SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1486 Digital Signage Management Passes $4.2M in ARR, Bootstrapped
19 Aug 2019
Chapter 1: What is the background of Byron Darlison and Rise Vision?
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Rise Vision launched in 1992, first with a partnership on Reuters. Today, over 6,000 customers paying 50 bucks a month, doing about 350 grand in monthly revenue. That's up 20, 30% year over year, so about 310,000 bucks per month in revenue just about a year ago. They're bootstrapped, which I love.
Gross logo churn, 1.3% per month, 4% gross revenue churn per month, so they're churning higher value customers, but they are actively working on how to bring that down by getting their activation from time zero to, you know, it all activated in value, an aha moment in under five minutes. Payback period is about six months, team of 35 based in all over the world, remote locations.
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 Byron Darlison.
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Chapter 2: How does Rise Vision's freemium model work?
It's in over, at this point, 125 countries. But our forte, where we really specialize, is education. And that's what we do. We try to make it effortless for our education customers in particular by providing them their content as they would need it for every imaginable job that they have within their schools.
Okay. So this is, you walk into an elementary school, you in the main lobby, you see screens on the wall that says, here's the events today. You know, here's a holiday coming up next week. Don't forget that kind of stuff. Exactly.
And are you. We also, we are a big provider of financial trading labs. So basically there are many financial floors in universities and they train business, business students to come out of there to, to move into the financial sector.
And what would you say your kind of core value proposition is? Is there a hardware component here, or is it just software, the school buys the TVs?
So traditionally, we did the whole thing. And that was the overwhelming chunk of our business. It was a one-time service. But over the last about five years, we've been really focused on our SaaS offering. And now it's about 65% of our gross revenue.
Oh, great. Okay. Put this on a timeline for us. When was your one? 1992. 92. Holy, Byron, you're aging yourself here.
Were you born then?
I was going to say I was the ripe age of three at the time.
Okay. That's great.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of digital signage in education?
Something like that.
Yeah. And, um, Byron, how have you done this? Your own capital or have you raised?
I know we're just bootstrapped.
Yeah. Why do you say that so bad? That's such a, that's a beautiful thing.
I personally think it's a fantastic thing.
Yeah. We were on a call the other day and that call was private, so I won't divulge details there, but we were kind of talking about and thinking about, you know, like why are people using venture debt and when does it make sense or when does it not make sense?
Have you, do you work with any founders or have you talked to any other of your colleagues around venture debt and where it's been used effectively?
I think if you have the ability and a strategy and you can see a return on it, why not go for it? For us, and you and I have talked about this before, we're at a crossroads where we've got some really interesting things coming up.
we we may look at to more expansion through debt financing stuff like that which is based on the exact same formula that any other entrepreneur should be using to evaluate that but i not just debt by the way like entrepreneurs should use that formula for even venture the big difference is venture is dilutive and debt is non-dilutive however there's an interest rate typically
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Chapter 4: How does Rise Vision generate revenue and what are its pricing models?
The 4 is our gross MRR churn.
Oh. Yeah. So just to repeat that back to you, gross logo churn 1.3 per month, gross revenue churn 4% per month. Correct, correct. Interesting. So that would tell me that you have higher paying customers churning. Yes. Those are the trading desks?
Yeah. So the financial trading floors are starting to shut down and move to, they're decentralizing and there's less concentration of them. So yeah.
What are you willing to pay to get a new $50 a month customer?
uh what's our customer acquisition cost our ratio is 3.18 lifetime value to customer acquisition cost and i know your math is way better than mine well that's okay what do you do you know what you assume lifetime value is in terms of dollars
Yeah, lifetime value. I love this, guys. If you're watching the video, I love it when a CEO has notes. They know what to expect. He's ready.
I listen to your show daily. I don't know what you're going to do to me.
Thanks for listening, by the way. I appreciate that.
Oh, no. We've talked. It's my morning coffee routine. About $1,900.
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Chapter 5: What challenges does Rise Vision face with customer churn?
That's okay. That's okay. Either way, either way, it's obviously, it's working. The trick, it sounds like you're focused on now is how to get churn lower.
Absolutely. Everything we're doing right now is all about churn.
So tell me about the test you're running right now that's going to decrease churn that you're most excited about.
We're trying to make the experience completely effortless. So we call it an aha moment, which is when a display activates, which typically takes about a day to see something. We have a really ambitious goal internally of making that five minutes. So we're putting everything we've got into that.
I feel like that's really smart because then you can kind of model out. So just to be clear, what does someone need to use you? If someone's listening right now and they've got a TV above their kitchen, right, in their startup office, and they want to put like a dashboard up on there, can they use you? Absolutely. Okay. And so what is the actual tech?
Like most people, what they would do is they would take like their reporting dashboard from Google Spreadsheets. They would just airplay it onto a TV and that's what they would do.
Yeah, so like a really small form factor or Chromecast, Chrome device, sorry, not Chromecast, Chrome device is what we would install our, what we call a player on, and it would connect just over the internet and pick up all your content and display it.
Okay, and help me understand why people would have to wait for you to ship them that and kind of do that process versus just airplane.
Oh, no, they don't have to wait for anything. If they've got everything.
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