SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 414: $70M Raised, $30k ACV, SaaS Success VidYard
11 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: How did Michael Litt start his entrepreneurial journey?
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 talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination.
Chapter 3: What is Vidyard and how does it operate?
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 Ferron. 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.
Chapter 4: What are the customer acquisition costs for Vidyard?
Okay, many of you heard I made a big league acquisition of a company called SendLater. And I'm a greedy business guy.
Chapter 5: How does Vidyard measure customer retention and churn?
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.
Chapter 6: What growth strategies is Vidyard implementing?
I'll tell you more about TopTal later on in this episode. Top Try, this is episode 414. Coming up tomorrow morning, you'll hear from Nora Orocheta.
Chapter 7: How much funding has Vidyard raised and its implications?
He runs a phone accessory company and hit $2.5 million in revenue in 2015.
top and tribe good morning our guest today is michael lit he is the co-founder and ceo of the leading video marketing platform vidyard while he's not bringing leading video based technologies to market he serves as general partner of garage capital a seed staged fund focused on super cluster companies looking to expand their networks into silicon valley he also sits on the communitech board of directors a kw based organization designed to help companies start grow and succeed michael are you ready to take us to the top
I am ready.
Chapter 8: What key lessons did Michael learn from his entrepreneurial journey?
Thanks for having me.
Okay, so you started off at Research in Motion. Now you're at Vidyard. Fill in real quick. Was Research in Motion where you started out of school?
No, actually, the University of Waterloo has a co-op program where you do four months of school and four months of work all the way until you graduate. So it kind of shakes out to two and a half years of professional work experience. By the time you finished. So Research in Motion was a year of that co-op experience for me.
Okay. And so how old are you now? I'm 29. 29. Okay. So right when you graduated, I guess, 21, 22, what'd you do right out of school?
Yeah. So I started Vidyard during school. Oh, very cool. And in fact, yeah, yeah. So I did a I did five years of high school. I did a program called USEP in my 50 year where I took a bunch of my final year high school classes and some first year university classes while I was still enrolled in high school. And that kind of leapfrogged me into my university career.
The co-op program is a five-year program. I took six years to finish it because I failed a term because I was starting a company. So, you know, by the time I actually graduated, oh yeah, I love failure. I love failing. It was the best feeling ever, but it is a retrospect, but I didn't actually graduate until I was 25. So we built the company in undergrad in our fourth year of engineering.
It was our undergraduate thesis project.
And when you say we, you mean you and Devin? You got it. Yep. Very cool. So what is the, I noticed like when I look at what you've done, you also have some other things in here, like co-founder Redwoods Media, things like that. Did you use the agency to kind of identify what you should build video software around?
Yeah. So through the co-op program, working at BlackBerry, working at Cypher Semiconductor, I had contracted a bunch of businesses to produce video for those companies to help explain our products and for installation tutorials, for marketing videos, for sales content. And it was very clear that there was a need for this in the industry. And I had some contacts.
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