SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1598 Mom of 2 Transitions $250k Agency to $23k/mo SaaS for Consumer Video Reviews
09 Dec 2019
Chapter 1: How did Bernadette Butler transition from agency to SaaS?
she took the jump with Storytap in 2015, launching it again, helping with video reviews, things like that, video feedback for larger brands. 45 customers paying right now for these videos, about 500 bucks a month, between 500 and 5,000. They're moving enterprise, doing about 23 grand per month right now in revenue. They just launched the SaaS revenue in early 2018.
Last year in 2017, when it was more an agency, they did about a quarter of a million in total sales. Now, Now, in the first few months of launch, their logo turn has been high, 20%. She's working on driving that down with her team of five in Canada by screening, better screening who she lets on. You have to have two marketers to really understand what they're doing.
Again, $230,000 raised to grow this so far. Hello, everyone.
Chapter 2: What revenue model does StoryTap use for its services?
My guest today is Bernadette Butler. She has 20 years experience in advertising, working with some of the greatest brands of our time. With two ads on the world's funniest reel, Bernadette is the CEO and co-founder of StoryTap, a DIY video platform for marketers to direct, own, and micro-influence authentic video stories at scale. Bernadette, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yes, I am.
All right. What does all that really smart stuff I just said mean?
All right. My background or the actual platform?
The platform. What does the platform do and how do you make money?
Yeah, so we work with brands, specifically marketers, who want product reviews, testimonials, content stories, and they need them from wherever their customers are.
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Chapter 3: What challenges has StoryTap faced with customer churn?
So our platform allows them to dive in and literally launch a video campaign in minutes and collect all those amazing video stories that move their business forward super fast and in high volume. So whether it's their content, it's going to sell more products on their website, etc.,
And what's, how do you make money? Is it, is it SaaS based?
Yeah, SaaS based. Exactly. So we do annual contracts for enterprise and for SMB, we do monthly, monthly contracts.
And what would you just, just to avoid going on kind of every customer cohort, what would you say on average a customer pays per month for this?
Uh, I would say on, okay, so our SMB on average is around 500 bucks a month. Um, and then most of our enterprise around $5,000 a month.
Okay. And would you say, break down that revenue for me? Does like 80% come from SMB or 10, 20% enterprise or vice versa or what?
Um, right now we're really kind of, I'd say 40% enterprise, 60% SMB.
Okay.
We're trying to swing it more enterprise right now. Of course. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How has Bernadette's experience shaped her approach to marketing?
You're talking like it was like professional service agency kind of work.
Yeah. Like we had the platform, it captured it at scale, but it wasn't DIY. Like the marketers had to work with us. Like it wasn't as smooth and we needed to prove that out before we invested in this full automated SaaS DIY platform. So that we launched that in January.
Okay. So I've been selling now for a couple of months. How many customers are you up to today?
We've got about, I think we just tipped over 45.
45. Okay. And that's a combination of both SMB and enterprise. Yes. Okay. Now, assuming those are all the smallest, let's say SMB is at 500 bucks a month. That would put you at about 20, 30 grand a month in revenue. Is that accurate?
Well, month reoccurring, we're around 15 right now, but that doesn't include enterprise. So the enterprise is, again, segmented differently. We've got about five big enterprise right now that are having fun and tons of volume.
That's good. When you said, okay, so 15 grand a month right now, just from the SMB space, you just said that the SMB channel does about 60%. So 60% is 15, which means the 40% is call it maybe seven-ish. So all in, you're doing what, 22, 23 grand a month?
Yeah, around there.
Yep. Okay. And talk to me about growth. A year ago at the same exact time, was it truly zero in SaaS revenue because you didn't have any?
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Chapter 5: What strategies does StoryTap employ to acquire customers?
So what's, you know, churn is critical in a SaaS business. What does your churn look like?
Yeah. So we, you know, ideally we want churn to be around 5%. The problem that we kind of discovered really, I'd say three months in is that we've got customers that have never paid fast, like monthly for video. It's always been, here's a chunk of money. Thank you for my one video. And we flip, we're flipping that. So it's like, no, no, you're getting like hundreds of video for that price.
And so we're kind of, um, we did experience a bit higher churn and now we're starting to drive that down by better qualifying who is using our platforms
So what was the bad churn historically? They're talking like eight, nine, 10% a month?
The bad churn is we really, we were up to like 20. We're fucking off. So we had to fill that bucket back in, which is disheartening.
And that's logo churn per month?
Sorry?
That's logo churn per month instead of revenue churn?
Yeah, logo. Logo churn. Yeah. Okay. Individual companies.
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