SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1317 He Left Eventbrite to Launch This, Growing Via API Partnerships
03 Mar 2019
Chapter 1: What motivated Mitch Calleran to leave Eventbrite and start JoinIt?
more confidence early on left event bride back in 2016 then launched join it in 2017 again the tool to help these folks whether it's professional organizations or membership sites manage those plans they've got about 700 customers paying 26 bucks a month 18 grand in monthly revenue up from 6 000 a month just about a year ago so good growth they are bootstrapped team co-founding team of two with two contractors
building this thing out three percent monthly revenue churn right now spending about a grand to get a new customer so too long of a payback period they're trying to figure out how to get that down and make those economics work more effectively driving most of their growth right now through api partnerships with people like mailchimp and other co-marketing opportunities 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.
Chapter 2: How does JoinIt generate revenue through its SaaS model?
I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everybody. My guest today is Mitch Calleran. He's the founder and CEO at JoinIt, a platform that helps nonprofits and organizations manage their memberships. Previously, he was at Eventbrite for six years where he worked on the API and developer platform. Mitch, you ready to take us to the top?
Let's do it.
All right, man. So when did you make the decision? You said, okay, I got to go do this thing and quit Eventbrite.
Chapter 3: What strategies did JoinIt use to acquire its first customers?
Yeah, that was in late 2016. After six awesome years at Eventbrite, great learning opportunities on the sales team, then the marketing team, and finally the product team, I kind of got the confidence to jump ship and start my own thing.
That's great. Okay. So what is JoinIt doing? What's your revenue model? How do you make money?
Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. We're a SaaS platform, so we charge our customers a monthly fee to access the platform. And then we charge a transactional service fee as well when they make membership sales through Joinit.
Chapter 4: How does JoinIt leverage API partnerships for growth?
Interesting. And over the past 12 months, if you look at total revenue, what portion was pure SaaS versus your transactional model?
Yeah, so we're a majority pure SaaS. I'd say it's probably around 70%.
Okay, very good. That's great. You're seeing a lot of SaaS companies like this add a transactional element. So interesting to see that with your business too. On the SaaS side, on average, what are companies paying to get access to the tech?
Our most popular plan is $29 a month, but we offer two discounts, one for nonprofits and then another annual discount.
Chapter 5: What challenges does JoinIt face with customer acquisition costs?
And so it typically comes in around $22 per month to use it.
Okay, that's great. And do you see like significant kind of like power laws in your customer cohorts? Do you have any big enterprise accounts doing thousands a month or?
Uh, we have two big enterprise clients, um, but they're on, on advertised plans and just kind of custom deals where they needed more from the platform than what we offered, uh, to our default customers. So we've set those up. Uh, one of my big goals for 2019 is to get more customers that look like that.
Of course, of course. All right. So you said 2016 or, or sorry, when was the actual start date of the company?
Chapter 6: What is JoinIt's current customer churn rate and how does it impact growth?
So I left Eventbrite in Q4 of 2016. And then we were open for business at January 1st, 2017.
That's okay. So you got two years and a month under your belt. How many customers to date? Yeah, so we have 700 paying customers. That's great. So walk me through kind of growth strategy. I mean, you ran growth at Eventbrite. So what did you learn from Eventbrite that you took in a joint?
Chapter 7: How does JoinIt plan to expand its customer base in the future?
And how did you get your first 10, 15 customers?
Yeah, I'll answer the second part first. I think for our first hundred and even extended a little bit today, it really was just being as scrappy as possible, talking to everyone, doing live chat, any lead that came through our door, offering to get on the phone, hearing what they're facing, what they need solved, really just scrapped our way to the first hundred customers.
But how'd they be specific there, Mitch? I mean, how did they find the website in the first place?
Yeah, a lot of our first customers came through co-marketing. We built some integrations with Eventbrite and MailChimp and Stripe and a couple other platforms and worked with them to do co-marketing blog posts, get listed in their directory, things like that. And they were our first customers. referral partners that send over customers.
So Mitch, let me go down the MailChimp path for a second.
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Chapter 8: What are the lessons learned from building JoinIt as a bootstrapped startup?
You call them up, you say, hey, I was with Eventbrite. I'm doing my own thing now. We're starting from scratch. Do an integration with me. No offense, but like, why do they care about you?
Yeah, absolutely, they don't. That's the quick answer. For companies the size of MailChimp and Eventbrite, they have an open developer platform where you can get an application key, you can start integrating their APIs, and you get listed in their partner directory.
They've built the program at MailChimp, and this is what I did at Eventbrite, where you build carrots for developers to integrate with your platform, and part of that is marketing. So they have open programs that are available that we integrated into to get small amounts of traffic and customers.
So did you do for anyone else looking to get their first a hundred customers by integrating with someone else's app store? Right. I mean, you're the perfect guy to ask this question. What, what were some of the things that like MailChimp did to give you that carrot and was it effective? I mean, did they drive you 10, 20, 30 customers in the first year?
Uh, yeah, they, they did drive us some material customer volume in the first year. Um, and we have now about 12 of these integrations and, um, The tough part is it's really hard to predict how much value is going to come from integrating another partner's API. I think every partner will boast about their marketing programs and what they're willing to do.
Obviously, for the big ones like MailChimp, they do very little for someone who's just coming to the platform, self-sign on, get an application key, build an integration. But their volume is so massive of their millions of small businesses that use them. We just need a few to stumble upon. in their app directory.
And then there's another approach where you can go to smaller partners that are more aligned or more your relative size and build deeper relationships with them. And so we have integrations with software like Kindful, which does donor management. And they're another SaaS platform based in Nashville. And we've done co-marketing with them that's more high touch.
So they have a much smaller user base than something like MailChimp, but you deploy different strategies to get similar traffic coming from either a huge platform like MailChimp or a smaller platform like Kindful or Eventbrite, even somewhere in the middle.
Very cool. And did you do anything when you were integrating MailChimp's API, like, you know, making sure the way you named your app or the headline or the description had certain words in it so you'd rank when people searched? I mean, how did you analyze all that stuff?
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