SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Finally! How to move from consultant to SaaS CEO (from a consultant who did $800k revenue last year)
13 Sep 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Out of school, he launched a consulting company called Besolve.
Chapter 2: How did the co-founders decide to invest in a SaaS product?
He's grown that to $800,000 in revenue last year and said, you know what? We want to build software to help our consulting clients do work better in the Microsoft ecosystem. Him and his partner have invested $150,000 from their agency into this new SaaS tool, which you can find at SP Robot. SP Robot is the name of it. Hoping to launch here in the next, call it three weeks, three months.
We'll see what happens. Hey folks, my guest today is Martin Hatting. He's a Microsoft 365 architect who's helped deliver SharePoint design, development, and adoption services to clients in the financial services industry for the past 20 years. He's currently building SP or S-ProBot, a SharePoint and Teams governance SaaS, which helps organizations prevent and manage content sprawl.
Martin, you ready to take us to the top?
Yep.
What is content sprawl?
So content sprawl is something that we encountered in our day jobs as Microsoft 365 consultants. So we've been working, helping orgs move into the Microsoft cloud and then also build out their apps and run their services in the cloud. And the one thing which is quite interesting
easy these days with Microsoft applications, with Teams specifically, and Teams have got more than 10 million users, is to create a workspace. You can spin up a workspace really quickly and really easily, and people tend to do that. It just goes wild. It's a good thing from an adoption perspective. But also what you end up having is like just thousands of workspaces that are unused.
You get duplicate information all over the place. And then what happens is people can't find stuff. And then they create more workspaces because they can't find what they're looking for. And you just end up with just overload all over the place.
That's content. How do you solve that?
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Chapter 3: What is content sprawl and why is it a challenge?
Okay.
Well, sorry. Okay, so wait, is this one company and there's a consulting arm with 10 people and then the SaaS product, which is six people?
Correct. Correct. That's how we split it. So some of the six people that work on the SaaS product, three are full-time and three do a bit of consulting work to pay the bills as well. So this is really a product of doing consulting work, finding this problem in our consulting, day-to-day consulting work and saying, we're finding this problem over and over again. Let's build a solution for it.
And let's make that solution available to the whole world while we can. It's identifying that, scratching that itch that we had, the typical scenario in SaaS, I think. So when did you launch the agency? What year? In 2001. Oh, wow.
Okay, got it. And if you're comfortable sharing, what was your best year in terms of revenue?
We got, again, in relation to the low cost of living, we got just over $800,000 annual revenue. That was in 2022? Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Wow. So I guess, how do you make the decision to siphon off some resources to invest and experiment with a SaaS product versus just to keep building the consulting business?
I think it's a combination of the one is realizing that the consulting business is just constant churn and constant grind. It's that part of it. One thing to free up a bit of time and have something that is scalable and that is repeatable. And the other thing is I have a really appreciation for really great user experiences.
And I've always wanted to build something that is just like amazing from a user experience perspective. The whole signup process, the onboarding process, the flow of it. And it's been a challenge of, you know, I saw it as a bit of a challenge for me to actually build that. So that's been an interesting journey for me personally to do the whole design of the system.
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Chapter 4: How can organizations effectively manage content sprawl?
But the clients are going to be running production with the first version once we launch in a couple of months.
Interesting. Interesting. How are you... You're pre-revenue on the SaaS. You have six people over there. Three are part-time. How do you pay the three that are full-time if you have no SaaS revenue yet?
With consulting profit. So we made the... The conscious decision to invest that money. So I'm taking a bit of a pay cut this year. I have taken for the last year. And I've got a really great partner. We've been partners in the business since we started in 2001. And he's committed to driving the revenue on the consulting side while I focus on this. Very grateful to have that.
It's not everyone that has that opportunity.
How much money so far has the agency invested in the SaaS company?
Roughly $150,000.
Does that make you nervous?
It does. Very. Why? Because it's the first time we've done this and I know it costs a lot to do this and I know it takes a lot of time and I know it's going to still take a lot of time once we get to selling because that's the hardest part. Everyone tells you it's easy to build it, it's harder to sell. And I am very, I'm still very nervous, even though we do all the validation.
We speak to so many people about where people are actually going to pay for this. How many people are actually going to pay for this? I don't know. I guess we'll find out. But we've got to start somewhere.
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Chapter 5: What pricing strategy is being considered for the SaaS product?
Amazing. Okay. But, but both of these websites are a hundred percent owned by one entity with you and your partner.
Great.
Great. And you guys just, your friends, you split a 50, 50 or what?
Yeah, we've got some minority shareholders as well in the business. But we started straight out of university. We decided we're crazy. We're going to start a business. Let's do this. And we started actually selling software and building software for schools, schools administration software at that stage, high schools. That was the early days.
And then we discovered Microsoft SharePoint while we were busy doing that in 2002. And we're like, this is a really great product. We can build something with this and we can, you know, let's use it. So we started rolling out intranets and building small little intranets and building up. And we eventually got to the stage where we built intranets for 55,000 personal orgs.
You know, that's kind of the scale we've done the consulting on.
Interesting. I love that. Well, heck of a story here, Martin. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, your favorite book.
Uh, Atlas Shrugged on rent.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
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