939 How he Bootstrapped To $15m in ARR Before $20m Round from IVP
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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.
How did Chris Hall conceptualize Bynder?
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, everyone. My guest today is Chris Hall. He's the CEO of a company called Binder, which has grown and he's grown the company to over 200 employees with six international offices in just three short years. He first conceptualized the idea in 2010 while working to establish a web development company, Label A, which is still in business. In 2012, the Binder was incorporated and by early 2013 had a license for business. Chris, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah. All right. What is Binder and what's your business model? How do you make money?
Well, we're a SaaS company, software as a service, and we are solving the problem that the marketing departments are experiencing. They can't find their files. So we're basically... Solving the age old problem of going through sub folders and searching everywhere on your local drives and network drives to find imagery or logos or the right version of the right file.
Yeah. This is like the marketing person just finished the demo call. The set, the person said, yes, send the proposal. And they're like shit in their Google drive trying to find the right proposal to send. Right. Yeah.
And sales, I mean, they always use the old version of the keynote. And so there's always sort of this, this, these, all these old documents, old versions of that flying around. So that's sort of the problem we're trying to solve.
I get it completely. What are people paying you, would you say, on average per year for this?
Well, our enterprise customers is, I think it's about $5,500 a month now. And our ASP is $2,400, something around that.
I don't understand. How is your ASP?
$24,000, sorry.
Got it. $5,500 times $12,000.
Yeah. Yeah. That's on the enterprise average, uh, average price. And then, um, our overall typical deal size is, uh, it's 24, 25 K. Got it.
I see. So, so sorry. Yep. So on the, on the, on the high side, you have enterprises at, at the 5,500 bucks a month or about 60, 70 grand on the low side, you've got 24 grand annually. Yeah. Okay. What, what, pricing mechanics are you using to drive people from a lower tiered plan to a higher tiered plan? Is it number of seats, additional features? What is it?
Well, we recently launched a freemium model that is, we're kind of rethinking that whole step because that is the tough part, right? We used to be seat based with a model, module pricing.
So
Basically for the enterprise, the more modules they buy, the more they're paying on a fixed rate. And then on top of that, there's a seat-based price. But it's difficult to do that. And so we're sort of moving into usage-based pricing.
And what is the usage kind of consumption metric that is number one for you?
Um, that's also a good question because we just launched our product. Um, right now we are tracking what we're tracking everything basically, but the, the, the one we're probably going to use in, in, in the new pricing is, uh, the number of events basically. So, and those are ROI events. So. Basically, the idea behind the new pricing is make it as fair as possible and as closely aligned to the return on investment of the customers as possible as well. So it sort of seems logical, yeah, if you're making more money, if you're using it a lot, the more you use it, the more you pay.
See, but people can still have the focus you just articulated and still get the consumption metric wrong. Like Facebook credits a lot of their success to realizing they had to get their – it's obviously consumer play there –
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:29
2
How did Chris Hall conceptualize Bynder?
0:29–4:28
3
What is the business model of Bynder?
4:28–8:19
4
How does Bynder generate revenue from its customers?
8:19–10:52
5
What pricing strategies does Bynder use to attract customers?
10:52–18:59