SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1168 Social Media For Lawyers Doubles YOY to $1.5m ARR, Raising $1m?
05 Oct 2018
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Double down on the business books from Adrian. Clearview Social. It's social media for lawyers. He got fired back in 2013 from his law firm.
Chapter 2: How did Adrian Dayton transition from law to entrepreneurship?
He was going, he had to go all in. You know, his wife wasn't working. They had a little child. And he's going, what do I do? Well, he starts selling consulting to legal firms on Twitter. He raised $300,000, hired an appointment scheduler, would go charge $7,500 per day, realized quickly professional services doesn't scale, said, let me build a SaaS platform.
He's now up to about 11 people, mostly in Buffalo, New York. Building out their software, they were doing about $75,000 per month 12, 13 months ago in December 2016. Today, they're over $1.5 million in ARR. That's over $125,000 per month.
Chapter 3: What strategies did Adrian use to grow ClearView Social?
So healthy growth. Churn is about 1% to 2% per month in terms of logo churn. 7% gross revenue churn annually. CAC is $3,000, so they're getting paid back in about four months from these customers. 147 of them that pay on average $9,000 per year or $750 per month. 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 Adrian Dayton.
He's the founder of Clearview Social and author of two books on social media for lawyers. His software is being used by over 20,000 professionals, including 25 of the 100 largest law firms in the United States.
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Chapter 4: What are the current revenue and growth metrics for ClearView Social?
Adrian, are you ready to take us to the top? Let's do it. All right. So let's cut right to this, man. Every year we put out a report on get latke.com.
Chapter 5: What challenges does ClearView Social face in customer retention?
It ranks companies by fastest growing, but I don't like dilly dally. We go right for ARR numbers because that's the most true metric. Right. And you say, Nathan, we should be on this thing. We're growing like crazy. And I said, Adrian, come on the show. We'll talk about it. So tell me, give us, give us the click bait first and then let's learn more about the story. So what's total ARR now?
What are you at?
Yeah, so total ARR, we're just under 1.5 million ARR.
Okay, and what were you at 12 months ago?
So 12 months ago, we were at about 900,000 ARR.
Okay, very good. Now let's back into the story. What's the company do?
Yeah, yeah. So we make it really simple for companies to get their employees sharing to social media. So a designated marketer within your company, they send out an email queue through our software that prompts everyone to click one button, and it will schedule out all the sharing across all the employees in your organization.
Okay. And you're focused in one industry, it sounds like, which is the legal one, correct?
Yeah. So it's really become professional services, law firms, accounting firms, recruiting firms, any company that kind of sells their you know, their brainpower, you know, in terms of consulting, professional services, that's where really we found our sweet spot.
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Chapter 6: How does ClearView Social measure customer engagement?
Correct. Yeah, that's great. Okay, and what do you, when you are bringing on these new customers, what are you paying to acquire them?
Yeah, so it's a good question. And I don't say it's a good question because I'm stalling, but I say it's a good question because our market is finite. So law firms and accounting firms and recruiting firms that are a fit for us, there are only about 3,000 total customers. That's our addressable market. And so when you talk about cost of client acquisition, well, it's about $3,000.
But if we spent twice as much we couldn't necessarily acquire twice as many customers because the market is just limited in terms of the size.
So wait, just to be clear, what was that 3,000 number? That's what you pay to acquire a customer? Yeah, that's what we pay to acquire a customer. Okay, got it. And if they're spending $750 a month or about $9,000 a year, you're getting that back in about three, four months, which is healthy payback.
Absolutely. Yeah, less than six months.
And what you're saying is you couldn't infinitely get customers at $3,000 a pop because they don't exist, right?
Yeah. And this is kind of the next step for us. And we don't have enough cash to build out. If you say like, how could we triple in size in the next year? Yeah. Well, it would really require that we have a major cash infusion so that we could build on, bring on salespeople to go after these other verticals. How much cash? How much cash would we need? Yeah. I don't know.
I mean, we'd probably need at least a million dollars to really expand to these other industries. Yeah. And so we're at this inflection point where we're trying to decide, we have a second product we're coming out with in the next month. Do we go deeper into this industry, increase the annual price for each customer, or do we increase the number of industries that we're going after?
And we're trying to do both, but we never had the luxury of being written a check for $2 million last year. with a three-year runway. Like, okay, hopefully in three years you can make something happen.
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