SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 350: Toronto Based SaaS Doing $25k MRR with 10 Clients with Amanda Parker
09 Jul 2016
Chapter 1: What inspired Amanda Parker to transition from a marketing agency to a SaaS business?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
Chapter 2: How did Simply Insight acquire its first clients before launching the software?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is none other than Derek Rodenbeck. He is an artist and he's looking to increase his revenue. If you want your chance to enter and to win 100 bucks each Monday on the show, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it.
Again, text the word Nathan to 33444. Top Tribe, this is episode 350.
Chapter 3: What pricing model does Simply Insight use for its subscription service?
Turn in bright and early tomorrow morning to hear how Anvu has built a 50K monthly recurring revenue business. Finally, designers can quickly give files to developers with Anvu of Avacode. Top Tribe, good morning. Our guest today is Amanda Parker, and Amanda is the CEO and co-founder of Simply Insight, a data and analysis as a service platform.
Simply Insight plugs directly into your data sources and allows you to ask questions of your data in natural language. Previously, Amanda ran a successful digital marketing agency working with notable clients like Pepsi, 20th Century Fox, UMG, and Indigo.
Chapter 4: How is Amanda managing customer acquisition costs effectively?
Amanda, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, I have to tell you. So Pepsi, 20th Century Fox, UMG, these are like comfy, cozy clients that are going to look great on your LinkedIn profile. Why give all that up for a hard, hard startup?
Well, we found when talking to those clients that data was such a core issue. And then we started investigating it and learned that this was a real business opportunity. So that's why we decided to jump in because it's a huge problem and the existing tools are just not solving the problem.
Chapter 5: What challenges does Amanda face while raising her first angel investment round?
Was the agency your agency?
Yep.
And so give me a sense of how big that was. People know what you gave up. How many total employees? What was 2015 revenue? How big was it?
Yeah, we were growing.
Chapter 6: What are the key metrics that indicate Simply Insight's growth?
So we were into, you know, doing hundreds of thousands in client contracts. So we were growing concern. I was still pretty young when I was doing this. I started that when I was 21, just coming straight out of school. Yeah.
So as we started to get more technical with a lot of our clients and I met my co-founder around the same time, it just seemed like a perfect opportunity to go out and build something really big.
And so is that still growing?
Chapter 7: How does Amanda view the current market for starting a SaaS business?
Is that still in existence today?
No, no.
You shut it down.
Yeah, exactly. We did it for a bit just to help with revenue and start paying everybody as we were building our startup. But ultimately, it was all about focus. You have to pick one thing and go really hard at it.
Yeah. Okay, so tell us more about Simply Insight. How do you make money?
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Chapter 8: What advice does Amanda give to entrepreneurs about stress and focus?
Sure. So we charge a subscription license, very similar to a lot of the other analytics tools out there in terms of how we're charging. So it's a license fee for clients. They pay anywhere between $2,500 and $5,000 per month.
Yeah, I see. I'm looking right now. This is a, I mean, would you consider yourself a SaaS product?
Yes, absolutely.
Okay, yeah. So this is going to be a fun interview because this is on the higher end in terms of ARPUs. Typically, I get ARPUs between our average revenue per user per month, somewhere between like 10 and maybe at a max a grand per month. It looks like you're going to have some probably really healthy economics numbers, which I can't wait to kind of jump into.
So help the listeners understand, when did you launch the business? How many years has it been going?
So we had a product before this that we were working with a lot of those clients that you mentioned earlier called Uplet. And that has eventually morphed into Simply Insight. So we started Simply Insight about six months ago when we signed on our first client contracts before we actually even had a product in market.
Amen. Don't you love that? It's the best feeling.
It is. That's always been our motto is kind of sell first or find clients, find a problem first and then build. Don't build yourself into a hole.
Oh, because you'd waste so much money. Exactly.
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