SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
$100m Deck Builder: Bootstrapped to $100M Valuation
12 Oct 2022
Chapter 1: What insights did the founder share from the Founder 500 event?
Hey folks, hope your Q3 and Q4 is off to a good start. We just wrapped up Founder 500 in Austin, Texas. Hundreds of bootstrap founders showed up. It was an amazing time. I loved meeting so many of you.
This interview today is a recording from that session, which you're gonna love because now we have visuals, we have the founder teaching, and I made every single speaker include their revenue graphs and real artifacts in their presentations. Without further ado, let's jump in.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool.
Chapter 2: How did Review Wave start and what was the initial business model?
It's like a big Excel sheet for all these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Please help me in giving Matt Prados from Review Wave a warm round of applause. Welcome, Mike. Welcome, welcome. This will be your mic. We'll grab a seat for you, get up here, get you featured. All right, so talk first. Guys, who knows about Review Wave? Have you used the product?
Chapter 3: What strategies did Review Wave implement to automate patient reviews?
You've seen the product? You've heard about it? Okay, how would you describe Review Wave? Okay. You know this guy? New customer? All right.
Perfect. Our product is definitely not for the SaaS market. It's for doctors.
Chapter 4: How has the pricing model evolved for Review Wave over the years?
So tell us more about that.
Yeah. What's the product do? ReviewWave. Doctors.
Sure. So about six years ago, I was running a digital marketing agency and did an analysis of all our clients who was getting the most new patients. And I found who had the most reviews, got the most new patients because we're using the same website and same ads, all this kind of stuff. And so it literally started as a little side hustle. Let's just show them how to get reviews.
Chapter 5: What key lessons can founders learn about team dynamics and co-founder relationships?
Coaching didn't work. Everything we went to technology. It was manual. That kind of worked. But then we automated it by connecting to the electronic health records that they already use, which you've heard that strategy over the last couple of days, integrating into their stack. It was magic. We just automatically started asking the reviews. The reviews came in. They got more new patients.
And, you know, that was the kind of the aha moment where we're on to something.
Chapter 6: How does the founder manage financial growth and personal wealth?
We've certainly grown way beyond just asking for reviews. We're in a complete recovery. Patient engagement engine, online scheduling, appointment reminders, automated campaigns. You know, it's a beast now.
Vertical integration is beautiful. Now, everyone wants to, I don't know about you guys, but some people my age, us millennials, they wake up in their bed and the first thing they look at is Snapchat on their phone or Instagram. Me, it's the Stripe dashboard. It's always the Stripe dashboard. It's did I sell while I was sleeping? And then I have a good day if you sell.
Chapter 7: What are the implications of secondary funding for founders?
Everyone wants to wake up and see this on their Stripe dashboard. So what are we looking at right here? What does 25.53 in gross volume look like?
Yeah. So, I mean, as you can see, it's not the hockey stick yet. We're still in the small, you know, upward tick, but it's doing the hard things over and over again, consistently growing. We've doubled year over year, every year for the first five years. And, you know, that's what it looks like. And it got us to, you know, these different graphs. I'm not a big graph guy.
Chapter 8: How does giving back to the community influence business success?
I'm actually in PowerPoint jail right now. Nathan had to walk me through because I don't do decks.
I'm like, Matt, you have such a fucking good story, but this deck is just not going to work. Just let me do the deck and let me just interview you. And he was game.
You're letting us do it. So that's good. So, I mean, I'm just, I'm an operator. I don't go around. I don't speak on stages. You know, literally Nathan asked me to speak and I was like, no, I'm actually not going to come. I just...
archive that email i was like i got too much shit going on i went home that night and then i felt guilty because i've been exactly where you guys are in these seats and needing to hear one or two nuggets that will allow you to go home and do something that'll change your business so uh i guilted myself into coming uh had no time to be here literally was he was trying to get me to do this deck while i was on my 25 year wedding anniversary in laguna beach and i was like i look really bad now
I'm so bad now. Okay. But okay. So let's tap into that guilt, right? What are those things where you're like, man, I really got to tell these founders, these couple of things about our early days.
Yeah. So, I mean, there's so many lessons that you learn from different stages, right? Um, you know, in the beginning, you know, when you're just trying to, you know, make any kind of money from, you know, like zero to a hundred clients, uh, you have to just be on top of everything. Right. Um, That we've come to learn was wartime.
Like that was the wartime CEO in me where it's like, you know, you're screaming to get stuff done. Like you're breaking everything like systems don't matter at that point. Just getting a result matters. And then, you know, you evolve into, you know, having more people and then you have to have systems and training systems.
You know, I think one of the biggest realizations, you know, in the last year that I've had is whoever starts with you is typically not going to finish with you. And that's something that most people don't talk about and they don't tell you. So you're not emotionally prepared for that when it happens.
So if you have people that you're really close with that have started this company and been with you for a while, life changes and sometimes they leave.
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