SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 383: Prospect.io $0 to $17k in MRR in 6 Months, 400 Customers
11 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 is Zach Faron. He's a 22-year-old Apple employee, and he's listening to the show and loving it. For your chance to win $100 every Monday, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word NATHAN to 33444 to prove that you did it to enter. This is episode 383.
Coming up tomorrow morning, you'll hear from Carissa Hill, who has turned Facebook Live into webinars. She sold over $105,000 on her last Facebook Live. She'll break down how she does it, including the psychology and the tools she uses.
top tribe good morning to you our guest this morning is vincenzo and i got to tell you you know this guy he's his company's prospect.io but he's been an entrepreneur for almost 10 years in the web industry mainly software as a service or sas he's currently the founder and ceo of prospect dot io so vincenzo rugiro are you ready to take us to the top
yeah all right let's do this so first things first what is prospect.io and how do you make money um so prospect.io is a software an online software sas software in fact what we do is you know sales prospecting automation uh so we help sales representatives to do prospecting online uh in a more efficient way you know Great. So, tell us how you make money. What are the plans? Yes, that's a SaaS.
So, basically, we sell, you know, we have revenue, recurring revenue. So, you have to, you know, choose a plan and then pay every month and we make money like that.
And so, tell us, let's go back to last year, 2015, what was total revenue?
Yeah. So just to be clear, we created this company six months ago. So we are only six months old. Got it. Okay.
So that would have been what month? What month did you launch?
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Chapter 2: What is Prospect.io and how does it generate revenue?
Right, great, 400 paying customers. So here's one thing people are gonna be wanting to know. You in six, well, what is it, seven, you're seven months old now at this point. You launched in January 2016, it's now July 2016. You've gone from nothing to 400 paid customers paying 45 bucks a month on average for a total of 17,000 bucks in monthly recurring revenue. How did you do that?
What's one thing that's driven the most customers?
So we don't do direct marketing like paying advertising or things like that. I like to say that we try to create value for our customers. So that creates a lot of word of mouth. A lot of people are referring our tool to other customers. We also have some kind of partnership with Close.io and Pipedrive because we have native integration with these two CRMs.
How do they drive your users? Walk us through what that flow looks like.
Yeah, that's pretty easy. We are just listed on their website. Close.io made a blog post about us. We did a discount for people coming from Close.io. So yeah, that's mainly what we do. And of course, word of mouth, we really try to give a lot of value to our customers, to take care of them. The second hire we made was a customer success manager.
Yeah, because we really want our customers to be good with us and to get a lot of value out of the tool.
Let's just talk about Close.io. How many customers has Close.io driven you, would you guess, out of the 400?
Oh, I don't have the exact number, but something like 50, maybe. Okay.
And what about the other one you mentioned, which was, I forget the name of it.
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Chapter 3: How did Vincenzo achieve $17,000 in monthly recurring revenue?
I think it's two books, in fact, Getting Real and Rework from 37 Signals. Both good.
Both very good. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?
Yeah, Joel Gascon from Buffer is one of my favorite because of course he shares a lot of things.
That's great. Number three, is there a favorite online tool you have like FreshBooks?
Yeah, I use FreshBooks in fact for my personal accounting.
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Chapter 4: What strategies did Vincenzo use for customer acquisition?
Why do you like them real quick?
Because it's simple. It's just simple. Just do the job. I like this kind of tool. Just do the job.
Which job? What do you use them for specifically? Invoicing. For like your agency, when you had agency work and all that?
Yeah, from that point, yeah. But I'm still using it because I still do some kind of invoicing on the side. Awesome. Yeah. But yeah, we use Slack every day because we are a remote team. We use Trello and we use appear.in, you know, for conferences and things like that. And that's funny because that's three tools we don't pay for it. That's great. That's very funny.
That's great. Okay, next question, number four. Yes or no, are you getting eight hours of sleep every night? Not, no, with the baby, you know. No chance.
That's a bit hard, but I try, yeah. I try to sleep well, yeah.
All right, well, last question here. You're 32. You've got two little ones. Take us back 12 years, Vincenzo. What do you wish your 20-year-old self knew?
Um, yeah, just be humble. Uh, I was, I was a bit, uh, you know, uh, arrogant at 20.
I'm still arrogant and I'm 26. So we're good. You still have six years. There you go. Well, Top Shrive, you just learned from Vincenzo with Prospect.io who says, be humble. They launched six months ago. The first four months, they grew to about 5K in MRR. They added 12K over the past two months. They're now doing $17,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
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