SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1157 From Artist to $200k MRR SaaS Company for Content Publishing
24 Sep 2018
Chapter 1: What inspired Taj Forer to transition from publishing to software?
stuff is never easy from Taj. He launched his company Fable back in 2013 after building his own publishing arm, publishing books, staying in the creative space. He decided to jump into software. They've since raised about a million bucks with a team of 22 in New York City and San Francisco to help really enterprise clients do content at scale and really manage at scale, monetize at scale.
They've got 50 paying customers doing around 200 grand per month right now in revenue. That's a 200% year over year 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 of 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 Taj For. He's an experienced publisher, digital media executive, entrepreneur, and artist.
He currently serves as CEO of Fable, the cloud-based publishing platform for content marketing, serving a global client base including CBS, Condé Nast, GE, and Ducati, among others.
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Chapter 2: How does Fabl generate revenue through its SaaS model?
He's a co-founder of Daylight, the celebrated international publisher of art books, and is the author of two books of his own critically acclaimed art photography. Taj, are you ready to take us to the top? Ready. You're a pretty creative dude, huh?
Well, I come out of the creative industry, studied art in undergrad and in graduate school. So that's definitely my background.
That's good. So tell us more about the company. What do you do and how is Fable to make money?
Yeah, so we are a cloud publishing company for rich media branded content, servicing branded storytelling, brand newsrooms, native advertising, branded and sponsored content. That sort of simplifies multiple facets of the process for building, deploying, and then analyzing engagement with associated content. So we operate with a SaaS model.
We sell commonly enterprise licenses to corporations and media companies.
And Taj, is this a pure play SaaS model or are there professional services, setup fees, things like that on top?
So, it's a hybrid. I mean, we talk about Fable's core product offering, of course, being the technology platform, which is monetized solely through the SaaS subscriptions. On top of that, we have a technology-enabled services group, the Fable Content Group, which does facilitate...
Content strategy, content development, creative services, and associated executions inside client accounts or alongside the client, depending on the need and the sophistication of the in-house teams. And then we have a targeting and distribution offering as well, which is an add-on service for native distribution, content discovery, social distribution, etc.
And then for our B2B clients, we provide qualified lead generation against the content that they're building and deploying with our platform also as an add-on service. So core technology being the platform itself, SaaS, and then add-on services sort of enabled by the technology.
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Chapter 3: What types of clients does Fabl serve and what are their needs?
And we began building in-house technology inside the publishing company to solve those internal problems that we and our customers were facing. And then a couple of years ago, we recognized just how significant the opportunity was to build the platform out for third party use and effectively solve these issues that we were very, very successful in solving internally for enterprise clients.
And so at that point in time, We began building the technology as the third-party cloud platform that it is today, and the uptake has just been exponential.
So what has the uptake been? You launched in 2013. What are you at today in terms of total customers?
Well, I'll tell you this. We've got over 100 accounts on the platform. What's an account, though?
Is that a logo or a group of a logo?
No, that would be an individual group using the platform itself. So we've got over 100 counts on the platform. You know, some of them are inside a single customer. Some of them are independent customers. They're all paid though, right?
None of those are freezers.
Uh, yeah, that, I mean, we, we are, uh, we are a for-profit business.
Well, no, some, sometimes people say, yeah, we have, you know, 10,000 customers and I go, so they're all paying and they go, Oh no, no, no, only a hundred are paying. Right. So, so just to be clear, you have a hundred groups that are actively using and paying for the product, the product.
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Chapter 4: What unique services does Fabl offer beyond its core technology?
So marketers begin touching the tool and they fall in love instantly because it just does everything that they're responsible for doing better, more efficiently, and it's an enjoyable environment to work in.
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Again, that's myemma.com. So you said your first batch of renewals came through. Was it a 90% renewal, 100% renewal, 50% renewal? I mean, how sticky was it?
Oh, we saw 100% renewal from all of our initial contracts.
Okay, that's great. Okay, so 100% renewal. And then have you bootstrapped the company or have you raised?
We bootstrapped for a while. And then we raised a small round to build out the enterprise version of the platform once we had taken the beta to market and saw it was working. Okay, so total raise is what? How much? Uh, we, we've raised only about a million bucks of external capital.
Okay. Got it. Got it. You couldn't resist the urge. You couldn't just stay bootstrapped, huh?
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Chapter 5: How has Fabl's customer base evolved since its launch?
There's a tremendous amount of sort of word of mouth marketing. And to be honest, we've never done like a big global marketing campaign. We never had like our big, you know, here we are.
I totally get that. I totally get that. But like of your team of 22, how many of them like how many of them are marketing people, salespeople, content people?
We have a lot of product people. We've got a sales and biz dev team totaling seven. And then we've got a product and design team that effectively comprises the rest of the company. So we're very... product focused and we're a mean and lean group.
Yeah. I mean, so look, a team of seven on sales and business development, assume a minimum salary of 60 grand. I'm sure they're probably more than that if you're in New York and San Francisco, but that's 420 grand a year right there. That is basically you'd put into your fully weighted CAC, I mean, your equation there, right?
So like, I mean, maybe a better question to ask is like, how quickly do you like to recover your capital on a new group paying you?
Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, I mean, I guess all paths lead to Rome, right? So we try to maintain an 80% profit margin on our customer accounts. Let's put it that way. And then we also do... a really good job of incenting our biz dev and sales team to, you know, align against a win. So we provide commissions to everyone that's doing BD and sales for us.
And, and, and we provide additional sweeteners for, for the larger accounts so that if there's attribution and we drive, you know, significant growth inside those accounts that, that attribution, you know, originated with the rep, you know, that, that, that brought that account in.
So, but Todd, just to be clear, gross margin wouldn't account for CAC stuff, right? Cause gross, like CAC is like stuff that's below the line. That's not server costs and, you know, pricing fees. So I'm just curious, like you have a $60,000 first year ACV. Do you generally spend up to that amount to acquire the customer and you have a one year payback? I mean, what does the actual data look like?
Oh no, it's much better than that. No, I mean, I'm just saying you're much better.
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Chapter 6: What growth metrics does Fabl currently achieve?
Your old self knew that shit is never easy.
There you guys have it. Stuff is never easy from Taj. He launched his company, Fable, back in 2013 after building his own publishing arm, publishing books, staying in the creative space. He decided to jump into software.
They've since raised about a million bucks with a team of 22 in New York City and San Francisco to help really enterprise clients do content at scale and really manage at scale, monetize at scale. They've got 50 paying customers doing around 200 grand per month right now in revenue. That's up 200% year over year. Taj, congrats, man. And thanks for taking us to the top.
Thanks so much. Appreciate it.