCharts' market 11:49 – iCharts will know the pain points of the users of NetSuite 12:53 – iCharts will already have an idea of the customer's needs 13:45 – iCharts has around 200 customers 14:04 – iCharts started focusing on various markets 14:25 – iCharts has raised $23M to date but they were initially bootstrapped 15:07 – Churn is around 5-7% 16:20 – CAC 16:32 – iCharts is highly profitable from the initial time they closed a deal 17:04 – There's an advantage of growing faster and burning yourself as you grow too fast 17:44 – At the end of the day, it's all about having a high-functioning team that produces quality 18:04 – Average ARR 18:21 – iCharts also offers additional services for their larger customers 20:13 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Build your business wherever you'd like to—even if it means leaving your home country. Having a well-functioning team that produces QUALITY will drive your revenue and contribute to the success of your business. Make time for rest and vacations; this will relax and regenerate you. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Daniel Fagella. He started a mixed martial arts gym when he was an undergrad and sold it after getting a UPenn graduate degree in cognitive science. He did turn his grad school thesis on skill development into an ecommerce business that grew for 4 years, reaching $4.2M in top line sales and recently sold it for a million dollars with 90% paid upfront. He's now using his funds for TechEmergence.com in order to influence global AI policy for the better. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Plutarch's Lives What CEO do you follow? – Last bio he read was Marcus Aurelius' Favorite online tool? — Asana How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6-7 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Daniel would tell himself that dealing with the existential human condition could be done by contributing to a much bigger world Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:20 – Nathan introduces Dan to the show 02:08 – Dan was studying skill development and goal setting science in psychology for his undergrad 02:17 – Schooling was expensive; Dan decided that he'd rather use himself as a skill development guinea pig than a pizza deliverer 02:40 – Dan started teaching and making money at the back of a carpet store 03:11 – Dan's jiujitsu gym was the smallest business back then 04:03 – Dan sold the gym after 3-4 years with $250K ARR 04:14 – Dan was 25 when he sold the gym 04:41 – The membership fee was $157 05:07 – Dan sold it for over $100K with 10% upfront to his right-hand and friend 05:45 – The business ran for over 2-3 years after that 06:05 – Dan took $30K from the $113K 06:36 – Dan was also making $20K a month selling martial arts instructional resources online 07:09 – Dan was using Infusionsoft for his e-commerce business, Science of Skill 07:56 – The e-commerce was doing around $200K top line 08:42 – The biggest cost for Science of Skill was on merchant processing, customer acquisition, advertising and affiliates 09:26 – Dan likes to spend half of his CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) on acquisition 09:42 – The CLV for membership programs were around $100 and affiliates $50-60 10:00 – One of the affiliates was Survival Frog of Byron 10:23 – Byron drove Science of Skill into 6-figures 10:44 – Dan was paying affiliates upfront 11:15 – Byron of Survival Frog was on Episode 395 11:44 – There are agencies who get onto their email list by paying 12:14 – One of the agencies is com 13:02 – Finding the right people to advertise and won't tag you as spam 13:11 – Dan will find firearm sites in com—go through the website owners and email them to find the right people to target 14:11 – Dan sold Science of Skill in February 2017 for a little over a million dollars 14:22 – Science of Skill was valued by the multiple of net 15:11 – Science of Skill revenue in 2016 16:27 – Dan's ultimate goal 16:31 – The buyers are a private group of 2 buyers in Ohio who previously ran SaaS businesses then sold them to the government 17:05 – Science of Skill should be at Inc 500 for 2016 17:13 – Dan sold Science of Skill because he believed he has better and bigger things to do in life 17:25 – Dan's core objective involves the global conversation of neuroscience and AI 17:48 – TechEmergence focuses on the business applications of AI 18:08 – TechEmergence is not making money, but will make money primarily through advertising 19:09 – The goal now is to scale and make traction 19:21 – Current cash burn 20:05 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: You can start your business literally anywhere. Focus on your goals and objectives, even if it means having to burn cash. The future will probably evolve around n_euroscience and AI. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Allan Willie. He's the co-founder and CEO of Klipfolio, a software-as-a-service dashboard company with over 8500 paying customers including Jet.com, Zendesk, Aviva and Ikea. He previously co-founded a company called Espial, an internet device software firm that is now publicly traded on TSX. He lives in Ottawa with his wife and 2 daughters. