SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bot Building SaaS Hits $1.2m ARR With Just $300k Raised
12 Oct 2021
Chapter 1: What is the Bot Platform and how does it enhance employee experience?
So our annual revenue is just under two million and our MRR is 110k and if you notice there's a difference between that that's because as well as charging for license we also have service revenue on top of that.
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. What's up, guys? My guest today is Tom Gibby.
He's the co-founder and CMO of The Bot Platform, a no-code enterprise software solution that empowers people to build a better employee experience on internal communication platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Workplace from Facebook. Tom, you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 2: Who are the primary customers for The Bot Platform?
Absolutely. Well, okay. So tell me more about this. What are people paying for this?
They are paying for the ability to easily build their own work tools. So using the bot platform, our customers can easily build their own bots, bespoke work applications, digital assistants, and automated workflows. As you said, they can connect these to the internal communication channels that their staff are already spending their time on.
So this might be Microsoft Teams that has 250 million plus users. It might be channels like Workplace and Facebook, which is an amazing product that has been built by the team over at Facebook, or soon to be any web-based interface they want using one of our API interaction endpoints.
So who are you selling to in HR?
Chapter 3: What pricing strategies does The Bot Platform use?
Yeah, we are selling to employee experience professionals. So that's HR, internal comms, people, HR teams, that kind of stuff.
And what are they paying on average per month to use the tech?
So it ranges. Our license fee, it's like a 12-month license fee. And the price they pay depends on the size of the company. We have some customers that pay us $1,400 a month, all the way up to others that are paying upwards of $15,000, $20,000 a month.
Is that your biggest customer, $240,000 a year?
Yeah.
Wow.
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Chapter 4: How did the founders pivot from messenger bots to enterprise solutions?
Okay. Interesting. When did you launch? What's the backstory?
Backstory is interesting. So we launched in 2016, but at the time we were actually focused more on messenger bots, like the whole chatbot craze from a few years ago. So we were actually an original messenger launch partner. We launched one of the first bots on Facebook Messenger. It was actually the first bot for the music industry for one of the biggest DJs in the world.
There was a huge amount of buzz around that, and we had a lot of brands and entertainment clients getting in touch.
Chapter 5: What strategies did The Bot Platform use to acquire its first customers?
And we thought it was really interesting, but we started to have a few concerns about how cluttered the market was. But also, we actually thought that the benefits of automation for our clients, even though they were getting huge benefits from the tools they were building, we actually thought that the benefits would be far better to be used internally rather than externally.
So we kind of pivoted about a year or so later And we ran a Betaworks experiment on the side to see if our customers would also get value from building their own automated work tools on Workplace and Facebook. And because we were already a messenger partner, we could actually plug our software directly into Workplace without actually having to rebuild too much of it.
Is that for your first 100 customers? Is it from the Workplace app exchange listing?
Kind of, yeah. It's not the way our platform works. It's not really like an app that you download.
Chapter 6: How much service revenue did The Bot Platform generate initially?
It's like, you know, it's very much like B2B enterprise software that you would then connect to your workplace instance or to Microsoft.
How did you get the first hundred users though? Were they cold outreaching people or did Facebook send these people to you?
I think at first it was probably channel promotion through those partners, so through Facebook. They were a big fan of ours and what we were doing on Messenger, and they were really interested to see if the benefits of bots and automation could also be applied to this workplace tool that they were building as well.
Who was the second channel partner?
Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft. Interesting. Who sent you more early customers?
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Chapter 7: What is the current revenue model of The Bot Platform?
Well, we've only been working on Microsoft Teams for the last six to nine months or so. So definitely Workplace.
I see. Okay. And how many customers today use the platform?
Around 35. 35.
So very much an enterprise motion. Now, can I take 35 times that $1,400 minimum RPU because you're doing like $50,000 a month right now in revenue?
No, we do much more than that.
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Chapter 8: What are the future plans and growth expectations for The Bot Platform?
So our annual revenue is just under $2 million and our MRR is $110K. And if you notice there's a difference between that, that's because as well as charging for license, we also have service revenue on top of that. So some of our customers, for example, pay us.
A lot of customers don't like charging service revenue. It hits their valuation. VCs hate it. Why do you guys do the services revenue?
We actually find that for some of our customers, they might be a bit time poor. They maybe have an urgent use case that they want to launch. And so if they want to pay us a bit of money to help build that for them, that means that we can get them off to a quicker and better start.
So we actually find that in the instances where some customers pay us a bit of money to build a couple of bots for them at the beginning, they get some really good success stories really quickly. That also then gives them a bit of time if they have some urgent use cases They don't need to worry about learning how to use a new platform, a new tool.
They can let us do that for them while simultaneously training their team. Then within a few weeks when they're much more comfortable with using our platform themselves, they can just go off to the races and build whatever they want.
If you're at $110,000 today in SaaS revenue, where were you about a year ago?
Ooh, maybe around 70, maybe. Zero, something like that. Okay. I can give you some other growth stats. I mean, cash and receivables were up 81% year on year. Last month, our invoicing is up 130% compared to last year.
Yep. Interesting. Talk to me about capital. Have you guys raised or you're bootstrapped?
Bootstrapped.
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