SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1280 Will she be able to raise $1m on $3.5m Pre Money with This MRR?
25 Jan 2019
Chapter 1: What is Maeve Kneafsey's background and experience in entrepreneurship?
She sold multiple agencies. She's now going into SaaS analytics where their company Cloud KPI launched just recently. 2018, raised an early seed round at a $1.6 million valuation. Currently raising a million bucks, aiming for a $5 million pre-money valuation. She thinks it'll probably be 3.5 million, which is fine. She's got three customers that are paying.
They're doing about 10 grand per month in ARR. 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 Maven Nisi. She is the entrepreneur behind Cloud KPI, which is her fourth startup.
Her latest venture addresses the frustrations involved in setting up and maintaining cross-business metrics for SaaS companies, a segment growing to a multi-billion dollar market value. Cloud KPI, which is raising a seed round, has completed programs at Plug & Play Tech and Women's Startup Lab.
She previously founded Amas, Ireland's first digital marketing analytics agency, which exited in 2003, another one in 2015, and a fintech SaaS benchmarking solution called Market Finder. All right, Maeve, are you ready to take us to the top? I sure am. All right, you're raising a seed round. How much are you trying to raise? And then tell us what the company does.
Okay, so we're raising a million. And what the company does is, okay, so you know SaaS companies. I mean, that's what you guys are all about. And the really hard part about SaaS is that you have to keep growing fast all the time. You've got to continue to grow fast to get to the level of revenues that's going to give you your profitability.
And to do that, you can't just look at your data in silence. Look at your revenue and your acquisitions and your sales and your marketing. You've got to join them together. So there are tools out there that allow you to build those integrations and allow you to try and build your metrics. But if you use Cloud KPI, all of that is done automatically for you. It's specifically designed for SaaS.
So we literally plug into your existing systems, pull the data, visualize it, and then use predictive insights to say, hey, you know what's going to happen tomorrow in relation to your churn or your sales or your marketing.
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Chapter 2: What is CloudKPI and what problems does it aim to solve?
And if you knew how painful that is, you'd know that it's not good.
I will not even admit to try and empathize with you because I have no idea what that is like. But walk me through what they're paying for. So how are you pricing?
So our pricing, like everybody else, we've struggled with this one. And what we've come down to is the fairest way of doing it is we base it on their ARR. And there's very good reasons for that because we learned very quickly. We did a lot of discovery with companies in the US to find out exactly what's going on with SaaS businesses.
And what we discovered is that in the very early days, your metrics are pretty damn simple, right? Just survive, know your run rate, get as many customers as you can. And then as you grow and grow and grow and grow, The metrics become more complicated. There's more data points. So that's why we've based it on the ARR because the two of them reflect one another.
And how do you see this as being different than like a bare metrics kind of concept?
I suppose in a couple of ways, we would see it different because of the genuine plug and play self-service model that we are really chasing. Because we don't want to be selling a whole lot of professional services to make this work for you. we want you to literally be able to pop it in, plug it in and use it.
I'm not familiar with Barometrics. Do they have a big professional services thing? Or I thought you just connect to a Stripe and boom, it works.
Yeah, of course. Of course, there are integrations that work like that. But ours are going across all of the different systems across the business. And we concentrate solely on SaaS. So there are some differentiations around what we're doing.
And tell me why you, and it looks like your best friend, you guys have this great picture on your website. Her name is Brenda, I believe, right?
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Chapter 3: How much funding is CloudKPI currently seeking and what valuation do they aim for?
OK, because we had both separately completely had two different worlds. I was working and building a digital marketing strategy company with a lot of analytics work that I was doing on behalf of clients. And separately, Brenda was she had a big management accountancy firm and she was doing the same around revenue metrics.
And both of us were using existing platforms that allow you build dashboards. And we said, this is really frustrating.
Which ones? What were you using?
I don't think I'm going to, I'm not going to diss them because they're the very well-known names that you guys all know, right? Okay. But they're not designed for, they are dashboard builders. They're not intelligent tools. And we said, why can't you have intelligence built into the solution so that the metrics that you need to calculate are already built in?
Do you think there's a reason they haven't done that?
I think because their strategy is to go for a much broader market. to start with, whereas we think it's better strategies to go for a vertical that's a very fast growth one and then move into other similar verticals. So it's a different strategy. Therefore, it's a different kind of product.
And also, you know, our whole premise is let's build in AI and predictive analytics so that we can look at a whole industry and start giving far bigger insights. And you can't do that if you're a broad based platform. It's too hard.
How have you gotten these first three customers?
And basically, we got them in a kind of an odd way. We got them from pitching at different events that we were going to because we were very lucky. We got into some of the accelerators in Silicon Valley early on. And when we were there, we'd meet people and they'd say, hey, I've invested in a SaaS company. You should talk to them.
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Chapter 4: What is the current revenue status and customer count for CloudKPI?
I imagine if you're a software CEO and I go to your site and it says, connect your Stripe account or QuickBooks, I'm going, do I trust these people? How do you make sure that you communicate, hey, we're not going to, data's not going to leak, we're not going to be hacked, it's totally safe with us.
I mean, you know, our whole business relies on security. So we're very, very careful about how we built the platform to ensure that we cordon off access to information and make sure it's secure. But in reality... we found nobody's questioned that.
And I know we're very early that things will change over time, but if you're desperate enough for an answer in a way, I don't think it's a barrier to using a solution. And of course we have to provide information that gives them that confidence about how we secure the data.
And I suppose being originally from Europe where there's very, very strict laws around security of data, we've built a platform with those in mind. And of course that's going to happen everywhere. It's just starting in Europe. I think it's going to happen everywhere.
When did you launch the company officially? Was it this year?
This year.
Okay. So I launched this year. And how much have you put into it so far in terms of money?
And we have put in about 200,000 so far. We got some early angel investments originally.
Okay. And, and that 200,000, what's it being spent on? Is it developers mainly?
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Chapter 5: How does CloudKPI differentiate itself from other SaaS analytics platforms?
They think you want to hear.
Fascinating. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?
Oh, I always watch Amazon. I mean, that's just the guru. I just follow him all the time.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business?
Oh God, that's a very good question. I think probably I use things like SurveyMonkey a lot to try and get feedback.
Yeah, that's a good one. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Oh God, I wish I got eight, but I probably get six.
And what's your situation? Married, single, kiddos?
I am with a long-term partner and I have lots of kids.
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