SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1374 Your Dish Network Repair Man Probably Uses This $1m+ ARR Tool For Communication
29 Apr 2019
Chapter 1: Who is Stacey Epstein and what is her background?
Hello, everyone. My guest today is Stacey Epstein. She's extensive experience in generating demand, fueling growth and building brand name global recognition for technology companies. She brings two decades of cloud social and mobile enterprise technology experience to her role as CEO of Zinc.
Before Zinc, she was chief marketing officer at ServiceMax, where she helped fuel five consecutive years of triple digit growth, leading to a $1.5 billion acquisition by GE in 2017. Stacey, are you ready to take us to the top?
I am, but yes, I am.
Sorry, I'm ready. What did I screw up in the bio?
Well, success factors was acquired by SAP for three and a half billion. Service max was acquired by GE for a billion. Probably not all that relevant.
Okay, got it. Very good. Well, it's helpful to understand that. Yeah, I cut off a bunch of your bio because I just did the first 50 words. We have a lot. It's fair to say you have a ton of experience in B2B sales.
I've been around a long time.
Yeah, tell us about Zinc. What is Zinc doing? How do you make money?
Yeah, so Zinc helps field-based or what we call deskless workers get access to real-time knowledge from the rest of the organization and from the systems in the organization. So that probably sounds like a lot of jargon to you. So let me explain that a little bit more fully. If you think of field service technicians like a dishwasher,
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Chapter 2: What does Zinc do for deskless workers?
Customers big and small.
Okay. And maybe let's then go away from the per logo basis. What do you charge on average per seat? I'm sure you probably do volume discounts, but are we talking like 10 bucks a seat, a hundred bucks a seat?
10 to 20, depending on what they want per user per month.
And depending on probably volume of what they're signing up with, right?
Yeah, right. Of course. Like, you know, 5,000 technicians, it's going to be a little lower than that. If you're doing 50, it's you're playing closer to list price.
Yep. Now give me the backstory here. You were very specific in the bio saying you're CEO, but I didn't see the word founder. Did you help create the company or were you brought in as CEO?
Um, well, a little bit of both. Uh, we were born out of another company that was just focused on a work texting app. So sort of like WhatsApp for work. Um, that was founded by some of the product leads at Yammer. And it had been, it was a freemium model that had been in business for a couple of years and great product, but wasn't really going anywhere on the go-to marketing side.
So together with the board, I came in and we basically- The Yammer board? No, no, no. The board of that company, which was called Kotap. So we came in and we basically took the assets of that company, which was Kotap, and the great core product, built out the product and relaunched it as Zinc. So I am the founder of Zinc, but there is a little bit more of a story there.
Our product's been around a few years longer than I have.
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Chapter 3: How does Zinc generate revenue?
Like even, okay, but this one's work-based, who cares? I just want to text my buddy. I'm not incented to go put a new app on my phone just for work messaging, right? So I was pretty convinced out of the gate that freemium wasn't going to be our big play.
We did have a fair number of customers, a handful of customers that were upsells from the freemium model where, Hey, the users loved it, but now we want the admin console and the ability to manage the, you know, have it be able to get their arms around it and manage it, have some of those enterprise features.
But we shut off freemium probably six months after we launched as zinc and basically said, Hey, you can do a free trial and, And we still do pilots today. I think try it before you buy it has been very successful for us, especially because the way we've architected our app is very focused on adoption. You can imagine the demographic of a field worker, a hospitality worker, a construction worker.
These are people that don't use technology all day for their job, right? They use their hands to fix something or they're talking to a customer. So you can't give them some complicated, you know, swipe here, drop down. It's really works better if you're on a computer than your phone because they literally won't adopt it. And they will go right back to that unsanctioned, risky consumer app.
So we were very much architected for wide adoption. And I think that the free trial, you know, it's smaller company. It's a free trial, bigger company. It's a formal pilot. And they get a real taste of how easy it is to use, the fact that the users will adopt it, the fact that getting live on the solution is very quick. I mean, we took thousands of technicians live at Dish Network in two weeks.
Um, so, so the time to value has been great, but yeah, direct sales, right? We have AEs that work the deal.
What's the total team size, Stacey?
We have about 30 people.
Okay. And how many AEs? Uh, three. Okay. And SDRs for AEs or no?
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Chapter 4: What is the story behind the founding of Zinc?
Like a lot of times people get into the trial and it's like, well, because it wasn't set up to their exact processes, they don't get a good flavor of it.
Are you that way or not? No. You're one flavor.
We're pretty much one flavor. I mean, yes, hotels are more used to talking on radios, so they might leverage the push-to-talk feature. You know, a telco or utility might be more reliant on our hotline feature where you can message to a group that you're not in and get to a team of experts to help you right out of the gate.
But generally, a communication platform is used in generally the same way, right? Like any given user is going to be sending texts, receiving texts, being added to groups. You know, being on a conference call, it's very to use. It's easy to implement. There's not a lot of we've got to tailor it to your process. You communicate like most companies do.
Stacey, we're running out of time here, but I do want to get in some inclination here of how you decide whether to experiment with different marketing and sales techniques. tests. So obviously the CAC number and things like that are still very much fluctuating. But when, when your account executive or SDR comes and says, Hey, I found a new channel. Can I test it?
You've got to use some combination of gut and data to say yes or no on that. So are you looking at like a payback period estimate, a lifetime value estimate? And what are you looking at?
Um, well, I will start by saying I am at my core, a risk taker. Um, and you know, I've worked for the likes of Lars Dahlgaard at success factors where a lot of our company was built around taking risks and having a lot of them not work, but having some of them turn into the big game changer that moved the needle. So, and I love people that take initiative.
So if somebody in my organization comes to me with an idea and, and, and it seems pretty reasonable now, I'm not going to do something crazy. That's going to break the bank, but I would say, on gut and on 30 years of experience, I'm probably pretty likely to say yes in a, at a small scale to anything that might move the needle for us.
So someone, if I was working for you and I said, Hey Stacey, look, I think I can land this new customer at the contract value. If the pilot goes well, it's going to be a hundred grand for the year, but it's probably going to take me about 200, 250 grand to like get them going in terms of the professional service. Would you say yes or no?
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Zinc face in its early days?
She's been there. She's done that. She's trying it again with a spin out from Kotap with some of our technical co-founders in 2016. Really a communications tool. for many different industries, especially industries where folks are not in front of the computer every day. Think your Dish Network guy or folks out on the road every day.
So today, serving over 70 enterprise logos, enterprise customers, and that makes it about 10, between 10 and 100,000 seats. They've passed a million bucks in revenue, hoping to break three-ish or four-ish this year with eyes on 5 million in A.R., Sometime next year, the economics make sense.
Net negative revenue of negative 17 percent grown between 100 and 150 percent year over year with 16 million dollars raised. Team of 30 people. Stacey, thank you for taking us to the top.
Thank you. Appreciate it.