SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
703: The "Accidental" $10k/mo Side Project
27 Jun 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
Chapter 2: How did Paul Tyma start his entrepreneurial journey?
You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Hello, everybody.
Chapter 3: What were the key milestones of Refresh Inc. before its acquisition?
This is episode 703. I love doing these.
Chapter 4: How does Mailinator generate revenue?
You know I love this, right, guys? It's unbelievably fun. Tomorrow morning, episode 704, we talk to Eric Dolan, and he breaks down a son saving his mom. That's really what's happening. He has a son.
Chapter 5: What challenges does Mailinator face in terms of customer churn?
He is saving his mom. with a health tech product that recognizes seizures, and it's big, big financially.
Chapter 6: How has Mailinator's brand recognition impacted its growth?
Tune in to find out, especially if you're interested in the health tech space. Good morning, guys.
Chapter 7: What features does Mailinator offer for QA teams?
My guest this morning is Paul Tima. He's the founder and creator of a tool called Mailinator. It's an email system. He's also the startup veteran, a startup veteran, has focused on four Silicon Valley startups, including Preemptive Solutions, ManyBrain Inc., which owns Mailinator, HomeAccount.com, We'll be right back. Yeah, thanks. So tell us first.
So you obviously studied computer engineering at Syracuse. Right out of that, did you go right into one of these startups or did you work for somebody else? No, actually, I started my first company during my PhD and actually incubated it at Syracuse. It eventually moved back to Cleveland, where I was from. Right out of PhD, I ended up working for Google. Got it.
And that was just a happenstance that I happened to move out to Silicon Valley and talk to Google, and there I was. And so which one of these companies was your first kind of big win, Preemptive Solution, HomeAccount.com, or Refresh Inc.? I think they've all been interesting in their own way. Preemptive is actually still a going concern. I'm still on the board of the company.
It's about 30 employees. Um, refresh was, was a little bit more of a sort of, um, I'd say advertise a very visible, uh, exit because LinkedIn purchased them. You can now see the refresh technology in what LinkedIn calls it's icebreakers, uh, in their application, their mobile app right now. I'm not sure if it's on, on their web or not. What year was that refresh acquisition?
That was one year ago. Okay. Got it. All right. No, two years ago. I'm sorry. Two years ago. And I left LinkedIn a year ago. Okay. And what was the, uh, what was the acquisition price on that? Well, obviously, it was confidential, but I think everybody was pretty happy. What was the business model of Refresh? Was it a SaaS business?
No, that was absolutely a consumer application that fascinated me to pitch investors who didn't ask how you're going to make money. And we never at any point had anybody ask us, and nobody cared. The goal was to absolutely get users and build technology, and we raised enough money to do that. How much? We raised 10 million total. Okay.
And was that, I assume you got into a series that priced around that wasn't all note, right? No, we started our first round was, was a two, two on four pre, which was a price round. We started priced. And then the second round was priced also. So just so everyone understands, uh, again, Paul started out doing a equity round.
In other words, he didn't do a kiss or a save for one of these YC notes that you're, you're hearing about. He got, you know, he raised $2 million and his valuation was $4 million pre money, uh, $6 million post money. So he sold what about a 30 year company, Paul? Yeah, yeah, that's about right. Got it. And were you the sole founder of Refresh or do you have partners?
No, I had another founder, Bob and Shaw. Okay. And then what did you grow that to in terms of number of users where it suddenly became so interesting to LinkedIn? It was only a couple hundred thousand users at the end of the day. It was the first startup I've ever had, though. And you could think of it sort of as people search on steroids.
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