SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
745: At $1.5m Revenue, Is This The New PowerPoint?
08 Aug 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Slidebean launched in 2014. His team, 22 folks located between New York City and Costa Rica are helping you quickly create much more presentable presentations. Folks are switching from things like PowerPoint and really engaging with his software. They're doing about 122 grand per month. Last year in 2016, they did about 750 grand.
They've raised $850,000 in funding and they're currently serving 2,500 customers Hang on average 50 bucks a month with a CAC of 150 and a lifetime value somewhere around 1000. 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.
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.
Chapter 2: What is Slidebean and how does it make money?
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. This is episode 745. Coming up tomorrow morning, Hal joins us. Hal worked with Bill Gates. He gives us the inside scoop on what it's like to work with the billionaire. But why did this founder leave Microsoft to start his own thing? Tune in to find out.
Chapter 3: How did Slidebean shift its business model for growth?
Hello, everyone. My guest today is Jose Gallasso. He is a growth hacker, co-founder, and CEO at a company called Slidebean. He's also a 500 Shards alumni and a frequent flyer miles hoarder. Kyle, are you ready to take us to the top?
Awesome. Thanks for having me, Nathan.
Where do you like flying?
Mostly, so if I, you know, we have two offices, one in New York City, one in Costa Rica, so I'm usually fine between the both, but I always do my best to hoard as many miles. Where are you now?
Chapter 4: What strategies did Slidebean use to reduce churn?
This is Costa Rica. This is part of our Costa Rica office.
Very, very cool. Okay. What is Slidebean and how do you make money?
So we have a web-based tool for making presentations, but the big difference with any other tool out there is that we focus so much on making it more efficient. So the idea is that all you need to do is add your content, and then we automatically take that and make a stunning presentation automatically.
So in the end, the companies that end up working with us and switching from whatever tool they were using before is because we save them so much time. It's a subscription service.
Got it.
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Chapter 5: How does Slidebean acquire customers and what is its CAC?
And what are people typically switching from?
Mostly PowerPoint, but we do have some former Prezi people that also are looking for a more efficient way to do it.
And you said folks pay you kind of a monthly fee. What do they pay you on average?
Yeah, so our team plans start at $49 a month, and that gives you unlimited presentations and a whole other feature that actually includes some design services from our own design team. But you can also purchase a single presentation if you don't need to use it in a recurring basis.
Okay, what's most of your revenue come from, the recurring model or the one-time model?
Absolutely the recurring model.
Okay, so what do people pay on average for the recurring model per month?
Yeah, that's around that.
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Chapter 6: What is the average revenue per user for Slidebean?
It's around 49 a month. That's our most popular plan.
49. Got it. Good. And then take us back and give me some history here. When did you launch the company?
So we started this back in 2014. Originally, we focused in, and it's part of this growth hacking process. Originally, we focused in end users, and we expected those to be
Chapter 7: How does the team structure of Slidebean support its operations?
the majority of our customers. But then we realized that most end users don't need to present on a regular basis. So when we started switching and developing features to serve businesses, that's when we started seeing much more significant growth.
So you basically switched from selling direct to the end consumer to actually selling to a business that's doing presentations every month. And obviously that's when you saw the change.
Exactly.
So that's obviously like a good way to tackle churn, right? So what's your monthly churn at now?
So we were able to bring that churn down from somewhere between the 15% range to actually negative churn on our most recent user base.
Well, don't give me revenue churn, though.
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Chapter 8: What funding has Slidebean raised and how does it impact profitability?
I know you can obviously have negative revenue churn, which is great, but what was your gross customer churn last month?
Oh, your customer churn. So it ended up being around 3.5%. Okay.
Monthly? Good. 3.5%. That's great. And so what would you credit? I mean, that's a dramatic drop. So 15% monthly churn is like you don't have a SaaS business, right? Like you're going to be bankrupt in two months, right? What was the number one thing you did to drive it from 15% churn down to 3.5% monthly churn?
You know, we tried, we call it the half measures. So we tried the half measures from, you know, offering more features, like discounting the price and so on. And, you know, that stuff, you know, helped move the cherry needle a little bit, but it didn't really make any significant changes.
When we saw, and then one of the problems we found was that our product, at that point, our product was priced at $29 a month. So actually increasing the pricing was what helped our churn drop significantly.
And by increasing the pricing, I mean shifting to a different type of user and changing the business model by offering this one-time presentation option so that people that don't need a subscription don't have to subscribe one. And then keeping the subscription and the premium value only for the people that really need it.
And so how many customers or businesses are using you today?
So we run around 2,500 businesses.
Okay, and these are all paying customers? Yes. Sorry, you cut out. They're all paying customers?
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