SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Founder Does $18m in 2023 Revenue Following 9 Strange SaaS Playbooks
20 Jun 2024
Chapter 1: What strategies did Gilles Domartini use to achieve $18m in revenue?
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To give a bit of context of what we've been trying to achieve, so we started in 2011 as an organization, We've been going fairly slow up until 18, 19, building the product carefully, trying to shape it to serve the client that we want to serve. I'll just cover this in a sec. And then from 2021, started to accelerate. And now we really see the acceleration. So that's in revenue.
But, of course, to sustain that acceleration, and we are focusing on the enterprise B2B space. We were more long-tail historically, but now we focus more on the enterprise B2B. We had also to recruit quite some staff.
So that's part of the challenges that we were facing, you know, how to organize this properly and to continue to manage the engagement of the team and manage the proper throughput of the organization. With Kling, very briefly, so Kling, we specialize in subscriber retention for video platforms. We work with the likes of, well, you see some of the clients here.
Our largest client is actually the NFL in the US. So you guys here, I'm sure you know. Some are in the telco industry. Some are more like traditional broadcasters. So we help sell video subscriptions. We are kind of CRM platform for video subscription, but what we do. We managed about 35 million accounts, half a billion in gross billing. So we became quite sizable nowadays.
And so what are some of these key learnings? And I'm sure you've been hearing some of these learnings in the past day, in the past few hours. Some people are repeating kind of the same, but there are also a few nuances. So I was happy that I could share maybe things that are a bit different. So one thing, and it's often a dilemma, especially with investors. Are there investors in that group here?
OK, there's a few investors. So investors, especially in the early days, we always look at, what's your time? What's your time? What's your time? and you need to expand very fast, and it needs to be sufficiently large, otherwise it's not worth investing. So you have the tendency quite quickly to go maybe a bit too far on what you can target.
It's easy to stretch a software, but actually it's hard to stretch the sales and to stretch the experience and the marketing and this type of activities. So one thing I think that we've been doing pretty well is to continue to focus very much on our vertical, so the media and entertainment vertical, and not to try other verticals. Often we speak about gaming, for example. It's very similar.
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Chapter 2: How did Cleeng adapt its focus from long-tail to enterprise B2B?
Since we go after clients with potentially millions of users, you end up with an AR of a million or more with certain clients. And of course, when you start to charge a million per year as software, you feel like, wow, holy shit, we make it. You have to adapt your strategy. I'm sure, well, some of you guys may be familiar with, so loss leader, basically you become extremely aggressive.
Scheming, you try to get the most out of all of this. is that you feel like, OK, I'm going to be aggressive for a certain time until I penetrate the market, get market share, and then I will re-increase it. Or premium, which is more the positioning that we have today. You feel, OK, I have high margin. I'll try to maintain them while it lasts, and then my drop later.
and then some other considerations. So I've been sharing a few parameters related to pricing, but I really feel that pricing is important that you constantly optimize it for the target group of users that you want to go after. And it was definitely a key learning from selling 200K of ACV to a million plus of ACV. Of course, it's a very different type of pricing.
The third element that was a big learning, and it's been a learning, I think, for the past 10 years, to be honest, we always neglected a little bit the customer success aspect and the retention aspect. We tend to always chase the new clients. And you organize yourself. You spend a lot of effort about acquisition and growth strategies of marketing.
You invest in customer success, but you may not invest at the same level of attention as you would do for the acquisition part. But you quickly realize that once you get that 5 to 10 million of revenue, I mean, if you have a leaky bucket, you know, I love this image of the leaky bucket.
If you sign 5 million a year, but you lose like 2 or 3 every year, I mean, there's no way you can get to 10, 15, or 20 million. So very important to... to invest in customer success, to structure well that team. It's maybe the most complex. I've learned that it's maybe the most complex role in an organization. Why is it the most complex role?
Because I assimilate that a good account manager is like a CEO. You need to know about sales. You need to be able to negotiate with your clients. You need to know very well your product, because your client is asking, OK, how do I use this product? How do I generate the right value from it? You may need to be able to answer some technical questions from these clients once in a while.
And you need to sell properly the value propositions, marketing, and so on. So very difficult to develop the right profiles there. So start early, in my view, to get the right guys. It's certainly one area where we've been doing good from a net dollar retention. We are 120%, 130%.
But from a staffing standpoint, we still have high rotation, and we still struggle a little bit to staff properly that organization. Surprisingly, especially after the point number three, is that as we grew, we hired a specialist of customer success and customer retention coming from IBM. She's been doing this for very long.
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Chapter 3: What unique pricing strategies did Cleeng implement?
I was speaking about pricing. I was speaking about market focus. A large part of the reorganization on pricing is when we sign the Looker, when we sign the Salesforce. You really go deep as a CEO to understand, OK, but why Salesforce is billing like this? Why Looker is billing like this? Why AWS is being like this?
And then you try to think, OK, what's the correlation between how we do it to how I do it? And where are the gaps? If it succeeded, if they succeeded in that domain, there's certainly ways that also I can learn quite a bit from them. Learn from others, very important, but I guess that's why we are all here together.
The nine is, and that's why I didn't follow the template sent by SysOpen, and I hope nobody will report me, is avoid boredom. One thing that we see also a little bit related to the culture is that when you move from 50, 60 people that were there at the beginning of the organization. So we really went into battle together. We were in the trenches, and we were fighting, and da, da, da.
And then you have a bunch of people which are coming in. And then it becomes a bit more corporate, like, OK, follow the processes. And I'm the first one to advocate for that. So that's a bit of the dilemma. You advocate to follow standards. And at the same time, you say, no, but guys, OK, go outside. And if you need to spend some money to invite some clients, OK, go for it.
Don't ask permission for free papers to be signed. So very important to, I think, resist the temptation of a form of bureaucratic model as you grow. And again, 100 employees is not like Microsoft's size, but it already starts to weight on our capacity to decide effectively. And that's about it. So it's past 20 minutes.
I've been sharing in nine key learnings, but I'm happy to take also a few questions if you guys have. Yeah, thanks, Jill. Give Jill a hand, please. A quick question before we bring Jeff on stage. Any questions? Good. I'll grab Jill after. All right, thanks, Jill. Appreciate it. Thank you.
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