SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
749: He's Making $9.6m Off Those Horrible Airport WiFi Connections
12 Aug 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
to launch Purple Wi-Fi, Purple Wi-Fi. And again, doing super well there.
Chapter 2: What inspired Gavin Wheeldon to start Purple WiFi?
They've passed 17,000 venues, have installed at least one access point with over 80,000 access points.
Chapter 3: How did Gavin's previous company achieve success in the translation industry?
At Reggie, access point is 11, 12, 13 bucks per month. So they're doing between 800 grand and a million bucks in MRR. Growing, this year they'll grow, we call it 100, 140% year over year.
Chapter 4: What is the business model behind Purple WiFi?
Gross churn monthly is about 1%, but they have net negative revenue churn. Payback period, he's always aiming for less than 12 months, but some of his good fit customers, lifetime value, he's projecting at well over $100,000. With his team of 100 in Manchester, UK, fighting hard to make your public Wi-Fi connections
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 5: How does Purple WiFi differentiate itself from competitors?
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.
Chapter 6: What metrics indicate Purple WiFi's growth and financial health?
We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. This is episode 749. Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from Makita Mikado, and he's going to talk us through how to 3X your customer revenue, and the way he did it at PandaDoc, so they could be more than just a document signing company. Hello, everybody.
Chapter 7: How does Purple WiFi handle customer acquisition and sales cycles?
My guest today is Gavin Williams. wielding with over 15 years experience working in technology-led or enabled businesses. Gavin has a deep understanding of the impact technology can have on the bottom line of an organization. He recently sold his last business, Applied Language Solutions, a global language technology and service business.
He set up Purple Wi-Fi, which is his current company, with the prime focus of building an enterprise guest Wi-Fi system that was end-user friendly.
Chapter 8: What challenges does Purple WiFi face in maintaining customer retention?
Gavin, are you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready and waiting. So when I hear about an idea like purple Wi-Fi, I think about the horrible experiences when I'm traveling internationally. And God forbid the Wi-Fi log on at the airport is in a different language. But I'm like, crap, how do I get from my Tokyo, you know, the Tokyo airport to my hotel?
But I can't read anything and I need to connect to the Internet to get Uber. Are you the guy that's trying to own that that moment?
It is exactly that. And that's the exact reason I decided to start the business. With the last business I had, I traveled all over the world. We had offices in 12 countries and customers in 91. So I relied on public Wi-Fi an awful lot. And it was one of those things that just got me more and more annoyed. I'd log on to a Wi-Fi somewhere.
I'd come back a few months later and ask me for a username and password. I had no idea what I'd put in. And I just thought, why isn't somebody doing this simpler? And so when I sold the last business, had a look around, is anybody doing this? They weren't. So I thought, you know, there's a problem, a very annoying problem here that needs solving.
Well, I can't wait to dig more into that story. Real quick, though, your history, what did you sell your last company for?
A considerable amount. Give me a range. Yeah, it was over 60 million sterling as a broad brush. And generally, just quickly, what did that company do? It was in the translation and interpreting business. And the key thing that we did differently was use technology. So whether that was to use machine translation engines and not like Google or MX,
These were engines that were built specifically for a company or a specific project. So they were highly accurate. And then we would have humans go in and tidy up any of the mistakes that the engine had made, which meant it was a lot, lot quicker and obviously a lot cheaper. Why did you sell it? I'd done nine years, I guess, you know. How old were you when you sold it? I was, how old was I? 36.
Yeah, 36. And you had bootstrapped it? Absolutely. Back bedroom, run up a load of credit card debt, hooked up the house and the mortgage and all those good things.
So it's fair to say I just want to get into your mental mindset when you're launching Purple Wi-Fi. That financial event for you basically set you for life. I mean, you bootstrapped it. You're good to go. You can now go take any risk you want. You choose Wi-Fi. Correct. Awesome. So, okay. Let's, so let's go back to purple wifi. Um, what, who is the incumbent in this space?
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