SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Can He Convert Twitter Followers to Software Subscribers?
16 Mar 2021
Chapter 1: How did the guest onboard their first customers?
I onboarded our first customers literally through Zoom. But how'd you even get connected with them to even ask them to come on Zoom with you? Where'd you find these people? Twitter, man. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka. Now if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed. To subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
When you subscribe, you won't hear ads like this one. You'll get the full interviews. Right now, you're only hearing partial interviews. And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting. Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public. We've got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Lookers CEO Frank Behan before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion. We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
There, you'll find a private RSS feed that you can add to your favorite podcast listening tool, along with other subscriber-only content. Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Tim Salo.
He's the future of work, or he calls himself Mr. Future of Work. He's a founder, investor, and creator, and is currently leading GuideGroup.com with an E on the end. It's a new age experience group and collective that owns two brands, Guide and Big Black Tea. All right, Tim, you ready to take us to the top? Let's talk, Nathan. Let's get it. Okay, so how do these two things relate?
A tea company and a tool to help manage your teams? Nathan, it's kind of wild. Well, first of all, we launched our tea brand last year during COVID, October 2021. And we also launched our software platform July 2021 as well. I'm sorry, not 2021. I'm in this year, both in the same year in 2020.
And fundamentally, you know, we're a tea culture, fundamentally, but we also believe that the world needed it due to COVID-19. And when we think about tea, we think it's just complementary to our product, our software product, which is learning. You can learn with tea, you can get better and healthier with tea. And it's very driven on our virtues and values as a community-driven company.
So that's how we came together with a tea brand and a software brand, man. Okay, so you launched then, you launched GuideGroup then in last year, 2029, 2020? Yeah. Yeah, 2020, man. During COVID-19, we launched. So talk to me about going to market. How did you get your first customer? Man, it's very guerrilla tactics wise, man.
I onboarded our first customers literally through Zoom and we just had deep conversations and said, hey, look, we just launched a product. Do you want to try? Do you want to be our first beta creator and give us feedback? And that's actually led us to being connected with more customers. We're actually still in beta and we're going to be expanding our beta.
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Chapter 2: What role did Twitter play in customer acquisition?
It's currently working on our roadmap. and this is a magical moment every founder has to go through what do you charge the first time you put pricing up so what are you going to charge and how do you come to the decision Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question.
So we're going to be actually charging for our business tier because, I mean, I don't know how deep your viewers talk about pricing model on the podcast, but we're charging $30 per employee for our business tier. But we also have a consumer tier, which we're charging $10 to $15 based on an annual and a monthly payment.
A lot of you guys will ping me out of the blue asking for help selling your software companies, but I'm not a broker and I'm really focused on founder path right now, not helping folks sell their company. So I'm always looking for great tools to recommend for you guys to quickly figure out what you could potentially sell your company for and how much cash you could get.
That's where Flippa comes in. Now, here's my thing about brokerages, especially for selling your company. You guys should not have to pay a 10% brokerage fee when you put your blood, sweat, and tears into building your company for years and have a sale.
Chapter 3: How does the guest's tea brand complement their software product?
All smart founders know, though, that the best way to maximize price is to have multiple options. So how do you get multiple options, multiple bids on your company without paying a broker 10% or more? Well, I recommend Flippa because they have the largest list of buyers for these sorts of digital assets, which almost always guarantees a bidding war.
I tell my founder friends all the time to try Flippa's valuation calculator to see what their company is worth. And I encourage you guys to do it today. Go to NathanLacke.com forward slash Flippa right now to test out the valuation calculator for free. That's NathanLacke.com forward slash F-L-I-P-P-A.
Doesn't it make it really hard to go to market if you're trying to sell to consumers and the B2B sales motion where you're selling on a per seat model per employee? Actually, it doesn't. It just depends on how you build the platform. When it comes to marketplaces, you have to actually think holistically.
A lot of people, when they build marketplaces, they only think about one vertical first, but eventually if you're going to try to scale, you're going to have to expand. Yeah, but don't you, I'm sorry, I have to disagree with you there. I mean, there are so many marketplaces that try and be everything to everyone on day one and they never scale versus what, you know, like a top towel, right?
Or a design pickle. And they focus exclusively on engineers or designers. And then they expand after years and years of history. You're trying to do two things at once right on day one. Why? Well, the reality is that building a marketplace is you have to think from the ground up. You can do everything on day one, but it depends on how you build the platform. I don't know.
Have you ever built a SaaS marketplace? Yeah. Tim, have you listened to any, just for context, we've interviewed almost 3,000 SaaS founders, of which about 180 of them have built marketplaces doing between, call it a million and up to 100 million per year in revenue.
