SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1199 Bootstrapping your way to your first $10k in MRR
05 Nov 2018
Chapter 1: What is the background of the guest and their journey to entrepreneurship?
Just go for it. He built a very successful agency, built over 100 applications for folks in Denmark, throughout Europe and throughout the world. Got sick of the professional services model, sold that company for more than a million dollars, but less than five million. Now doing software, launched Pre.do in 2017, focused on helping you capture your team's ideas, organize them.
understand where duplicate ideas exist and put them under kind of one thought bubble. They've got two people so far, him and his founder, and then one part-time intern, along with three other interns under them. Again, doing about five customers currently, paying $450 a month, so about $2,200 in revenue.
Supporting themselves off setup fees currently, but they're looking, obviously, to move away from that. 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.
Chapter 2: How did the guest transition from an app agency to a SaaS model?
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 Ufa Ka.
He's a 43-year-old engineer married with three kids living on a farm in North Denmark. He built up a top app agency from 2008 with 15 employees and produced over 120 apps for top Danish companies. He then sold that company and co-founded Predu to help companies capture, create, overview, and progress on ideas from their employees. All right, Ufa, are you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 3: What is Pre.Do and how does it help companies?
Oh, yeah.
Good. All right. So tell us first, I want to dive more into your history and how you got into it, but what does Predu do and how do you make money? What's your revenue model?
Okay. So we are a subscription-based software as a service platform where companies pay a fixed price based on their size for getting access to the tool.
What does the tool do, though?
Okay, so the tool helps companies capture all the ideas that are in their employees' heads. It helps them create overview of them, find duplicates and areas and so on, and then it basically helps them progress on those ideas and execute on the good ones and weed out all the bad ones.
So, I mean, a lot of people right now will use tools like Trello, and they'll have a board called Ideas, and people will just dump ideas there. This is like a much more robust version of that.
It's much more structured in that way. And also, we go for helping companies with not all IT-capable people. So we also work in production companies and so on. We help capture ideas in different ways. So you can capture ideas in the tool, on email, and even with voice and so on. We're building that.
So a blacksmith with dirty hands can actually go speak to an Alexa in the corner of the production environment.
Yeah, so you're built into the workflows that already exist. Yeah. Very good. And what does the average customer pay per month?
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Chapter 4: What is the revenue model for Pre.Do?
But in that sense, we're... We just know that the handheld onboarding we're doing now won't scale for us.
Yeah, I mean, people say it's the long, hard road to death. The trick is if you let anyone in the tool, your churn then potentially becomes an issue and you don't know who to focus on. But what you're doing now is the other extreme, which is extreme handholding. But I bet you don't have any churn.
No, no chance yet. So everybody's very happy with what we're doing, and employees are happy, management are happy.
I, like you guys, have never been able to find a project management tool that I love. You know, my blog writers like one thing, my developers like one thing, my designers like a different thing, and it's so difficult to get them all on the same page. So when I had Roy Mann, the CEO of Monday.com on the show, I was pleasantly surprised at what he told me regarding his traction and his growth.
And I said, maybe I should try this thing. So we now use monday.com. I started with the magazine. We've launched the Latka magazine, solely dedicated to SaaS founders. It's the only magazine focused on SaaS. And my content writers and my designers worked beautifully together on that project using monday.com for project management. I then said, well, let me give it a real test.
Let me see if I can use this for sprints and product cycles with my developers using it as well. And so we did that for Git Latka on our last release. It worked like a charm. Never before have I been able to find one tool that my developers, my designers and my writers and myself can use and be happy with.
You know, for me, I do most of my work waiting on the boarding deck about to get on a plane. I have to be able to access this stuff on my mobile device and it works beautifully. We've been using it for several months now. And I said, Roy, I'd love to introduce this to my audience, but you got to give me a great discount. Make me a great offer. He said, Nathan, OK, fine.
If your folks sign up and try it today, we'll give them 10% off all plans if they use this link, nathanlacke.com forward slash Monday. So you can go there, try it for free. And if you decide to start paying, you'll get 10% off. Again, that's nathanlacke.com forward slash Monday. What's the team size today?
So we have two founders and then we have four interns, no, five interns.
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