SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
830: SaaS: With $20m Raised, $10m+ ARR, He's For Enterprise Customer Management on Social Media
01 Nov 2017
Chapter 1: What is Conversocial and how did it evolve from iPlatform?
Converse Social split it out from his first company, iPlatform, back in 2012. Started with a $2.5 million round of capital. Has since raised $20 million. But more importantly, he's grown his team to over 100 folks. He's done it in a way where he's not burning loads of cash.
Chapter 2: How much venture capital has Conversocial raised and what are its financial goals?
Raised just, again, $20 million total, over $10 million in ARR. Focused on helping his 200 paying customers specifically do customer engagement and customer support on social media. 20% year-over-year revenue expansion, really in an 18-month payback period. So healthy economic...
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 top. Five and six million.
Chapter 3: What challenges does Conversocial face with customer churn?
He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of customer acquisition costs for Conversocial?
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.
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.
Chapter 5: How does Conversocial integrate customer service with social media?
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.
Chapter 6: How does Conversocial ensure customer retention and upselling?
My guest today is Josh March. He's the founder and CEO of ConverSocial, a customer engagement solution that helps businesses increase customer loyalty by enabling effortless, in-the-moment customer service through social and mobile channels.
The largest global firms, including Google, Sprint, Hertz, and Hyatt Hotels, turn to his platform to deliver an amazing social-first customer service experience at a large scale. He previously founded leading social application platform, iPlatform, one of the world's first preferred Facebook, sorry, Facebook preferred developers, which was acquired in 2012.
Josh, are you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 7: What are the differences between logo churn and revenue churn for Conversocial?
I am. Did we compete with each other back in your iPlatform days when I was building Hayo? So we were building Facebook apps for big brands. Professional services? Yeah, we were building competitions, promotions, marketing apps, working with brands like McDonald's, The Economist, built Facebook apps for them at the time.
But you were very much in the buddy media, wildfire, Involver, Vitru, Tabs, that kind of world, right?
Chapter 8: Why is the guest not interested in selling to Sprinklr?
Yeah, correct. Very cool. You sold in 2012, which was also the year most of them sold. Who did you sell to? We sold to a large agency in the UK. You were already probably serving a bunch. They were a big customer and it made sense. Yeah, we were actually starting Converse Social at the time. Converse Social had got going and we were kind of looking to move out of the agency world.
We'd separate them off into two businesses. And the agency was a big partner of ours and we were selling services to them and it just made sense. Yeah, that makes good sense. Now, so you sold to them. And I mean, was this a soft kind of exit for you? Or was it a big financial event where you could basically go on and take whatever risks you wanted? I mean, financially, how was the acquisition?
It was medium. It was a mix of cash and equity. Certainly, it was a good exit for the age I was at the time. Which was how old? 2012 so it would be like 26 okay yeah that's good so what are you fast forward now you're what 31 yeah yeah very cool okay tell us about Converse Social so what's it doing what's your business model how do you make money Sure.
So we're an enterprise SaaS product, and our software is used in the contact centers of really big consumer brands to deliver customer service through social media, through mobile messaging. So if you rented a car from Hertz and you have a problem with that car, something's wrong, something's wrong with the billing, you don't want to phone them and wait on hold while you're traveling.
You don't want to email them and wait a week for a response. So what do you do today? You tweet at them. You send them a message on Facebook.
hundreds of people in their contact centers is just responding to these messages and resolving issues with their customers through these channels and software to do that our software completely invisible to the consumer but behind the scenes it's collecting all of these messages from all of the different channels
It's analyzing them, prioritizing them, routing them out and distributing them among potentially hundreds of agents who are online at the same time, providing all that workflow. And then also providing all the analytics and dashboards for managers to be supervising and managing that team.
And what is the, I mean, have you bootstrapped this thing or have you self or erased capital or what's the financing story? Yeah, we've raised capital. So we've raised about $20 million of venture capital from a few different investors. The primary investor is a company called Octopus Cattle, and then also Draper Esprit that was originally part of the DSGA network. Yeah.
What did you, I mean, why did you just make the decision to go ahead and raise capital versus just bootstrapping this from the start? And by the way, the start, that was, you said 2012? Yeah. So it originally was a kind of product that we were starting within iPlatform. And we kind of had an interesting journey with it. Mid-2011, and I can go into that journey a little bit of how we got into it.
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