SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1333 Dealing With Professional Services Temptations with Cliently CEO
19 Mar 2019
Chapter 1: What is the background of Spencer and his journey in sales?
Launched about a year and a half, two years ago with a product. Grew it to about six grand per month, seven grand per month in revenue over about 10 months. Then said, you know what? There's way more money doing professional services, which we scaled about 60, 70 grand in revenue per month. But again, it's low, low margin, hard to scale.
So raised additional capital, 800 grand in the company so far. Now relaunching his SaaS platform at Cliently. Again, about 13 customers right now make up about 40,000 bucks in AR.
Chapter 2: How did Spencer transition from professional services to SaaS?
He's hoping to really double down over the next five months and see if he can hit that $1 million AR mark. 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 Spencer. At 23 years old, he accepted his first sales director role, and a year later was promoted to VP of sales for an e-commerce doing $5 million in revenue.
He went on to begin his own company, then found himself working at Panadoc, a hot Silicon Valley startup, before founding his current company, Cliently, which we're going to talk about today. Spencer, are you ready to take us to the top? Ready to roll. All right. So give us an update. You came on on December 6, 2016.
You'd raised $100,000 at that point, 80 customers doing about $7,000, $8,000 per month in revenue. What have you scaled to today?
You know what? It's actually sort of an interesting story. We've gone on, as a lot of startups do, we've gone on a few different, I don't even want to say pivots, but tangents. And so actually, in December 2016, we had raised 100 ā or I should say we hadn't raised 100, but we were bootstrapped of money that I just actually had from saving, selling some old PandaDoc stock, etc.
But we continued to grow slowly in the beginning months of January, February, March, etc., But then we found that clients really wanted help by having phone calls made on their behalf as well as part of what we were doing. So we decided to do a beta with that. And at that point, we had one client that was using it.
We started to then test the waters to see if it would be interesting about mid of last year. And that sort of spiked for us. And so we ended up selling our product with us doing what we called at that time cliently calls, making client calls for the leads that we were sourcing. using our system for the rest for email, video message, et cetera. And we almost had too much success.
It took us all the way to about an MRR of about 65 to 70K by the early part of 2018. But at the same time, it took us off of our core focus, which was really our SaaS application and finding other interesting ways at scale to help our clients find leads and engage prospects.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Spencer face when scaling Cliently?
It's interesting. It's a hot space. It's very fragmented, though. And so it sounds like you're you're pivoting and doubling down. Give me the total number, though. So how much capital in the business to date?
To date, we have raised 700,000.
Okay, good. So 700, and that includes the 100 you put in at the beginning? Does not include that. So 800, if you include my own as well. Okay, got it. So 800 in and all of the raise. So from Pat and everything, I know his model is typically a note up front. Is all this on a note? These are all notes. Yeah. Interesting. Okay, good.
So about 40 grand in AR, now pure play SaaS revenue across how many customers?
Literally about, you know, 12, 13 accounts. We literally started this process last week of May, first week of June.
Yeah, no, that's fine. So it's probably too early to talk about economics-related questions like CAC, churn, ARPU, correct?
It is. What I'll really go into for you is our goals, which I think is going to be interesting for others to understand as well and how we plan to achieve them. And so I mentioned in terms of, hey, we're looking to reach a million dollars of ARR by the end of the year, which is really at this point only another five and a half plus months.
And the way we look at that is, and again, the reason we weren't able to scale earlier is the application just wasn't there. It now is.
Yeah, but you were, all right, sorry, Spencer. That's a little confusing though because you were doing more MRR a year and a half ago, pure play SaaS, than you are today.
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Chapter 4: How has Cliently's revenue evolved over time?
Uh, married. Any kiddos? Not yet. All right. And how old are you? I am 36 as of this week. Oh, congratulations. That's exciting. Last question. What do you wish your 20 year old self knew?
Um, You know, I don't have a great answer for that. As far as what I wish they knew is you have to get experience. So I really don't even know what I would tell them because what I found as I've tried to give feedback and thoughts to those that are younger than me. they're going to have to experience on their own anyways.
So guys get experience as fast as you can. Coming from again, Spencer launched about a year and a half, two years ago with a product grew to about six grand per month, seven grand per month in revenue over about 10 months. Then said, you know, there's way more money doing professional services, which is scaled about 60, 70 grand in revenue per month. But again, it's low, low margin, hard to scale.
So raise additional capital, 800 grand in the company so far. now relaunching his SaaS platform at Cliently. Again, about 13 customers right now make up about $40,000 in AR. He's hoping to really double down over the next five months and see if he can hit that $1 million AR mark. We'll have him back on and see if he does it. Spencer, thank you for taking us to the top.
My pleasure.
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