SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 491: $13M in Funding, Grow.com Hits $300k MRR, Helping 600 Customers w/ Better Dashboards with Rob Nelson CEO
27 Nov 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 Grow.com and what problem does it solve?
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 is Charlie Daggs, okay? He was a middle manager at a manufacturing company. He wants to break free, and he won the $100 I give out every Monday. For your chance to win, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes right now, and then text the word NATHAN to 33444 to prove that you did it.
Guys, if you want an easy tool to use to book your meetings back to back, to batch your calls, to make sure people actually show up when they schedule, you want to use Acuity Scheduling. It's what I use for my podcast interviews at nathanlatka.com forward slash schedule. I'll tell you more about how I use it later on in the episode.
Chapter 3: How did Rob Nelson transition from his first venture to Grow?
Nathan Latke here. This is episode 491. Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from Randall Nachman. He's raised $2 million and just passed $12,000 in monthly recurring revenue in a space that I like a lot, document signing. His company is called DocuFirst. Top drive. Good morning. Nathan Latka here. And our guest today is Rob.
Chapter 4: What unique pricing model does Grow.com use?
And he is the CEO of a company you may have heard of called Grow.com. It's a business intelligence platform. And the way I actually came across Rob was actually twofold. First off, I was doing a lot of research in the business intelligence space. There's a lot of companies in the space. And many people online had very good things to say about Grow.
Chapter 5: What are the customer engagement statistics for Grow.com?
And to my delight, when I reached out to Rob, he said, you know, Nathan, I'm already a fan. I listen to the show. So we're excited to have Rob with us. Rob, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, you bet. All right, let's do this. So why don't you tell us first, what does Grow do and how do you generate revenue?
Yeah, so Grow is very powerful, simple business intelligence. And we built it specifically for the small and mid-sized company, the S&B market.
And what years you found the business in?
We founded it, let's see, I founded it in 2014.
Okay, and give us, before we get into some more of the metrics, give us some of the backstory there. Did you leave corporate or what?
I had a company before, a software company that I bootstrapped, and we had our own data challenges. So I struggled pulling all of our data from Salesforce and QuickBooks and our own database to update our metrics in a spreadsheet. We had tons of these spreadsheets. We only updated them once a month, and it drove me crazy because they were always stale and out of date.
So I called several BI providers. I tried several to try and solve the problem, and they were either insanely expensive, really complex to manage, or they were too simple and just didn't give us what we needed.
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Chapter 6: How much funding has Grow.com raised and why?
It was things like our latest tweets and Facebook likes. It wasn't anything that really drove our company. So we found this gap in the market of like something that was really simple to use and yet really customizable and flexible. And so we never solved the problem there. I ended up selling the company. And, uh, said, this is what I want to, this is the problem I want to solve.
Generally a good exit on that first business or.
No, it was a great exit. We had a larger company came and they made a couple of offers and, um, we turned them down. They eventually said, Hey, what would it take? And we threw out some conditions, not thinking it would stick. And they came back and agreed to everything. So it surprised us. It was a good transition. And, um, It was a great experience.
One of my favorite questions to ask entrepreneurs if I'm looking at buying their business is, hey, Rob, I just say, Rob, get crazy with me for a second. What is your crazy number?
Chapter 7: What were Grow.com's revenue milestones from 2014 to 2016?
The thing where if you got it, it would just blow your mind. And what's hysterical is many times they come back with that number and it's actually very doable. It sounds like that's what happened with your first exit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's awesome. All right, let's get into some of the more growth stuff. So walk us through how you make money. Is it a SaaS model?
Fast model, yeah, subscription-based pricing. What makes Grow unique, one of the things that makes us unique is we give people unlimited users, so we don't charge based on the number of users.
That's a big give up, Rob. I mean, a lot of these companies, their whole ARPU kind of increasing strategies around adding seats. Why'd you make that decision?
You know, the thought of one guy running a single user seat, managing BI in his back cubicle makes me throw up in my mouth. I just hate that idea, you know? And where we're trying to democratize this process and data and BI, You know, it kind of goes in, it plays into our mission where, like, hey, we don't care if you're in marketing or in sales.
Chapter 8: What challenges did Rob face in scaling Grow.com?
Connect to the apps that you use, pull the data back, build reports, and get it out in front of the team. So whatever department that you're in, we want users to do that. So we charge based on the number of metrics that they use or that they're tracking or the number of reports that they build. Okay. So our average, you know, average RRP is like $600 a month.
Okay, great. And are those folks usually signing up for an annual plan up front or are they mostly paying monthly?
Yeah, so they all pay monthly, but there's a 12-month commitment. And our brand promise as a company is that, hey, we'll guarantee you success in the first 30 days with unique insights. And if we can't, then you can cancel and walk away, no issues. So do they actually pay the $700?
If I take $600 in a monthly ARPU times 12 months, it's $7,200 in average annual contract value. Do they actually put up the $7,200 on day one or after the 30-day trial?
No, they just pay $600 monthly. So it's a 12-month commitment. $600 gets deemed every month on the credit card. And if we can't get them hooked to the product in the first 30 days, they can walk away and... So that's, that's, that's really our trial period. That first 30 days.
That makes sense. What percentage of people that go into that first 30 days completed and continue on?
Yes. 75%. That's pretty good. Yeah. We feel good about that. 70, you know, 76%. in the last 90 days, you know, renew from that trial period.
That's great. Okay, good. And then they stay with you for, you know, another 11 months at a minimum because that's what they commit to, right? That's right. That's right.
And the ones that don't stay with us, it's typically like they run their company off spreadsheets and it's just really messy. They're just not ready for BI yet.
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