SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
846: SaaS: $50m Raised, $12m+ ARR To Incentivize Reviews and Influencers
17 Nov 2017
Chapter 1: Who is Mark Organ and what is his background?
founder of Eloqua, grew that, then eventually left, still saw a big financial windfall when obviously it exited. Now he's building Influitive, launched in 2010.
They raised $50 million of capital, 125 folks, really helping you build stronger and basically help you get influencers, customers, and everyone else to give you better reviews and incentivize them to talk about you and share their stories. Again, over $50 million raised, growing about 50% year over year, doing over $10 million in ARR now.
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. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit sold mark.
Chapter 2: What challenges did Mark face when leaving Eloqua?
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... 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.
Chapter 3: How does Influitive help companies leverage customer advocacy?
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, everybody. My guest today is Mark Organ.
He is the founder and CEO of a company called Influitive, helping companies mobilize their advocates to produce massive increases in referral leads, reference calls, social media participation, and more.
He revolutionized B2B marketing as the founding CEO of Eloqua, which you guys may or may not have heard of, the world leader in marketing automation software, which was acquired by Oracle for $871 million. In between, he was the go-to-market consultant for SaaS companies in North America and Asia.
Chapter 4: What is the current financial status of Influitive?
Mark, are you ready to take us to the top? So finish the Eloqua story for a second before I get into Influitive. What happened there? Did you stay with Eloqua through the exit or did you leave? What went on?
i left earlier um so i got the company to around 20 million sales 165 people and uh you know and then uh another ceo actually took over for me and it was the person who took it public so um you know it's which is which is interesting it's actually one of the things that has me pretty fired up this time around i really want to ring that that nasdaq oh mark come on give me give me the scoop here i mean you don't just leave a company you grew that fast so what was the reasoning there did the board force you out the investors didn't like you you didn't like what was happening what happened
like a 33-year-old guy running a company with 165 people around the world. And look, that was before the age of Zuckerberg and all these other, frankly, amazing founders. So I think VCs have really begun... to appreciate the value of founders, right?
Chapter 5: What strategies does Mark use to incentivize reviews and influencers?
So founders don't, you know, they may be missing some of what a professional manager can bring, but they can often more than make up for it with their passion and their vision, ability to see laterally and this sort of thing. So I think that fashion's actually changed quite a lot.
So Mark, just to be clear, it was the VCs. They're raising more capital. They're saying, hey, Mark, sorry, man, we got to bring in, you know, someone, a parent to run the company and you can't do it. Yeah, it's like you don't have enough gray hair there, man. Exactly. We got to go find all those tall, good-looking guys with gray hair. Mark, I think you're good-looking. There's no shame in that.
Chapter 6: How does Mark view the role of VCs in his business journey?
Okay, so I understand. Now, last question before we move forward to Influitive. Did you get a meaningful financial exit from the company? I did, yeah.
Okay, good. a shareholder of the company.
Oh, that's great.
And so that worked out pretty well and allowed me to basically start this new company and have a pretty good lifestyle.
So tell me about Influitive. What's it do and how do you make money?
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Chapter 7: What is Influitive's customer acquisition cost and payback period?
Yeah, so at Influitive, we help companies grow by getting a lot more value out of their happy customers. So you think about it, every company's got happy customers or should have happy customers, but are they getting the most out of it, right? So These days, we need a lot more in the way of referral leads. We need to get their stories.
We need to have customers help out, close deals, especially in B2B, which is where we focus. And So this is a problem I want to solve and actually I learned about this while I was at Eloqua. I just saw how important it was to have mobilized customers in order to make buyers purchase faster. But the challenge was that the experience of being an advocate is not always that great.
Chapter 8: What advice does Mark have for building relationships in business?
You've got people calling you saying, hey, can you give us close a deal over here? Can you give us a couple of referrals? We're looking to grow. So the gap that I saw was in making a much better, much more fun and rewarding experience for these advocates. So what we do is we create these communities where companies invite their customer advocates into there.
It's like a VIP club for their best customers. And we make them feel like a million bucks, and they get to network with each other, and we gamify the process of advocating. So people get points for a successful referral, for example. or for telling their story successfully. And if more people sort of read their guest blog posts, then they get more points over time.
We've made it as fun as like the best mobile games out there. And so it's really engaging and fun. What do people pay you?
What do they pay you on average? I like that. I love the business. It makes complete sense to me.
Yeah, so on average, we get about $50,000 a year from our customers, and there's quite a range there. We have some customers that pay quite a bit less. I mean, we have some customers that are as low as sort of $15,000 a year, and then we have some really big customers like IBM and Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle.
How many customers work with you today, Mark?
There's about 270 customers. Okay. Yeah.
So I mean, it's a healthy amount.
It's a healthy amount. And again, there's a range from the IBMs and Oracle's of the world, which pay us a quarter million dollars plus a year, all the way down to small startups that we work with.
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