SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
835: $3m+ in Revenue, How to make a SaaS and Professional Service Model Work Together
06 Nov 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Scott East founded his company, M-Sites, back in 2003, really doing consulting, then added kind of a platform plus professional services bent to it in 2004 when they started to obviously increase revenue at that point to about $150,000. 2016 did about $3.21 million.
Chapter 2: Why did Scott East decide to write a book?
Last month, it did about $264,000. On track to do $4.1 million here in 2017. Less than 5% annual churn serving about 20 clients.
Chapter 3: What services does MSIGHTS provide for marketers?
So definitely high ACVs and low volume. The ACV value there is about 250 grand, spending only about 10% of that to acquire the customer.
Chapter 4: How does MSIGHTS' SaaS model differ from professional services?
So healthy unit economics with their team of 35. Again, as they help folks understand and better organize their data so that marketing data truly becomes insights. 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.
Chapter 5: What was MSIGHTS' revenue growth trajectory over the years?
I'm now at $20,000 per talk.
Chapter 6: What is the significance of churn rate in MSIGHTS' business model?
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 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,
Chapter 7: How does MSIGHTS charge clients based on data integration?
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 Scott East. He founded his company, M-Sites, in 2004 to help marketers make better decisions with better data and reporting.
His experience includes global ad and digital agencies, a Fortune 20 telecom, and AOL prior to founding M-Sites. He understands how to engage marketers, having been one of his 20-plus year career.
Chapter 8: What are the blended gross margins for MSIGHTS' services?
His new book, The Cuttlefish Marketer, The Five Essential Traits of a Modern Marketer, focuses on helping marketers transform themselves into modern marketing professionals. Leader Scott, are you ready to take us to the top? I am. I just wish you wouldn't have emphasized the 20 plus years of experience. We can't tell. We can't tell. Let me ask you a question. You're building M sites.
I assume it's doing well. Why on earth write a book? Like it takes so much time. You don't make money. It's no fun. It was a bucket list item, and it was one of those things that I felt passionate about. In 20-plus years of marketing, it's just amazing how much it's changed, even over the last five years.
And over drinks, I was talking with some friends about just how different it would be interviewing and getting into a marketing position now, and that kind of evolved into a book. Huh, interesting. Now, did you self-publish, or have you gone and teamed up with a publisher? What's their model? I think he's the one that has partnered with Forbes on their platform.
Are you going through that platform? Not yet. This is the first one out of the gate, so I'm a little bit of a newbie. But I have friends that are on it, and with the Forbes relationship, from what I understand, it's been really rocking for them. So it's worked well. The Forbes distribution channel for book sales has worked for them? Yeah, definitely.
Adam's a great guy, and Advantage is a great company to partner with. Now, is it already live? Can my audience go buy it now on Amazon, or what? They can. Yeah, it's available on Amazon. It's also available via Apple. But yeah, it's been a lot of fun. And how many copies have you sold so far? And when was launch date? I don't even know.
I think I've given away more copies than I've sold because I really use it more as a business development tool. I think the only person that really bought one so far may be my mom and my dad, and I forced them to buy it. I think we've sold a couple hundred copies, and I'm not really advertising it that much, but it's been a really good experience.
How long generally just did it take you, would you say, months-wise to write it? God, you know, it's kind of a funny question. From beginning to end, it was about a year and a half. But I worked on it for about six months, shelved it because I didn't like the original concept. And then I made the mistake of telling my executive coach that I wish I would have done it last year.
And that's a big mistake. You never tell your coach that you wish you would have done something and didn't do it because then he was asking me every week. So once I had the revised concept and put it in high gear, it took about maybe about 10 solid months of work from there. All right, let's shift now to M sites. You're really using this obviously as a glorified business card.
And I giggled in the pre-interview. What did you say about studying? I think the last time I studied this hard, I think it was for a final at business school in Georgetown. So let's dive in. What is M-Sites doing? What's your model? How do you make money? Yeah, so M-Sites, what we do is we provide data management and performance reporting services for large marketing departments.
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