SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 432: Boostrapped SaaS Hits $75k MRR, Viral Campaigns, 1000 Customers with KickOffLabs CEO Josh Ledgard
29 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 does KickoffLabs do differently in the SaaS space?
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 does KickoffLabs generate revenue from its customers?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the $100 is Rich Jones. Okay, Rich Jones, he is stuck in corporate. He wants to break free. He's binging on the show. For your chance to win $100 every Monday morning, simply subscribe to the podcast right now on iTunes and then text the word NATHAN to 33444 to prove that you did it.
Chapter 4: What is the monthly churn rate for KickoffLabs and how is it managed?
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 432. Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to hear from Jim Fowler.
He sold his business to Salesforce for $176 million, now just launched a new business called Owler, raised $19 million, and went from zero to a million active users very quickly for his competitive intelligence platform, Owler.
Chapter 5: What strategies does KickoffLabs use for paid customer acquisition?
Top Tribe. Good morning, everybody. Our guest this morning is Josh Ledgard. He's the co-founder of KickoffLabs.com, a viral lead generation platform with amazing landing pages, lead capture forms, and email marketing built in. Josh, are you ready to take us to the top?
Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Nathan.
Chapter 6: How many customers does KickoffLabs currently serve?
There are so many people in kind of this space of, you know, emails and landing pages and whatnot. Tell us what Kickoff Labs does differently and how you make money.
Yeah. So we sell the idea that customer engagement and having engaged customers, uh, is the best, most sustainable form of marketing.
So a lot of our competitors and a lot of tools in the space are great tools for building pages, but they're really focused just on like you build the page and you get somebody just to click through or take one step, or you get somebody to just enter their email address and then like their job is done. Um, And we don't see it that way.
We want to take those people that gave you an indication that they were interested in whatever you're doing and turn those into people that can carry the message, your message out on your behalf. Because, you know, online advertising is getting harder and harder and more competitive. People are learning to ignore it. People are running ad blockers. And so the best way
Marketing, we believe, is marketing that involves an engaged customer. And so that's why we built a platform that enables these kind of viral referral friend refer a friend contest as part of that larger vision that we believe in.
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Chapter 7: What was the revenue growth for KickoffLabs in its early years?
Ultimately, you know, word of mouth and customer engagement and having tools to make that a sustainable process in every business is vitally important.
And what is the so how do you make money? Is this a SaaS business?
Oh, yeah. So absolutely. So it's a it's a software as a service business. So customers that want to run a contest or a launch or sign up people for an event, they pay us a monthly a monthly fee depending upon the size of their campaign, meaning how much traffic they're going to generate, how many leads they plan on generating.
How do they know that beforehand, though?
Um, most people have a good idea and we can also scale up and scale down a campaign so they can start with a lower price plan. And then as they get going, they can scale up to a larger price plan, um, to that, that fits their traffic, their traffic needs.
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Chapter 8: What are the goals for KickoffLabs in 2016?
And then larger companies obviously are pretty good at guessing, you know, this campaign, we're going to spend this much in advertising, meaning we're going to get this much traffic in general.
And what is the, what is the, you have a bunch of different pricing plans. If you take an average cost, your customer base, what's the average customer pay you per month?
The average customer paying per month is around $75 to $80 per month.
And I have to ask you because my first SaaS business I launched and built and sold was called Heyo.com, which was kind of in this space, but it was only for Facebook pages. And our biggest issue, Josh, is churn was so difficult to manage because we'd have people come in and run a campaign for Black Friday and then cancel. And it was so frustrating. Do you guys see that seasonality?
And if so, how do you mitigate that?
Absolutely. I mean, to a certain extent, we've just had to come to accept that churn is going to be a part of our business. We probably have a higher churn rate than, let's say, a billing provider, right?
What is it, Josh? What's your churn rate monthly? We'd see about 10% churn. Okay. Yeah. So higher than normal, but again, maybe that's just part of the model. Yeah.
And so that's what we've just assumed as part of the model. And part of what we do to mitigate that is we've started working in the last couple of years with a lot more agencies to run these kind of contests on behalf of customers. And they may have customers that churn constantly, but they're constantly churning through five customers on a larger price plan for us.
And they stick around permanently. And the other way we mitigate it is by finding a larger stable of the higher end customers. And so where we probably were at a couple of years ago, an average of more like $39 a month, like the lower tier customers. Now we're at that higher average.
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