SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1318 He's flat, cash flow positive, moving freemium, will his tests turn the ship?
04 Mar 2019
Chapter 1: What inspired Jose to start Slidebean?
start a business faster. That's what he would have told himself. Building up Slidebean, presentation software for everybody. Founded in 2014, now at about 20 people. He right-sized the business over the last year.
Chapter 2: How has Slidebean evolved since its founding in 2014?
They raised 850 grand flat year over year, doing about 100 grand per year in revenue. But again, profitable, which is key. It's buying him time to run some of these tests that he's thinking through. So hopefully we'll have you back on, Jose. You'll give us an update on the tests and we'll keep cranking in the meantime.
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.
Chapter 3: What strategies did Jose implement to right-size the business?
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 Jose Callasso.
Chapter 4: How is Slidebean achieving profitability?
He is the founder and CEO of a company called Slidebean. He's a TEDx speaker, graphic designer, and has transformed into a growth hacker. He's also a frequent flyer miles hoarder. Jose, are you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready. Thanks a lot for having me again, Nathan. How many frequent flyer miles do you have? Piling up on a couple hundred thousand at this point.
And does it just give you gratification to just hoard them and you're never going to use them? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I try not to use them. If I have money, I try to pay for the ticket and then hoard more miles. Some family random trip, then I spend them just to make sure I do. All right. Last time you were on the show was back in June of 2017.
At that time, you had about 2,500 customers paying 50 bucks a month, doing about $122,000 a month in revenue. Where are you today? Actually, not that far from there. And it's an interesting story. I was actually hesitant to come back and then say that we haven't really grown our monthly recurring revenue too much.
But for the past year or so, we've been really focused on improving the app itself and improving so many holes, like so many holes in the bucket and the funnel and churn. Um, so we kind of, you know, took an important company decision.
We, we build ourselves to have a profitable team and then not to force ourselves to be in a position to raise money again, and then use that revenue, uh, simply to improve on the product, knowing full aware that we were gonna, you know, that we were gonna stop most of the growth hacking efforts and simply dedicate and building a more, a much more solid product to support our users much better.
Well, thank you for coming back on. I think people that do what you do have to be celebrated because many people think the only thing to celebrate is when you raise the next round of funding, which is totally inaccurate. So walk me through what you did to right size the business. First things first, you're still out. You haven't raised any more capital. You still just 850 grand in total.
That's right. Okay. You had a team size of 22. It sounds like you may have shrunk that a little bit to save some costs. What's the team size today? we're still, we're still 20. So, uh, not that far from, from where we used to be.
Um, but again, uh, a much, much larger focus on the product again, uh, you know, when you're building a product so fast and when it grows so fast, in our case, we grew from, you know, from zero to 80 K revenue in a couple of years. Um, you know, you leave a lot of stuff. You're talking 80,000 a month, right? Yeah. Yeah. And you were founded in 2014. That's right. Yeah. Um,
When you grow that fast, you leave a lot of stuff behind. You leave a lot of stuff that's not relevant enough because if you don't improve the servers, then the tool will crash in a couple months. Or some design rough edges that you never have time to polish.
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Chapter 5: What challenges does Jose face with customer acquisition?
And it's really hard to kind of look back and see all the stuff that is pending, that you realize that if you keep focusing on growth and supporting more customers, you're never going to be able to fix that. Um, that's number one. And then number two, we had the advantage of running the operation profitable, which is something that few companies do. Right.
Um, so if we're profitable, we really don't depend on further rounds of funding. We rather, uh, you know, improve the way, you know, improve, for example, our, our margins and then developing the app so that the app and the automation so that we less manual effort is required. Um, and then working towards that so that.
So that eventually when we decide to kind of focus or refocus on growth, we can do so with an app that's powerful enough to support where we're going next. That's great. Now, last time you came on, you said you were burning $10,000 to $20,000 per month. And that was net burn, not gross. So are you now cash flow positive? We are. We are.
We're actually dealing with a bunch of new problems this year, like taxes. on our revenues and actual margins. Yeah, like there's actually something hitting the bottom line, so you have to pay taxes. Exactly. Yeah. And give me an update on revenue. What are you doing per month now? So it's still on the range of 100 to 150K revenue. It fluctuates a lot.
We run some promos that spike the revenue up. We motivate a lot of users to pay yearly, and that's something that any SaaS business should really focus on. When a customer pays yearly or prepays an annual plan, You have that revenue up front and you have that revenue to invest again in growth or to invest in the product or to invest in the team.
You also don't have to deal with churn for a few months. So we focus on that a lot. And then as we change the interface and so on, it fluctuates between those numbers. Yeah, but Jose, I imagine you probably keep a cash kind of base balance, you know, P&L and also a kind of a deferred revenue one. So really, on a SaaS company, anytime I hear revenues are volatile, it sends up warning flags.
Because if you're taking an annual plan that hits this month and dividing by 12 and recognizing over 12 months, you still should see pretty smooth revenue numbers. So if you give me the monthly recurring revenue number on a deferred basis, what are you doing per month? Yeah, and when we talk monthly recurring revenue, we always do, we always talk at deferred, like we never count yearly.
So why is it going up and down so fast? But the final, so monthly recurring revenue, which is around the 100K, that's one number, but the actual revenue that we collect in a month. It's cash, it's cash, not revenue, right? The cash you collect, yeah. The cash we collect, that's right. Yeah, yeah, and that's because of annual plans. Mostly annual plans.
We've run a couple of promos like Epsumo, which is a very, very powerful platform. You know, that's, you know, we're talking $30,000 of revenue by just running that promo. Yeah, but Jose, come on. Like you're selling, the only reason their thing works is because everyone goes, wow, Epsumo is going to give me a lifetime deal to a SaaS business. That's amazing. I can't. But that's interesting.
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