SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 542: HipLead Hits $120k MRR Helping 30 Customers Get More Leads with CEO COnor Lee
17 Jan 2017
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 led Conor Lee to transition from TellFi to HipLead?
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.
Chapter 3: How does HipLead help companies scale their outbound sales?
He is hell-bent on global domination.
Chapter 4: What pricing model does HipLead use for its services?
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 Daniel Alsodini.
Chapter 5: How did Conor secure funding for HipLead?
He's based overseas. He's an employee at a current company and can't wait to break free. For your chance to win 100 bucks, Top Tribe, simply subscribe to the podcast now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it. Again, text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it.
Chapter 6: What is HipLead's current customer churn rate?
I give away 100 bucks every Monday. Many people ask me what tool I used to sell my first company, Heyo.
Chapter 7: What strategies does Conor use to calculate customer lifetime value?
The answer is thetopinbox.com. I used it to send emails, schedule emails to be sent out later, and set reminders inside my inbox so I would know when potential buyers were actually interested. And I easily remember to follow up with ones that hadn't replied to me. You can try it for free at thetopinbox.com.
this episode 542 coming up tomorrow morning you'll learn from oleg of people.ai they're getting ready to close a massive round see what he shares live nathan latke here good morning folks our guest this morning is connor lee he's the founder and ceo of hiplead.com the company helps leading b2b companies scale their outbound sales with high quality lead generation and outbound campaigns
Before founding HipLead, Connor founded several other companies, including Telfie, which was in Y Combinator Winter 2011 batch. Prior to that, he worked as a lobbyist and led statewide political campaigns. Connor, are you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready. Thanks for having me on. Of course, man. Thanks for coming on.
Chapter 8: What challenges did Conor face in his first year of business?
Hey, tell us real quick, because you're not doing Telfie now, and that was in Y Combinator Winter 2011. What happened to it? Well, you know, like a lot of, you know, early stage startups, you know, you got to think of them like, uh, you know, they're sort of, I think it was Paul Graham.
He used to always talk about, um, startups as, as, uh, you know, a little baby turtles, there would be a thousand of them on the beach. And then, you know, only, only, uh, 200 of them would actually make it to the surf and only a hundred or 50 of them would actually make it to be a adult turtle.
So, uh, you know, we, we did a lot of fun things and learned a lot, but, you know, didn't make it past its infancy. Yeah. I was gonna say, Connor, don't be shy. Tell us like what happened. Seriously. People don't talk about how to shut down a business. Like there was a moment where you realized, shit, this is not going to work. Like, how do I shut this down while I still save face?
Like where my ego doesn't take a big hit and where everyone doesn't think I'm a total loser. How'd you shut it down? Like in an efficient way. Well, you know, at the time, you know, I was lucky enough to have another co-founder that was sort of want to keep it going. So so basically the backstory is basically we're doing a couple thousand dollars a month in revenue.
We were a couple months out of YC and the company itself was basically trying to do Google voice for business, compete with Grasshopper. It was a telephony startup. It was built on Twilio. And we got some good traction, mainly among Canadians, interestingly enough, because Google Voice didn't work in Canada. And we did. And so we got a lot of traction.
But at the end of the day, it wasn't something where we saw a nice, large win. On the horizon, we kind of did a lot of math and did a lot of understanding of what the market looked like. And we did the calculations. We understood, hey, you know what? Now is the time to pull the plug. So I decided to take off and start a new venture. And my co-founder at the time kept it going.
Oh, so it's still going. Uh, he spun it down since then. Um, but I think it, I think it sort of petered off over the years. Um, but, uh, but yeah, I believe last I checked the site was still up. So now you're doing hip lead fast forward. Now what does hip lead do? And what's your revenue model? How do you make money?
Yeah, so Hip Lead, we help companies scale their outbound sales and we make money basically by working with sales and marketing teams to do a lot of the things that are repetitive in their sales process, lead generation, some sales ops functions. and then actually help them on a consulting basis to run their outbound email campaigns and outbound sales.
And we charge companies between $2,000 and $4,000 a month on average. I think our biggest client is around $20,000 a month. Yeah, and we basically help them to scale their outbound sales. We're usually working with their demand gen team or with their sales ops team. And as of December 2016, how many customers are you working with?
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