SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1428 Bootstrapped and $12m in ARR. My kinda CEO!
22 Jun 2019
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
My new book, How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital, is out.
Chapter 2: Why did Max Israel found Customerville 15 years ago?
You can get it at capitalistbook.com.
Chapter 3: How did Customerville grow without venture capital?
Here's what Nicholas said on March 6th on Amazon.
Chapter 4: What led to the pivot in Customerville's business model eight years ago?
Incredibly incisive, useful, and sensible.
Chapter 5: How much do Customerville's average customers pay annually?
The author is not greedy and is in fact extremely generous and does not hold back on the knowledge he imparts.
Chapter 6: Why does Customerville choose to remain bootstrapped?
I've barely made it halfway to the book, and I'm already gushing over the book because it's an absolute gem.
Chapter 7: How is Customerville achieving a million dollars in monthly recurring revenue?
Nathan gets to the point quick, shows proof, and best of all, shows you not just what to do, but how to do it in explicit detail.
Chapter 8: What strategies are in place to maintain low churn rates?
To say the book is actionable is an understatement. Now, you guys that listen to the podcast know I'm detail-oriented, so that review might not surprise you, but I hope you grab the book. It's now a Wall Street Journal Instant National Bestseller. Grab it at capitalistbook.com. Audible version is available too.
Launched company back about 15 years ago in 2003 retail chains, you know, didn't pay himself for three or four years into that. Then finally started taking a check before they pivoted in 2000. And it was about eight years ago. It's about 2010 for about two years. They kind of found where they were building. Then they scaled really quickly for about call it two, three years.
Stayed bootstrapped today. They're serving over 50 enterprise clients, helping them do much better experience-driven surveying. Past a million bucks a month. That's up 100% year over year or between 1,500% year over year. So healthy growth, less than 10% revenue churn per year.
They've got a team of 40 people based between Seattle and Spain looking to scale, especially in the sales role over the next 12 months. Maybe raise, maybe sell. We'll see. 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 Max Israel. He's the founder and CEO of a company called Customerville, creator of the design driven feedback platform.
Max leads an innovative team who blend technology, art, and behavioral science to make the customer feedback process engaging and actionable. CustomerVille is known for aggressively pushing the limits of what people expect from customer surveys and reporting. Max, are you ready to take us to the top? I am indeed. All right, tell us about the company. What do you guys do and how do you make money?
That's a good question. So I founded the company about 15 years ago because I needed a way to get feedback from customers in a business I owned at the time and I still own. And you've probably seen the customer feedback surveys. Everywhere you go, if you fill up your car with gas or you buy coffee or something like that, you're going to get a request to fill out a survey.
And kind of in the early days, 15 years ago, there really wasn't an approachable way to do that. So I hired a programmer and we invented a platform to get feedback from our customers and put it right in the hands of of our employees. But about eight years ago, things got really interesting because I woke up one day and realized I fucking hated it.
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