SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 397: ProsperWorks SaaS 40k Paying Customers, Announces New Funding Adding to $10M Already
25 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.
Chapter 2: What is Jon Lee's background before ProsperWorks?
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 3: How did Jon Lee transition from gaming to tech and advertising?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Jose Avila. He is a 17-year-old that doesn't want to go to college and he wants to start his own business. For your chance to win 100 bucks just like Jose every Monday morning, simply subscribe to this podcast on iTunes right now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it.
This is episode 397.
Chapter 4: What challenges did Jon face when starting ProsperWorks?
Coming up tomorrow morning, you are going to hear from the MindMaestro.com CEO, Michael Huloff. They have over 5 million users, are doing 250 grand in monthly recurring revenue, and is a powerful SaaS platform. Top Tribe, good morning.
Chapter 5: How does ProsperWorks leverage partnerships with Google Apps?
Our guest today is John Lee. He's the co-founder and CEO of ProsperWorks, the leading CRM solution for businesses powered by Google Apps for Work. ProsperWorks has been named the only recommended CRM for Google Apps by Google and was the recipient of Google's Best New Tech Partner Award.
Before ProsperWorks, with Kelly Chang, Joe co-founded and served as CEO of DNA Games, a social gaming technology company backed by Battery Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures that was acquired by Zynga in 2011. He's also the co-founder and CEO of Bazaar Advertising Solutions, a leading advertising technology company that was sold to Epic Advertising.
Additionally, after the merger, John became division president responsible for key strategic and line management roles for a business that delivers hundreds of millions in revenue.
Chapter 6: What unique features does ProsperWorks offer to its customers?
Now, before all this, earlier in his career, John served as head of global business operations for Yahoo Search International, joining the company through its acquisition of Overture Services. His start, he had to start as an investment banker with Merrill Lynch Technology Group and is still an active advisor and investor in technology startups.
All right, John, are you ready to take us to the top? Sounds good. All right, let's do this. So let me make sure I get kind of this thing right. Merrill Lynch, Yahoo, Bazaar Advertising Solutions, DNA Games, now ProsperWorks.
Chapter 7: How does Jon measure the success of ProsperWorks?
Is that right? That's right. Okay, so this is kind of interesting.
Chapter 8: What are the unit economics of ProsperWorks?
You go from kind of banking to tech to Yahoo to gaming. Walk me through kind of how you're figuring out what you're jumping in and out of.
Yeah. So at Overture and Yahoo, you know, I'd seen basically the growth of that business just skyrocket in terms of pay per click advertising. And so, you know, clearly saw a need for advertisers to be able to get highly profitable, high volumes of and highly scalable leads. And so my first company was really focused on doing that.
And so we had built a platform that allows us to be able to find leads for our customers through paid search. And so we had actually done a handful of affiliate. That was epic advertising. That was bizarre advertising. Sorry, bizarre.
Yeah.
Yeah, and at Bazaar, we actually started out as an affiliate marketing company that was sending leads to various advertisers. And then we realized, in the process of doing this, that we could actually automate that process and build a real technology around it. So we built something called Adaptive Marketing Console, AMC for short. And it did really three things well. It was keyword discovery.
So we mined the long tail of keywords. So whereas most people would buy keywords, you know, at the head for their specific interest area, we would actually crawl Google search. We'd crawl the Wall Street Journal. We'd crawl various parts of content to find keywords. the long tail of keywords. And then we had a bid management system that would bid and effectively optimize based on gross profit.
And then we had a offer optimization engine, which after the user figured out the right keyword and paying the right price, make sure that we send them the right experience so that they ultimately converted on that.
And how did you make money? Was it just a percentage of ad spend or was it a SaaS platform or what?
Arbitrage. So we would buy on a cost per click and we'd sell on a cost per lead or a cost per action or a cost per sale. And basically we would use our own proprietary technology to buy low and sell high. And we did it about 90 times a minute and had built a very programmatic approach to be able to do that. And so we started this company out of our apartment in Palo Alto.
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