SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1548 When Will He Stop Consulting And Go All In on $13k MRR SaaS Product?
20 Oct 2019
Chapter 1: What motivated Tom Cameron to switch from engineering to SaaS?
created to do view back in 2014 again helps freelancers manage billing time management a bunch of other stuff uh you know sending out invoices they've passed 500 customers paying 27 bucks a month so 13 000 bucks per month in revenue that's up from 4k per month in revenue just a year ago three percent logo term per month spending 162 bucks to get a new customer at 27 bucks a month so six month payback period team of you know one or two people within a small you know three four group of freelancers working on a need basis all based down in australia
Hello, everyone. My guest today is Tom Cameron. He's abandoned his structural engineering career in 1997 to pursue internet technology. He's founded multiple small businesses and two internet SaaS companies.
He currently lives in Brisbane, Australia, where he co-manages a co-working space and manages his company, To Do View, and still has a hand in a web consulting business he founded 18 years ago.
Chapter 2: What is To Do View and how does it serve freelancers?
Tom, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes, I am. All right. So what is To Do View? And is your revenue model purely a SaaS one?
Yes.
Chapter 3: What is the pricing model for To Do View and how does it compare to competitors?
So to do view is a SaaS solution providing a suite of productivity tools to freelancers and small and micro businesses. And yes, yes, our revenue model isn't purely SaaS. That's great. So what are people paying on average per month for this kind of tool? Well, it's $9 per user per month, and our average team is around three users. So it's actually quite small and quite cheap.
Chapter 4: How has Tom's SaaS business grown over the last year?
That's great. So maybe $27 per new logo, three team members? That's correct. Yes. That's great.
And when did you launch this company?
Chapter 5: What challenges does Tom face with customer churn?
What year? It was 2014. We started up with the idea. We didn't really go live until about a year or so after that.
Okay. And kind of why get into this space?
Chapter 6: How does Tom acquire new customers for To Do View?
It sounds like you had your hands full with consulting business, a co-working space, a bunch of other stuff.
Yeah, well, I've spent the last 20 years really working in small business myself. And really, I couldn't find a tool that gave me the solutions that I needed for the price that I thought was acceptable. And I really felt that there was a space there for a solution for really small micro businesses and freelancers.
It makes a lot of sense. And it looks like you're incorporating kind of CRM project management, time tracking and billing for freelancers and consultants all in one spot.
Chapter 7: What are Tom's future plans for his business?
Yeah, that's exactly right. There's a lot of talk about pluggable solutions and building solutions from multiple different sources. But the reality is for a lot of small businesses, that can turn out to be an expensive, complicated and ineffective approach. My analogy has always been when you put the camera in the phone, it became a completely different type of solution.
So bringing those things together can behave completely differently.
And so what have you scaled today in terms of kind of total customers on the platform?
Chapter 8: What advice does Tom have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
We've got around 5,000 customers, but to be honest, around 500 of them are actually paying customers. We have a free solution for freelancers.
Okay, got it. So 500 kind of paid and can I multiply that times 27 to get MRR?
Correct.
Okay, so about 13,000 bucks in monthly recurring revenue?
That's right.
That's great. And what does growth look like? So if you go back a year to November 2017, what were you doing per month then?
We were doing about a quarter of what we're doing now. So we've 400% in the last 12 months.
That's great. Obviously, small numbers are nice, but growth is growth, right? So we can still use the big percentages. Where is most of that growth coming from?
To be honest, it's spread out internationally. We've never chased any particular market. Our only limitation at the moment really is English speaking small business and our advertising is entirely global. We get about a third from the US and America is about a third from Europe and about a third from the rest of the world. And Tom, how do you bootstrap this?
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