SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1619 How He Got first 120 Customers, $10k in MRR Selling Into Industry You Wouldn't Expect
30 Dec 2019
Chapter 1: What is WalletCard and when was it launched?
Launched his company WalletPro back a couple of years ago, call it 2014, sorry, WalletCard launched in 2014. Now 120 customers doing about 10 grand a month in revenue up from 1500 bucks a month just a year ago. They raised about 500,000 bucks, currently burning about 15 grand a month with their team of seven between Austin and Vancouver.
Too early to talk about a lot of economics, but they do have about 90% annual retention today as they look to scale. Again, really managing and helping manage risk associated with, you know, high, you know, construction or kind of blue collar jobs.
Chapter 2: How did WalletCard grow to 120 customers and $10k in MRR?
Hello everyone, my guest today is Michael Prince. He is the founder of a company called WalletCard, which is an occupational health and safety records are easily and automatically updated to reduce administrative burden of training management. So safety records, certification solution. Michael's gonna do a better job at describing it than I am. Michael, are you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 3: What challenges does WalletCard face in scaling its business?
Yeah, you got it. So yeah, WalletCard, we're a compliance platform for managing safety records. That's the short of it. The long of it is we help companies, training providers, manage their health and safety, make it easy on them, basically from the shop floor to the top floor, cover your assets kind of thing. Michael. Yeah.
So a lot of people is going to be without getting, unless we get really specific, this is all going to go over their heads. So give me like, tell me a customer story of someone paying you. Sure. Yeah. So, uh, we work with a lot of like blue collar companies. We got guys in construction, warehousing, manufacturing. They got maybe a hundred, 300 guys that they have to manage.
Those guys got, you know, they can have up to 10, 20 different types of certifications have to get renewed. It's a big job. Sorry. Like what?
fall protection let's do forklift training first aid training so is it mainly construction like physical labor kind of companies you got it yeah blue collar employers we call it blue collar technology yeah again I'm trying to make it real so everyone can follow along so these are like kind of construction companies leaf cutting or sorry you know tree branch cutting companies you know these kinds of things yeah you got it anywhere where skilled labor is involved okay that's great so and then what's your business model is it a pure play sass company
Yeah, we're a SaaS platform, a couple of different types of revenue, basically subscription model or consumption model. Okay. So subscription model and help me understand kind of on average, what will one of these companies pay for you on an annual or monthly basis? Yeah.
So obviously depending on employees, depending on features, our average kind of annual customer right now, our sweet spot is kind of a medium sized business. We're looking at about five to 10 grand for a company, depending on what they turn on and how many guys they got. Okay.
So is it really just number of seats or are there other kind of other kind of value-based upsells that would push them to a higher price? Yeah, they, they can choose to have like iPads with, um, uh, the form builders, different things like that, the higher level features, um, more than just the database management and, and the matrix, the training matrices and whatnot.
And when did you launch the company? What year? Uh, so company launched four years ago. Uh, so in about 2014, we built the product for the first two years, uh, then threw it away and then rebuilt it, uh, over the next year and, and kind of launched about a year and a half ago. Okay, great. So 2014 kind of in and out building scaling.
And then what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers using you? Uh, uh, We just broke, I think, about 120 customers the other day, so getting there. Still in startup mode, but getting out of it. Yeah, no, no, there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, so can we take that 120 times the $5,000 kind of ACV you're doing to like 50, 60 grand a month right now, something like that? We wish.
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Chapter 4: What is the business model of WalletCard?
So quite a lot in the last little while. That's great. And I want to jump into kind of how you driven that growth in a second, but first, have you done this bootstrapped or did you decide to raise capital? Yeah. We bootstrapped a lot in the beginning and we've raised about a half million so far. Okay. Or was like angels or venture capital or what? Yeah.
We got some local angels here and then, um, and where is here? Where are you based? Uh, in Vancouver, Canada. Everyone's there. The whole team. Uh, Some of the teams in Austin, Texas right now. Okay, that's great. So Austin, Vancouver, and how many folks are you now? Seven of us. Seven of you, okay, great.
