SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1705 Would You Ever Put $1m Of Your Own Money In Before Turning on Revenue?
25 Mar 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of Scott Snyder's company, Sellution?
Solution is his product, essentially all-in-one marketing and experience automation, specifically for the manufacturing industry. That's what he knows best is what he's came from. He's put a million bucks of his own capital in, burning about 17 to 20 grand per month with 10 people, mostly engineering and developers, as he looks to turn on revenue here in the next couple of months.
He's got an advisory group or early adopters using the platform, again, watching usage metrics, hoping to turn those people on into paid customers in the near future. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Scott Snyder. He grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and studied business at PSU.
After he started working as a 3D VFX artist, he ventured into manufacturing, wholesale, and distribution of electronic novelties.
Chapter 2: How much personal investment has Scott made in his business?
During the recession, he realized that business had changed forever, and in order to compete with businesses, we're going to need a whole new set of tools. This gave rise to his company, Solution. Scott, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, how are you doing? Good, man. Thanks for jumping on. So tell us what the company does and how you make money.
All right. So what we've created is a unified platform that streamlines your sales, marketing, and customer service and commerce into one system. It's a SaaS platform. We're doing a monthly membership fee.
Okay. And what's the membership fee?
We're ranging from right now, $35 up to $113. Just the entry level starter plans at $35. Then we go up to 80, then $113 on the enterprise plan, which is, you know, get everything that you need.
Okay. And how many customers today, Scott?
Right now, what we've done is we've launched an early adopter program. So we have early adopters in the platform, but it's pre-revenue right now.
Okay. So these are free, they're pre-revenue. So you're not sure what price point you'll go with yet?
No, I think it's probably going to go up because we're really targeting the SMB market. But right now, in this phase right now, we are focusing on companies here in the that are closer to more of a startup phase where they're selling products into the SMB market.
Yep. So what year did you found the company and how long have you been building this?
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Chapter 3: What strategies is Scott using to convert early adopters into paying customers?
What are you burning?
The company's burning. Previously, I mean, we'd look at like somewhere upwards of 17 to 20K a month.
Okay. Are you married?
Not married. I couldn't be married doing this.
I was going to say, does it give your spouse heartburn? No, no, no, no.
I anticipated that.
Scott, people are going to be listening to this going, well, where'd this guy get this money? I mean, did you just save this up? It was just a diligent process over many years, or did you have an exit before this or what?
No, I was in the manufacturing wholesale distribution industry, developing products in China, importing them into the United States, distributing them around the world, primarily electronic novelties.
What does that mean? What is an electronic novelty?
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Scott face during the development of his platform?
Yeah. Who sits behind you at the desk?
That's my other position right there for working on my laptop.
Oh, got it. That's your own desk.
It's multitasking. You know how it is, right? But we're trying to automate the process. So nobody has to sit behind the desk.
Yeah. All right. Take me back to this advisory group you've put together. How many people are in it today? And are these your friends or how do you curate the group?
Okay, so no, I'm going out. We're using outbound call strategies because most of this has to be outbound. This type of platform is more complex where we're not going to just open the floodgates and start trying to figure out how to use it.
So it's much more hand-holding, doing networking events, trade shows, and then going through and finding and identifying companies that are struggling and showing them, how they can use the system to streamline their whole entire sales marketing customer service.
I know a lot of you listening are DevOps teams or app developers. You're now working from home, but we're all trying to continue to move incredibly fast, keep our apps live, have redundancy, and also make sure they're secure. A lot of folks listening are using this tool called F5 if you haven't heard of it. F5 is a cloud services SaaS solution designed specifically for us.
They enable you to do this Globally, they have incredible redundancy and they protect the most critical components of our app infrastructures, including our DNS, domain name system. So you can set this bad boy up with just a few clicks or API calls so that you and your team can spend more time innovating, even if it's virtually on Zoom calls these days.
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Chapter 5: How does Scott plan to validate the need for his platform in the market?
Your angle, what you told me is, you have a unique kind of insight into the manufacturing space. So your tools are specifically built for that space. What are things that your industry needs that something like a HubSpot or Marketo or other marketing automation tools, they can't speak to that market right now?
Market research. So like really understanding your customer. When you look at some of these other platforms, the data is pretty much you enter it and then what? It's not tied to the transaction. So the transactional data is what really needs to drive your automation. And when you're just entering data,
It's not really connected to something that's going to tell you, like, who is your best customer, right? So when we can go and use things like recency, frequency, and monetary scoring, you're going to identify who are these best customers, not just by putting some arbitrary lead score on them. We can find out who they really are that are the ones that are spending the most with you.
All right. When do you turn revenue? How many people are in this group? And when do you start asking them to pay you?
We're actually, I just finished a training just before getting on the line here. And that's where we're moving into now. So it's like first quarter starting to convert these early adopters into paying customers.
How many of them are there right now?
Right now we have, there's 10 companies in Singapore and we have five here in Southern California.
Okay. And so what's it sound like? I mean, the outreach to them when you ask them to pay sounds like what?
Well, that's part of the rapport that's been developed through the early adopter program is we've established a relationship where it's pretty much clear that they want to continue to use the platform. So it's not like a hard sell. We've established the fact that's part of the whole point. you know, building that relationship and also getting to understand their business more.
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