SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 511: How to Pivot $50K MRR SaaS Company with Ian Cullen CEO of Leadiro
17 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.
Chapter 2: What led Ian Cullen to sell Target 250?
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 sold mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Rhett Gillins. He is a restaurant industry. He's in the restaurant industry and he feels stuck. He wants to start his own software business.
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.
Chapter 3: How did Ian transition from Target 250 to Internal Results?
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 all my podcast interviews at nathanlatka.com forward slash schedule. I'll tell you more about how I use it later on in the episode. Nathan Latka here. This is episode 509.
Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from Yosef West. Yosef founded HubDoc, and it just hit $132,000 in monthly recurring revenue. They've raised $2 million, and they're helping 1,200 customers manage accountants and manage their documents. Top five. Good morning. Nathan Latke here. Our guest today is Ian Cullen.
He is a demand generation expert and currently the co-founder of Leadero, an account-centric data platform designed to enable account-based marketing and sales development efforts at named accounts. Previously, he was a co-founder of Internal Results, which was acquired by Madison Logic in May 2016, a leader in accounts-based management.
He started his first business, Target 250, in 2001 and built that company to a team of 130 staff and established the company as a leading B2B technology-based lead generation company. He sold that company in 2010. Ian, quite a story. Are you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely, Nathan. Looking forward to it. Awesome. Okay, let's go back first to Target 250.
You launched it in 2001, sold it in 2010.
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Chapter 4: What is Leadiro and how does it generate revenue?
What did you sell it for? Oh, not enough. Good answer. How was that company valued? Was that a SaaS business? What was the valuation like? Oh, no, we received an investment from a venture capitalist, a firm called DN Capital. How much? And they put $5 million in. So after about six months, myself and the other founder, we sold during March out to the venture capitalists.
Was it a good return or was it a soft landing? Yeah. Yeah. I wish people would chat about this stuff more. Yeah. So was it like a, Hey, we just want our customers to find a good home and some of our employees to get jobs. Let's just sell this.
Chapter 5: How does Leadiro's platform differentiate from competitors?
Is that kind of thinking? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Very good. You go from, you go from target to 50. What happens after 2010? So I did a one year non-compete and then set up a very similar business, which is called internal results. And then, took it from there to build it to a team of about 60 people. I sold that in May this year to a firm called Madison Budget. Did you raise capital or no? No.
Okay, got it. So that was like, you're like, I don't want to raise capital again. I don't want any liquidation preferences. I want all the money when I sell it. That's it. Did you have a co-founder? Yes, the same guy, Chris Weiss. And is he your co-founder today at Ladero? Yes. Oh, very cool. Okay, so tell us what Ladero does and how you make money. So it's a fairly new startup.
Chapter 6: What challenges does Leadiro face with early cancellations?
We're just over four months old. We're a B2B data as a service platform, which is mainly focused around account-based marketing. So you can currently search around 30 million B2B execs in the platform and download that specific audience. Okay, give us an example, like the last customer that paid you. Well, typically our customers are either software vendors, large software vendors, or publishers.
So they would sign up to a plan. Name one. I mean, a lot of them are on our website. So someone like Selling Simplified Group. Okay. So they've got access to a certain volume of contacts. And what do they do with that? Why do they pay you? They'll download that audience to run typically CPL programs, which is, you know, they're doing outbound...
sending out white papers on behalf of technology companies, looking for those individuals to click their downloads, and then they'll pass that back to the software vendor as a lead. What are the laws around that?
So, like, if you get somebody's email, especially in mass, they're a company like Ladero, can a company like Selling Simplified actually email 100 people kind of cold, or are there rules around kind of email marketing there? Sure, I mean, that's up to them, and that's, I mean, with the data processing. What are the rules? I don't know what they are. What are those rules? Do you know? Oh.
They're different in each country, but as long as it's relevant, you can send, and it's specific, so you've got to send that content to an individual that, for example, works in anti-security. You can't send them something that's totally irrelevant. I see. Interesting.
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Chapter 7: How does Leadiro acquire its customers?
Okay, and how do you make money? How does selling Simplified pay you?
Chapter 8: What advice does Ian Cullen have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Is it cost per lead or SaaS or what? It's SaaS, so most customers pay us on a monthly or quarterly basis. Okay. So the annual plans people sign up to, companies sign up to, and they get access to a certain volume of records per month. I see. Okay. And what does the average customer pay you per month? So average, I mean, our prices range from between $20,000 and $20,000 upwards.
But some are paying more per month or per quarter or per year. Yeah. Per month. Okay, $20,000. Sorry, no, so the annual partners range between $20,000 and $40,000 per year. Okay. Average... Ian, we lost you if you're still there. We can't hear you. $6,000 to $10,000. Okay, got it. So they're paying you $6,000 to $10,000 per month. You dropped out there. Say that again.
Yeah, $6,000 to $10,000 per month, depending on their volume. Okay. But wait, you just, okay. Okay. Wait, didn't you just say annual plans were like 20 grand? They can, they start at 20, but they can go much bigger than 40. Oh, I see. Okay. So, so you're, you think your average is somewhere between 6,000 and 10 grand per month? Yeah.
So our prices are on our website, but sometimes publishers want access to bigger volumes of data. And what year or month did you launch? In July this year. Okay. So July, 2016. And how many customers are you serving now? Well, just under 20. Okay, 20. And walk us through, how are you finding those folks? So, typically, we're not doing really any marketing.
We're doing more outbound, you know, reaching to them. So, typically, calling them. What's that sound like? Is it a call? Is it an email? And if so, what's the email or call sound like? Um... So they're typically people that we know within the industry or, you know, because our background is working in software sales and lead generation.
So they may have been people that we worked with in the past that have moved to a certain company. Okay, so let's say I'm the guy at Sony that you're selling to. What is his role at Sony? Like CMO or what?
marketing they could be campaign managers um they're looking at audience development for specific products and they're launching a specific product that they want to reach out to certain certain audience and roll with me you're calling me right now i just picked up i'm the guy at sony what's that call sound like oh no i couldn't do that come on it's really just if we're looking to uh we'd ask them questions if they're looking to expand their data reach to um do they want to
It would be more intelligent if we look and see this product is launched to market. So we ask us how they're getting that product to market. Do they need help in reaching out to a bigger audience other than their own first party data set? There are a lot of companies kind of in this space. What are you doing? Why are people buying your data versus others? Yeah, you're right.
There's lots of companies in this space, but I suppose our platform is proprietary. It's very easy to use. What's proprietary about the platform? So it was really driven out from our experience in the generation that you can, the buzzword these days is account-based marketing, account-based everything.
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