1700 How A Bootstrapped $3m Revenue CEO Plans to Handle Virus, Potential Cashflow Issues
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What is the current revenue situation of Badger Maps?
Badger Maps, they've added about $100,000 in MRR over the past year and a half, doing $350,000 per month in revenue. But they sell to field sales reps, and reps are not selling right now because of the virus. And we're worrying about cash in the bank and burn. And Steve has done a good job raising some debt capital to make sure that he's able to kind of get through this time. Also planning for when customers email in and ask for things like... you know, pause the account or even cancel the account and what its response times look like.
How is the CEO of Badger Maps responding to the impact of the virus?
So far over the past, call it week, two, three weeks, only about $1,000 in MRR loss out of its $350,000 a month base. Hello everyone, my guest today is Steve Benson. He's the founder and CEO of Badger Maps. After receiving his MBA from Stanford, he was Google's enterprise top sales executive in 2009. You can tell because he has perfected that wave. In 2012, Steve founded Badger Maps, a software company that helps field salespeople optimize their routes and schedules to save time and be on time so they can sell more.
What strategies are being implemented to manage cash flow during the crisis?
Steve, you ready to take us to the top?
Let's do it.
All right. I'm not going to beat around the bush or anything here, right? So last time you came on the show, you shared, you broke about $3 million in ARR. You know, you were serving 7,500 customers.
How is Badger Maps adjusting its customer engagement during the downturn?
I believe those are actual salespeople inside of companies. So that's your user base. But it's to help them do field sales. No one's driving around doing field sales right now. As a software CEO, how are you responding to the virus?
Well, you know, so I think that we're one of those companies that will be affected by this because of the service that we provide, you know, helping field salespeople go and meet their customers. So dentists, for example, right now aren't, they're probably not buying a lot of new fake teeth or new tools or new medical devices. And so our customers, the people that go and sell that dentist, that type of stuff, they probably don't, they're not getting meetings. They're not out in the field. some software companies will be impacted differently than others. I mean, obviously, if you were Zoom, then more people need your stuff right now. But for us, definitely, there's going to be
What lessons has the CEO learned from previous business experiences?
there's going to be a downtrend in demand for our products, at least for the short term here.
And so many CEOs right now are thinking about things like how much cash do I have in the bank relative to my runway if I get no new revenue? Should I plan for three months? Is this going to be a quick turnaround? Or should I plan for like seven or eight months? Is it going to be a little bit longer than everyone expects? What are your thoughts?
Well... I think that the more cash you have on hand right now, the better off you are.
How does the CEO plan to pivot the business model during this time?
And, uh, you know, just hunker down and make the product great for when you come out on the other side, um, and, and kind of turn the focus to that on the sales and customer success side. I would say people, at least what I'm thinking about is how do I make the customers that I have more successful? How do I keep them extremely happy? Um, and, uh, And how do I find new customers who maybe are in a slightly different area than I was working with before the crisis started? So can I pivot to a slightly different customer set that is going to have great needs going forward for this, or even short-term needs while this is happening? So an example there for us is doctors, nurses, other services that go to people's homes that
helping them organize what they're doing on a map. So they're not, you know, historically we helped salespeople do this, but we've had, we've, we've run into companies like this before where a hospital group is doing a bunch of home visits. And so they'll, they'll have their doctors or their nurses organized using our tool. So that's where we're going to be looking for to pivot towards things like that and bring in new business from that instead of to make up for the lost business in other places.
So when you did come on last, that was October 29th of 2018, pre-virus, so three, four weeks ago, what did you grow your customer base to?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the current revenue situation of Badger Maps?
0:00–0:25
2
How is the CEO of Badger Maps responding to the impact of the virus?
0:25–0:53
3
What strategies are being implemented to manage cash flow during the crisis?
0:53–1:05
4
How is Badger Maps adjusting its customer engagement during the downturn?
1:05–2:01
5
What lessons has the CEO learned from previous business experiences?
2:01–2:34
6
How does the CEO plan to pivot the business model during this time?
2:34–4:22
7
What are the implications of taking on debt for a SaaS company?
4:22–5:55
8
What advice does the CEO have for startups considering debt financing?
5:55–19:46