SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1719 He's Expecting $500k PPP Stimulus Check for Virus, At $6m ARR Today, Whats next?
08 Apr 2020
Chapter 1: What urgent updates are shared at the beginning of the episode?
Hey guys, I'm recording this here on April 5th. It's Sunday. Everyone's trying to survive the crisis. Quick note to you guys, we are moving, you know, we used to delay these episodes by, you know, four to eight months after we recorded them in terms of releasing them on the podcast. We've changed that.
A lot of these interviews you're gonna hear over the next many months are gonna be ones we recorded only
days prior we think that's a smarter way to run the show i've made the change so expect more urgent information coming out secondly i am getting destroyed on itunes reviews by these people that say nathan's rude he's hard-hitting blah blah blah which by the way i am it's part of my style it's what works the problem is people that love that style never take the time to go leave a five-star review
So I only get one or five star reviews on iTunes. And right now there's a streak of one star reviews that is driving me crazy. It would mean the world to me, guys. If you're loving the show, you love how direct I am. You like the style. If you go leave a review on iTunes now, if you do that and tweet it to me, text it to me, email it to me, whatever you want.
I'm going to reply with a very special surprise. I think a lot of you guys will really like it is heavy, heavy data oriented. All right. So I appreciate that. Thanks, guys. Enjoy the show. Again, surviving the virus, they've seen $46,000 in paused MRR over the past 30 to 60 days out of their total kind of $460,000 in MRR.
So again, about $6 million run rate right now, helping teams scale their content better with their massive army of writers. He's applied to PPP. We'll see what happens. Hello everyone, my guest today is Steve Pokras. He brings 20 plus years of startup, Fortune 500, and nonprofit experience to his role as CEO at a company called Verblio.
He's also served in leadership roles at LiveOps, Tendro, Western Union, and many other companies. He received his MBA from Kellogg School of Business and his MA from Wesleyan University. Steve, you ready to take us to the top? I'm excited to be back. All right, yeah, thanks for coming back on. If people missed your first episode, just quick overview, what does Verblio do?
Verbalio is a content creation platform. We provide content through our network of 3,000 US-based writers. And we do that through our SaaS platform that's focused on how to deliver content at scale.
Yep. And you were on a couple months ago and shared that, again, you're serving about 1,000 customers, pay on average maybe $500 a month or $6,000 ACV. So people can kind of back in, obviously, to $5 or $6 million in ARR. How's the virus impacting you guys?
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Chapter 2: How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted Verblio's business model?
the nominal number of small businesses or accounts have dropped by 10%.
Yep. Are you, so when I was preparing for this interview, I could see a use case where, you know, you help people find writers to write more content. I could see a scenario where people are now doubling down on digital because there is no in-person really anymore right now. Are you seeing some of your larger accounts, you know, double and triple expansion revenue over the past 30, 60 days?
Yeah.
So not yet. I think everyone's kind of in shock mode. We're still in this, right now we're on April 3rd, just so everyone knows, because every week is so important at this juncture. Everything could change in two weeks. I think right now everybody is mostly trying to do a reset and a pause. So most of the revenue that we did lose turned into paused revenue.
So our paused revenue went up by 50% in three weeks. So they're not officially canceled. But I think what's going to happen And I'll give insights into I've been talking to as many industry leaders as possible. I think there is going to be a lot more towards the trend of content marketing. Digital marketing are two of the few avenues that still remain relevant.
And it's one of the few ways that you can market in a way that is that fits the right tone and the appropriate tone for the times that we're in, which is you don't have to be aggressive. You prepare your your story for when people are looking for it as opposed to when they're not ready for it.
So when you say that you're paused revenue, how much MRR right now is in your paused bucket? 65,000. Okay. 65 out of a total of what? Like 294, 300, something like that? 500? Around 460 to 470 a month. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. And how, when will those accounts, like, have you set up a structure of when those accounts will unpause or is it indefinitely for now?
Yeah.
So we have a limit on the number of paused moments you can have. One of the reactions that we had to COVID is to expand the number of months that a customer could pause. It used to be three months, and now we're up to four, and we're looking at all options as far as we want to make sure that our clients have enough time to come back to us for when they're ready.
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Chapter 3: What strategies are being implemented to manage revenue during the crisis?
Yes. Yeah. Very good. All right. And talk to me a little bit more about how you've capitalized the business. Obviously, you were not the original founder and you went into how that kind of changed in the last episode. So we won't rehash that. But are you raising additional capital or has your VC backers? Are they saying, hey, Steve, do you need more?
We are fully bootstrapped. We have no capital, much less additional capital at our hands. And so I think that comes with pros and cons. In this crisis, it is a particularly good time to be a bootstrap company because we had to learn to live lean for a really long time.
And so the one access to capital that I'm looking at and I'm waiting for a call right now is from the Payment Protection Loan Program. which the government made available. We're all trying to figure out how that can give us an extra level of assuredness to keep the staff that we have for as long as humanly possible.
So the math behind that is essentially taking your total payroll expenses, excluding 1099s between February of 2019 and January of 2020, and then dividing by 12 to get it monthly and then multiplying by 2.5. So whenever you get that number, obviously you then fill out the forms and things.
Did you already actually submit with your local bank or are you still waiting on instructions from your bank?
So first of all, I learned. Thank you so much for sending out proactively guidance to your audience on how to do it. I learned more from you than I did from the government on how to do this.
Thanks.
I am in this very interesting point where I am currently looking at my phone. and waiting for my banker to call me to do the application over the phone because she personally has 800 applications she's trying to submit on her laptop today and didn't know as of yesterday what the process would be.
Jeez Louise. Which bank are you with?
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Chapter 4: How is Verblio adapting its services in response to client needs?
We want to make sure that we nailed our tone and provided our clients and our audience something really valuable. So we've thought about this in a few ways, which is what can we reach out to everybody with? So one of the first things we offered was we reached out in bulk to all of our clients and offered them a guide for how to change your content tone in the modern age.
It's so important to get this right right now. You just have to lead with empathy and there's It's all about them right now. It's not about you. And we also offer 10 free topics, which we charge $100 for, for our top SEO topic creation team to redo your topics or offer new topics. And we're thinking about our next level of things that we can offer as well.
And then we adjusted the pause, the amount of time that companies could take off too. So I think that was one of the things. The other thing we thought about is what other assets do we have to offer?
And so I started a new video series on LinkedIn that we're sharing out where I'm just interviewing marketing leaders, agencies, agency coaches on how to guide, what do they expect to see from the crisis? And then what are their best recommendations? We're trying to make these really short, like five minute videos that people can see three times a week.
People can just find that on your LinkedIn?
You can find it on my LinkedIn and hopefully find it valuable.
Very good. We'll link to that in the show notes for sure. Steve, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.
Cool. So I gave you my favorite business book last time, which was Switch. But I'm going to tell you my favorite current one, which is The Power of Little Ideas by David Robertson. And it's about it really appeals to a company like mine, which is innovation doesn't have to come from a blue ocean strategy where you have to disrupt the whole world in classic startup style.
But you can incrementally build out what you've already done in a way that's much more similar to Apple.
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