SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1205 The Art of Your First $3k in ARR with Ukrainian CEO Vladimir Polo
11 Nov 2018
Chapter 1: What inspired Vladimir Polo to pivot his startup?
launched his company back in 2016 on a totally different idea. I realized the real money was in the academy concept that they built when his customers started asking for it. Today, he's got 15 people paying 200 bucks a month doing three grand per month in revenue.
He's spending about seven grand per month on his team in Ukraine, about seven of them looking to make onboarding and marketing easier for companies looking to train and teach their new customers or prospective customers.
Growing slowly, 100,000 investment raised, looking to go from adding two customers per month to four to eight and hopefully come on the show in a year and be a multimillion dollar company. 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.
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Chapter 2: How does Academy Ocean help SaaS companies train customers?
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 Vladimir Polo. He's launched his first SaaS startup in 2014.
He created his first customer academy for that startup. And when he saw that a lot of people wanted to have the same academy, he decided to pivot his startup and in 2016 founded an academy builder for SaaS companies. Vladimir, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes, Nathan. Hi. Hey, how are you? Okay, so tell us about this.
Chapter 3: What pricing model does Academy Ocean use for its services?
So is this basically when you hire somebody new, you put them through your academy and then they learn all about your business or what?
Yeah, actually, it can be used for your employees. But what we do is it's SaaS for SaaS. We provide a platform where every SaaS company can teach their customers so they can have like a private Coursera or their own Udemy. Actually, half of our clients use academies directly to teach their current customers. about how to use a product or about how to use new features.
And another half are using academies in a very interesting way. They use it as a brand new content marketing tool. So for lead generation.
So this is like, I mean, it's like Thinkific, Coursera, Udemy, these kinds of companies, but internal.
Yep, yep. We are in this market, though we do not position ourselves as a learning management system. But yeah, we are focused on SaaS companies only and on customer success and marketing issues. So tell me why people would use you over Thinkific? Yeah, sure.
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Chapter 4: How did Vladimir secure funding for his startup?
Because when you use a platform like Syncific or Teachable, maybe you're like you can create an academy for your customers only for more like not for all
steps of customer journey because uh using our platform you can teach your customers starting from when they even don't know they need your product or even they don't know about that their problem can be solved that way and after that you just continue teaching them step by step And also we're focused especially, as I said, on SaaS companies.
So no homeworks, no like teachers profiles and something like that in the platform, only for SaaS companies.
Got it. And when did you, you said you launched it in 2014, but pivoted fully into the project in 2016?
Actually, it's a very interesting story because it was another product four years ago. It was my first startup. I was learning how to do the things. And it wasn't really a successful one, but one of the best things we've developed was our own academy to teach our potential customers.
And when we found that more people want our academy than our main product, I decided to test demand on this kind of services. That's what I haven't done with my first startup, unfortunately. And I've just created a landing page that was mentioned like, hey, this is an Academy Ocean. It will help you to teach your customers.
And I wrote several hundreds of cold emails that I've chosen from SaaS companies' founders.
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Chapter 5: What challenges does Vladimir face with customer acquisition?
And when I received a dozen of positive replies, like people told me, hey, we want to see your product, show us. We had the calls and I told them that there is no product yet, but we will build it soon. And I was interviewing them to better understand their needs.
That's great. And that was the start of the company. Yep. So what are people paying on average per month for this? Our pricing plan now, it's $300 per month.
Okay, is that an average though? Is that what the average customer pays? As we have not so many customers right now, we have 15 customers. And our average is around $200 because when we started, we have given a few discounted accounts. So they still affect an average.
Got it. So you're doing about $3,000 per month right now.
Chapter 6: How does the team structure support Academy Ocean's growth?
Exactly, yeah. Okay, and tell me more about the team size. Is it just you or what's the founding team look like? We have a team of six people, including me. So how do you pay six people on three grand a month?
Actually, we've got an investment from Netpeak. It's one of the edges. It was 100K for 10%. Okay, and that's all the money raised to date?
Yeah.
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.
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Chapter 7: What marketing strategies are being implemented for growth?
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 gotta give me a great discount. Make me a great offer. He said, Nathan, okay, fine.
If your folks sign up and try it today, we'll give them 10% off all plans.
Chapter 8: What future vision does Vladimir have for Academy Ocean?
If they use this link, nathanlaca.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 nathanlaca.com forward slash Monday. What does growth rate look like? Like a year ago today, what was revenue?
A year ago, we had zero. Now we have 3,000 and we are growing like one or two customers, like previous months, two customers per month. So it's about 10 or 15% if it counted in percent.
So what month did you actually launch this particular product? It was in April 17, 2017. April, okay, so you're approaching a year in. Okay, good. What about churn? Have you lost any customers?
Yeah, we've lost four of them. Two of them were not SaaS companies. That's like one more. We've tried to help not only SaaS companies, and we found that it's much more useful for SaaS companies. So yeah, four from
total 19 yep Vladimir how old are you I'm 29 so let me we're almost the same age I'm 28 so so let me ask you a question right I mean because you're in such a fun spot right now um this is like the prime time of your life are you married are you single yeah I'm married do you have any kids nope okay do you have any big life expenses house payments mortgages car payments anything like that
um not really okay so right now you have the most freedom that you're probably ever going to have in your life um how do you know that every minute you spend right now it's totally worth being on academy ocean have you given yourself a date and said if we don't hit this revenue by this date i've got to shut it down and try something new actually i truly believe in the thing that there are
too many, there are a lot of technologies, new technologies appear every day and year after year people will need to master these technologies. So our mission actually is to help people master new technologies. Now we are focused on more like small niche, like SaaS companies, but in the future I believe that
There's something wrong with the teaching system with how people learn how to use new technologies. So that's what we want to fix.
Yeah, this is like a great vision, Vladimir. And by the way, this is what you have to believe. Otherwise, you wouldn't have started this. But I also, I just wish... I wish people would also set up artificial tests from themselves and say, if we don't do this by this date, I've got to stop because I know right now in my life, 29, married, no payments.
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