SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1488 ECommerce Solution Hits $8m in ARR and $8m in Services, Raising $20m on $60m pre?
21 Aug 2019
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Company founded back in 1999, today doing north of $8 million in SaaS revenue, another $8 million in services each year. They've built that growth on just $3 million raised, serving about 290 customers, again, on the SaaS side. 100% net revenue retention annually, spending about $3,000 to acquire a new $4,500 a month customer. So basically, one to two-month payback period there.
A team of 210 people based all over the world. 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, everybody.
My guest today is Suchit Bachali. He is the CEO of a company called Unilog, a global technology company which specializes in e-commerce solutions and enriched product data for the B2B marketplace. Under his leadership, the company is now a multimillion dollar business with 800 global employees and hundreds of customers across diverse industries. industry.
Suchit, are you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely am. And thank you so much for having me, Nathan. You bet. Okay, tell me about the company. First of all, I'm interested, obviously, what does it do? And then secondly, is it a pure play SaaS model? Or is it pay as you go or something else? So the company is 19 years old.
And that's what some people don't realize is that we've been around for a long time. We've had some changes over the years. And as you can imagine, Unilog today looks nothing like what Unilog looked 15 years ago. And that's the fun part of being an entrepreneur and making sure you can pivot every economic cycle. So Unilog started out as a content service provider.
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Chapter 2: What eCommerce solutions does Unilog provide?
I'm sorry, revenue or logo churn? Both in terms of because our contracts are because these are enterprise SaaS deals and we're literally providing and powering the face of the company through their e-commerce site and all the revenue flows through there. It's very sticky in terms of the quality of the revenue that we have. And so the churn is minimal, negligible to nothing.
That 0.5%, is that gross revenue churn though or net? Are you adding back expansion? We are. I mean, so it would be, you know, expanding expansion on our on our logos as well as on revenue and then taking off. Maybe it's one that we might lose. OK, so then you would be with point five percent net revenue churn that basically said otherwise.
It basically means one hundred percent net revenue retention annually. That's correct. Yeah. Yeah. One of my favorite things about building this podcast to well over 10 million downloads and being just super connected in the SaaS space is I get the opportunity to connect and meet you guys in person at conferences. And there's one you can't miss on September 10th and 11th in San Francisco.
West Coast. I'll be speaking, giving a keynote I've never given before. We'll get into data and details like you've never seen, plus 10 predictions I have about the SaaS space, including the next IPOs, the next Mammoth Rounds, the next big buyouts. You won't want to miss it. Additionally, there'll be other speakers like Dan Martell, who built and sold his company
CMO of SurveyMonkey, Lila, will be there. Santi from Emergence Capital will be there. There'll be over 400 people, the biggest and brightest minds in B2B SaaS, investors, entrepreneurs, and founders. Be sure you get a ticket today before prices increase. Go to SaaSstock.com forward slash West Coast. That's SaaS, S-A-A-S, stock, T-O-C-K.com forward slash West Coast. Walk me through the team.
What's the team size today? So I have, you know, we implement entrepreneurial operating systems.
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Chapter 3: How has Unilog evolved since its founding?
So we started that process about 18 months ago. So I have a core leadership team that is about nine people that is finance and sales, which I think are the real drivers to our company. And they're pretty much in lockstep. I think that that's very, very critical to have. a strong forecasting ability as a company to be able to tell very accurately what the next six or eight months look like.
That's very important. So finance and sales are my two critical leaders. I have marketing, which is led by an industry veteran. I have product, and then I have a couple of other functions around professional services and tech support. So total team size is what? So my direct report's about eight. Not direct report, your total team size, the whole team. Oh, the whole company? Yeah.
Oh, we're just under, just on the software side, we're about 210 people. 210, and where's everyone based? About 40-ish, I would say, are in North America. The others are India. We have a development team in Minsk in Belarus. And we have a couple of other offshore people in Canada as well as in Australia. It's all spread out. That's great. And then last economics question here.
So when you look at, you know, grabbing and finding a new customer, what are you willing to spend to acquire a new $4,500 a month customer? Our cost of acquisition tends to be a little hard to track because it's a true enterprise software sale. So it's not comparable to sort of consumer SaaS products where you could say, hey, I'm spending X amount of dollars in web advertising and marketing.
Most of our sales or cost of acquisition is actually direct cost. So it's the cost of our sales team.
and uh or a cost of of our sort of larger marketing budget um you'd be surprised to know that our our sales team is actually just three people yeah but just be clear i mean listen i've interviewed about three three three thousand b2b sas ceos they all know their cac it's not consumer model i mean so i mean when you factor in your sales team and everything your fully weighted cac would come out to be about what
I would say that our fully weighted CAC in order to run that 4,500 a month deal would probably come to about the cost of about, I'd say about two and a half to $3,000. Okay, so you have a one month payback period then? Yeah, so on our payback period, it's usually 40 days ish.
40-45 days because we're essentially considering that on a typical sales cycle, which is about two and a half to three months, a sales rep is probably spending on average about 60 hours, right? So I'll take that and then I'll take some other costs associated with it.
And I'd probably come out, depending on the average, and some sales cycles are shorter, I'll probably come out at about that $4,000 to $6,000 jack. And is the company bootstrapped or have you raised? The only capital we raised was $3 million from Kalari Capital Ventures. in 2015. And at that time, we had no SaaS revenue. So their return on equity has been phenomenal. That's great.
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Chapter 4: What is the revenue model of Unilog's SaaS platform?
About six. That's pretty healthy. And walk me through, how busy are you? How many kids are you working with? I have one daughter. She's seven. But outside of that, I teach entrepreneurship at a high school level. Oh, wow. Yeah.
January through June, I run a pretty intensive curriculum for high school kids in the local Philadelphia area, and we do it through part of the nonprofit that I belong to called TIE. That's great. So TIE, the board of TIE, so I do that. That's great, Suchit. And how old are you? I'll be 40 in a couple of weeks. That's great. So last question here, what do you wish your 20-year-old self knew?
that I'm going to be just fine. Guys, everything will be fine. Coming from Suchit again, company founded back in 1999 today, doing north of 8 million bucks in SaaS revenue, another 8 million in services each year.
They've built that growth on just 3 million raised, serving about 290 customers, again, on the SaaS size, 100% net revenue retention annually, spending about three grand to acquire a new $4,500 a month customer. So basically one to two month payback period there, a team of 200 people based, 210 people based all over, world sujit thank you for taking us to the top thank you so much take care