SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1469 How He's Bootstrapped to $7.2M in ARR with Less Than 5 Sales and Marketing People
02 Aug 2019
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
My new book is out on Audible, How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital. You can grab it right now. Here's what a user, Thomas Lornaviticus, said. Latke is the real deal. Five stars. Hey, Nathan, I just listened to your podcast with JLD. You killed it. I saw your book earlier last week and thought, meh, I'll wait when Kindle costs $1.99 or whatever, as I have over 150 books to catch up with.
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Guys, all of you that listen to the podcast, you were the reason I wrote the book. SaaS CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs, go grab it today at capitalistbook.com. Especially if you like audio, go grab the audible version right now. Again, capitalistbook.com. Launched a couple of years ago, call it 2010. Now 70 people between New Jersey and Europe.
Again, 600 customers paying an average a thousand bucks per month. So north of 600 grand per month in revenue. That's up about 40% year over year. They finished 2017 with about 5.1 million bucks in revenue. In terms of economics, 12% logo churn per year, and they've got net negative revenue churn annually, which is great.
too early to measure CAC and LTV, things like that, as most their 70-person organization is actually focused on engineering and customer success versus sales, marketing, or any inbound strategy. 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 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 Jeremy Greenberg. He's the founder and CEO of SellerCloud.
His vision has guided SellerCloud to the forefront of the competitive e-commerce management playing field. Jeremy, are you ready to take us to the top?
Sure.
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Chapter 2: How did Jeremy Greenberg bootstrap SellerCloud?
So, revenue churn...
Chapter 3: What services does SellerCloud provide to e-commerce companies?
If you have 90% revenue churn, what that would mean is if you're doing 5 million last year, that would go down to like a million.
Sorry, sorry. Yeah. So we have net negative churn. Yeah. So we're not only retaining our clients, but we're adding clients every month.
Yeah. So what I'm trying to figure out, gross revenue churn per year is what? 12%? Because you said you retained 88. So if you retained 88, that means you churned 12.
Yeah. Yeah.
Is that right?
That was the logo churn I was referring to.
What's revenue?
So the revenue, I honestly don't have the number off.
Oh, that's okay. That's okay. So, okay. So 12% logo churn per year and you have net negative revenue churn each year. Correct. What do you drive? The only way to have net negative revenue churn is to obviously be driving expansion revenue. What kinds of additional things are you selling into your, you know, into your customer base that drives the upsells?
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Chapter 4: How predictable is SellerCloud's revenue model?
Marketing, we have one person. And what about kind of like content, things like that, SEO, SEM? Just one person. Okay, so five people kind of total on that side? Correct. And then the rest are all engineers?
No, so there are around 20 people who are involved in support, onboarding. Okay, that's like customer success. Customer success. So aside from them, the rest are all either developers or project managers and things like that. So it's mostly... we're pretty much heavy weighted on the technology side development wise.
That's great. Now you've bootstrapped the company. Would you ever raise capital? Are you in talks today to raise any capital or no?
Um, I'm not in talks right now. Uh, you know, it's, it's at the right time. Maybe it would make sense. Um, one of the challenges, a company of my size is that, you know, it's, uh, you don't want to really give up equity at this stage unless you really need it. Um, sort of, uh, You know, it's really hard to know what what will be.
But I think I probably want the company to grow a little bit more mature so that it's a little bit more easy to get like a minority investor or something like that, you know, without giving up too much equity percentage wise. But we sort of got through a lot of the hard stages already, you know.
Yeah, I know you're building a great company. I love it. It's great that you're doing it bootstrapped. Um, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
Um, I haven't really read too many business books to be honest. And the last book you read? Um, I read a book, uh, about emotional intelligence by, uh, Sheldini sounds familiar. Good answer.
It's fine. Emotional intelligence. Number two, is there an under the radar CEO that you follow or study?
Uh, not really. I'm pretty much, uh, you know, I don't really follow any type of model.
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Chapter 5: What has been the growth rate of SellerCloud over the years?
I would not say just cause you sleep less means you're working harder. I do not think those things are correlated at all. But why don't you sleep more though? Seriously? What do you have? Small kids at home or?
Yeah, I got some small kids at home, but, uh, you know, it's, it's a challenging balancing, uh, all of the responsibilities at home and at work.
But, uh, so, so how many, how is it? First off, are you married? I'm married. Okay. Married. And how many kiddos? I've got eight kids. Oh my God, Jeremy. Okay. That's the reason you just say, Nathan, leave me alone. I have eight kids. That's why I only sleep five hours. All right. And how old are you, Jeremy? I'm 40, 40. Last question. What do you wish your 20 year old self knew?
Um, I wish I knew earlier that people really needed software like this. I could have had a head start, I guess.
Guys, earlier start on software. There you have it from Seller Cloud. Launched a couple years ago, call it 2010. Now 70 people between New Jersey and Europe. Again, 600 customers paying an average of $1,000 per month, so north of $600,000 per month in revenue. That's up about 40% year over year. They finished 2017 with about $5.1 million in revenue.
In terms of economics, 12% logo churn per year, and they've got net negative revenue churn annually, which is great. too early to measure CAC and LTV, things like that as most their 70 person organization is actually focused on engineering and customer success versus sales marketing or any inbound strategy. So Jeremy, thank you so much for taking us to the top.
Okay. Thank you. Enjoy.
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