SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
eComVids Pivots to SaaS For DropShippers to Get Product Creatives
31 Jan 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
We are basically in beta phase right now. We have over 15,000 clips basically on our website right now, and we are about to launch in about a month and a half.
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Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker 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 John Reyes.
He came up after hitting rock, rock bottom, found a way, and through this period, he wanted to find a way to really take control again and prepare to make an exit by the end of 2021. That exit has to do with direct response e-commerce video ads. He's building a company called ecomvids.com. John, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, absolutely.
So what's the company doing? What do you mean by you want to make an exit by the end of 2021?
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Chapter 2: How did the guest pivot from agency work to a SaaS model?
So, so my question is why would people keep paying a monthly subscription fee if they're not using the credits?
Oh, if they're not using their credits, that's a good question. Well, we'd always incentivize people to be using their credits just for the sake of... In the dropshipping model, you always want to be testing and there's always new creatives that we're going to be putting out.
So in the Facebook world, it's all about... What a lot of dropshippers don't do is they don't refresh a lot of their ads and they die out and they move on to the next product. But the thing that we offer is that there's always new stuff going out. So essentially, you're incentivized to keep... keep using those credits because we're always offering value.
Yeah. I mean, when I look at your website right now, I mean, it seems like the skillset is like you guys creating very custom videos for brands like Clorox or Germ-X, this picture you guys have about halfway down your sales page. I mean, why would people use templated stock videos to sell their very personal custom products?
Well, that's the thing. It's not going to be focused so much on those who are private labeled or branded. Dropshipping is, I would say, pretty vast in terms of everyone's selling the same blackhead remover. Everyone's selling the same back stretcher. And a lot of the times people are stealing videos. And so from our experience, we've shot the same product over and over and over again.
And rather than shooting the same product over and over again, we're just like, let's shoot it once and then give it to everybody. So essentially, it's a it's a starting point for beginners who don't have access to high end production like ourselves, who don't want to rely on AliExpress or stealing videos or finding YouTube clips to mash up and they get custom content that isn't burnt out.
So that's kind of where we wanted to position ourselves.
And why do you feel like sort of the grass is greener for you on the SAS like world? I mean, 2 million in revenue sounds like a pretty sweet gig to me, especially with the team size. That's as small as what you guys are. I mean, that's a good revenue per employee number.
Um, well for me, um, I don't want to necessarily have such a large team anymore. I love it. I love my team so much. But in terms of value, I would say we would have a bigger bang for our buck given a subscription model and scalability wise too, because we don't want to continue scaling our team just as our company grows. So that's kind of why we take that direction.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did the guest face while transitioning to SaaS?
How much of your own money have you put into it?
We put about, I would say, $25,000 of just like development costs and labor. And who is we?
I would say e-comm bids. Yeah, but I mean, you, do you have a co-founder? Who is we?
I have two other partners, yeah.
I see. And do you guys just split equity 30-30-30? Yeah.
Roughly, it's 40-40-20. We had a third partner come in that was later in the game. We just focused on operations.
And why do you feel like, I mean, this is a hard model, right? I mean, Netflix, right, in the B2C space for creating content spends, you know what it was, like $13 billion a year creating content to keep users hooked. I mean, you're going to basically try and do the same sort of thing, but B2B and not movies, but clips of products that you have been doing videos for over and over again.
I mean, for you right now, at your stage in life, you had a successful agency. Like, why is this the right move for you? It's considering you only own 30%. you had a successful agency, you know a lot of brands, you own a big email list, why not go launch something that's a pure play tech business that doesn't require so much content?
For me, I feel like this is like the path of least resistance in terms of what we've created as assets, systems-wise, processes, resources, and it just feels like, because we ourselves are really heavy on the, obviously, like the post-production side, like We systemize so many things in house internally, and we realize how valuable it would be to put this stuff out into the world.
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