SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1614 Why 100 Enterprises Pay Him $3m ARR So Employees Can Record Training Videos
25 Dec 2019
Chapter 1: What is SlidePresenter and how does it help employees create training videos?
founded a company back in 2011 called slide presenter employees use it to create training videos now 100 enterprises using them paying anywhere between call it three four five six grand a month usually on annual contracts doing somewhere in the three four ish million bucks in terms of arr range today hoping to scale to five million sometime in 2019 growing 60 year over year you know call it break even today on just 1.5 million bucks raised so pretty capital efficient 28 people on their team between germany and ukraine 18 gross revenue churn annually
net revenue retention north of 100% willing to spend up to first year of ACV to acquire a sorry of lifetime value to acquire the customer looking at maybe raising if they want to get more aggressive after they prove out some additional data points here in the next couple months.
Hello, everyone, my guest today, Sebastian Walker, he's the CEO of slide presenter, a digital knowledge transfer software, he
studied business economy and worked at major consultancies before the company is now looking to revolutionize the internal knowledge flow for corporations globally founding the company in 2011 an intuitive solution that empowers any employee to create training videos within minutes sebastian are you ready to take us to the top sure all right good so i think the company kind of is clear you know these videos help us understand what the business model is how do you guys make money
Right. We provide a software as a service, actually the world's most easiest way and most fun way to capture knowledge from all kinds of people inside a company, especially for corporate knowledge. And our clients pay annual licenses based on either the amount of video footage they create or based on the amount of users.
So we have two kinds of models, depending if you want to go for global knowledge transfer, which means you have a global license and we charge you by your success, like how much content is created. Or on the other hand, like based on the number of authors. So what would you say kind of the average customer pays per year?
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Chapter 2: What is the business model behind SlidePresenter's pricing structure?
Are we talking like 10 bucks a year, a million a year? It's more than 10 bucks. All of them are enterprise customers. So what does it mean? It means that they pay larger amounts and a lot of them have global licenses. A lot of them have huge departments that produce content. So it rises dramatically.
Yeah, Sebastian, just because I know you have a lot of different customer cohorts and we have limited time, I mean, are we talking, I was being facetious there when I said 10 to a million, that's a huge range. I mean, are we talking like 10 grand or?
Chapter 3: How does SlidePresenter ensure customer retention and expansion?
Yeah, usually it's more than 10 grand. It's like, let's say between 10 and 100 grand for what they use currently. If someone's listening right now and they want to get started, is 10 grand what they got to spend to get started? A good point for starting with a slide presenter if you have a team is like 15K per year. Okay, got it. That's helpful to understand.
That's where you guys are currently focused on kind of onboarding new customers. Yes, it's a land and expense strategy. So we start entering the companies and then it grows inside. What can you predictably kind of rely on in terms of expansion?
Chapter 4: What challenges does SlidePresenter face in customer acquisition?
So if I sign up with you today for 15 grand a month, what will I expand to in year two probably? It depends on like, it mainly depends on how the adoption inside the company is, how large the corporation is and Well, it often also depends on how companies see this topic. So like the more agile, the more innovative, the more digital they are, the faster it spreads.
So if you look at them, who is our customer base? Like we have customers that are all large, successful corporations with more than 1,000 employees. So that's our current focus target group from across all industries, mostly from pharmaceutical, endurance, and financial industries. And so... Yeah, so Sebastian, the question is, I understand what it's dependent on, but what is yours today?
What is your kind of expansion year one to year two typically?
Chapter 5: How has SlidePresenter's growth trajectory been over the years?
It can double. If the customer is successful, it can also stay on this. With this 15K, customers already have something they can really use. The broader base, it could be around, as an average, maybe something like 50%. 5-0 or 1-5? 5-0. 5-0, okay. So the reason I'm asking, it sounds like you're pretty sophisticated in terms of what you're measuring.
When you look at your cohort that signed up a year ago, if you look at a total cohort, all the revenue that signed up in December 2016, you can basically look at what expansion was on that account. So you're saying that cohort will grow by about 50%.
Chapter 6: What changes did SlidePresenter make to its pricing model and why?
That cohort will grow Those who would stay because they're agile enough, they would grow by 50%. Okay, well, so let's talk about the situation where they might potentially leave. So what's revenue churn annually today? And if they do leave, why are they leaving? If customers leave, they mainly leave because like people might be afraid of being on the video and stuff like that.
Because what we do is like we help them to create everything they do based on knowledge of videos. If there is a cultural issue with that, if the leadership makes fun of people who are on videos, for example, then this is a major problem. Looking at our churn rates, we have a negative revenue churn. But if you only look at the churn, it's like 1.5% per month.
Chapter 7: How does Sebastian Walker measure the company's success and future goals?
Okay, so 1.5% revenue churn per month. Okay, which would be about 18% per year. So 18% of the revenue churns per year. That's if you only count the chunk. Yeah, if I finish there, what I was going to say is that's 18% gross churn. You then have expansion. So when you add them together, your net revenue retention is how far over 100%? It's about 100.
Yeah, actually, this number I don't have with me currently. You measure it the opposite way, it sounds like, which is net negative.
Chapter 8: What insights does Sebastian share about being a successful CEO?
How far negative are you? Um, yeah, same number. It's like, I don't have it. Oh, you don't know. You just know you're, you just know you're above a hundred percent retention. Okay. Well, if, if you do have 50% expansion on the cohort and there's 18% churn on the cohort net should be about 132%. It's true, but customers are, have different sizes and so on.
So this is also, it doesn't matter if you're looking at cohort analysis based off time. Do you measure it a different way? Not so far. We implemented a new pricing beginning of last year, which changed a whole lot of things, so we don't have a final number for now. Let's dig into that lesson. So why change pricing?
Because we found out that we came from a user-based pricing, which leads to the situation that some customers might have 30 licenses, for example, and those 30 licenses might be used by 25 people and five people might not use it.
But in the company, there might be hundreds or thousands other users who could and would want to use such kind of workplace 4.0 application to create content to avoid that they, subject matter experts, have to repeat themselves. But they don't have a license. So what we did is basically we changed it. So we enabled companies to start with a slide presenter based on a
global license where we don't count the authors. We just counted the number of hours they produce. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So do you have no per seat pricing now? No, we still have it because some companies want to start a very, very small, uh, departments and for them it's, yeah, it's better to start with lower amount. Let's Sebastian put all this on a timeline for me.
When did you launch the company? What year? Uh, we launched, uh, quite a while ago. We launched in 2011. And then we first, we went to the wrong direction and we did heavy pivoting. And since we did the pivoting successful, we are quite successful now.
And yeah, we had like looking at the last year, for example, October to October, we had a slow growth because we worked with some organizational topics and stuff like that. So the overall revenue growth from then to today, like one year, was 60% for the 12 months. And, um, yeah. And, uh, yeah.
So like this will increase again, um, from now, because we hired several team members and now we staffed marketing, which we didn't have before. What's the team size today, Sebastian? Uh, the overall team size today is 28 people. 28. Yeah. 28. And where's everyone based? Um, we have two locations. It's, uh, Germany, Frankfurt, uh, and Ludwigshafen.
And another location is in Ukraine, where we have some development team production. Germany and Ukraine. So you launched in 2011. Over the past seven years, how many customers have you scaled to? As I said at the beginning, we scaled fast in the wrong environment. We went for conference organizers and stuff like that because we thought, okay, cool.
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