SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
ChiliPiper Meeting Tool Hits $12m Run Rate, Approaching Unicorn Status
14 Sep 2021
Chapter 1: What milestone did ChiliPiper achieve recently?
We actually passed the 10 million mark earlier this year, so we're now aiming for the 20 million mark. That's what we're aiming for.
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Hey folks, my guest today is Nicholas Vandenberg. He's building a tool called ChiliPiper.com. He helps you automate lead qualification, routing, and scheduling.
Chapter 2: How did ChiliPiper navigate challenges during COVID-19?
Nicholas, you ready to take us to the top?
Let's do it.
Nat, last time I saw you was pre-COVID in New York. I think it was 2018, 2019. We had our little CEO mastermind and you were talking about breaking a million dollar run rate and how excited you were. And now you're like, you exploded. What the hell happened?
Yeah, a lot of things happened. Yeah. It's been a different world.
Chapter 3: What factors contributed to ChiliPiper's growth and funding success?
Well, when COVID happened, we...
um it's all sort of advice from our investors to lay off people and cut costs and all that and alina and i felt strongly that we had built a beautiful team and and we shouldn't do that so we actually applied for that payroll protection program from the us government thinking at least you know we'll survive and we don't lay off anybody and um the appetite of what everybody expected happened our company actually grew faster
A lot of people came to us and needed to do more things online. We double inbound conversion rates, so who wouldn't want that for inbound? So next thing, we went from fearing for our life to getting tons of interest from VCs literally three months later. So in June, we did our A round.
We had bootstraps all the way because we were cash positive and we never found an offer that was attractive enough. But this time, the VCs were serious about investing and Base10 gave us a very strong offer. So next thing, we took a 15 million A round.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of ChiliPiper's recent funding rounds?
And what was the pre-money on that?
It was, the post was close to 75. So it was 15 on north of 55.
And then we- 63, 75 post?
yeah and then and then we kept growing even as you can imagine when you bootstrap for a long time you know suddenly you have money you can invest beyond what you were doing and then things go better so unsolicited in march we got an interest from tiger global um i got on a call with john curtis uh And literally he made the offer on the fly.
Later the evening with a term sheet, two weeks later with the money for 33 million be around. So now we're definitely growing faster than we used to, as you can imagine, with this money to invest. We passed 150 employees. We actually passed the 10 million mark earlier this year.
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Chapter 5: How does ChiliPiper enhance lead qualification and routing?
So we're not aiming for the 20 million mark. That's what we're aiming for.
MRR last month, Nicholas?
I always think on run rate annual. So we know between 10 and 15.
Got it. Okay. And you think you'll hit 20 by the end of the year?
That's the plan. Yeah.
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Chapter 6: What new products is ChiliPiper planning to launch?
Yeah. Interesting. Real quick, when you boot trip a company to this scale that you and Elena, and by the way, guys, this is a great story because Nicholas, I'm saying this, Elena is your wife, right?
Yeah, she's my wife and co-founder. That's right.
And then you guys split it 50-50 back in 2016 when you launched?
Yeah, that's right. We did. Yeah.
That's impressive.
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Chapter 7: How does ChiliPiper's team structure support their growth?
And you're still married and things are still good today.
So these are all good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Lex is going to show up to say hi.
How are you? It's good to see you. I love that. Yeah, no, this is, this is a good story.
Chapter 8: What future strategies does ChiliPiper have for acquisitions?
Cause I remember when, when we were in New York, you were really only doing, from what I remember scheduling, like I would see people send me a scheduling and get say powered by Chili Piper. Now you're expanding the product.
That's a very interesting observation you make. It's actually not the case. But the scheduling piece is a visible part of what we do. So that's how people are associated with scheduling. Our product is really about a very simple problem. When you go to a website, you want to talk to somebody, you want to see a demo, you submit a form. And typically, you get a thank you page.
Say, thank you, somebody's going to call you. And there are people whose job they call inbound SDRs to call you and schedule that call. It turns out that the company are happy to convert at 40%, which means that they lose 60 out of 100 of these requests. And they think it's good because they compare that to the outbound where you're trying to get meetings and you get 3% or 2%.
So 40% seems like so good that you send these emails and you get so many meetings. But the reality is these people already said they wanted a meeting. So that's the problem we solve. And the hard problem with that is that The form is typically tied to the marketing system.
It's a very critical part of the marketing system because it's where you know you can tie back the visit to all these actions they've done to a particular person. And the follow-up is done in Salesforce or in CRM. So you had the gap between these two systems. So it was a very hard problem to solve to automate that process. So that's what we did.
We integrated with forms from marketing automation systems to, in real time, get the data, possibly data augments, qualify, route, and retrieve the calendar.
but all that and then book a meeting and what happened is that all our customers doubled the inbound conversion rate so they go from 40 to 80 percent or from 20 some went from 23 to 75 percent right there some in the smb business they lose a lot of their requests uh but the hard part is not to show a calendar the hard part is to do the real-time uh qualification and routing right with all the logic that needs to come with it and also you you don't want to interfere with the marketing automation form so
We think of ourselves as an inbound automation, but people, when they see Chili Peppers, they see the calendar like you did, right? So you think, oh, you're a scheduling company. No, we're a company that does all the hard things to get to scheduling and then end the scheduling piece. And now we see that
There are other pieces that need to happen around inbound, so we're expanding our solution around inbound. That's what we're going to be doing for the second half of the year. Other things around inbound conversion, where we see a lot of opportunities to do the job better than with the legacy system they're doing.
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