SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 426: 1500 Customers and Profitable, $5.5M Raised with Pablo Fuentes of Proven.com
23 Sep 2016
Chapter 1: What is Proven and how does it help small businesses?
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.
Chapter 2: How does Proven generate revenue from job postings?
He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. OK, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Jose Avila.
Chapter 3: What are the pricing models used by Proven?
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. Okay, many of you heard I made a big league acquisition of a company called SendLater.
And I'm a greedy business guy.
Chapter 4: What was Pablo Fuentes' revenue growth from 2009 to 2015?
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 426. Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from Keith. He did a million dollars in his agency in 2015 and launched a SaaS business called Segmetrics out of that, already doing five grand a month. Top drive. Good morning.
Chapter 5: How does Proven ensure customer retention and manage churn?
Our guest today is Pablo Fuentes. He's the founder and CEO of Proven, a leading small business hiring tool. He's passionate about helping minorities and women start technology companies. He also enjoys Brazilian jujitsu, making cigar box guitars and playing the blues. He has a BA from UCLA and an MBA from Stanford. Pablo, are you ready to take us to the top?
Sure.
All right.
Chapter 6: What is the funding history of Proven and how much has been raised?
Give us the down low. What does Proven do? And most importantly, how do you make money?
Yeah, absolutely. We are a small business hiring tool. And what we do is we help when, let's say you're a small business, a restaurant or a retail shop, and you wanted to hire people, instead of having to go to a number of different job sites and post a job at each one, we help you distribute the job.
And then we help you collaborate with other managers to make sure that you hire the right person. A big differentiator for us is our mobile tool. So we have probably one of the best mobile apps in the business and native apps in both iOS and Android where people can collaborate for the hiring directly from their phones.
And we're the only app in the app store that allows you to post jobs directly from your phone.
Who do you compete with, Pablo? Who would you say your biggest competitors are?
I would say there's a few. ZipRecruiter, they've changed their direction a little bit.
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Chapter 7: What strategies did Proven implement to increase profitability?
The company's like Workable, and then there's a number of other smaller ones as well.
Got it. Okay, so break down kind of history. What did you found the business in?
We started the company originally in 2009. Back then, the idea was to connect people with jobs through text messages. And that's evolved over time. We pivoted quite a few times to find our way into a growing, successful business today.
And this is always embarrassing, but what was your first year revenue in 2009?
Oh, God, definitely zero. That was also revenue in years two and three and four.
Okay. So in 2015, what was total revenue?
Uh, in, in 2015, we did, uh, by a little bit over a million dollars in revenue. Okay. This year we're on track to grow about 60%.
And so you're on track to do what? About 1.5, 1.6. Correct. And, and tell us how you make money.
We make money every time a small business posts a job. It's a menu type option where they choose where they post and the jobs can be, you know, vary in price. And then we have partnerships with different third party job providers and then job boards and we make money that way.
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Chapter 8: What are Pablo Fuentes' future goals for Proven?
It's over, it's over 1100, uh, individual companies, but it's a 1500 location to some, some companies have more than one location.
I see. And what does each location pay you on average?
It really depends. They can spend, you know, a couple hundred bucks a month.
Okay. So what is the ARPU? I mean, what's your average revenue per user if you do the division per month?
If you, I'm sorry, help me understand.
Average revenue per user. So take your total revenue in August of 2016 divided by total number of paying customers.
Okay, well, the way we think about it is more in terms of the lifetime value of a customer.
So let's say... How do you get lifetime value if you don't know ARPU?
Okay, let me walk you through how we think about it and then we can get there. So our average customer pays us about $350 or $400 a year.
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