SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Can This Data Company Win? $9k to $40k MRR in 6 Months Bootstrapped
18 Aug 2021
Chapter 1: How did the company grow from $9k to $40k MRR in 6 months?
So can I take those 12 customers times 2000 a month, you're doing about 25 grand a month right now in revenue? It's actually higher than that. We are doing almost 40k. 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.
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He's building a tool called ScaleStack.io. He's passionate about technology and making the world better and having fun while doing it. The tool is a B2B data platform to help you accelerate your sales. Elio, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, sure. All right. You bet. Yeah, budger on. Data is a tough space. When everyone buys everyone else's data, it seems like it repackages it.
Do you have a unique data source you're using? I would say that it's not just data, it's tools that we build on top of data. So for instance, we use sources like LinkedIn, Crunchbase, PitchBook. But what we do is that we build tools on top of them. So for instance, for our customers, we listen to their ideal customer profiles, we model it, and then we put a scoring system on top.
So the ideal customer profile provides the inputs, the data sources provide the output, but they are then scored with our proprietary tools. Very cool. And so what are customers paying for this on average per month? Most of our customers pay between $2,000 and $6,000 per month. And do they stick? They stick, yeah.
We usually have like a three-month paid trial so that they can like, you know, we both like see if the model makes sense for them and like, and, you know, sort of like they can check if the ICP gets matched and then they switch to an annual contract. I would say like, you know, 90% of our three-month trial convert to annual. Very cool. And very little churn. How many customers today?
Today, we have 12 customers. And I would say that there are like two groups of customers. One is like NASDAQ listed type of technology companies that have like already experienced ads. scale massive pain points in having their salespeople search for data on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and so much that there are stats that says that 60% of salespeople time is spent researching.
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Chapter 2: What unique tools does the company build on top of data?
That was, uh, one of the smallest customers. So what we've learned from that is that, um, like, uh, companies that are like, um, you know, seed stage to Syria series, a stage. So they haven't yet hit product market fit are like a really tough. Um, how much revenue were they paying a grand a month, two grand a month more less than two. Okay. Got it.
So grand a month is, you know, what you were at that time, like 10, 20 grand. So, okay. Interesting. And do you have expansion revenue? And if so, what do you upsell metrics? Do you like upsell against number of seats, number of leads, something else? It's a combination of seeds for our Chrome extension feature.
And then on top of that, it's different data sources that we can activate for our customers and different APIs to facilitate the injection of the data that we provide into existing workflows. The way we look at our product, it's similar to Zapier. So they create workflows for simple processes that people need to do. So then we do that for B2B sales data.
Take LinkedIn data, enrich it with some of the PitchBook or CrunchBase. And then like create and add the scoring system to see how close that company resemble. Got it. That requires technology of eight people on the team. How many are engineers? Three. Three. Okay. Any sales reps? No, we're just, just you. Yeah. All right. Good.
And so, so how do you go from where you are today to, you know, about a hundred grand a month or 300 grand a month? Well, I mean, like 100 grand right now seems within reach with our current pipeline in the next, I would say, six to nine months. And then for the 300, I think it really depends on how well we can grow the existing customer basis.
Our top customer has now doubled the size of their monthly billing. What's your top customer pay per month? With the renewal, they're now going to pay $7,200 a month. Okay, that's great. Yeah, that's really good. Very cool. So what's the next product line here? I mean, this is something that, you know, people would argue data is a commodity today. You're making money on it right now.
But what's next product line? It's all about tools that you build on top of the data. I agree that data is a commodity, but what you do with that data and how can you integrate that data into existing workflows is where we see the value that we can generate.
Something as simple as the scoring system, scoring as in, is this account close to my ideal customer profile, generates tremendous value for our customers because their salespeople can start targeting from the highest scoring companies and then go down the list. Yep, totally understandable. We're going to watch closely as you go build that, hopefully keep scaling, doubling revenue.
Any plans to raise capital or you want to stay bootstrapped? Not for now. I mean, eventually, yes, but not for now. All right. I think that we're fine like we are. On that note, Elio, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite book? Guns, Germs, and Steel. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now? I'm studying the career of Jeff Bezos.
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