SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1078 How agile content marketing solution Turtl hit $125k/mo
07 Jul 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.
Chapter 2: How did Turtl evolve to reach $125k in monthly revenue?
Hello, everyone. My guest today is Nick Mason. His background is in software engineering and product development for customers, including LexisNexis and the University of Oxford. He co-founded Turtle with the aim to empower anyone to create beautiful, interactive content, get simple analytics-based insights, and dramatically improve the performance of their content over time.
Nick, are you ready to take us to the top? I am, yeah. All right. So tell us about Turtle. And it's T-U-R-T-L dot co for those of you that want to follow along. But what's the company doing?
Chapter 3: What is Turtl's revenue model and how does it work?
What's your revenue model? How do you make money? So, well, so starting with revenue model, we're a monthly licensed subscription SaaS business. So we essentially rent our software out to large enterprises to help them solve their marketing challenges. And those, as you said in the intro, really around content.
So how we see it is that large enterprises spend an awful lot of money on content creation and on content marketing. But actually doing that in an efficient way, in a measurable way, and in a way which means that you're getting the best bang for your buck is not an easy challenge. So our software really helps people to solve that problem. And you mentioned it sounds like a pure play SaaS model.
Give me a general sense. What's the average customer paying you per month? So average contract value per month is around two and a half thousand UK. So you're paying in that kind of mid-market enterprise space then? Yes, that's right. That's right. Obviously, for our larger enterprises, you know, that's where pricing really starts.
So for larger enterprises, as they buy more seats and as they buy more features, it goes up from there. Got it. And when did you launch the company? 2014.
Chapter 4: What challenges did Turtl face during its founding?
And Nick, what's that founding story look like? I mean, were you like on the street, had to make something work? So you did this or you quit a big corporate gig? What was it? No, I was doing a lot of consultancy and it was kind of interesting because several things came together all at the same time. So I became aware of content marketing and the fact that this was a growing area of the market.
But whenever I saw the content that people were making, I was really disillusioned with just the way it was presented. So static PDFs, static web pages, and my job at the time was really doing UX. And I kind of thought like people are spending all this money, but the results just look really, really bad.
And at the same time, I was working at University of Oxford on a project for them web development project. And I came across some really interesting research to do with how we actually consume information and how we retain it, how we engage. So putting all those things together, like obvious growing market,
um problems as i saw them and um you know a starting point for solutions in terms of scientific research around how we might actually get people to remember content and engage with it more sort of a perfect picture of starting the business and how many founders are there uh two so just two of you guys you split it 50 50 the easy way uh to start with yeah we have investors now and it's obviously got a little more complicated but yeah how much how much have you raised
So under a million. Under a million, okay. Yeah. So we're trying to do it, you know, keep control of the company. So everyone who's invested is someone who we know and someone who has a direct impact on the business on a day-to-day basis. So we want to kind of steer clear of doing it the VC way and, you know, try and maintain control and keep it that way.
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Chapter 5: How does Turtl ensure customer engagement and retention?
Did you take on this capital as convertible debt or actual priced equity there on the cap table? Priced equity, yeah. Priced equity. Interesting. How did you go about setting and kind of getting a lead investor? I mean, did you have one person that makes up more than 50% of the round? Yes. I'm trying to remember back in the first round we did. So it was actually a good story.
We went into pitch to this guy. Who was it? Well, Mark Asprey, one of our investors. So we went into pitch. to him at his former job. And he and his sales director liked it so much. that they actually said, well, we want to get involved and we don't want to buy the product for our current business. We want to buy equity in the product and leave our jobs and come and work for you.
And what year was that? That would have been in 2015, early 2015. And scale size, where were you at that point in terms of maybe revenue or your pre-revenue?
Chapter 6: What strategies does Turtl use to acquire new customers?
We had two customers, so our revenue was about 10K. Wow, so very early. You must be very charming to walk in and convince two people to quit their jobs and give you money to do it. I couldn't possibly comment. All right. And what's the team size today? So we are split across Slovenia and the UK. So we have five in Slovenia. That's our development team. They're great guys.
And we have 15 in the UK, but we're hiring quickly and the number changes all the time. So that's probably inaccurate. But at least 15. Yes. All right. And then what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers you're serving? So we have in the region of 50 customers ranging from Bloomberg, Cisco, Oracle, um, economists, people like that down to smaller businesses.
Um, but our, our kind of strategy is really to try and get some big names, um, so that, you know, other people can follow. So Nick, I mean, is it fair to say at a $2,500 monthly RPO, you guys are what, somewhere in the one 20 K K per month range? Yes.
Chapter 7: What metrics does Turtl use to measure success?
Yeah. Yes. That's about right. And generally trying to move upstream. Uh, how do you mean? Sorry. Larger, larger, larger accounts. Yeah. Well, it's kind of interesting. We, what we found is that if we go in too high to start with, um, you know, we, we struggle to demonstrate value quick enough for people to really get what we're doing.
So our strategy at the moment is to go in a tiny bit lower and to grow value over time. So, you know, get in, get a beachhead in a company, you know, build up usage, get a critical mass. And then you can start to go to other parts of the business and say, well, look, your colleagues over here are doing this great stuff.
How about you take a few licenses as well and trying to get basically get a foot in the door and grow that strategy. Give me an example like Bloomberg, right? When you say grow usage, most companies know the number one usage metric they've got to get to get people to spend more money with them. What is that number one metric for you?
It actually varies between companies because people have different objectives for their content. So it can be any one of a number of things. So for some companies, it's lead generated.
Chapter 8: What lessons does the guest share about entrepreneurship?
For other companies like Bloomberg, it's going to be insight generated. What is that? What's an insight? Well, so for example, you know, through using our technology, people can see how people consume their content on a really, really granular basis.
So for Bloomberg's use case, if they're using it in a sales context, being able to send out, you know, a piece of collateral and see, you know, this guy read this page for five minutes and skipped over the pricing page, but was really interested in these particular pages about features, you know, that on a very granular level is incredibly valuable to the salesperson.
Um, so, you know, the downstream effect of that will be that, you know, the, the, um, you know, we improve the performance of their sales team. Um, you know, and that will be the metric that they're looking at to work out whether they buy more licenses. Um, so it really varies. Got it. And Nick, what do you give me a sense of growth? So you launched only two, three years ago.
You're at about 120 grand a month today. Where were you 12 months ago? Oh, crikey. Um, sub 50. Oh, wow. So you've more than doubled. Yes. So we're trying to stay on the doubling path. That's our objective. That's the magic number, right? Exactly. Yeah, as I understand it. Now, obviously, a key thing to doing that is keeping churn in control.
What's your churn look like and how do you make sure to try and control that? So I don't have an exact number of churn, but it's always a number which you want to get down. So we've started in the last six months doing a proper customer success function. And I think that if I had one thing that I wish we'd invested in a bit sooner, it would have been that.
Because, you know, it takes time to get up to speed. And, you know, it's also a tremendous opportunity for upsell and growing accounts if you're doing that well. So, you know, really implementing that and using every trick in the book to get closer to your users. Because at the end of the day, you know, those are the people who buy our software. They don't sign the checks.
But those are the people who, you know, will be demanding more licenses and saying, you know, you absolutely must not take this thing away from us. So those are the people we really need to influence and get good relationships with. So that's something we're investing a lot in.
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