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Lead by Greatness What CEO do you follow? – Tobias Lütke Favorite online tool? — SEO Plus Chrome plug in and Owler How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6.5-7.5 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "Listen, build something of value and then see if you could raise money" Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:07 – Nathan introduces Allan to the show 01:50 – All of the meeting rooms in Klipfolio's office have different wallpaper 02:12 – Klipfolio is an online, cloud-based, dashboard vendor 02:18 – Klipfolio works with mid-sized businesses who use them for everything 02:40 – Nathan uses Klipfolio quite aggressively, especially for his Facebook live streams 04:17 – When Allan was last on The Top, he was passing 7K customers—now he has 8500 customers 04:36 – In January, Klipfolio announced a $12M raise which was an insight round from existing investors 05:14 – The initial round was to raise an external round 05:43 – "We did use market to validate" 06:12 – Klipfolio had verbal offers that were lucrative 06:40 – The valuation were multiples for some of the terms 07:00 – Klipfolio also had some acquisition discussions 08:08 – Allan won't call the acquisition discussions offers, because it would still have to go through a lot 08:59 – In every acquisition discussion, you want to layer how much information to present to another company 09:35- Customers usually get the $70 plan for the first month, then move up to $150 in a year 10:10 – Some of the customers are partners who can pay directly or pay as a partner 10:24 – 30% of Klipfolio's income come from their partner channels 10:35 – Last month revenue was $500-600K 11:16 – Klipfolio's valuation was between $700-800K 11:25 – Some of the VCs that Allan has talked to are putting terms in place with a higher valuation 11:47 – You have to sustain your valuation to get into the next round 12:34 – Anything on Klipfolio is being tracked 13:15 – The weirdest use case 13:25 – There are NGOs who use Klipfolio to push some of their metrics out 13:34 – Red Cross uses Klipfolio for flooding, zika virus and other stuff that is happening in Africa 14:11 – Churn has gone up slightly 14:35 – Klipfolio started paid ads for $120K a month 14:41 – Klipfolio has a blog about the lessons they've learned from Facebook Ads 15:24 – One of the cons of ads is that the conversion rate drops and churn goes up—which is normal 15:40 – CAC 15:54 – LTV 16:05 – LTV to CAC is still relatively healthy 16:26 – Team size is around 90 16:47 – The team is moving to a new space in November 18:20 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Maintain your valuation in order to get into the next round. Not all acquisition talks are considered offers. A company of great value has a better chance of raising money and getting acquired down the road. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Blake Smith. He's the CEO and co-founder of Cladwell, a clothing company that doesn't sell clothing. His goal is to fight for sustainability and human labor practices by enabling people to buy fewer, but better clothes. Blake was at The Top a year ago where he articulated that they passed 11,500 customers with each customer paying $6/month; so, they were doing about $70K MRR a year ago. They were at about 5% churn, monthly spending and at $17 to acquire new customers. They're based in Cincinnati and they've raised about $1.8M and $100K in revenue. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Wooden on Leadership What CEO do you follow? – Ben Horowitz Favorite online tool? — Calendly How many hours of sleep do you get?— 2 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Blake would tell himself the importance of following your curiosity as opposed to having a strategy or a plan Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:04 – Nathan introduces Blake to the show 01:59 – Cladwell's current customers is around 17K in number 02:06 – Cladwell is an everyday styling app 02:50 – When you go to the Cladwell's website, you'll click "buy" 02:58 – Cladwell is also downloadable in the App store 03:12 – Cladwell is doing pricing tests 03:45 – Cladwell looks at other SaaS products that customers are paying for 04:02 – Cladwell also looks at other workout apps 04:21 – Cladwell is looking into charging $9 04:41 – "We're going forward unless proven otherwise" 04:47 – Pricing tests never end, especially with SaaS 05:31 – Last month total revenue is around $60K 05:41 – Cladwell used to bill quarterly 05:49 – Cladwell is around 900K ARR 06:17 – 80% of Cladwell's customers are using the web app on their mobile devices 06:42 – Last year's revenue in the same month 07:19 – Marketing spend last year 07:32 – Cladwell has recently raised a $1.2M round 08:07 – 2016 total sales is $760K 09:35 – Blake explains how the app works on a daily basis 09:40 – Every morning, the Cladwell app gives a recommendation of what to wear 09:53 – Cladwell recommends 3 outfits basing on what's in your closet and the daily weather 10:18 – Cladwell will also know what you wore for 3 days 10:55 – The more that you use the app, the better the experience is 11:35 – Majority of Cladwell's users are working millennial moms 12:18 – People have tried Cladwell's ideas before and onboarding was the biggest issue 12:33 – Cladwell did something similar to Google venture's sprint design process 12:56 – Cladwell provides a feed of all the potential items in a person's wardrobe 13:34 – A female customer will have an average of 60-70 pieces of clothing in her wardrobe 13:58 – The onboarding process is now easier for customers because of the feed 15:30 – Team size is around 15 16:02 – Cladwell's currently spending is still TBD 16:18 – Churn rate is a bit high 16:50 – From the 17K customers, around 5K has downloaded the app 18:00 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Onboarding is one of the biggest challenges for a styling company, customers lose interest using the product. More and more millennial mothers are finding it hard to manage their time; having an app that will save them time daily is heaven sent. Follow your curiosity—it can lead you to something GREAT. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives