SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
822: SaaS: 25 Years Old and $250k+ in MRR, Here's Trick to Starting With No Developers
24 Oct 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
in 2012 was just a hustler selling a white labeled version of his product to folks did about 25 grand a month or 300 grand that year in revenue has since scaled between 1000 and 5000 customers now paying a minimum of about 59 bucks per month unit economics look healthy 2015 was their first million dollar year 2016 they wrapped up
Chapter 2: What is BuildFire and how does it empower non-technical users?
about 250 grand per month in december so you can obviously do the run rate math well over uh two and a half million bucks uh run right there 2017 looking to continue to grow they've raised 2.5 million bucks all convertible notes gross churn logo churn monthly five percent revenue churn somewhere closer down to three percent team of 30 out there in san diego building build fire over 10 000 apps drag and drop build the platform they also help you with customization this is
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 3: How did Ian Blair transition from college to founding BuildFire?
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 top.
Chapter 4: What milestones did BuildFire achieve in its early years?
Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark.
Chapter 5: How has BuildFire's revenue model evolved over time?
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.
Chapter 6: What marketing strategies does BuildFire use to acquire customers?
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 7: What challenges does BuildFire face in customer retention?
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.
Chapter 8: How does BuildFire manage its growth and team dynamics?
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. Go get on now at getlatka.com.
hello our guest today is ian blair he founded a company called build fire while he was in college and have grown it to become one of the most successful app builders with 30 employees and close to 10 000 apps in the app store his expertise is in online marketing and growth hacking ian are you ready to take us to the top absolutely so we're looking yeah things are going on we're looking at a beautiful skyline behind you if you guys are watching the youtube version of this interview where what city is this what are we looking at we're in downtown san diego and that's the financial district right there so and our student
I'm jealous of all you San Diego wins. It's always 75 with a slight breeze. I'm always jealous. Yeah, it's not too bad. I can't complain. That's for sure. All right. Tell us about BuildFlare. What's it doing? How do you make money? Yeah, so BuildFire, we're a mobile app building platform that allows non-technical people to sign up and start building their own mobile app with no coding required.
However, we also allow for a lot of extensibility. So I like to kind of think of us like the WordPress for mobile apps in many ways where you can have anyone who's never built a website before fire up, you know,
a wordpress site and then um it also powers some of the largest websites in the world so in the same way with buildfire like anyone can get started building an app but you can build unlimited amount of custom functionality if you if you need for your app so this we can think about this like what weebly or wix or squarespace are for websites you are for mobile apps Yeah, exactly.
But a little bit further because we allow for the customization because, for example, you can't really build an enterprise-level site on Squarespace or Weebly or something like that, whereas something like WordPress, you can. Yep, got it. Okay, makes good sense. So what's the backstory here? When did you launch the company? Yeah. So I actually started when I was in college.
And so amongst our competitors and us, we have a white label reseller program. So basically what you can do is take our platforms and completely brand it as your own and start selling to your own customers. And that's actually how I got started. So I was white labeling one of our competitors products. What year? let's see, that would have been 2012. I think I just got started.
And then we became, I think I incorporated in March of 2013. Um, but started off as a reseller started, um, you know, just with a couple hundred bucks a month. And then we ended up building up a $300,000 recurring revenue stream in 12 months. And we realized like, Hey, there's some serious potential here. So that was, that was in 2013, you were doing 300 grand a month by the end of 2013.
We're doing 300 grand a year, so about 25K a month. Right now or in 2013? In 2013. Got it. Yeah, so I did that in about the first 12 months, and that's before we actually launched any of our own technology, and BuildFire wasn't even around at that point. So you were just white labeling? Yeah. Just white labeling. And then, so we're like, okay, what if we actually built our own technology?
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