SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1396 Percolate Flirts with $40m in ARR, 600 Brands Using as Their Ultimate Content Machine
21 May 2019
Chapter 1: What is the significance of SaaS Stock East for B2B SaaS companies?
I've had the fortune of meeting a lot of you guys at B2B SaaS conferences all around the world. And one of my favorites is coming up in New York city, June 4th to 5th. That is SaaS stock East coast. Now it's my favorite. And I can say that because I'm getting asked to speak at almost every major SaaS conference because my data set is so large. Nobody has anything like it.
And the reason SaaS stock is my favorite is because it's the most curated. It's a large group of extremely intelligent individuals. In fact,
Many CEOs I've had on the show will be at SaaS Stock East Coast on June 4th through 5th in New York, including many you guys have heard of, like Rajit Thomas, CEO and founder of Sprinklr, Daniel, CEO of Greenhouse, and Stacey Bishop, partner at Scale Venture Partners. So I hope to see you guys there.
If you decide to come, I will get coffee with you and I can get you guys a great discount, I think, as well. You can check it out at this link, nathanlaca.com forward slash SaaS Stock East.
s-a-a-s-t-o-c-k east and then use code latka hyphen 20 to get a 20 discount that's l-a-t-k-a hyphen 20 l-a-t-k-a hyphen 20 and then shoot me a text if you decide to come so we can get coffee 703-431-2709 i hope to see you guys there there's a little bit more kind of, what do you think? Let me make sure your feelings are good. Support your decision. Give me an updated report.
A little bit different than the military. Randy is obviously adopting well. You know, maybe if his wife didn't get sick of him surfing and doing yoga at home in the middle of the living room, he'd still be home doing yoga in the middle of the living room. But he's not. He joined Park after a search and he said, you know what? This is a company I want to be with. Joined them just six months ago.
Founded in 2011, the ultimate marketing machine. They're serving about 200 logos across 600 brands, 75 million bucks raised, growing between 50 and 100% year over year. Somewhere, we'll say it, somewhere in the kind of $40 million AR run rate range. Again, retention metrics generally aligned with industry.
Payback period, they try to stay below six months with a team of around, call it 200, 300 people. 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.
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Chapter 2: What is the current ARR and growth rate of Percolate?
like most startups, you end up, you get a little money to prove a thesis and you execute 12 to 18 months. You go get a little bit more money and you keep going.
Randy, out of curiosity, because debt I know is just getting hotter, especially in a good economy. Did you decide to do like revenue-based financing where you're paying back as a percentage of monthly revenue? Or did you do like an MRR term loan where there's an interest rate, interest rate for the first 12 months and interest in principle over say four to six years?
Wow, that's a really technical question. I'm just curious.
Yeah. So I inherited the debt line that we had. It's an MMR debt line. The additional debt is a convert.
Okay. So you're not paying it as a percentage of gross receipts per month. It's a fixed interest rate.
Fixed interest rate, yeah. And I was interested in your question, your assumption around the debt.
What I found is, and having done this at Rocket Fuel as well with debt financing, is there a bunch of banks that are just lined up with the VCs, the top VCs in the world, and they got these different deals that they do, and they invest in the portfolio, and you get good terms because you're a Sequoia-backed like Sequoia, GGV, Lightspeed, and First Round.
Those types of companies want to, the banks want to do business with those companies. And so it's a matter of, I think capital structure is one of the most interesting things you have to think about as a CEO and for early stage entrepreneurs.
Getting smart on that is really important because the price of capital, the cost of capital of debt versus equity and how much you take and when you take it, really different instruments and different expectations. And clearly something that people, CEOs, CFOs, need to be thinking about all the time.
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Chapter 3: How does Percolate define its business model and target audience?
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If you wanna get started on Capterra today to find the right tools to make 2019 the year for your business, and quite frankly, save time and energy on all your software expenses, we all spend a lot on it, visit nathanlaca.com forward slash Capterra.
Chapter 4: What challenges do Fortune 2000 companies face in marketing?
That's nathanlaca.com forward slash C-A-P-T-E-R-R-A to get started today, totally free. we can quantify this in terms of net revenue retention annually. So I assume based off your incredible ability to drive expansion and your ability to pull cash, your net revenue retention I'm imagining is over a hundred percent per year. Is that accurate?
Yeah. Again, can't comment publicly. What I would say is that what we are focused on is large enterprise customers who are buying the new capability, the content marketing platform, and we have great net retention in that, in that segment. There are some smaller midsize customers, uh, that we have, uh,
as we've evolved the company are, are, are working with and we perhaps have more churn in that segment than you would, you might expect.
What would we expect in the market? Don't talk about you, but on average in this market, what would we expect for churn?
Well, I think your general sense of enterprise software are different than mid-market, right? So, enterprise software, I think expectation of 80%, 90% retention is totally reasonable. It's long-term contracts. As we said, you're making these big commitments. With the mid-market space, what you struggle with isā¦
um just to be clear sorry you putting yourself in market or enterprise no we're enterprise yeah yeah we're enterprise so the mid-market space what you struggle with is if you're selling a complicated enterprise solution with uh what requires a lot of implementation is people they like the idea they get into it but then they can't fully commit to changing the way they're doing marketing um or they can't support the ongoing change management required to enable it so i think
When you're Google and you're live in five with a search solution, they probably have small, medium-sized business and mid-markets that use them all the time. When you're doing an enterprise software sale trying to sell in the mid-market, it's just mismatched with what the mid-market buyer wants.
Yep. You mentioned CAC earlier. I don't want to know what your specific CAC is, but I'm actually more interested in how aggressive you're being on your payback periods based off what you raise. So are you happy considering your cash cushion to have and be patient for a 24 month payback? Or do you try and stay below six months or a year or what?
Yeah, we look below six months on CAC. I would describe it as one of the areas where we're investing, coming in and pivoting and focusing on B2B marketing more specifically. Let me put it this way. There's a different way of running an enterprise software sales motion from a mid-market play. It's inbound leads. It's qualification. It's sales funnel.
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Chapter 5: How much capital has Percolate raised and what is its funding strategy?
It's your decision. Great. We're going to go take that hill, but you're going to go lead it. And the corporate sector, the big thing I had to learn, it took me a while, was it's lead, follow, or let's talk about it. And you spend all this time in meetings with people just talking about things.
And it just drove me nuts when I first got into the corporate sector was like, it's clear there's a decision to be made here. Who's going to make the decision? And so I think to the 20-year-old self, it would be recognize that you're going to have to do some evolution of operating pace when you go into the corporate sector.
Guys, there you have it. There's a little bit more kind of what do you think? Let me make sure your feelings are good. Support your decision. Give me an updated report. A little bit different than the military. Randy is obviously adopting well.
You know, maybe if his wife didn't get sick of him surfing and doing yoga at home in the middle of the living room, he'd still be home doing yoga in the middle of the living room, but he's not. He joined Percolate after a search and he said, you know what? This is a company I want to be with. Joined them just six months ago. Founded in 2011, the ultimate marketing machine.
They're serving about 200 logos across 600 brands, 75 million bucks raised, growing between 50 and 100% year over year. Somewhere, we'll say it, somewhere in the kind of $40 million AR run rate range. Again, retention metrics generally in line with industry. Payback period, they try to stay below six months with a team of around, call it 200, 300 people.
Randy, thank you so much for taking us to the top.
Yeah, right on. Have a great day.
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