SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 404: $360k June 2016 MRR, $4M ARR, 5000 customers paying $72/mo on average with DaPulse founder Roy Man
01 Sep 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 Dapulse and how does it function as a management tool?
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 sold 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. Okay, many of you heard I made a big league acquisition of a company called SendLater. And I'm a greedy business guy.
I didn't want to give away equity to a technical co-founder. So I found my coders on a website called TopTal at NathanLatka.com forward slash T-O-P-T-A-L. I paid over $12,000 to the site to a guy named He Sheming in China, who I've never met, but we're going to build a big business together. I'm taking SendLater public by the time I turn 30.
I'll tell you more about TopTal later on in this episode. Top Tribe, this is episode 404. Coming up tomorrow morning, you'll hear from Jonathan Gass, who breaks down 409A valuations, cap table pro formas, and more. Top Tribe, good morning, everybody. Our guest today is Roy Mann. He is the CEO of DaPulse.com. That's D-A-Pulse.com. He's based in Tel Aviv. Roy, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, sure. Okay, so let's do this. First things first. Thanks for joining. What is Dupulse and how do you guys make money?
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Chapter 3: How did Dapulse achieve $360k in monthly recurring revenue?
So the Pulse is a basic tool essentially that allows you to manage your team or your company and no matter what scale it has. So every one of us is using some sort of way to manage our work, right? Like tasks, projects, all that stuff. So we figured that something is inherently problematic with how things are done today and we've built the Pulse.
So essentially... So what year did you launch it in, Roy? So we launched the first payable product in February 2014. Okay.
And how do you make money? Is it a SaaS business?
Yeah, it's a SaaS business. You can try it for 30 days online, then you're required to pay. It's a per user basis. Pretty simple.
So you launched it, you launched it, you said back in February 2014?
And since then, I'm like, yeah, I'm here.
So you launched in February 2014, you said? Yeah. And so how many currently, how many customers are you guys working with, paying customers?
So we have currently over 5,000 paying companies. And it's actually been scaling since we launched.
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Chapter 4: What strategies did Dapulse use to acquire over 5000 customers?
We double every five months or so.
So that's of June 2016, right? 5,000 paying customers?
Companies, yeah.
Companies. And what does each company pay you per month on average?
So it depends vastly because we have a lot of two people teams working with this tool and we have a thousand employee companies working with it, also large enterprises. So it very much depends. It's a very versatile tool. So I wouldn't say an average is like we have a basic plan for like a small team and, you know, you pay as you scale. So it's very varied.
So in June, last month of 2016, what was your total MRR?
In June right now, we're like, our run rate is, you mean MRR is- Just give me monthly recurring revenue and then we can calculate the annual run rate from that. Cool. So it's like $360,000. $360,000.
Is that US dollars?
Exactly. Yeah. If you follow us on Instagram, we actually take screenshots of our dashboard. Oh, I love that. Yeah. So it's like, we're very open about the numbers and everything.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of customer acquisition cost in Dapulse's model?
So I will actually, I'll link to your Instagram in the show notes at nathanlaca.com forward slash the top 404. So if you're doing 360 grand per month, Roy, in June of 2016, that means you're on a run rate of about 4.3 million bucks annually. Is that accurate?
Yeah.
And are you self-funded?
No, we're VC-backed. And, you know, we're scaling and scaling it nicely.
How much have you raised?
We raised $9 million until now.
Okay, $9 million up to now. And walk me through those in stages. So how big was the convertible note and what year did you raise that in?
Um, so we had a few, I'll tell you like the, uh, we were like, uh, we raised like 1.5 early on when we had like only, uh, uh, one customer, which was Wix.com. So we raised like one.
Another, another big Israeli company.
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Chapter 6: How does Dapulse manage customer churn and retention?
One of the first ones to go public, right?
Yeah. And like they had the two, one of the most successful Super Bowl campaigns. Yeah. Like the last one. Yeah. Like a really good one. So they were like initially we started the product with them as first customer and from their problem of scaling a company and really having that startup mentality stay there. within a company as you scale. So that was our initial intent.
So we raised 1.5 million and then afterwards, you know, it took us, yeah, you know, from going from a solution that you have that works to a product market fit took us like a year point two, I think.
So what year did you raise the 1.5 million? Was that 2014 or 2015?
No, it was like before 2014. Like 2014, we launched the online, the first product you can actually pay for.
Okay, and was that 1.5? Or was that a convertible note with a discount and an interest rate and all that?
No, it was actually around. A priced round? Yeah, yeah.
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Chapter 7: What funding rounds has Dapulse gone through and how much have they raised?
So on that priced round when you did it, because you were basically pre-revenue at that point, what valuation were you able to negotiate?
So it was a 3.53 and a four point, well, like almost five posts.
So, so everyone listening right now is going to go, Nathan, you got to ask Roy, how does he do this? He has like very little customers. He's getting a $4 million post money valuation. How'd you create $4 million out of thin air?
Well, we had Wix as a customer and I was working with Wix for a long time on this product and it was a very solid one. So there was a very good market validation for the problem and the product and we went with that. It wasn't out of thin air. It was with a lot of work.
So take me through after the 1.5, then what?
Then we had like a year or something of product market fit, which included a lot of going to a lot of customers and looking what they're doing. And essentially what we figured is that people use Excel to manage stuff at the end. So it wasn't like... easy to get that at first because there is a lot of noise. You know, you have meetings, you have emails, you have a lot of problems.
Everyone is asking a lot of having a lot of issues with a lot of data. But at the end of the day, people think in tables, tables or something really clear for us. And Excel is not like especially just like a really good table. You know, even if you have like a whiteboard, then you have a table, right?
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Chapter 8: How does Dapulse maintain transparency with its financials?
Like you draw lines on it and like it looks like something that makes things clear. So until we reached that point where we understood that the product that we initially thought needs to look more like something people actually understand, intuitive, very simple for their processes and their problems, it took us a while.
And something else useful I can share is that the product market fit a lot has to do with what we wanted to make out of the company. We really wanted it to be a really good product. That's what I do all my life.
Roy, I want to talk more about product, but round out the funding for me. So when was the next round? You did 1.5 first, then what?
Then until after product market fit, we started to launch, it started to scale. And then our investor backed us up and like we did a convertible notes.
For how much?
for it was one, like over a million in the first one and over a million in the second. Like I don't really remember.
Let's fast forward. What was your last round of funding?
Our last round was we got five million more money. And with the post valuation and, you know, with all those convertibles, you can only talk about the post. It was in twenty eight point five million.
That's great. 20.5 million post money, which means, you know, pre-money, it's hard to get around, but somewhere around 22, 23-ish million. So, okay, congratulations, Roy. This is exciting. Tell us about, I always love asking this question. 2014 was kind of your, it sounds like your first year. What was your first year revenue? It's always embarrassing.
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