SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 447: $0 to $13M Agency Revenue in 10 Years with RaizLabs CEO Greg Raiz
13 Oct 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 RaizLabs do and how does it generate revenue?
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. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Rhett Gillins.
He's in the restaurant industry and he feels stuck. He wants to start his own software business.
Chapter 3: What challenges did Greg face in the early years of his agency?
So congratulations, Rhett, for your guys' chance to win 100 bucks every Monday morning. Simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now in order to enter and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you subscribed. Folks, many of you heard I made a big league acquisition of a business. NathanLatka.com forward slash send later is the name of the business.
And I didn't want to give up equity to a developer because I'm a business guy. So what I did is I used a website to find a guy named He Sheming. I paid He over $12,000 to help me build send later. And the site that I am using now is called Topdol at NathanLatka.com forward slash T-O-P. T-A-L. I will build SendLater into a big business and I will take it public by the time I turn 30.
Chapter 4: How did Greg achieve significant revenue growth at RaizLabs?
I'll tell you more later on in the episode. Nathan Latke here. Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to hear from Peter who walks us through how he brought the very popular YouTube video Day of Glass to life. He's raised $1.8 million and just hit $1.2 million in revenue. Top Tribe, good morning. Our guest today is Greg Reyes.
He is the founder of Reyes Labs, which is a technology innovation firm that designs and develops custom applications, web platforms, and other cutting edge software. They've earned the trust and respect of a wide range of organizations from fast moving startups to Fortune 500 companies by solving their most difficult challenges. Greg, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, absolutely.
Chapter 5: What financial strategies does Greg use to manage his CEO salary?
So excited. Thanks for having me.
Hey, thanks for coming on. So tell us what Reyes Labs does and how you make money.
So we're a software development and design company. We work with both startups and Fortune 500 companies, and we help them solve hard problems by building technology. Most frequently, we build iPhone, iPad, and Android applications. We also build websites and web services.
And you say on your homepage, 13 years in business, 600 million world or 60 million worldwide app downloads, 500 million in revenue generated for clients and unlimited potential. Tell us the story.
Chapter 6: How many employees does RaizLabs have and what are their roles?
Well, first off, give us a sense of size. When a customer pays you, what are they typically paying you? What's the average job size?
So our project definitely range in size, but they tend to be anywhere from a couple hundred thousand dollars. We have some projects close to a million dollars in size. So it really depends. We typically put a full team on a project, really thinking about the nuts and bolts of how to build a product.
And so that includes design, it includes product management, it includes obviously development and engineering. Oftentimes it includes a back end system as well. And so
Chapter 7: What tools does Greg use to manage his agency effectively?
Uh, we really think of ourselves as product as a service. So lots of times companies have a core business and they know they need technology as part of that business, but they're not really a technology company. So they'll come to us and we'll help them figure out, you know, how do you build a tech business?
Uh, especially if you're a retailer or a finance company, or you're operating in some other business other than technology, it can often be a challenge to figure out all these things.
So what year did you launch the business then?
So I started in 2003 out of a coffee shop. I was previously working at Microsoft and I left.
What salary did you give up? I'm curious.
I was making, I want to say $60,000, $80,000 at the time.
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Chapter 8: Can you share a success story about a project with a major client?
That was my first job out of college.
So how old were you when you left?
I was 23, something like that. Yeah. And how old are you now? I'm turning 40. I'm 39. So I'm still on the cusp. Yeah.
Very cool. And I always love asking this because it's usually embarrassing. What was your first year revenue back in 2003?
Oh, it was embarrassing. I definitely lost money. I think, I think we made like 15 K or, or 15, 20 K. I mean, I was really living off my savings, uh, and trying to figure out exactly what we would do. And I was building a little bits of software. I was, uh, building kind of recurring revenue and some of our own products. Uh, but really figuring out how do you, how do you bootstrap a business?
How do you start it? We've never taken funding, uh, And we've tried to really figure out how do you build things the right way, quote unquote, you know, the hard way, rolling up your sleeves, but making software better. There's so much kind of poorly engineered, poorly designed software. We really wanted to rethink that entire process.
And so fast forward to 2015, what was total revenue in 2015?
I think we were just shy of 9 million. We're on track to 13, 14 this year.
Okay. Very cool. And what, and it's August, 2016 right now when we're recording this. So how many, you know, the margins in these kinds of businesses usually are pretty high, but how big is your team? How many people on it?
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