SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 318: She Threw Away Old Company, Now Doing $3.3 Million/year, $18,000,000 Raised With MatterMark.com
07 Jun 2016
Chapter 1: What is Mattermark and how does it generate revenue?
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Chapter 2: Why is discussing equity splits important among co-founders?
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Chapter 3: What metrics should you focus on to prevent customer churn?
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You are listening to episode 318 of The Top, and coming up bright and early tomorrow morning, you are going to hear from someone who's 23 and his Asian parents don't like the non-traditional entrepreneur route that he's taking. Top Tribe, good morning, good morning, good morning.
Our guest this morning is Danielle Morrill, and she's a technology executive with more than 10 years of experience solving business problems with software. She's currently the CEO and co-founder of Mattermark, organizing the world's business information.
She's the Y Combinator Summer 2012 graduate, formerly head of marketing and employee number one at Twilio, the cloud communications platform company, and supply chain is still her first love. Danielle, are you ready to take us to the top?
Absolutely.
Let's do this.
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Chapter 4: How did Danielle pivot from her initial startup idea?
Okay, first things first. What is Mattermark and how do you guys generate revenue?
Mattermark is a service where people can research private companies. We are a staff company, so we generate revenue when people sign up for a recurring monthly or annual subscription to access our data and do research.
Okay, that's great.
Chapter 5: What are the roles of Danielle's co-founders at Mattermark?
So what do people get? Just tell me the story of your last customer or a customer that pays you.
Yeah, so there's kind of the easiest way to think of it is the sell side and the buy side. So either you're looking to sell to companies or you're looking to buy equity in them. So you have customers on both sides of that equation. So we have venture capitalists and hedge funds trying to figure out what companies are worth and what companies to invest in.
And then we have salespeople trying to figure out which companies make excellent targets. So in both cases, they're prospecting for the best opportunities to put them into their CRM or into a spreadsheet and then prospect and reach out to the people on the team.
Okay, great. And so give us a sense of when you launched the business.
Chapter 6: How much capital has Mattermark raised so far?
What year did you launch it?
So we launched in 2013.
Okay, 2013. And as of... And I always love asking this question. Do you remember what first year revenue was?
Chapter 7: What is Danielle's vision for the future of her business?
I mean, I think it was a couple hundred thousand dollars.
It's pretty small. You got to start somewhere though, right?
Absolutely. I was very proud of that at the time.
Chapter 8: What advice does Danielle have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
I'm so proud of it.
Yeah, that's a good one. Now, where did you... Give people some more context. What did you leave in order to start Mattermark?
So, I mean, I left Twilio ultimately to start my own startup. And actually we started something completely different called Referly. That's the company that got into Y Combinator. We did that for about a year. And we realized it was a terrible business, terrible margins. We were never going to make much money.
Was that an ambassador program, like a referral program, affiliate marketing?
Pretty similar to that. Yeah, it was affiliate marketing, but kind of consumerized so anybody could use it really easily.
Okay. Okay, great. So you pivoted.
Yeah, but you know, you don't make a lot of money being the middleman. So we decided let's do something where we're really building the software and where we're the ones creating the value. So we built that company.
So you pivoted, obviously. Did you pivot while you were still at Y Combinator or after Demo Day?
It was after. So it was about six or seven months after. Okay.
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