SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1721 How SaaS CEO Plans To Cut $500,000 Burn Amid Virus To Hit $8m Revenues This Year
10 Apr 2020
Chapter 1: What urgent changes are being made to the podcast format?
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. Daisy Intel, helping online retailers decide what products to promote, how to do it to drive additional revenue.
Seeing a little bit of a pullback right now with the virus, but they raised $15 million to get through it. Burn was a little north of 500 grand a month. They're cutting that burn down to make sure they can live off the cash that they just raised back in September last year. But they still are seeing nice growth, up 7 million run rate today, up from 4 million just about 18 months ago.
Hoping to break about 8 million run rate at the end of this year, despite obviously the recession and viruses. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Gary Saranverda. He is the CEO and founder of a company called Daisy Intel, which is helping companies optimize operational decision making.
He's a rocket scientist with 25 years experience helping enterprises make hundreds of millions in net income gains using artificial intelligence. His mission is to reduce poverty as companies invest these gains to lowering prices, which lowers costs of living for you. And Gary, are you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. All right.
So artificial intelligence can be a little bit dangerous because there's a lot of marketers and sales guys like me that just throw the term around and doesn't mean anything. So, so walk me through a case study. How is somebody using Daisy Intel? So we're helping them make decisions that are beyond human capability.
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Chapter 2: How is Daisy Intel adapting to the current economic crisis?
So sweet spot there again, $200,000, $300,000 sorts of deals with some that are much larger. Yeah. Okay. Very good. And that would, so I mean, 25 customers times, obviously that ACV, I mean, you've, it sounds like doubled over the past 18 months. We've almost doubled in the past 18 months. I mean, the world has gone sideways now, given that retailers are struggling to do supply.
I mean, promotions have been frozen. So that's kind of affected our short-term revenue, but I mean, our, We're fortunate that the retail industry in the long term will be less affected than others. Insurance is less affected than other industries. So I think new sales is kind of stalled, but I think we'll preserve the majority of our revenue.
So I think we're just, the world is going into pause, hit the pause button, but then we expect to get back on to even faster growth. We were planning to triple in revenue this year. based on the series A we just did in September. So that I'm doing some back of the napkin math here. You were doing about 4 million at early or beginning 2019. You're at around 7 or 8 million run rate today.
Yeah, I wrote 7 million run rate today and then And we were planning to get to about 1.2 million run rate by the end of the year. Well, I said 1.2 million monthly, so we're going to get to about 17 million by the end of the year. That was the plan. Our first quarter sales were on track to that. And so now it's just been like kind of pause. Yeah.
So, so, so let's talk, you just did a recent raise. So let's talk, every founder right now is thinking like, how do I make sure I have enough cash to outlast this? And once I feel comfortable outlasting it, should I actually invest more aggressively now? Cause it's, everything's cheap and it's an opportune time. And these are like the big questions. So let's dive into that for you.
You, you raise additional capital. How much total have you raised now today? Yeah, we raised, um, you know, total of 15 million today. We did a $10 million raise in September, you know, and so, so that was capital we raised. And so we're kind of, We were planning to do a B round this year in the fall. I think that'll be delayed a bit. The goal was to burn through that money.
It came in two tranches. The first tranche was $7 million. The second one will be $4 million. It'll actually be $11 million. That $4 million will be unlocked later this year. The goal was to make sure we have cash runway to get to those milestones. The milestones of $8 million and $10 million, those are the milestones for for tranche two of the A and then the B rounds. Okay. Interesting.
So how much of the 7 million that you actually got accepted back in? And it sounds like you also did a $5 million round of the espresso, a debt round on top of the seven, right? So you had basically 12 million in cash in the bank come in, in September. No, I mean, we had, there was a topping up an existing credit facility.
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Chapter 3: What unique services does Daisy Intel provide to clients?
So we had, you know, so, and it was, and it was this 5 million credit facility based on run rate. So, you know, it could grow up to five. So we currently have enough cash. You know, we've, you know, we're cutting burn like everybody else.
So we've kind of stopped, you know, obviously travel has stopped, which is a big part of what we do, traveling to sell and, you know, marketing conferences, stuff like that has stopped. So we've kind of stopped all discretionary spending for the moment, kind of on the marketing travel front. And then we're probably doing some temporary layoffs at some point.
We're thinking about that if the world continues to go sideways, just to make sure that the cash will last as long as possible. Yeah. So once you're done kind of right-sizing the company to make it through the virus, how many months of runway do you want to have in the bank? Um, we want to have, uh, you know, 12 months with our credit.
I think it'll be, I mean, the destiny, our destiny will be in our control with our credit facilities, as long as we can grow slowly and, Cause our credit facilities are a multiple of our revenue. So I think we want to cut the burn back to the place where we can run indefinitely within our credit facilities, but that means we got to get some growth.
So I'm relying on modest growth will allow us to last indefinitely and allow us to get to the,
place uh you know so we built a plan that's back when we got 18 months runway within our existing credit facilities yep what was burned prior to virus you're taking like 300 400 grand a month something like that no it was like it was like 500 grand a month we were planning to burn you know 500 times 12 6 million spend 7 million you know like leave a bit of buffer there that was the plan to spend that money and that would that would get us to the next round so so now we're just dialing that back you know dialing back probably like 200k a month so
Yep. And how do you, so obviously travel goes out the window. That's an easy thing to cut because no one's traveling. You maybe cut back on some marketing stuff, but how do you make sure you cut, but at the same time, take advantage of online retailers who are going to be growing like crazy right now that might use you more in a recession? Yeah.
I mean, so we're doing a lot of campaigns, outbound calling. So we are inside sales teams, but we've targeted them. of clients out there. We've had a lot of active deals in the funnel, so I think the ones that were very active and close to closing, we're still working with those. We've just flipped our sales process to be by video like this.
Fortunately, we're a tech company, so doing video meetings is not a big deal. We've flipped everything to video and continue to go out there. We're looking for alternative revenue sources. We're helping
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Chapter 4: How many customers does Daisy Intel currently serve?
I'm married with kids. Divorced, my kids are all grown up, but I'm remarried. How many kids? I got three kids. Oh, wow. Okay. And how old are you? Me, I'm 54. 54. Last question. What do you wish your 20-year-old self knew? Would have started a business a lot sooner. Guys, there you have it.
Daisy Intel, helping online retailers decide what products to promote, how to do it to drive additional revenue. Seeing a little bit of a pullback right now with the virus, but they raised $15 million to get through it. Burn was a little north of 500 grand a month. They're cutting that burn down to make sure they can live off the cash that they just raised back in September last year.
But they still are seeing nice growth, up 7 million run rate today, up from 4 million just about 18 months ago. Hoping to break about 8 million in run rate at the end of this year, despite obviously the recession and virus. Gary, we're rooting for you, man. Thanks for taking us to the top. Thank you. Thanks, Nathan. Appreciate it.