SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1038 How Prezly Bootstrapped To $1.6m+ in ARR
28 May 2018
Chapter 1: What inspired the guest to start Prezly?
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 everyone, my guest today is, yes, Neil Nellison.
He's the CEO and founder of a company called Presley.
Chapter 2: How did Prezly evolve from a hobby project to a serious business?
He's been building stuff since he was very young and had one real job where he was hired as an assistant, built their website, their intranet, and their parent company.
He then started a web firm, grew it to 10 people, started his startup, which never really took off, called trackmypeople.com, then moved to a large agency where he grew it from five to 80 people in charge of sales, and then moved to Presley about three years ago and has not looked back. Yes, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, thanks, man. Thanks for pronouncing my name correct.
You bet. Now, is Presley your baby? You created it or you joined the founders?
I joined them like two months in or something, but I kind of like redid all of the work. So like I consider myself as a founder.
So do you have equity?
Yeah, sure. Like, yeah, we're just two partners right now and we share. 50-50? Yeah, 50-50. It's like a little less, but close to that.
So you have what, 45, a little less?
Yeah.
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Chapter 3: What is Prezly's unique value proposition in the PR industry?
Yeah, it's like 43. Okay. Tell me what the company does. How do you make money?
Yeah, so, well, like Presley, we try to help brands in connecting their content with stakeholders or influence around them. So, like, an easy way to put this is, like, clients like IKEA or something, like, they use Presley to get their content to the right people at the right time. You know, like, they have to deal with... I mean, like maybe employees, journalists, partners, clients.
And so connecting their content with the right stakeholder is like what the platform helps you to do. And so like to put it in more like to compare it to something else, it's kind of like a combination of a CRM, CRM built for PR, MailChimp, and maybe like a mini WordPress all combined in one package, you know?
Okay, and when did you launch the company?
Oh, well, like-
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Chapter 4: How does Prezly generate revenue and what are the pricing models?
Official launch was like 2010 or something, but the first years we were just like, it was like a hobby project, you know, like people like didn't take it seriously. So I consider like 2014 as our real first year where we started charging clients.
Yeah. Okay. So you started charging in 2014 and on average, what do you, what, you know, what are customers paying today?
By now. Yeah. Well, so, um, our average, uh, like our pool or something like is around 400, uh, per license. So that's not like per user. So I like to use RPL or something here just to make sure that it's not like a, a user metric, but that's $400 per month or per year.
Uh, per month. Yeah. So that's like 5k a year. Yeah. And have you guys bootstrapped the company or have you raised? I love that.
Chapter 5: What customer acquisition strategies does Prezly use?
And what are you at now in terms of total customers?
We don't share our exact revenue, but it's in the hundreds. So you can count more than 100, less than 1,000.
Okay, got it, got it. Can we put a little narrower gap? Can we say between 100 and 300? Is that fair?
Well, it's more than 300.
Okay, got it.
That's all I can say.
Well, then that's helpful. We'll say between 300 and 1,000. That's good. So at a minimum, if I take 300 times 400 bucks a month, I mean, you're doing at a minimum 120 grand a month in revenue.
Yeah, absolutely.
Got it. And what are the, I mean, some of the other economics around this kind of company, obviously churn is critical.
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Chapter 6: What are the current churn rates and how does Prezly manage them?
What are you guys at now in terms of churn?
Yeah. So, um, logo churn is a little higher than our revenue churn. Uh, that's because like ours, our plans are like moving upstream a little bit, getting more expensive, like more targeting, uh, bigger clients. So our logo churn is around like 1.2 percent monthly. Yeah. And so our revenue churn is below 1%. So it's like 0.94 or something. So that's pretty good, I think.
And what's driving that churn down? Are there specific parts in the product where once people use that part of the product, they get really sticky?
Yeah, that's a tough question to answer and things like we're working on really hard right now to nail that because, you know, like we are kind of like we have different value offerings. Like some people use our CRM mostly like purely the CRM side and then other like mainly older clients came in for the newsrooms. The real promise or USP, I guess, is the combination of both.
But to nail that metric exactly like Facebook with the 12 friends or whatever it is, we're not there yet because it's different per segment.
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Chapter 7: How has Prezly's growth trajectory been over the years?
But it can be something like number of newsrooms published or right now on the CRM side, it's mostly after they import a big list of contacts and they start using it. I would say importing right now is really important.
As I'm traveling the world on planes, trains, and automobiles, you guys hear it, I'm closing loads of different deals, whether it's buying a company, closing a new account for getlatka.com, you name it, I've got to do it. And part of my issue is signing documents while I'm on the road. So I just found this new tool. I'm using it pretty aggressively. It's called SignEasy.
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If a company is listening right now and you're trying to, like in the past, maybe you put out a press release. Instead, take that press release, upload it to Presley, and you'll basically put that release in the hands of a bunch of influencers who will then spread the release versus like a PR web. Is that generally accurate?
Yeah.
No, it's not. It's not like I would say I would describe that as like an old way of doing things like creating a press release. So how do you do it? That's what I'm trying to figure out. So we want brands to tell their stories themselves.
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Chapter 8: What future plans does the guest have for Prezly?
So we give them awesome newsrooms that are like social friendly, mobile friendly, responsive, all the things. What does that mean, though? I don't get newsroom. Yeah, Newsroom is like, I guess, like a website with like a news hub where they post all there.
So you could say like maybe like a best way to put it would be like a mini WordPress site or a medium posting or something like where they can publish all their news, right? It's a CMS, right? Okay. there are so many CMSs out there. So that doesn't make us unique. But what makes us unique is that we link that CMS with outreach and CRM tools. So you can be like, all right, so I'm Emirates, right?
We work for Emirates. And so they publish like first-class entertainment, a story or press release about first-class entertainment. They first push it to their website, which is like integrated in their main website. But then also like from Presley, they can orchestrate like tomorrow morning, I want this to go out to journalists.
Tomorrow afternoon, I want to send this personal pitch to this high-profile blogger. And the day after, I want to send it to all our pilots or all our staff.
So why do people use you versus just putting the thing on their own blog and then emailing all their press contacts?
Yeah, great question. So I think... There's a number of reasons, but one of the reasons is that if you want to do this PR machine really well, you need to link up a lot of different solutions. It's not just publishing it on the website, but it's also doing personal outreach, following up with a journalist, doing mass emails to lower-tier journalists. It's all the work that comes in.
There's a lot of tools that can help you with that, but as a PR professional, you have to get those tools to work together. And that's why they use Presley. Like you're all those in one night. Yeah. All in one. That's it.
Okay. What are you spending to acquire customers?
Um, like there's a big difference, um, in, uh, in customer, like fully weighted customer acquisition. Um, so like I would say right now it's around seven to eight K fully weighted. Yeah. Fully weighted. So including salaries and like, but, um, there's, There's a really big difference in like self-service client and enterprise clients, which are our most important segments, yeah.
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