SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping King: $4m ARR with 6 Person Team, $2.8m Profits
11 Jul 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
And can we take the 304 times a thousand bucks a month? You're doing about 300,000 bucks a month in revenue. Yeah. So we just did 310. So yeah. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is James O'Neill.
He's the co-founder and CEO of Wildjar. It's his first startup, 100% bootstrapped, launched in 2016. And he's a passionate and driven with an appreciation for IPAs and APIs. I love that. James, you ready to take us to the top? Yep, ready. Thanks for having me. All right. What is Wildjar? What are people paying you for? So we're a call tracking and analytics platform.
So when customers search online, everything's very measurable through digital analytics. But when the customer picks up the phone and calls, there's a disconnect between what they've done online and that offline journey and conversation. So
We help businesses understand which digital marketing channels drive inbound phone leads, what happens on the calls and the conversations, and then integrate that call data into whatever technology stack you're using. So CRMs, analytics tools, you name it, we'll be there. In December 2020, when we chatted, you mentioned that the average customer is paying about $1,000 per month.
Is that still the average? Yeah, it's actually pretty much bang on. So we've gone through a few changes with how we've approached the market. We started as a product-led platform and we've We shifted to hiring some people in sales development teams and tried to go down that sales development outreach way, but it didn't really work for us. So we've shifted back to pure product inbound strategy.
And yeah, I mean, it's the best model for us. So sticking to that. So let's talk more about inbound in a second. But first, let's get the output of great inbound. How many customers do you have now today? 300. Well, as of last month, billing, it was 304. 304. He knows the number exactly. Okay. I love that. And can we take the 304 times a thousand bucks a month?
You're doing about 300,000 bucks a month in revenue. Yeah. So we just did 310. So yeah. That's awesome, man. All bootstrapped, right? You own 100% with your co-founder? Yeah. 100%. Yeah. That's amazing. Do you create an option pool for employees still just to get them some upside or no? Yeah. So not from an exit point.
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Chapter 2: What is Wildjar and what services does it offer?
We've definitely talked about it. There's nothing in writing, but we've had those conversations internally. But every month, we have a 5% of gross profit as a share. So that goes to employees every month. Okay. Tell me how that works. So on $310,000 of top line revenue, how much do you take to the bottom line? And then how do you split that up usually? Yeah.
So gross profit, I think last month was about $12,000. So in terms of 5%. So that $12,000 split between the team as commission. So we don't pay commission to... I mean, we've only got one sales. Well, James, sorry. Is it 5% of $12,000? No. So $12,000 is the 5% of our gross profit. Oh, I see. I see. Got it. Got it. Got it. So if we take 12,000 times 20, right?
You guys did like, oh my gosh, you guys are very profitable. You did like 240K of gross profit last month. 5% is 12 grand. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then how do you decide who on the team to give what portion of that 12 grand? Yeah. So we said it pretty early. So we're fortunate that we haven't grown too many people to complicate it yet. But so at the moment, so we share it differently.
So sales gets more because that's more of the growth side because there's no individual commission on sales. So that's how we set it from the beginning. It's worked really well because it also means people who come into the business can also share immediately. But it also means the main reason why we started that way wasn't more from a sales point because I was the only person doing sales, but
It was more of a support and technical and implementation side where the quicker they get things done as well, they know that if they help customers faster, close support tickets faster, they also share in that revenue that comes on because we're a very sticky product and it's a growing product. So the more numbers and minutes our clients use, the higher their profit and revenue to the business.
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Chapter 3: How does Wildjar generate revenue and what is the average customer payment?
So how many folks are on the team full-time today? We're at six. So we went from five to 10. And then, so it was three new sales and like a customer success. And we've brought it back to six. I mean, you're doing 50,000 in revenue per employee per month, which is just like exceptional, world-class. Four to five times what your VC-backed competitors are doing. Yeah. Yeah. I know.
It's exciting when you put it down in numbers. This is why I like doing this because you get to really go into the numbers and look at it. And it's exciting. I mean, we love it. So we wouldn't change it for sure. Let me ask you guys, as co-founders, you still have another $200,000 of profit you're making every month. How do you decide how to allocate that capital?
Do you pay it out to yourselves as dividends? Do you keep it in the business? Do you go buy other smaller companies?
Chapter 4: What changes did Wildjar make to its sales strategy?
What do you do with it? So, I mean, we have been looking to acquire. That's definitely been on the roadmap. And we've identified a few businesses. And I mean, debt's pretty easy at the moment too. So we're looking at possibly doing a bit of a debt raise there to do it. But at the same time, it's... We have shared the profit as well. So we've taken it in different times to help each other out.
