SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
847: SaaS: How DaPulse has 3x'ed Revenue YoY
18 Nov 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Founded DePulse back in 2014.
Chapter 2: What is DaPulse and how does it operate?
Last time he was on about a year ago, they were only doing, well, not only, they were doing about 360 grand in monthly recurring revenue. Now they've almost tripled to over $1.1 million. They've raised $34 million in capital, have 15,000 paying customers, again, paying on average 72 bucks a month to use it. They're doing between 1.5 and 2%.
monthly logo churn, spending about $1.5 million per month on paid marketing. They have built this internal tool called Big Brain, which helps them manage and make sure their ROI on all their channels are performing well. 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 3: How has DaPulse achieved a 3x revenue growth year over year?
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 sold 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, I keep it to myself. It's so freaking valuable.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of DaPulse's customer acquisition strategy?
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 Roy Mann. He is a career entrepreneur, artist, and 3D printing enthusiast.
He's experienced in fields of product development and marketing, and before co-founding DePulse, which we'll talk about today, Roy was part of Wix's senior management team, which obviously is a big runaway success. Prior to that, he founded the online social game Save an Alien. Roy, are you ready to take us to the top? Sure. Good.
Chapter 5: How does DaPulse measure customer churn and retention?
So we had you on before. Your episode was a big hit. That was back about a year ago. But your company is called DePulse. Tell us what you do and what's your revenue model. How do you make money? So the Pulse is a tool for teams they can use to manage their operation, their tasks, everything. And we make money by, it's a SaaS product. You just go online, you give it a try for free for 14 days.
And afterwards, if you like it, you need to pay.
Chapter 6: What marketing tactics has DaPulse used to attract large corporate clients?
That's a good thing, right? So what's the average customer paying you per month, Roy? And so that's like actually the average is misleading a bit because we have quite a bit of big companies and small ones. So the small ones might pay like the entry level I think is about $29 a month like for five people.
But then bigger ones might pay up to thousands if they have like hundreds of people and you know manage complex stuff and go to higher tiers. If I forced you to pick an average, what would it be would you say? So we measure everything. So it starts at $70 and after a year it grows more than doubles. But the average is misleading because there are way more small companies out there. Got it.
Chapter 7: How does DaPulse handle its advertising budget and CAC?
So just to be clear, your average customer will start in the $70 range, but you really know with a good amount of accuracy that year-over-year growth will be almost 2x. That $70 customer will turn into a $140 customer. And again, some might stay small and the big ones will grow. Yeah, I'm just talking on average. Yeah. Okay, great. And give me some of the history here.
So last time you were on the show, you said you were launched in 2014. Your team size was 37 back then. What are you at today?
Chapter 8: What challenges does DaPulse face in scaling its operations?
70. 70. And what's the breakdown there, like sales, marketing, engineers? Kind of like even, I think, we're like a third engineering, a lot of engineers, R&D, a little bit marketing, customer success, G&A, a lot of growth building company stuff right now going on. Like by the end of the year, we expect to be 100. 100 people. That's great. And where are you guys based?
Are all your folks in Israel? Most of them in Israel, Tel Aviv, and some in the US. And we're growing the operation there as well. That's great. And give me an update. So last time you were on, which was about this time last year, you were at about 5,000 customers. What are you at today? 15. 15,000? Yeah. Roy, that's amazing. 3x year over year, huh?
Now, have you raised additional capital on top of the $9 million, or you still just have $9 million total into the company? Yeah, so in the beginning of the year, we raised $25 million from Insight Venture Partners and our existing investors. So you've raised about $34 million total? Yeah. You got the $25 plus the $9? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it, got it. 34, yeah. Yep, got it.
It took me longer than you to calculate it, yeah. That's okay. You get a free pass because I think it's pretty late over there, right? Yeah, yeah. No, it's actually, yeah, yeah. You know what? Yes, it's late. Use that as your excuse, Roy. I drank like six cups of coffee just so I can keep up with you. There we go. That's funny. Now, give us an update, if you can, on MRR.
So last time you were on, and that was, again, about a year ago, you said you had about 5,000 customers paying $72 on average. So that was about $360,000 in MRR. Has that also tripled? What was it? It's interesting to me. Yeah, yeah. Last time, which was about a year and a month ago, you said you had about 5,000 customers paying a $72 ARPU on average monthly.
If you multiply those, you get $360,000 in MRR. Has that number also tripled? So we're now at over 1 million in MRR. In ARR, it's 13 point something. That's great. Yes, you're at about 1.15 million in monthly recurring revenue. That's incredible growth. How have you grown so quickly? If you had to focus in on maybe one or two different tactics you used.
So first of all, we're a B2B company, but our entire approach is very much B2C. Our tone of voice, how we contact people, how we relate to them is very, you know, we are emotional about what we do. We feel it's like something that is very close to our hearts. And I think our marketing is the same. And kind of like everything we do is kind of in that approach.
So we're very much with the approach of consumer products. That means that we are aiming for individuals that might adopt it for their team, and then it will grow inside the company. So we do a lot of online marketing. How much did you spend last month, would you say, just on online spend? $1.5 million. Okay, wow. So you spent a significant amount. And where is that spread out across?
Is it Facebook and Google Ads mainly? Yeah, and Facebook is a big part of it, and they're awesome. That's great. It works really well. That's really great. Are you managing that internally, or did you hire a firm to manage your Facebook ad spend? Internally. Oh, that's great. What are you paying on average, CAC-wise? So again, we don't really look at the CAC.
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