SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 499: GetSignEasy Passes $200k MRR and 130k Customers To Help Sign Documents withCEO Sunil Patro
05 Dec 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. 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 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 bucks 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 2: What inspired Sunil Patro to create SignEasy?
Folks, many of you reach out to me and you say, Nathan, so many guests on your show talk about the importance of batching. But whenever I try and batch, you tell me this. You go, Nathan, they don't book back-to-back times. Or they don't show up after they book. It's frustrating.
Chapter 3: How does SignEasy generate revenue and what are its pricing plans?
The answer is, guys, you have to use smart tools. I use a tool called Acuity Scheduling at NathanLatke.com forward slash schedule. I'll tell you specifically how I use it later on in the episode. Nathan Latka here. This is episode 499.
Chapter 4: What milestones has SignEasy achieved since its launch?
Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from Matthew Joust. He's raised $5 million in funding and is doing $1.3 million in revenue for the LGBT lifestyle traveler, kind of like Airbnb. Top Tribe. Good morning. Nathan Latka here. And our guest today is Sunil Patro. He is the founder of SignEasy, which was, again, he's a technologist, product thinker, and entrepreneur.
He has a decade of experience as a member of multiple early stage product teams at Microsoft, Juniper Networks, and Tokbox. Building enterprise communication apps to carry our grade routing system to consumer focused video conferencing software. After facing many problems to sign an important job offer while traveling in Mexico, he was inspired to build a product that could solve this hindrance.
Since bootstrapping SignEasy in early 2010, he's led SignEasy to a growing and profitable company approaching 3 million downloads with a five-star rating in over 150 countries, ranked one of the top 10 grossing apps and top 100 downloads apps for business, including Apple's best new apps and editor choice picks. Sunil, are you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 5: What strategies does SignEasy use for customer acquisition?
Yeah. Okay, very good. Thanks for inviting me.
Thank you for coming on. Okay, first things first, tell us what SignEasy does and how you make money.
So SignEasy is a cloud-based, easy-to-use app that helps individuals and businesses of all sizes to be able to sign documents, send documents for signature, and manage all of these documents from their smartphone, tablet, and the web.
So it essentially allows you to be completely paperless and forget all the hassles of printing, scanning, faxing, and shipping that are regularly involved in business-related paperwork.
And how do you generate revenue?
So we, our product is SaaS based. So we have a free, free trial for limited 15 days, or like the first three documents are free to sign. After that, consumers can buy the page you go package, or if you are a business user, you can subscribe to our pro and premium plans.
And so what year did you did you code this and launch this business, Sunil?
We started coding it in early 2010 and we launched around July 2010.
And do you remember what your first year revenue was?
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Chapter 6: How does SignEasy maintain its high customer retention rate?
Could be even much lower because we were a completely free product when we launched. And then we, then we went to a one-time paid product for $3 for unlimited use, unlimited time, you know, so you could imagine the revenue from that.
Yep. Okay, so let's fast forward a bit. So 2015, how many customers are you currently serving? Oh, sorry, in 2016?
Right now, we have over 4 million downloads. And out of that, we have over 130,000 paid users.
Okay, and are they have all they all paid one time or is it monthly recurring?
Um, around, uh, around, uh, 40 to 45% of them are, um, subscriptions and the rest are one time page ago users.
Okay. Got it. So let's just focus on the recurring for a second. What is the average price kind of folks pay you per month?
So our most popular plan is the pro plan. They pay four to $5 per month per user.
Okay.
And that's around 40%. That's around, I would say, out of our subscription user base, that's probably around, you know, 80 to 90% of our subscriptions are actually pro subscriptions.
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Chapter 7: What role does the app store play in SignEasy's success?
No, actually, it will be a bit lower than that. The reason being, in order to get 130,000 paid users, a lot of them are actually grandfather users in the beginning. So if I consider the current mix of grandfathered users and pro and business subscription users, it'll be much more around the range of less than 200 K. Okay.
So total, like in October here of 2016, you did about 230,000 bucks.
No, it should be like somewhere lower than 200 K, but in that order.
Okay. Okay. Got it. So somewhere around 200, a little less than 200 K. Yeah. Okay. Very good. So, so, and again, it's, it's hard to kind of split this out because a portion of these users have just paid three bucks one time. Is that right?
Those are like, you know, up till 2012, those were the type of paid users. After that, we had subscription users. But even within subscription, a lot of times we started with $10 per year per user. And since then, we have grown it up to $50 per year, $100 per year. And we even have plans for $200 per year offerings right now. So there's a mix of, you know, different price points in that.
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Chapter 8: What are the key features that differentiate SignEasy from competitors?
And so, Sunil, you said your first year you didn't know maybe two, three, four grand in revenue. What was total revenue in 2015?
You know, I can't answer that clear now directly. A range is fine. Yeah, but we are still at sub $5 million revenue.
Okay.
At this point. And we have grown a high double digit year over year for the last three years.
Did you do more than $2 million in 2015?
I can't give you the exact number, but, you know... Well, basically, that question is, did you do between $2 million and $5 million?
It's still a pretty big range.
Yes, it'll be in that range for $16 million.
For $16 million. Okay, got it. So maybe a little less than $2 million in 2015 and somewhere between $2 million and $5 million in 2016. Super healthy business. Is it bootstrapped or have you raised capital?
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