SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
837: SaaS: A Good Reason to Have Flat Growth at $200k MRR
08 Nov 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Asim at Societo, he's helping B2B folks give really personalized, targeted touches, especially in industries where it's not, you know, a mass market approach.
Chapter 2: What does Socedo do for B2B marketers?
He's doing it in a very fragmented space. He's obviously got funding growing, really focused on how to use his 25-person team right now to grow revenues past that $200,000 per month mark. 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: How has Socedo's focus shifted in the last nine months?
He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit sold 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
Chapter 4: What is Socedo's revenue model and current MRR?
I keep it to myself. It's so freaking valuable.
Chapter 5: How does Socedo help companies find relevant prospects?
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.
Chapter 6: What challenges does Socedo face in a crowded SaaS market?
Hello, everyone. My guest today is Asim Badshah. He's the founder and CEO of a company called Societo, which is a 20-person B2B social media demand generation company backed by Techstars Ventures, Vulcan Capital, and Divergent Ventures. Before this company, he was founder of Uptown Treehouse, a social media marketing agency working with brands like Uniqlo, Nike, Western Union, and Lenovo.
All right, Asim, are you ready to take us to the top? Let's do it. Absolutely. Very cool. So for people that did not catch you when you came on about a year ago on the show, tell us real quick, what does Societo do and how do you make money? What's your revenue model? Yeah, happy to. Happy to. So it's pretty simple.
What we do is we help B2B marketers find relevant prospects out there on social media that are talking about their space, that are showing real-time behavioral interest. And we give them a really easy way to engage with those folks on social media and add those folks to their email marketing campaigns.
Chapter 7: How does Socedo differentiate itself from competitors?
So they can grow their social channels. They can grow their email channels and get more leads over to the sales team. And then a quick update on team. So last time you were on again, about nine months ago, you had about 25 folks helping your customers do this. Are you still at about that same level? That's correct. Yep.
Chapter 8: What is the importance of product-market fit for Socedo?
The, uh, the last nine months has been all about efficiency. How do we take that head count and get more out of it? Increasing quotas, uh, you know, decreasing. What did you increase quota to? So we're now, I think, around about $4,000 in MRR per month per AE. Interesting. And how many AEs do you have? We've got three AEs. Okay, got it. And how do you help them hit that, right?
Are you having to hire SDRs for an AE to get them better leads or higher volume? What levers are you pulling? Yeah. So this is interesting, right? Because...
I think over the last six months, we really started going down more and more of that STR route, the account-based marketing route, trying to focus more on outbound, leaning away from the free trial and really leaning more towards leads that are registering for content, webinars, white papers.
and frankly i think the learning in the last six months is the more you can get people into the product up front and the more in our particular case that we can drive inbound leads the better our sales team is going to do so we're actually moving a little bit away from the outbound and abm model and finding hey our sweet spot is going to be in the smb middle market we do grow our enterprise companies
But they all kind of start there around $1,000 per month on their licenses. And really the best way for us to bring that in at scale is have a great free trial and get people into that free trial. So even on our website today, it's more of a request-free trial. But we're moving back to that inbound kind of self-serve model, let the product speak and let people get in there.
So that means no touch, right? But you said you increased quotas. Wouldn't you want higher touch, higher price points if you're increasing quotas? No, no. So the point of the trial is to become the pipeline for our AEs.
So instead of having an SDR doing 100 email outreaches every single day and then that turning into one or two appointments, really we're looking at it and saying, hey, if we can get more trials in, the AEs are going to be able to work those warmer leads. We're going to see higher conversion rates to opportunities, and that's going to allow us to increase quotas.
So it's still a human that's closing the deal, but the way that we're getting the efficiency is by letting inbound to do the work of actually building pipeline. Got it. Well, we've had a few of your customers on like Pendo. They share their numbers. They're growing like crazy. So you must be helping them do something right. Indeed. Yeah, we were actually just talking about them yesterday.
That's awesome. Customer count. Last time you were on, you were at about 200. What do you got now? Yep, still hanging out around there. What we've basically seen is moving up the ACB. So We went through this period of time where we sold to everybody. If you remember what I said in terms of what we do, it's specific to B2B.
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