SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 357: He Quit His Job, Lost His Life Savings, Then Hit it Big With SaaS Business
16 Jul 2016
Chapter 1: Who is Hank Leber and what is Vytamin?
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 top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
Chapter 2: What challenges did Hank face with his first startup?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks that I give away every Monday is Kim Dust. She's in the entertainment industry and is currently working a full-time day job and doing her side hustle on the side.
Chapter 3: How did Hank recover from losing his life savings?
Kim, congrats. For you guys' chance to win 100 bucks every Monday, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to officially enter.
Chapter 4: What is the revenue model for Vytamin?
Again, text the word Nathan to 33444 after you've subscribed.
Chapter 5: What strategies does Vytamin use to manage customer churn?
Top Tribe, you know I don't have a lot of time to waste. That's why I use FreshBooks to send out invoices and make sure I'm collecting my money.
Chapter 6: How does Vytamin generate revenue without a marketing budget?
To get your free month, go to nathanlatka.com forward slash FreshBooks and enter the top in the how did you hear about us section. Top Tribe, this is episode 357. Coming up tomorrow morning, you hear from Karam Haseen. His SaaS company did 10 million in 2015 and it helps salespeople win big. Okay, top drive.
Chapter 7: What insights does Hank share about entrepreneurship?
Good morning, everybody. Our guest this morning is Hank Lebern. He is the founder and CEO of Vitamin, a marketing technology company that provides an end to end growth system for early stage companies. He's an advertising executive turned entrepreneur. He's won major awards in digital and social media strategy and creative communications.
He's best known for putting the Travelocity gnome on chat roulette. Hank, are you ready to take us to the top? I am. Thanks for having me today. Tell us real quick, what were you doing before we go on to vitamin? What were you doing? Were you working with Travelocity or working with Chatroulette? Yeah, Travelocity.
I was on the agency side working at McKinney in North Carolina, which is a smaller agency with big brands. And Travelocity was one of our clients. I love that.
Chapter 8: What advice does Hank have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Okay, very cool. Okay, so let's go back to vitamin. So tell us what vitamin does and how do you guys generate revenue? Yeah, vitamin is marketing technology software that helps early stage companies have an end to end marketing solution pretty much right out of the box.
So in 15 minutes time, you can have a system set up that gives you traffic that drives to a landing page that converts to an email address and the email marketing and the metrics all in one. And that right there is actually a really hard thing to build if you don't have a marketing team with you, which most early stage companies don't have. And it almost sounds too good to be true.
So let me ask customer, sorry, pricing wise, what's this cost? Yeah, it is $1,000 a month service at the most basic package. And then it goes up from there if you want deeper features or more traffic. So it starts at $1,000, which is about half the price of a paid intern to get a team's worth of work. I love how you put out that comp, right? The opportunity cost is about half of a paid intern.
That's usually what people put on these projects. Yeah. And what you get is garbage in, garbage out. No offense to interns, but if you have some marketing needs that are pretty advanced or you really need to have that whole system running smoothly, very difficult to do that without hiring expensive people to do it. And so do you, you mentioned a thousand bucks a month.
Do you see yourself as a SaaS company? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, as most SaaS companies, we've had some Wizard of Oz to get started, where you got a man behind the curtain that's turning the wheels a little bit to get started. But yeah, absolutely. And these days, marketing technology can be SaaS. There's a lot of data going into, you know, machine learning AI that's happening now.
And it's actually made a very cool environment for marketing technology. And why did you, so what year did you found this business in? It was in January of last year. This is 2015. So it was, yeah, just about a year and a half ago we started. And help us understand, why did you, were you just fed up with corporate? You didn't want to do the agency stuff anymore or what?
Why'd you, why'd you start it? Yeah. So I had been working in the big agency world, which was it was invigorating for a while, you know, making TV spots and, you know, big websites and things like that. Brands with big budgets. But, you know, I actually had goals in my life. that I had wanted to hit in the agency world. And I hit them all and then was kind of stuck.
I'd wanted to work on a Super Bowl ad. I wanted to win some awards and I wanted to make a lot of money and rise up the ranks fast. So I was lucky to work on good teams with good brands and push them hard and get all those things done in a three year span instead of a 30 year career. And so I was like, all right, well, what else? What else do we do?
And then the answer is the same thing over and over. Make more ads. win more awards if you can, make more ads and then make more ads. So we'll pay you more money than make more ads. And that's just, it seems like a cycle that doesn't end. And I'd much rather be making things that never existed and change the way people think instead of just more ads.
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