SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1635 How He Plans to Get Churn Under 30% Annually in Event SaaS Space
15 Jan 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
launched Meeting Pulse back in 2014. Now today, serving caught between 100 and 200 paid accounts on their SaaS model, paying about $2,000 ACVs. So they're doing caught 16, 17 grand a month right now, or about 200 grand in ARR. That's about double year over year. So doing about eight grand a month just a year ago.
Chapter 2: What is Meeting Pulse and how does it operate?
Still burning cash, looking at raising a million bucks right now on 7 million in terms of cap. They're looking at doing a convertible note. 50 grand into the company so far in terms of early angels.
investing after a hackathon team of 12 targeting to get you know getting churned under 30 it's tough in this space but he's focused on it got a 500 cac when he does spend money for a five or six month payback period looking to test some of those channels with new money that he raises hello everyone my guest today is aaron lifshin he's the ceo and founder of meeting pulse he's got a 20-year track record creating and managing award-winning technical teams in the us and the uk his last successful exit was xln telecom as cto aaron are you ready to take us to the top
Absolutely.
Chapter 3: How does Meeting Pulse generate revenue?
All right.
So, yeah, thanks for joining. What is Meeting Pulse and what's the revenue model? How do you make money?
Meeting Pulse is a new type of audience response system, which gathers real-time sentiment as well as a Q&A and polls from audiences. And our revenue model is SaaS and services, software and services.
Okay. So how do you, you know, one common theme I've seen in the SaaS space, well, in the event space where they try and use a SaaS model are events start and they stop. So churn is always an issue. Have you solved this solution somehow? Or do people keep paying even when there's not an event going on?
Chapter 4: What challenges does Meeting Pulse face in reducing churn?
In the event, I see a lot of opportunity to really add value around the services. But you're absolutely right. There's going to be a one-off. And then if that relationship is created, then they come back for the next year. Because usually if they've organized it this year, they're going to organize it next year. But where I really see the value of the application of the technology, as well as...
a good business potential as an enterprise and getting this into internal events and regular meetings.
So give me a general sense. I mean, you have some enterprise logos listed on your website. On average, what's the customer pay per year to get access to this technology you've built?
It varies, but it's in the thousands.
Okay, yeah, I'm just curious, like if we're talking like a thousand or a hundred thousand per month or per year, I mean, are you talking like four or five grand a month or a year or what?
No, no, not usually. Our largest customers, it's the tens of thousands. Most customers to start out would be in the thousands. And, you know, it really depends. And what we see a lot is there is a virality of spreading inside of the largest enterprises with this kind of technology. What we see is a kind of mix of an old, B2C model where somebody else would see it and bring it in.
And we're using a similar thing to spread inside of an enterprise where one department head will bring the technology in and use it for their meeting, but somebody else attends. So then they bring it into, they want to have it in their meeting as well. And so as we spread, then that revenue, of course, scales up with the usage.
So you'd say, you know, two grand a year is a fair average for the folks you're trying to cater to.
Uh, that is about our, uh, our average value, but that includes all of those one-offs. Um, so for the larger enterprises, um, our price point is, is, uh, closer to 4k.
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Chapter 5: How does Meeting Pulse track customer retention and churn?
I mean, I assume you're tracking that, so it's probably a bad question, but I mean, are you tracking that? And if so, how? A lot of people have troubles tracking churn if it's not like per monthly. Some people have a lot of trouble tracking. They paid in November this year. They canceled for 11 months. They paid in November again. That's actually a good customer.
Yeah. I mean, that's a challenge and we do it with some manual work, especially there's turnover in those companies potentially. So you might get somebody coming in with a different email. So what I do is I just, you know, I have admin matching those up. And as long as the domain is the same, then it'll get matched up. And then also, you know, there's the question of churn.
Like, what do you consider churn? If somebody comes up and they only ever needed it for one, you know, for a one-time use.
You just never count them as a customer at all. That's what I would do.
Right.
They're never a SaaS customer.
They're never a SaaS customer. They're in a different model. So in this industry, it's like it's a mix of models. There's this one-off model, the more standard SaaS model for people that have more events, and then the services model as well, where we really are seeing something emerge, which is interactivity consultancy around events.
You have your AV guy, your sound guy, your caterer, you have your interactivity person. And we've seen more and more expectation of that and a new skill set and a new niche in that event ecosystem that's emerging around providing that service, telling people when to ask questions, when to enable interactivity to be most effective to get those feedback and engagement. Sure.
Yeah, the product makes complete sense to me. I want to understand more of your story here. When did you launch the company? What year?
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Chapter 6: What is the average customer payment for Meeting Pulse?
It's about right, yeah. Okay. And if I asked you growth rate on that, so go back a year, you'd say zero, right? Because you just launched it in May?
Yeah.
We launched the marketing in May, but we did have customers. So we doubled year on year. So about eight grand a month a year ago. Yeah.
Is that right? About eight grand a month a year ago?
A hundred. Yeah, that's about right.
About right. Yeah, that's good. That's healthy growth. So how are you signing these folks up? What's the number one growth channel?
We use Google AdWords and we get a lot of referrals. We get repeat business and just the organic. As soon as we put this up there, we had organic.
Yeah, but Aaron, that's not just like a magical thing. Like everyone who puts up a website doesn't just like magically get traffic. You had to do something. Whether you realize it was smart or not, you had to do something to get traffic.
Well, for a while, it really wasn't. We got a few influencers that came and saw it. You know, we launched at the launch festival. We were at the hackathon. People saw us there. So I think that helped us kick us off. And then from there, it was organic for a while.
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