SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Folderly Email Deliverability SaaS Hits $1.56m ARR In Under 9 Months, Bootstrapped
17 Sep 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
So does that mean your monthly recurring revenue on folderly is about $150,000? Almost. So I can say that's like a little bit less. Okay. 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.
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check it out right now at getlatka.com hey folks my guest today is vladislav podoliako he's building a tool called folderly.com an email a platform that helps you understand your email deliverability problems and how to solve them vladislav are you ready to take us to the top absolutely okay first off how did you discover this problem were you a marketer that had email deliverability problems
Yeah, so I had a backstory about that. We have our sales agency called Belkins. We serve for our clients as an email marketing provider. We help them with B2B appointment setting. And back two years ago, we had an issue when, you can imagine, we had back there 200 clients. It's around 500 up to 1,000 mailboxes under our management.
Uh, we usually have our successful email campaigns where we are getting around like huge open rate, like 70% plus and great replay rate, like 20, 25% plus and great appointment rate. And, uh, someday it like went up to 5% open rate, low replay or replay rate. And no one like answer you at all. And there is no meetings and our clients expected to get those meetings. And it was so frustrating.
So I needed to spend some time to solve this problem. And I started to dive deep to this deliverability topic and find out that there is a lot of stuff we forgot to take care of. And for me, starting from that time, email marketing started to be like technical marketing because you need to take care of different things like DNS settings, like set up in the right way your domain, mailboxes, tools.
You need to have, like, keep an eye on your content that you need to, like, do not use links or spam boards. And you need to take care of your leads as well. So you need to, like, have hand-tailed leads and show, like, top-notch quality. And collecting all those case studies makes me, like...
make me the thought that we can pivot to the product because a lot of marketers on the market and salespeople, like SDRs, head of sales, et cetera, they're struggling with email deliverability because no one on the market shows you how to fix any spam problems that appeared in your mailboxes. So basically, yeah. So this law launched out of Belkin's, your agency, where you discovered the problem.
Now, how big is Belkin's? How much revenue did Belkin's do in 2020? So in 2020, Balkans did almost six mil in ARR, so in the annual revenue. We have like 150 people on the board of Balkans. There's a lot of self-marketing people. Also, we started there to collect our development team, which is now a product team for the folderly.
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Chapter 2: What is Folderly and how did it start?
And even we do not outreach the clients of Balkans with the folderly stuff yet. And we try to do it by our own. Because we're like starting from scratch. Just what's the difference? We have our expertise and maybe resources at the beginning, like hiring or... some sales and marketing efforts. How many people are full-time only on Folderly? 20. So in total, we have 180 people. Engineers, seven.
And how many are sales and marketing? Two. Any quota carrying reps on Folderly or no? We have customer success team and it's now like three people. Three people. Okay. So got it. There's 20 people on the folder lease specifically, 180 over at the agency. There are two separate cap tables. So how is the equity of folder lease split up? Do you own the majority? Yeah.
So I have a partner, Michael, as my partner in Balkans. So we're like equal partners, but in the Balkans. And what we do in order to create our product. So we split it up on each and every product we will build.
Chapter 3: What challenges did the founder face with email deliverability?
And the person who like involved most have a majority. And the other person who like just helping with advisors or some other stuff have less. Yeah. So you have the majority, how much equity do you own in folderly? So we did like 60 on 30. You own 60%? Yeah. So the agency will basically sit on the cap tables of these products that you guys spin out.
And then you or Michael or whoever the leader is of the product will own 60% of the business. Yep. I see. Do you like that model? Is it working? So far. You know that a company is worth nothing because no one asks you for the price. Yep. How many customers are you serving today on Folderly? Around 100. Okay. And what do they pay per month on average?
So we're starting to bill our clients 200 bucks per month as the minimum subscription. On average, we charge our clients, so with every check, it's around 1,500 bucks per month. So they scaled up in the system when they see the results. So does that mean your monthly recurring revenue on Folderly is about $150,000? Almost. So a bit less. I can say that it's a bit less. Like $130,000?
Yeah, somewhere. How are you getting new customers? Are you just selling to agency customers from Belkins or are you getting new customers from somewhere else? So first of all, since email marketing covered bread and butter, we heavily invest into the outbound marketing. So we have SDR who handled the appointment setting, the guy who handles calls with me.
And this is the first source, so outbound marketing. And other source, we're heavily starting to spend to content marketing, SEO, and organically we're getting around... So not converted, around 100 leads per month, plus outbound leads, we're getting like... 150 around that in terms of outbound meetings.
So in total, we're having per month up to 300 meetings, which is converting to our full decline. So 300 meetings, 150 convert into what? No, I mean that 150 comes from the outbound marketing. Okay. The other 100 coming organically from the other sources like funding marketing. From those 300 meetings, how many converted to paid customers last month? Our average conversion rate around 10 plus.
So at the beginning when I was mostly involved in sales, it was like 25 because founders can easily sell until you know what to say. And our average conversion around 10%. Okay, got it. That makes sense. Now, have you bootstrapped Folderly or did you guys raise external capital? Yeah, bootstrapped. How much of your agency money have you invested into Folderly?
I can say that nothing because if we will count the resources, so we hire the folks in the for the development team, we started to like raise the ideas that we need to build the product. So we have an idea that we solve for our clients in Balkans and we need to build the product. So we started to hire people under the Balkans and we started to build the product and you know,
We were strapped from the beginning and we did not like add some money on top because we started to sell the product to clients even though we don't have like the MVP version. So we started to figure those problems by our hands. For some clients, they appeared that they have those delivery problems and they agreed to us to do this. And we reinvested those money to the growth of the portfolio.
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Chapter 4: How did the agency model contribute to Folderly's growth?
So, uh, building the group, building folderly on the side and yeah, planning to grow bootstrapping. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, your favorite book. Actually, it's Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? Actually, no one because I haven't the free time for following. I'd rather sleep.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your business besides your own agency? The good one. It's Zapier. And like Confluence and Jira and all those development stuff. Number three or four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? It depends on the day, but it's the lowest, like four up to six. Okay. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids? Married. Any kids?
No kids. Okay. How are you? 25. 25. Last question. What's something you wish you knew five years ago when you were 20? I wish I knew the experience I collected over the sales and marketing with agency and why it's so hard to build agency first. So you know that if you're building service, It's hard because it's everything around you and your partner.
Michael and I talked to Bill Belkins with $100, and we came so far with a lot of people. So I think I will tell myself that it never was easier just starting to go faster or something like that. Folderly was launched, guys, in November of 2020. They've gone from nothing to a $1.5 million run rate in nine months. How'd they grow so fast?
Well, founders Vlad and Michael had an agency that did $6 million in revenue last year. They built the SaaS tool as a separate company outside the agency and are now scaling very, very quickly. The tool helps you make sure your emails don't end up in spam boxes. It's an email deliverability tool. Vlad, thanks for taking us to the top. Thank you, Nathan.
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