And yeah, so we've done that too. So it's only been more recently that we've decided to do that because there's no point just keeping it in the business. We invested in another startup. So we did help fund that. There's another sort of charity business that we've put money into. Okay. Yeah. Okay, so you're doing a variety of things. That makes a lot of sense. This is great.
Now, talk to me about the acquisition stuff, right? So when you look at companies to go acquire, considering your stage, what are you looking for? Similar businesses. Our competitors, a lot of them have been around in market for a really long time. And that's where we're winning a lot of our businesses from competitors who haven't evolved. And their platforms and products are still...
They haven't moved forward and they're still on old systems. Some of them haven't even moved to say like AWS and cloud-based. And so we know that we can go in, migrate their platform to our platform. Maybe not everybody and not do it seamlessly, but we know because we're winning so many businesses from them. that we can do it pretty easily.
And also... So you'd go buy an extension where you'd kill their code base, transition their customers from that other billing system onto yours and paying for your tech stack, your code base, your product. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's kind of what we're looking at. And then also other complementary. I mean, SMS has been... There's this huge re-market for it again through e-commerce and the like.
And because we are technically carrier... we started to do a lot more SMS. So we've bundled in sort of SMS products off the back of voice products. So if a call goes into a business and they miss a call, we'll immediately SMS the customer and re-engage with them. And it's just more revenue that is adding onto it.
So looking at other SMS providers, and then we can also just cut that cost back because they're usually paying somebody like us to deliver the SMS. So we buy that to acquire them that way. All right, if you guys are like me, you're traveling a ton and I am working out of the Delta Lounge in Austin, Texas or Barcelona or San Francisco constantly or at local coffee shops.
What that means is I see that network pop up here that says connect and then I'm connected and then I use it. Well, these are open public networks and these are one of the easiest ways for hackers to get into your computer and your accounts, steal your information you don't want them to have.
this is when i started researching vpns it was really because my youtube channel got hacked a while ago a couple weeks ago i couldn't figure out how and so i just wanted to make everything safer so i found nord vpn which is sort of the go-to i mean they're growing very quick it's what everyone's using now to protect their networks for online privacy creating anonymity when they're viewing things online from these public networks i encourage you guys
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Chapter 5: How does Wildjar share profits with its team?
None of those businesses do what we do. And we do everything before the call actually comes into the business. That's where our IP sits. And that's what we're really good at. All those other businesses, it's around like what we're doing now is having the conversation and bringing analytics in the conversation, which is really, really important.
But in a buying cycle through a website, people have been searching for three months or a month. And then... As soon as they call, it goes into the contact center and they have that information, but they don't know what the journey has been like before.
So we're now integrating into like a dial pad and the talk desks and those cloud-based contact centers to enrich their data so that when we send it to the agent, we say this customer has come through a Google paid ad. They started their journey X months ago. They've called three times. So then when they have a conversation, it's more meaningful as well. Yeah, that makes sense.
I mean, if you end up doing that really well, they're all going to want to buy you, right? So that's great leverage for you. Talk to me about churn, right? So what's gross churn and what's net dollar retention? So churn, so like a logo churn. So because we went through that sales, we have churned more than what we traditionally did.
I don't have a number, but a net dollar retention has definitely gone up. So when I worked it out, it was like 22, so I think 122%. Okay. So it's quite, it's still quite strong. That's great. Yeah, it is good. And we actually know it can be better. And the reason why it's not is we've changed our onboarding a little bit too. So we...
we offer, we don't say free because we like to entice them to say that they will stay. So we waive the first month or two months invoices to onboard them with an idea that they would obviously stay on. And by doing that, obviously there's that cost incurred on that side, but you know, it's quite a competitive market at the moment. So it's been good for us to onboard clients easier that way.
Well, James, again, congrats on the growth. It's impressive to watch you guys bootstrapped. We're out of time. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite book. I don't read enough, but we did Traction recently. So that was quite good. So Gino Whitman, I think it was. So that was quite good for us. And I think we'll stick to it. So I'll go with that.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? No, not really at the moment. That's okay. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business besides Wildjar? Slack, 100%. We do everything with Slack still. I think I said that last time and yeah, it's amazing. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Well, I've just had another baby.
So I wasn't sleeping much at all. I was about three or four, but back to about six. So six. Yeah. So nice. So, so you had two kids last time, three kids now married and what you're 37 now. Yeah. 37, two days ago. So I was flying, I flew from Singapore to Scotland. So I had like a 45 hour birthday. So it just kept on going, which is quite good. Man. Well, happy late birthday. I'm sorry.
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