SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
825: SaaS: 4 Founders, 150 Customers Paying $30k for Pipeline and Revenue Management
27 Oct 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Had a lot of success. Had a big failure back in 2010.
Chapter 2: What does Full Circle Insights do and how does it generate revenue?
Learned a lot from it. Now is part of, with actually her friends that called her up, said, come join us, Bonnie. Full Circle Insights for founders. They're really helping you close the gap between data and insights. Helping you really get better at sales and marketing. She's basically building the product she wishes she had. It's a smart way to run your company as the CEO.
And they're growing fast. $11 million raised, 150 customers, you know, doing, you know, call it somewhere around $4 million a year currently. Would love to get $7 million in AR by the end of the year this year. Logo churn or logo retention over 90% annually. Looking to grow ARPU expansion year over year.
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. 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. many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every b2b sas 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 that database I keep it to myself.
It's so freaking valuable. 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. Go get on now at getlatka.com. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Bonnie Crater. She's the CEO of Full Circle Insights. She's a five-time VP of marketing at many software companies in Silicon Valley.
She's been named one of the top 100 most influential women by the Silicon Valley Business Journal and one of the top 20 women to watch by the Sales Lead Management Association. Bonnie, are you ready to take us to the top?
You bet.
All right. Let's do this. Okay. What does Full Circle Insights do and what's your revenue model? How do you make money?
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Chapter 3: What lessons did Bonnie learn from her previous business failure?
Okay. So give us some more of the backstory here. What year did you launch the company at?
We launched the company in 2012. We actually started the company in December 31st, 2010. So this is my advice to entrepreneurs is never start a company on December 31st, 2010, because the IRS will want a tax return for that one day that nothing happened.
Oh, Lord have mercy. That's horrendous. Okay.
So, and, and okay. January one, not December 31st.
That's so funny. So, okay. 2010, you launched, sorry, your first full year was 2011 then, correct?
Uh, yeah. Uh, we launched our product in 2012 though.
Okay. But I want to get the buildup to that. So 2011, like you quit whatever job you were at before you're all in, right? Yep. What did you quit? I mean, how, I want to know how, how ballsy you were. What'd you give up?
Oh, I just quit another VP of marketing job, right?
And I've done that job many, many times. And I had some friends call me up and say, hey, you know, we have this idea. I said, oh, you can do that? So I was really excited. And so we started Full Circle.
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Chapter 4: How did Bonnie's past experiences shape her approach to founding Full Circle Insights?
Oh, wow. That's a lot.
Yeah, it's a lot. Usually it's one or two. But this was a team of four.
And we actually needed all four people with all four skill sets.
Describe the skill sets.
Yeah. Two of us were ex-Salesforce people. We worked at Salesforce.com. Did you? Yeah, I ran what's now known as the Service Cloud at Salesforce.
A small little business.
Yeah, a small business. And Andrea Wilt, she was the product manager for the marketing product at Salesforce. And then we had two other founders, Rowan Baer and Dan Appelman, and they were experts at the Salesforce platform and how to build applications on the Salesforce platform.
So is Full Circle built on Salesforce?
You bet.
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Chapter 5: What strategies did Full Circle Insights use to raise initial funding?
I'd been CEO once before.
Okay.
And I had
2001 okay that was really good you know it's good you know uh how shocking was the failure oh my god it was devastating why i was in depression for like a year like what does that mean like you were on the couch crying like what does that mean yeah well you know i wasn't on the couch crying but i was definitely um you know it's definitely a big impact for me i hired and fired 100 people in a year okay so there was an emote you're talking there was an emotional impact what about financially
Well, yeah, financially, I didn't make any money, but, you know.
But you were fine, right? I mean, you had savings from previous jobs.
Or did you have your whole— Yeah, I was not homeless afterwards. Yeah. That's good.
Yeah. So when you say depression, it was really more of like, oh, my gosh, these people—I'm 100 people. I have to tell them face-to-face, you're fired. Exactly. Yeah, not easy.
That's really hard, yeah. I mean, Nathan, come on. I—
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Chapter 6: What is the current customer base and revenue model of Full Circle Insights?
So we learn from these things and we don't make the same mistakes twice.
That's the rule.
So what do you do in between? And that's when you were doing kind of the VP roles in between that failure and 2010. Right.
I was VP of marketing a number of times between then and now. And one of my jobs was I was an executive at Salesforce. And that's where I learned the SaaS business, which was really exciting. Because I started my career at Oracle. This was way before Oracle had any SaaS kind of revenue.
All on-prem.
All on-prem. Big elephant.
Servers.
Go get it.
Okay, very good. Okay, so boom, fast forward. So the company, self-funded or bootstrapped, full circle?
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Chapter 7: How does Full Circle Insights manage customer retention and churn?
And when did you raise the first capital?
That's—in 2012.
Okay.
Okay, good. So maybe you were half a million at that point. You're doing about a half a million dollar AR run rate when you raised your first capital.
Yeah, something like that. It took us longer to build the product, right? This is, of course, the...
How did you fund it though before? Do you all put money in?
Oh, yeah.
We all put money in. We actually built our first product on $22,000 and our sweat equity.
That's great. That's great. Any developers on the team?
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Chapter 8: What unique marketing strategies has Bonnie employed to attract customers?
Yep.
And then we have 11 people that are doing sales, about four or five people doing marketing roles. We have some people counting the money.
Yeah. That's good. At least there's money to count. That's a good sign. Yeah, we've got money to count.
And then we have really great customer success people, seven, eight people doing that. I'm not sure if that has up to 35.
That's okay. Those ranges. Yep. Okay, good. Well, I mean, and I can, I mean, if you don't mind me doing this, I mean, I can kind of back in a little bit to your guys' size. With 150 customers and an average contract of about 30 grand, you guys have broken 4 million bucks in ARR or somewhere around there, correct? Correct.
Somewhere around there.
Yeah. Okay, good. Fair enough. And what's kind of your target? With the money you've raised at board meetings, are you still in the range of tripling year over year, or are you more happy with doubling year over year at this point?
Our model has always been to double year over year, and then one year we need to triple. So when I've done this modeling, basically that's kind of how you have to do these SaaS businesses, is one of these years you have to have a breakout year where you triple in order to get to breakeven.
Okay. It's really interesting. There's a model, there's a theme that I've seen from some of the breakaway IPO SaaS businesses that have gone on IPO. I call it the double triple and the triple double. So your first two years, you should really be tripling year over year. And then you got to double three years after that. It's kind of an interesting comparison.
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