And almost all of them exclusively talk about how they had to monopolize one industry first before expanding into additional marketplace models. For example, Writer Access right now started with a writing marketplace to hire writers. And he's just now three years in and over 10 million through his platform last year, now scaling into design. He didn't start with writers and designers.
He just started with writers to monopolize it. Yeah. You know, the thing about us is we're starting actually with it's a it's a hybrid marketplace platform. So it's a bit different than traditional marketplace platforms that focus on one vertical niche to start off because you can still do that. But we have to build a business model to support the platform.
from the inside out and the bottom is up. So our platform is unique in that sense that when you compare it to traditional marketplace platforms, it's a little bit off because we don't have to necessarily focus on a vertical niche, which there are marketplaces like that. And some of them are more consumer. And to a degree, ours is business to consumer. And Business to business.
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Chapter 4: What guerrilla tactics were used to attract early customers?
His name is Tim. He's one of our most popular creators on God right now. He's active on LinkedIn. He's a professional in this Adventist healthcare facility. And in addition to that, he also buys into our team brand. Consumer, professional, Fitz is a perfect case study for the type of person we want using the platform.
But you also have to think about he's connected to a network of customers in a B2B sense. So often when you read a lot of articles and blogs, they're like, oh, like consumers in B2B, you got to sell differently to them than you do consumers. And the reality is that, no. There's consumers in the business context, and there's consumers who are just consumers.
Yeah, Tim, I mean, again, I'll disagree with you here. Really what you're talking about, in my opinion, is bottoms-up versus top-down. If the employee you just mentioned, Tim, is putting this payment on his personal credit card, you're taking a bottoms-up approach where you sell directly to the consumer who's also an employee.
He then gets his coworkers to use it, and eventually the CTO or the head of HR at the company is paying 30 per seat for all 10 people that Tim signed up. That's bottoms-up versus top-down. top down B2B where you're selling directly to the HR manager and you're selling 30 seats on day one. Which route do you plan to go? Well, the reality is that a hybrid model works better than just one.
You can go bottoms up and you can go tops down. I mean, I've never seen someone with a dual business model focus on day one have success focus. Well, I mean, obviously you can't do both at once. That's why you build the platform bottoms up. But the reality is that you're going to start. Yeah, that's why we built the platform bottoms up to ensure that it's self-service and it scales.
And we don't necessarily have to have too much velocity when it comes to a directive, like a direct to the business bottom top down sales model. So so for us, it fundamentally is like, how can we make this?
How can we automate the business as much as possible from even a software experience standpoint so customers don't necessarily have to always have us hand-holding them throughout the entire buying and purchasing journey? So how do you go get 10,000 Tims? So, you know, as far as selling to them? Well, yeah. How do you go find them? You got to go get sales. You got to get distribution.
Demand generation. You know, gratefully, you know, we built a really great brand. We recently featured Forbes Next 1000. So really, you know, demand generation. We already have a huge network and community online through Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Yeah, but how do you get them using GuideApp? I mean, your Alexa rank on the website is 1.6 million. They only have one inbound site link.
I mean, how do you get all that community traffic to your site using your tool? Wait, you said that last question? You said Alexa? Yeah, your Alexa rank, which just measures unique website views to your site each month is ranked 1.6 million. There's only one site linking into guideapp.co.
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Chapter 5: What is the unique selling proposition of the Guide software?
Okay. What's a book that is not your own book that you enjoy? The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek. I don't know if it's my favorite of all time, but it's a good one. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? Yeah. I love Ryan Roslansky from LinkedIn. He's a great guy. We're mutual friends. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the business?
My favorite online tool for building the business, Twitter and LinkedIn, because that's where customers and community is. Number four, Tim, how many hours of sleep are you getting every night? Seven to eight, at least seven to eight. That's healthy. And what's your situation, married, single, kids? I am single, man. I'm single, bro. And how old are you? I am 27, man. 27. Last question.
What's something you wish you knew when you were 20? Something I wish I knew when I was 20. Oh man, dude, like I was incredibly creative, but I think I never told myself that. I operate based on limiting beliefs. And I think now I embody that a lot more. Guys, there you have it.
Guidegroup.com, a tea brand and a software play on the HR tech space, helping teams train their other team members faster. Bottoms up approach, pre-revenue right now on the software side, but putting a pricing wall here in the next couple of weeks. Tim, we're rooting for you. Thanks for taking us to the top. Thank you, Nathan. I really appreciate the opportunity.