SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1714 Do This Today: How Much You Get $349b PPP Stimulus for SaaS Founders
03 Apr 2020
Chapter 1: What is Go Personas and how did it evolve from HipLead?
connor lee used to be hip lead now called go personas because they're doing much more than just leads uh they grew from 1.8 million in terms of run rate caught a year and a half ago to over 3.6 today serving two separate cohorts self-serving enterprise together again 310 000 a month uh in recurring revenue he's done this in san francisco and bootstrapped which i loved used some debt to get going but basically bootstrapped no equity raised 20 folks on the team all remote five engineers one salesperson 95 net revenue retention
as he looks to scale. Check out covid.gopersonas.com for deals during the virus that SaaS companies are doing in terms of discounts. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Connor Lee. He is building a company called gopersonas.com, formerly named HipLead, helping sales and marketing teams scale the top of their funnel. Connor, are you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 2: How does Go Personas help companies scale their sales?
Ready to take us to the top. All right. So talk to me first about what the company does and then why the name change from HipLead to Personas.
Yeah, absolutely. So at Percentage, we basically help companies scale their sales. So we provide them a platform, a software tool for them to use to run outbound sales and build basically custom growth engines for their companies. And we do that... you know, primarily through our own application on a self-serve basis.
Chapter 3: What is the significance of the name change to Personas?
And we actually will go in with larger businesses, enterprise companies, and help them to build out using custom versions of our software package, their own custom growth models. And about, I'd say about six months ago, we started to move over to a new name, Personas, from Hiplied. And the reason why we changed names is basically because our application, one, isn't just focused on lead data.
It's focused on automating the B2B sales and marketing processes. And personas is really our focus. So we believe that people are most, when you're running a sales and marketing process, what you want to do is you want to start by focusing on your audience first.
who you're actually talking to and that's and that's the kind of the center of everything if you're going to make um you know with b2b especially if you're going to make uh sales marketing work it's going to be focused on your audience what they care about their pain points um and slicing and dicing it and making the most of it now you got this going back in in 2012 and when he came on the show back in i think it was july of 2018 you'd share that you'd scale it at that point about 50 customers on the hip lead product where are you at today how many folks are using the product
Chapter 4: How does the revenue model differ between standard SaaS and enterprise offerings?
Um, we're, we're have, let me see, we have about, uh, on the hip lead at, well on the personas actual tool, we have roughly a hundred, 110. Okay.
And what is the breakdown between like, if you look at total revenue last year, are you doing any, I mean, consulting here makes complete sense to me on top of a SAS product. Do you have, I mean, are you doing both or is it all strictly SAS, no consulting?
So we do do a little bit of consulting, but what we've done is we kind of have two distinct products now. We have our enterprise plan. And rather than doing consulting in the past, we actually build tools that our clients use. So we'll help them to build out that tool. So
So it's, it's less about us, you know, writing content and running campaigns more about taking the software that we have and building custom versions of it. Um, kind of like a Lego block.
How do you manage all that though? I mean, then you're dealing with a bunch of different code and you have to deal with bug tracking on seven different, you know, code basis. Doesn't that drive your dev team crazy?
Well, we actually, so, you know, we started out, you know, being a consultancy, we basically built a backend that can support a lot of this different functionality. So one of the things that we've been successful, we've done is we've kind of turned a lot of our infrastructure into an API.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the COVID-19 stimulus for SaaS founders?
So we can take parts. So what the core is, is an API, and we can build little modules, kind of like building blocks on top of that, and pull them in and pull them out. So kind of like a set of Lego blocks or like an erector set, right? You've got one piece that grabs data from, say, their CRM, our client's Salesforce. And then it filters it.
And then it has logic that then would go and say, okay, well, based on what's in here, what's the business logic? And they would pass it into another system.
Chapter 6: How can SaaS companies apply for the PPP loan?
All those are these individual parts.
So yeah. So it's more like plug and play, not full customization. Yeah, exactly. I see. I see. Okay. All right. So 110 customers. And are you still kind of in that sweet spot of, you know, three, 4,000 bucks a month on average, or have you moved up or downstream?
So we've moved downstream in our services. We're closer to around, sorry, in our percentage product.
Chapter 7: What strategies are in place to prevent customer churn during economic downturns?
We're closer to an average of 1,000 per month. But our enterprise business is a little bit different. So we're doing roughly 130K in the app on MRR and about 180K in our enterprise. What's the difference? The Personas app is basically what you get when you log in. It's like a regular standard SaaS application. You log in, you use it.
The enterprise is basically, we've taken elements of our consulting business and then built the custom code for our big clients. We have about six pretty large SaaS clients that are paying us $180K a month in total.
so so what like if someone asked you what is your total monthly recurring would you take the 130 a month plus the 180 a month yeah okay got it so 310 310 yeah yeah okay that's interesting so so and that's by the way nice growth again last time it came on was about 18 months ago you're at about 150 000 a month did you raise a bunch of extra capital to drive that growth are we able to do all that with no extra
Yeah, all that.
We've been around for a while, so we've got a lot of software, we've got a lot of processes, a lot of people.
Yeah, and so all that's been, our growth has been really driven by just kind of listening to our, kind of going after these bigger clients that, you know, bigger companies have complex organizational needs and they're willing to pay money, a lot of money, to solve these complex organizational needs that you can't just, that they can't, you know,
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Chapter 8: What are the main lessons learned from this episode?
throw their own developers out or can't, um, you know, can't throw, you know, sales operations or marketing.
Okay. So still just about $200,000 in equity raised. Yeah. Yeah.
We have zero.
Now you, uh, I'm going off. I'm trying to remember email threads. Did you decide to use debt or not?
A while back. Yeah. So we use lighter capital. Um, yeah, we were, we haven't, uh, our loan was, uh, 150 K in actual loan and we had a 50% interest paid over, over three years. So we paid 225, uh, K 75, 75,000, you know, in, in, uh, in, in fees and whatnot. Uh, so it was, uh, it was, but I, it was a good experience. We enjoyed it. And, um,
And in general, we haven't done it yet, but there's a lot of people, I'm not sure when this is going to air, but there's a lot of resources around COVID, Small Business Association resources that a lot of companies, you know, are a good way to get really cheap debt.
Yeah, totally. So we're going to put this out fairly soon. So let's talk about that. Tomorrow, April 3rd is when the, the actual, the federal government has said, okay, you can now apply. Now there's some caveats here, especially we're in San Francisco. A lot of my audience is VC backed.
One of the issues is, is it's called the affiliate clause, essentially in the contract would basically potentially makes it impossible for VC backed companies to apply for this. Now, would this apply to you? Do you consider yourself VC back? Cause you raised $200,000. No, it was, it was debt. It was fully paid off. Um, Oh, that 200 grand was an equity.
Yeah. It was no equity at all. So we have some friends and family that, that have done safe notes, but not, not, not a, not a significant amount. So there's no actual, like, you know, true equity on, um, on our, on our books.
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