SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
805: SaaS: 30,000 Customers Make Him King of Call Tracking and Attribution
07 Oct 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
founder of call tracking metrics with his friend now uh now wife growing the company managing three kids as well they just passed 30 000 customers again basically what they're doing is they are selling phone numbers are selling tracking and services around attribution via phone calls this is the top
Chapter 2: What is CallTrackingMetrics and how did it start?
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. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
Chapter 3: How did Todd Fisher acquire his first customers?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every B2B SaaS CEO that I've interviewed. If you want to get access to the database I've created with year-over-year growth rates, customer accounts, margins, and many, many other data metrics and data points, you can go to getlatka.com. Here's the thing, though. This database... I keep it to myself.
It's so freaking valuable.
Chapter 4: What strategies did Todd use to grow CallTrackingMetrics?
And to preserve the quality of the data and make sure that the people that have access to it have a true advantage, I'm only letting 10 companies on each month. So we're full this month, but you can go to getlatka.com to get on the waiting list for next month. And look, there's big people on the waiting list. I mean, the biggest VCs you've ever heard of, you've probably heard of them.
They're big, private equity, billions and billions under management. So it's an impressive waiting list.
Chapter 5: What is the revenue model for CallTrackingMetrics?
Go get on now at getlatka.com. Hello, everybody. My guest today is Todd Fisher. He's the co-founder and CEO of Call Tracking Metrics, a top-rated call automation and lead management platform serving over 30,000 businesses around the globe. Todd developed the initial software and continues to be the driving technical force behind the company.
He's also made a number of notable developments in the technical field, especially within the Ruby on Rails community. Todd, are you ready to take us to the top? Let's do this. All right. Hey, put some brackets real quick around. We said 30,000 businesses using the platform. Are those users or are those paid customers? Those are paid customers. That's amazing.
And that's 30,000 total businesses or those are the seats across a lower number of businesses?
Chapter 6: How does Todd track customer acquisition costs?
It's... It's hard to say because, and I'm sorry, it gets ambiguous because I guess the easiest way to classify that is those are credit cards. Got it. Paid customers. Businesses then, actually, yeah. Some of them may be grouped with marketing agencies. Yep. It's tough. This is a problem you see with a lot of people who have a land and expanding strategy.
Usually it starts with a personal credit card of the head of sales, and then the team starts adapting it, and then it's moving up to the company credit card, but you still have two on file, so it's tricky.
Chapter 7: What is the monthly churn rate for CallTrackingMetrics?
Yeah. Exactly. Yes. Exactly. Okay.
Chapter 8: How is the team structured at CallTrackingMetrics?
Tell us what it does. What's Call Tracking Metrics and what's your revenue model, how to make money? Sure. So, effectively, we sell phone numbers and minutes, but we provide features and functionality around those phone numbers and minutes.
So, like our name describes, Call Tracking Metrics provides primarily call tracking, which means somebody sees a phone number in a particular ad, maybe a Google ad, and they click and then they land on your website. The phone number changes on the website, and then we know which ad resulted in that phone call.
This is really the most effective way, based off the research I've done, to do attribution from phone calls tied back to online ad campaigns. Yes, that's right. So what year did you launch the company in? I guess technically 2011, yeah. Okay. Actually, 2012 would be on the books, yeah. Okay.
And what were you, as you mentioned Ruby on Rails in the bio, were you just kind of contributing to the open source community before that, or what were you doing before 2012? Yeah, so I guess I really got my start in 2005 at Revolution Health Group. We sort of spearheaded the initiative to have that product be built in Ruby on Rails.
2008 left, started trying to start like a consulting company, which became Coptico, which we didn't know what we were doing. We were just like all over the place. We had no idea what we were doing, but we had a good team and we tried really hard to But these aren't the things that create success, unfortunately.
And out of that, though, came this idea that I'm not very good at asking people for money. So if I have a web page that accepts a credit card, that I would have much more success. So March 1st, 2011, we had a web page up that accepted a credit card that surprisingly started to grow rather quickly. But I had to... uh, actually, yeah, 2010, March 1st. Yeah.
And then, uh, 2011, I had to take a job at living social, uh, worked there for about a year. And then in 2012, uh, Lori and I, uh, Lori had been taking calls during the day. How did you meet Lori? Oh yeah. She's my wife. Got it. Okay, good. The 2008, uh, were you married at this point already or no? Yes. Going back in time, 2008, uh, I met Lori, uh,
uh fortunately uh i met her uh was this like was it on like a ruby on rails reddit thread how'd you meet her no actually this is a good uh well yeah so i i woke up that day fortunately and uh made it to my mom's 60th birthday party and lori was there as she was a daughter of our neighbor And we hit it off that night. Wait, like literally hit it off or like you chatted and had fun?
I wish, but no. You had a good conversation. Good conversation, yes. Many weeks later, I actually decided I should call her back because I was quite nervous about this whole idea. If you met her, you'd be impressed. Yeah. All right. So is she now with you at the company still? You founded it together? Yeah. Yeah. So she does operations and I do technical stuff. That's amazing. Okay.
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