SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1000 The Genius in Agency + SaaS Business Model
20 Apr 2018
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everybody. My guest's name today is Sean Schroeder.
Chapter 2: How does Sean define the concept of 'flow'?
He's the chief commercial officer of Blue River and co-founder of the Mural Digital Experience Platform. A former front-end developer and designer, he's been on a mission to simplify and enrich lives by helping others find flow long before he knew it was a thing. Sean, are you ready to take us to the top? I am. Thanks for having me, Nathan. You bet. Okay, what do you mean flow? Flow.
So flow is a concept that was created by, or I guess formalized by a happiness researcher and psychologist. My Haley cheek sent me high, uh, basically it breaks down to the, the, the source of human happiness as he has discovered it is, uh, found through doing meaningful things in our lives.
So whether it's, um, you know, doing something that, uh, people will often refer to where they find flow is, uh, I'll refer to the athletes find it doing certain things, uh, when you can eliminate distractions, when you can know what your clear goals, your next steps are, there's these principles that sort of all come together.
And when that happens, it creates a very meaningful experience where people are immersed in the activity that they're doing. And so, uh, when we say that we're specifically talking about digital experiences and how can we apply those principles of flow to create happiness, uh, ultimately through the digital experiences that we create or help create. Okay.
So I don't want to lose my audience by thinking, Oh my God, this Sean guys woo and way up there. How do you like bring it, bring it down for me? What do you mean create a happy experience? Tell me a real customer story. So, uh, well, let me tell you a cultural story. Let me tell you, uh, I guess give you an example. So the, so flow can be found in varied different ways.
Like I mentioned, you can do them, you know, doing athletics can also be done. People find it in the most simplest and most mundane activities. So it could be, you know, laying bricks, uh, part of, uh, So we're in the middle of doing a rebranding process. And part of this process that we're doing are really focusing around this concept of flow.
I asked a question to our employees, have you ever experienced being in the zone or an optimal experience state that you might consider has great flow? One of the things that was really surprising to me is when they came back and told me that a lot of them instantly had examples that they were talking about. So we have comedians.
We have a lot of artistic, creative folks here that work at Blue River. And consistently, they came back with examples about where they find flow. They would talk about one particular person talked about. um, how long they do kinetic sculpture. They built these really, really cool bikes out of all these different parts and everything and, um, weld them together and super, super creative.
But, um, this particular employee was talking about how he would forget to eat for 10 to 12 hours. I totally, I'm with you there. I think, I think we, I definitely understand. I think my audience gets what flow is and it can be happen anywhere, anytime to anyone on any kind of task. But how are you building a business around this?
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Chapter 3: What customer stories illustrate the importance of flow?
Again, HostGator.com forward slash Nathan. Now, what have you scaled Mura to over the past several years in terms of total customers today using you? There are about 4,000 active Mira sites right now that we're aware of. And being that it's open source, and it's not all open source, but of the open source ones that have been deployed, those are, and in front of a firewall, it's about 4,000.
So yeah, there's 4,000 websites that use Mira, but is that directly analogous to the number of customers? There's 4,000 unique customers paying for Mira? Yeah. No, no, not at all. I mean, because it's open source, it gets adopted at a much higher rate relative to the customer base. Yeah, that's what I was asking. So that's great adoption.
How many customers, though, do you have that are paying for it? You know what? I apologize. I'd have to go through. I don't handle that part of the business, so I would need to go look at that. But if I had to guess, I would say they're around... 50 to 60. Okay. Wait, but Sean, my audience is going to listen to that and go, wait a second.
Sean's Sean's at the top of this company and he doesn't look at how many customers they have. What's going on here? Tell me why you don't look at that number. It's just because I focus mostly on the marketing and product development side of things. Um, and it, it, you know, changes, uh, all the time. So, uh, and it is just not substance.
I have two business partners that handle different aspects of the business. And so one of the CEO of our business, Ryan Thompson handles that aspect of it. So I tend not to focus on that. That's fair enough. That makes, that makes good sense. Now what's the split in terms of, so you have a hundred percent pie, let's say the a hundred percent is revenue.
Is it split 50 50 between agency and software or no? No, it definitely leans more heavily into the agency side of things at the moment. Yeah, like significantly, like 80%. Like what's the split percentage wise? Yeah, it's probably about 75%. Okay, 75%. Okay, interesting.
And when you mentioned you're part of the business, are you doing that stuff for both the SaaS, the software and the consulting side, the agency side or no, just one of them? No, I focus primarily on the product side. The product side. Okay, great. So mainly Mira? Yeah. Exactly, yeah. Okay. What kinds of changes are you making or what kinds of things are you doing to increase your retention?
In other words, when someone new starts using it, how do you get them sticky? A lot of it just revolves around creating content. One of the things that we, because we come from a very strong
And so we've been really focused on trying to provide valuable resources for our customers, whether it's training, helping people learn Mura out in the community or helping our customers serve their customers better. So do you know what that retention number is currently each year? Did 90% stay with you, 100%, 50%? Yeah, it's around 92%. So that's really healthy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How does Sean's agency integrate SaaS into their business model?
Wow. And how old are you? I am 47. All right, Sean, take us home here. Take us back 27 years. What do you wish your 20 year old self knew? Oh my gosh. Where to start? Oh my gosh. Wow. Uh, I would say, uh, you know, probably just could stay stubborn. I think one of the things that has enabled us to be gainfully self-employed for the last 16 years is just being stubborn and keep churning.
There you guys have it from Sean. Don't literally churn your customers, but keep churning. Stay stubborn. Launched his company back in 2001 with his partners. It's 75% agency revenue, 25% SaaS model under their brand Mira.
They're helping people find flow, serving over 50 enterprise customers, paying $2,500 a month, so you can do the math there, somewhere around $125,000 in MRR, growing 20%, 30% year over year, all bootstrapped, which I love. I think it's really important. Retaining over 92% of their customers year over year with their team of 20 people between California and other remote locations.
Sean, thank you for taking us to the top. Great. Thank you so much, Nathan. I appreciate it.