SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
939 How he Bootstrapped To $15m in ARR Before $20m Round from IVP
18 Feb 2018
Chapter 1: 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.
Chapter 2: 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?
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Chapter 3: What is the business model of Bynder?
That simplicity is like critical. So for like you, are you still experimenting? I mean, can you say a statement like we have to have the company in the first month do 10 file lookup searches for them to be sticky?
Well, it's a mix of those different things. And we're actually tracking those personas and tracking the most likely cohorts that will actually become active users and convert to paying users. We're tracking that through Amplitude. And we're discovering, so there's different personas and there's different ways to get to that critical lock-in or critical stickiness. So it's not one metric.
It could be the amount of people they invite, because we have unlimited users in this model. Um, so the more they invite people and the more they upload and the more they start sharing those files, that's a good indicator of stickiness, but it's, there are different, different paths to, uh, to conversion.
Why are you choosing to figure out that magical number by, by looking at new cohorts versus going into your, you know, downloading your current customers, looking at the ones that have paid you the most and saying, what did they do in their first month that has now led them 10 years later to pay us this much money?
Well, um, we have been looking at our existing data for our, flagship product. But one of the things that we've noticed is what we want to try and do is bring down, which is sort of a legacy name, or that's the category name we're in visual asset management, trying to bring that to the masses. CRM, CMS systems, they used to be high end enterprise solutions. And now it's sort of commodity.
And we're trying to do the same thing with with down. And So what we're trying to remove is that barrier of a, of a long implementation period. Um, and we're trying to automate that. So we can't really compare that, that first initial usage, um, with our flagship product because it's a different, it's a different product.
So you launched in 2012. Where are you at today in terms of total paying customers?
Uh, we have 450 plus clients right now. Um,
and over 250 000 users in in the system um i think over 50 countries we're active in so yeah it's um starting to take some uh it's starting to get some traction no it's great and you said earlier kind of your minimum acv or asp was around 24 grand or two grand or two grand a month can i take the two grand times the 450 and assume you're doing about 900 grand a month in revenue um
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Chapter 4: How does Bynder generate revenue from its customers?
Um, and last year, uh, August, we did our first round of funding with, uh, uh, insight venture capital. I'm sorry. Insight venture.
You go to the dark side. Why? You don't even know their name.
Why do it?
Uh,
It's a big step to do. It was our first round, and it was a very exciting, ambitious step to do a round with those guys.
What was the round size? How much?
It was 22 million. Well, 20 million euros, so about $22 million. Yep.
And why'd you do it, though? You're killing it. How do we get there? No, why? Why do you do it?
Well, that's also a good question because we try to sort of prolong that as long as possible. And I think, um, anyone bootstrapping recognizes that sort of number one, two and three problem in your life is cash. Uh, it's very cashflow driven. Um, and at a certain point that is just the, it's, it's too much of a barrier, um, and, and it's, and it's slowing down the potential growth.
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Chapter 5: What pricing strategies does Bynder use to attract customers?
So, yeah, there's still some other shareholders in the management team. But other than that, we're not that far diluted yet. So we still have sort of potentially room if we want to do a B or C round. We can do that without really hurting the whole cap table structure.
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If you had, at the same time you got the offer for 20 million from Insight, if you had someone like Benioff come to you, Mark Benioff from Salesforce come to you and say, hey, we'll buy the whole thing for 60 million right now, would you have taken that deal? No, you, you wouldn't have. Interesting. Interesting. So you're, you're like a billionaire bust kind of guy.
You don't care if you only own 5% by the end of it, but you want a billion dollar company.
Um, yeah, it's, it's a little different because we were pretty big when we did this. I mean, this is very late. We were already pretty big when we did this round.
So you were like 10, 15 million ARR, right?
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