SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 463: Close.io More Than $200k MRR, 500 Customers, $400 ARPU with CEO Steli Efti Who Wont Sell for $40M
30 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 is Steli Efti's background and 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 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 none other than Derek Rodenbeck.
He is an artist and he's looking to increase his revenue. If you want your chance to enter and to win 100 bucks each Monday on the show, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it.
Chapter 3: How did Close.io evolve from a services business to a successful CRM?
Nathan Latka here, and folks, this is episode 463. Tomorrow's episode is going to be unbelievable.
Chapter 4: Why does Steli Efti choose not to disclose Close.io's churn rate?
We have none other than the Chris Saka joining us, one of the first investors in Uber, first investor in Twitter, early in many tech companies that you know.
Chapter 5: What sales tactics have contributed to Close.io's success?
Many call him the most successful angel investor ever. That's what Forbes said. He's on Shark Tank. He's doing it all.
Chapter 6: How does Close.io define its customer acquisition cost (CAC)?
You don't want to miss that tomorrow morning in episode 464. Top Trot, good morning.
Chapter 7: What is Steli's perspective on funding and acquisition offers?
Our guest today is Steli Efti.
Chapter 8: What unique challenges does Close.io face in the competitive CRM market?
He is the CEO and founder of Close.io, among other things. Steli, are you ready to take us to the top? I am so ready. Okay, good. So hey, give us a little more context first, because I didn't have a complete bio. Close.io is your baby right now, but how to get started?
Yes. So I've been a lifelong entrepreneur originally from Europe. I came to Silicon Valley 10 years ago and I've started a number of companies. I would say my entrepreneurial superpower is sales and communication. So I've been hustling my whole life and I had spectacular failures and some decent successes. So here we are. Which success are you most proud of so far?
I would absolutely say CloseR has been the biggest success in terms of just the size and the impact of the business. It's a very small team. We're less than 20 people and we're driving many, many millions in revenue and are competing with massive organizations. And it's not just the revenue that we make and the impact that the product had, but also just everything about this business in terms of
The people I work with, the customers we touch, even with our marketing and blog posts, the kind of impact we have in helping startups and new companies succeed by selling better has been pretty tremendous.
So what year, Steli, did you found the business then? We started, we launched Closeout as a product in January 2013. Okay, and this is always usually an embarrassing kind of answer, but do you remember what your first year revenue was?
I do remember what the first year revenue was. It was a few hundred thousand in revenue. That's not horrible. No, no, no. But to be fair, this is not quite fair to frame it that way because we had started as a services business called Elastic Sales. And in running a services business within the first year of running Elastic Sales, we had developed this internal piece of software called Close.io.
And a year later, we launched the software product. But we launched it with a lot of kind of unfair competitive advantages. We already had a little bit of a name as a thought leader in our space. We had a bunch of customers we could sell to. We had a lot of skill and experience by that time.
So if that would have been the first company that I launched and it would have been like the first month we worked on the product, the numbers would have looked totally different.
Yeah, Steli, I don't know if you see this trend. You're based here in San Francisco, so you probably see more than I do, but so many successful SaaS companies I'm seeing are starting where it's an agency and they see the same problem with every client and then they spin out a piece of software and they already have a built-in customer base and then it takes off from there.
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