SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 560: Badger Maps Does $1.2M in 2016, $120k MRR, Looking to 3x with CEO Steven Benson
04 Feb 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. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 2: What does Badger Maps do for salespeople?
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.
Chapter 3: What was the first-year revenue for Badger Maps?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the $100 is Zach Theron. He's a 22-year-old Apple employee, and he's listening to the show and loving it. For your chance to win $100 every Monday, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now, and then text the word NATHAN to 33444 to prove that you did it to enter.
top tribe you know i don't have a lot of time to waste that's why i use fresh books to send out invoices and make sure i'm collecting my money to get your free month go to nathanlatka.com forward slash fresh books and enter the top in the how did you hear about us section Nathan Latke here. This is episode 560. Coming up tomorrow morning, you'll learn from Ken Marlin.
He did $1 billion with a B in 2016 transactions at his M&A firm, Marlin & Associates. They take on average 3%, so you can do the math. They made a lot of money. Nathan Latke here. Good morning, everybody. Our guest today is Steven Benson. He's the founder and CEO of Badger Maps, the number one sales app in the Apple App Store, which helps field salespeople be more successful.
Badger shows salespeople their customers and leads on a map and connects to their calendar to build daily routes. Steven, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes, I am. All right. Good, good, good. So tell us about Badger. And by the way, do you go by Badger Maps or Badger Mapping or just Badger? Badger Maps usually. All right. So tell us what Badger Maps does and how you make money.
Sure. So what Badger does is we help field salespeople with their jobs. It's called Badger Maps originally because the original thought was that field salespeople needed to be able to view their territory and activities and schedule on a map when they go out into the field every day.
And it's really, you know, it started from that base and solving that set of problems and then grew from there to now really trying to do a lot of things for the field salesperson and make their day go better and more efficiently.
And how do you make money? Are you a SaaS model or what?
Yes, we're a SaaS model. So it's a monthly service. It's $18 and $35 or $66 a month.
Okay. And give me an average just so we can be more clear. What's the average customer pay you per month?
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Chapter 4: How does Badger Maps generate revenue?
You guys are doing a great job, obviously acquiring customers. How are they finding you?
Um, in, so we, the, the most, the biggest way they find this is, is through, is through, uh, just word of mouth. That's, that's the, the, we track that as being our, our, the best way that we find people. Second best is, uh, is SEO. Uh, third best is SEM.
Got it. And what are you willing to spend to acquire a new customer?
Um, I guess it depends on the, it, it, it depends on the, the, uh, the, the marketing venue. So, I mean, I, I kind of use Google as the benchmark. And so most Google search SEM is the benchmark for, for what I'm willing to spend at wire. And so everything else always ends up seeming really expensive to me by comparison. Um,
So we actually, you know, we, we do have like things like retargeting and that's, that's reasonable.
Facebook has never pent it up for us. Add it all up for me though. So like in a given month, like last month, what'd you guys spend total on paid marketing?
Oh, um, that's a good question. Probably about 12 grand.
Okay. All right. So about 10% of revenues. Yeah. Got it. And what is the, like how many, again, if we now divide that by the number of new customers it brought you, what's your average customer acquisition cost?
I'm not sure. It's different depending on different venues. In Google, it would be way different than if it was SEO.
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Chapter 5: What lessons can be learned from splitting equity among founders?
What interest are you paying on the money you raised? um i think i think it was like 22 23 got it did it require a personal guarantee or no no they didn't interesting so those that's the valuable it's like a bank is like maybe 10 and they require a personal guarantee vcs want like a hundred you know 100 return lighter capital is kind of in the middle 20 annual return no personal guarantee
Well, yeah. I don't know if I'd say VCs want 100% return, but... But that's their target. I'd say their target's to 3 to 10x their money, but that's equity, right? It's different than... It's different than...
than a loan where you're just paying a set interest rate got it okay good that's helpful um let me round out here so last question before i jump into the famous five um 20 what was total i imagine you're doing 140k right now so what you guys did you break call it 1.2 million in 2016 total revenue total revenue um yeah yeah it was actually right around there 1.2 Yeah. Okay.
And what's your goal for 2017?
In terms of ARR, I'd like to see it at five. And so yeah, I'd take four and a half though. Rather have it be six, but I'd take four and a half.
So you're at 140 MRR now to get to a $5 million ARR, you've got to get to about 416 grand in December, 2016 total revenue. So you're like almost doubling or tripling the business. That's your goal, right? Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, Top Tribe, as many of you know, I sold Hayo and everyone is always asking me what my expenses were when I was building Hayo. Well, a big expense was that I spent over three grand per month on financial services to keep me out of trouble in terms of taxes.
You know, my mom would always harbor me, Nathan, you gotta keep all your receipts and put them in a freaking box or something to make sure you don't get an audit or things like this. I'm like, mom, I'm a millennial. You think I'm gonna keep all these receipts? I now use FreshBooks. I use their mobile app to take a picture of receipts and it makes taxes a cinch.
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