SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 375: Dad of 4 Holds Secret to Buying Time, Clearing Your Calendar With Ari Miesel of LessDoing.com
03 Aug 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Dustin Goodwin. He's in the HR industry, specifically in the software as a service space, looking to increase his revenue. So congratulations, Dustin.
Chapter 2: How does Ari Miesel define productivity in his consulting business?
For your guys' chance to win 100 bucks every Monday on the show to build your idea, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444. Again, text the word Nathan to 33444. 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.
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. This is episode 375. Coming up tomorrow morning, you'll hear from Frank Urokota. He did $5 million. I raised $5 million on a $15 million pre-money valuation for his goal, for his blockchain-based Burst IQ company.
Again, $5 million raised on a $15 million pre-money valuation.
Chapter 3: What unique services does Less Doing offer to its clients?
Top Tribe. Good morning. Our guest today is Ari Maizel. And look, this is a guy that I met because he's just, he's an efficient, efficient guy. And he's built the whole system around getting more done faster, right? It's called less doing. It's a great, great business. We're going to jump into it today, but Ari, are you ready to take us to the top? I am ready, Nathan. Thanks for having me.
Chapter 4: How does Ari's business model generate recurring revenue?
Of course. Okay. So tell us what you do and how you make money. Okay. So, uh, Productivity consultant slash coach. I started this productivity system called less doing seven, six or seven years ago. And I do coaching. We would do group coaching, individual coaching, and then we do business consulting. And the main thing now is that we have a virtual assistant company.
Chapter 5: What strategies does Ari use to attract customers?
Okay. So of all, we could go down kind of any of these rabbit holes. So let's go back to 2015, which one of those particular lines of businesses made up the most revenue? And then let's focus there. Well, it's funny. The virtual assistant company by far, even though the virtual assistant company started in the third quarter of last year. That's crazy. Okay. So is this lessdoing.com? Yes.
Chapter 6: How does Ari balance family life with running a business?
Yeah. Okay. So tell us how this thing works because it's hard. It can be hard for people to wrap their minds around. How does it actually work as a consumer wanting to pay for this? Okay. So we, well, first of all, I'm almost like remiss to call them virtual assistants because we do so much more. We're more like
On-demand project managers, and to a greater extent, we are your on-demand chief of staff. So we can handle any project of any size, business or personal.
Chapter 7: What insights does Ari share about his book and its impact?
And people sign up for a subscription of $149 per month, which is basically a membership fee, and then they're paying $50 per hour, and we bill by the second. And we're extremely efficient. All of the assistants are trained in my methods and my methodologies. And when I say we can do anything, I mean anything.
And we're doing things from producing podcasts, creating sales funnels, writing books, research, travel planning. Really, we haven't had to turn down a single project yet. So do you look at this? I mean, this is kind of a SaaS business, right? You've got a recurring aspect here. Oh yeah, absolutely.
Chapter 8: What advice does Ari give for aspiring entrepreneurs?
That was a really big, we didn't have that the first month and that was a really important shift for us. You mean the monthly fee? The monthly, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so let's break this down. So SaaS business, you launched it in late 2015, you said, right? Yep, I think just the very end of August, actually. Okay, so this is always an embarrassing answer, but you got to start somewhere.
What was first year total revenue on that business? Well, we haven't had a full year yet. Well, I know. That's why it's going to be embarrassing. In 2015, what was total revenue? In 2015, I want to say it was $200,000. Okay. And what do you think you'll do here in 2016? Oh, we're going to break a million for sure. Oh, nice. Nice, nice, nice.
Okay, so let's dive deeper here because I want to understand kind of how the relationship between people paying you kind of monthly and then how many hours they're typically billing and some other tasks they're using you for. So how many... How many current, so it's June 2016 now, how many current customers are paying you that monthly fee?
Uh, I think we're at last count would be like in one 70ish range. Okay. One 70ish range. And how are these folks finding you? I mean, by the way, well, tell me first how they're finding you. Then I want to add something about how you, how we found each other. Okay. Well, so I mean, first of all, we're actually in the process right now of putting in some serious analytics.
So we're going to know really like the actual numbers behind those answers. But, uh, for the most part, I have created a pretty big following with less doing, I think I have,
best-selling book and now I have my second book just came out last week and a lot of people find me that way we have the podcast which is a top podcast not the top podcast like yours and it's which is also so anecdotally the podcast seems to be one of the best ways that we find people because it seems like they really get to know what we do part of part of the problem in our business is a lot of very few people who are high performers self-identify as unproductive and
And the truth is, it doesn't mean that they're unproductive, but they can always be more productive. So it's a little bit hard to get people to realize that themselves. So the podcast is great, hear how things are done, what we can do. And then that's when they say, oh my God, I do that every day. I didn't know someone could do that for me. So the podcast is really huge.
And then we just have some strategic partnerships that have been really fruitful for us. Yeah, and you care a lot. I mean, the way that we got connected, I mean, you really qualify. I mean, you care about the people that are signing up. This isn't like a no touch kind of thing.
You really, you have to know and kind of be close to these 170 people that are paying you every month because they're asking you to do tasks that might be personal. Yeah, well, and beyond that, you know, we are an expensive service as far as virtual assistants go.
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