SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1381 When should you shut your agency down to go all in on SaaS?
06 May 2019
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Built a great agency producing revenue, but decided about five years ago, does not want to be in the agency business long. So he launched Content Launch, which is really a software platform. Has gone through some growing pains, but is now just going through kind of beta launch phase here in 2018. 30 customers paying, you know, 100 bucks per month each.
So they're doing about three grand, four grand, something like that per month in pure play SaaS revenue. As he looks to shift more of his focus, more of his energy strictly on the SaaS revenue and away from agency or content writing, other professional services stuff.
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 John Wibben.
He's the CEO and founder of Content Launch. He's also the author of three marketing books, including Future Marketing, Winning in the Prosumer Age. John, are you ready to take us to the top?
Hey, ready to go.
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Chapter 2: How did John transition from agency work to launching a SaaS platform?
And so the platform basically enables you to plan, create, and distribute all of your content all in one place.
Okay. And I mean, so how does it compare with like a Hootsuite or some of these other solutions?
Yeah, Hootsuite is a social media management dashboard or scheduling dashboard app. And we're more straight content. So content planning, like helping with topics, actually distributing the content, getting it out there, whether it's WordPress or HubSpot or Twitter. It's not just a social channel, but also other places where content needs to go.
And is it a pure play SaaS model from a revenue perspective?
Yeah, exactly.
Okay. And I don't want to go on every customer cohort, but in general, what do customers pay you per month on average?
A hundred bucks per user per month.
Okay. That's fair enough. That's good. And then put this on a timeline for me. When did you launch?
So we were in beta last year. We did a soft launch a couple of months ago. We signed a big partnership deal for a white label kind of partnership a few months ago. We're onboarding a bunch of users there. We're doing an official kind of launch with all the bells and whistles here in a couple of weeks. So we've been kind of doing it in stages.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did John face during the SaaS development process?
So, I don't, you know, because we signed that deal a few months ago, I see it differently. It's not like we're, and the other thing is we have agency revenue still. So we still have our agency, right? So that's supporting the business. So this is not the end all be all. The startup, the software is just one division of our company.
So in other words, last year in our agency, we made $35,000, right? So that's why I don't, you know, it's not the imperative for me to look at sales every morning. Yeah, I do.
Chapter 4: How does Content Launch differentiate itself from competitors?
I'm curious. I'm interested in that. But it's not the end-all, be-all. I'm looking at, I'm the visionary of the company, right? I'm scheduling the next phase. We're actually going to be a year from now, right? So I leave all the sales stuff to my sales guys. And, you know, they've got a great sales team. So I trust them. I know they're going to hit their objectives.
Okay, so a couple thousand, call it 3,000 per month right now in pure play SaaS revenue with your new SaaS product. Like you had an agency in the past that you kind of spun this out of. I totally understand that. And you have a separate content writing kind of business as well. Walk me through team size today. How many folks on the team and where's everyone based?
So we have eight people. We have people in North Carolina. We have people in, actually in Eastern Europe, some developers there. We have operations guy in Irvine. So yeah, we have eight in our team right now. And we're lean and mean. We all wear a lot of hats.
So at what point, first off, a lot of the most successful SaaS companies are born out of agencies. But where I've seen some work and some not work are people try and do both for too long. So neither one of them gets full attention and they just end up diluted. Where they seem to really work, the best example I would say is Ryan Holmes at Hootsuite. It was an agency.
He grew it to about three, four million bucks in just professional service revenue. Everyone kept asking for them to manage manually their posting.
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Chapter 5: What revenue model does Content Launch follow?
So he said, I'm gonna build software for this. And then he shut down that agency. He totally washed away four or five million bucks in revenue and went all in on Hootsuite. Now they do over 200 million bucks a year in revenue. So question to you is, why launch a SaaS company at all And what do you have to see on the SaaS side or the agency side to decide to go all in on that one thing?
Yeah, because I had a choice five years ago. Do I grow my agency and become another big agency or do I build a platform? That was the choice I had. And I decided to build a platform.
I didn't want- Why choice? Why was that the choice though?
I'm getting to that, man. Slow down. The reason I made that decision is because I didn't want to run a big agency. I didn't want to run a big agency where I'm managing clients on a day-to-day basis. I'd already done that for 12 years. Running a software company was the next thing for me. Right. And so I really work well with software developers. I love conceptualizing things.
I love building stuff. So for me, it was an easy decision on that side. It was a hard decision. The fact that I knew it was going to take a lot of time and I knew it was going to take a lot of money. Um, but for me, all roads were pointing towards building a platform. So that's what we did.
Okay. You said that was five years ago.
Yep.
Okay. But I thought you just said you're just now kind of launching the SAS platform. So what happened in the four years before that?
Yeah, so that's the part that a lot of people, a lot of startups, a lot of entrepreneurs kind of don't understand or don't appreciate is that it's not easy, right? We had an alpha product two and a half years ago. It was not ready. It was not ready for prime time. We went through the whole thing. We spent a lot of money. We marketed it, and it just was not good enough. We couldn't compete.
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