SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
890 SaaS: Self Serve Infographics Tool Hits $250k MRR
31 Dec 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Good morning, everybody. I wanted to just quickly remind you if you love B2B SaaS and you're loving all these CEOs I have on, remember you can get all of their data in a big, beautiful spreadsheet at getlatka.com. That's G-E-T-L-A-T-K-A dot com. So I hope you're enjoying the month. I love December. I love the holidays. And here is our program for today.
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everybody. My guest today is Eugene Wu.
He's the CEO of Vengage, an infographic design tool. His mission is to help businesses tell their stories with compelling and memorable visuals. He enjoys reading and writing about content marketing, entrepreneurship, and data visualization. You can read more of his articles on the Vengage blog. Eugene, are you ready to take us to the top? I sure am.
I'm so excited to talk to you because I love, love, love data visualization. There's nothing that turns me on more than like, you know, an infographic about like the wealth of, you know, current billionaires when they were 27. So I can like compare myself and see how I'm doing, right? Yes. So tell us what Venngage does. What's your business doing? How do you make money?
So Venngage is an infographic tool. So it's an online tool that allows mainly non-designers, people with very low design skills or non-design skills to create beautiful and like really visually stunning infographics and graphics easily. And what's your model? Yeah, so it's a SaaS model. So it's a freemium model.
There's like a free version and then you can upgrade to a premium and to a higher level business plan. And if you just take the average of all your paying customers, what's the average one pay per month, would you say? The average pay, so one plan's at $19, the other one's at $49. The average comes up to like 20. 22. Less than 25, yeah, 22, 23, something like that.
Yeah, makes a lot of sense there. And give us some of the backstory here. When did you launch the company? Launched in 2012. Actually had a infographics company before that called Visualize Me. It was a resume infographic company. Basically, you stick in your LinkedIn profile and then it like visualized it and then you could pick themes and all that.
So similar to like About Me, except that it was an infographic resume as opposed to like a landing page. So yeah, so started with that. How'd that do? What did you grow that to? Your best year in revenue was what? zero revenues. Well, you didn't say you did it all free. Yeah. So that was completely free. Uh, and the way we monitor, what the hell were you thinking? I didn't know what I was doing.
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Chapter 2: What is Venngage and how does it help businesses?
Yep, yep, yep. So they've done many in this space. By the way, this is like, I want to make sure I'm looking at the right company. It's like Matthew Pinsky, Robert, Rajiv, all those guys. Yes, correct. Matthew Pinsky. Yeah. So Matthew Pinsky approached me out of the blue, like one summer in 2013. And one thing led to another and got acquired.
And I actually went to work for Parchman for about a year and a half. Did you hate it? No, no, not at all. Actually, I quite enjoyed it. It was like the first time I actually worked closely with a CEO. And Matthew Patinsky, by the way, is a pretty well-known name in the education space. He was the creator of Blackboard.
You may or may not have heard of it, but it's like the biggest education company, probably still now. I think it has the biggest exit, like the exit was over a billion dollars. So he was like the first CEO really a well-established CEO that I got to work with. So it was a good experience. So you launched Vengage and you leave Parchment in 2012?
Chapter 3: What is the business model of Venngage?
No. So I sort of left Vengage, went to Parchment, and then Vengage sort of just kind of, you know, went nowhere for a year and a half. Uh, and then I went back to Vengage after, uh, after I left parchment, uh, in 2014, I think, or 2000, yeah, 2014. Uh, and, uh, and then sort of had a, like restarted it all over again.
And back then Vengage was down to like two people, you know, sort of, I hired like, what is it at today? Now it's about 20, 20 people. And have you bootstrapped it mostly? It's mostly bootstrap, yeah. So we had some initial money from Accelerator, like $50,000 from Jolt. And then we got a couple of smaller grants from the government. But it's mainly bootstrap. So how much total in?
How much total in? A little less than half a million. Okay, a little less than half. Okay, wow, that's a lot of grants. Those are obviously non-dilutive, right? No, you're correct, non-dilutive. Except for the Accelerator, that was it. I think we pay whatever, 6%, 7%, whatever the standard rate is. And these grants, where are you based? What country are you in? We're based in Canada. Got it.
So is this a Canadian government kind of grant program?
Chapter 4: What was the backstory behind launching Venngage?
Yes, something like that. Got it. All right. So 20 people, Canada, 2012, you started, it kind of went dead for a year and a half, then you re-engaged it in 2014. What are you at today in terms of customers? We're about 11,000 something clients. Now, are those users? Don't lie to me, Eugene. Paying customers. Paying customers. All right. Yeah, users we have like in the millions.
I honestly don't track three users just because it's a vanity number, but it's over a million. I don't know what it is at the moment. We hit a million a while ago, and I have not kept track. That's good. So 11,000 folks handing you a $20 bill every month. You guys are over $240,000 a month in revenue, right? Yeah. Or around there? Around it. I grew about 250 in MMR, yeah.
Yep, and still no additional capital raise, just the less than 500 grand in? Yes, nothing raised, yeah. How are you? Go ahead.
Chapter 5: How did Eugene Woo acquire users for his first company?
Yeah. No, I was saying I run the business like a bootstrap, like a cash flow business. So yeah, we spend less than we earn. Are you the sole founder? I am now, yeah. So I had a founder early days. What the hell? I mean, what happened? You kill him or what? No, no, no, no. So I had a founder called Lucas Walker. He's still my friend, buddy. In fact, he was in the office like a week ago or so.
No, he left. I mean, you know, there was... as you know, in starting at the start of a startup, there's a lot of stress and there's a, there's a lot of things that happen. And, uh, and, uh, we parted ways, uh, amicably, thankfully. And, uh, and, and, you know, can you be, can you be more transparent there just so other people are comfortable realizing that it's okay.
If you go through shit like this, I mean, look, I had the same issue with my co-founders. They just didn't have the same risk profile. They were getting married. Their wives were about to have a baby and the wives were like, get, you got to go get a real job. I think it was, yeah, it was along the same, same lines. Like his risk profile was a bit different. He couldn't sustain.
So we weren't paying ourselves that much money. In fact, I didn't think, I don't remember now, like we're probably weren't paying ourselves. So, so there was the, the, like, he could not withstand, like, it wasn't practical for him to go to, you know, long periods of time without pay. And it was getting really stressful. Like we weren't making as much money as we thought we would be.
Uh, and, and I think back, back then he was in charge, I was in charge of the product. He was in charge of the sales slash marketing. And so the user acquisition wasn't working, you know, initially. So, So, uh, so what did you try early on? What was, what was not working from an acquisition perspective?
So early on, we thought we would go like enterprise, uh, just cause you know, Hey, you know, we want to validate their product. People have to pay us a lot of money, uh, that before we build it, you know, we were all into the lean startup thing. Uh, and, and we had some, what I call like false starts. So we managed to get a few customers that when I'm at a few, I'm at like less than five.
who were paying us between like $1,500 and like $5,000 a month to use our tool, which was a lot of money for us. And then we thought, oh, we can do this model. And then nine months later, that number pretty much stayed the same. So we like acquired nobody. Were they churning like crazy? Well, we only had five. So yeah. But I mean, did they say no? Or did they pay five grand for a month and churn?
Oh, no, I think after nine months, I think maybe like one or two had churned. In fact, some of them wanted even to pay us more, but then they wanted us to do custom work. And I wanted to basically like... You're not a design agency. Yeah, so exactly.
So we were turning into that and then the sales process was too long and I was like, oh, and then, you know, so that led to some changes into the business model and all of that. And then part of that was, that's why things, you know,
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