So 500 grand raised up there in Vancouver, based between Austin and Vancouver, seven of you guys. And are you the sole founder? There's three of us. Oh, wow, three, okay. It's a lot of decisions. A lot of agreeing has to happen. Sorry, can you say that again? You just said a lot of agreeing has to happen with three founders. Yes, yeah. Equal voting rates too. You just went 25, 25, 25, 25? Well...
Yeah, kind of with employee stock option pools and stuff like that. You bet. We wanted a good way of deciding how decisions were going to get made. So not in a bubble. It's hard to pay seven people on 10 grand a month in revenue. So I assume you're still burning some of that 500,000 bucks you raised. You're burning cash today. How do you get to break even?
Uh, we get to break even by pumping up one side of our platform that is more revenue based than the other side. So just getting, getting us, uh, one of our user types up there. And basically we just got a little bit of a VC investment. Um, so we're really heavily bootstrapped all couple months. to go to some of that. So this is more runway to build some more features.
And like some of our current customers are just crying for a few features. So once we feel that we're able to do that, we're able to convert more. How many months of runway did you raise for? In other words, if you're burning, you know, 10, 50 grand a month today and you just raised 500, that'd be 10 months essentially of runway. Yeah.
We look, we look at about a year right now that we have runway before either break even or, or. Okay. All right. So, so if I take 500,000 divided into 12 months, that would mean you rate, you know, that's like what you're burning 30, 40 grand a month right now. Something like that. Uh, hopefully not. Okay. Well, that's what that would equal.
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Chapter 5: How did WalletCard manage to retain its customers?
If you optimize for a year long run, right? Yeah. We don't have the 500, all 500 left, of course. So when did you raise that? Uh, well, we raised some of it. We raised the last 300 just recently. Um, okay. So that was to basically last you guys over the next year. Yeah. So the two, the first 200 was raised as angel and friends and family around. Got it. Okay. So 300,000 bucks per over a year.
That means maybe you're burning closer to 10, 15 grand a month, something like that. Yeah. You got it. Developers are expensive. Yeah. I was gonna say mostly headcount. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Makes it makes sense. Um, talk to me about stickiness. Once, once these guys sign up, do they stay? Oh man, we are, that's what, that's what we love about our platform. It's so viral. It's so sticky.
Once they get their information into our platform, um, that everybody stays like that's, that's one thing that we've really nailed down. So you've turned no customers. Well, we, we turned one or two so far, but, um, considering what we've turned, the amount that we brought in are, we're in the like 90th percentile right now, um, for churn rate, it looks like. So it's, it's good. Sorry.
How do you know that? What do you mean compared to what? Well, I mean, a hundred, a hundred customers and we've, we've churned out a couple of them. So we're, Retention rates being in the 90%. Okay, and that's annual retention? Looks like annual retention. Like I said, we're a little early to be clocking numbers exactly, but yeah, that looks like where we're at right now. Yeah. It's pretty sweet.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, obviously you're operating on a small cohort. Some of these people are really passionate because they're your first early customers with big discounts, right? So that makes sense too. You mentioned once they get activated, they're really sticky. What do you know you have to get a new customer to do in the first month to make them really sticky?
We got to get what's called historical onboarding. We got to get all their previous stuff into the platform. The faster we onboard that client, the stickier it is for them to stay, especially in the free trial point. We give one month to three month free trials.
And we found if we go above and beyond in the customer service side to grab all their records, put them all into the digital platform, set them all up, get everything in there, they're bound to stay with us forever. years to come. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, man. Uh, let's, uh, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book? Uh, you know what?
I'm a big ultra runner. It's kind of a weird one. It's not so much a business book, but it inspired me more than anything has inspired me. Ritual Finding Ultra. It's called Finding Ultra? Finding Ultra. It inspired me in a life sense, not a business sense, but it really motivated me to get my butt in gear. Good. Finding Ultra. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?
Hmm. Nobody in particular. That really... Okay, none. I want Shark Tank. That's about good enough for me. All right, number three, what billing tool do you use? Billing tool, we use Stripe. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Eight and a half. Okay, and what's your situation? Married, single, kids? Living with a dog and a girlfriend.
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