SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
He closed $3.2m at $17m valuation with $20k in MRR last week for Estate Planning Tool
28 Dec 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of estate planning discussed in this episode?
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 a year in revenue doing custom solutions for the same customers he's now serving today. That's why he's now scaling so quickly.
And that's what allowed him to get the seed round done in a market that's crazy where no one can get deals done. Team of 17 as he looks to scale. New version coming out here shortly. Hey, folks. My guest today is Jonathan Fischbeck.
Chapter 2: How does Estatespace simplify estate management?
He is buildingestatespace.com. It's estate management simplified. Jonathan, you ready to take us to the top?
Always. Thank you, Nathan, for having me.
No one thinks about estate planning. How do you make them think about this so they pay you?
Yeah, so I think from an estate planning perspective, where estate space really is setting the bar is when we're dealing with real property assets. So we're talking about managing your property, maintaining your property, managing your assets and maintaining those assets.
ultimately coming back to where we started as fintech right we want to help appreciate the value of the things that you own and help you manage them better we want to add depth to your general ledger and your balance sheet where it might just be a single line item and then from there we also want to help you slow down the depreciation of assets that might lose value over time and helping you extend the life of things that you own so ultimately
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Chapter 3: What challenges does the guest face in getting clients to trust software for estate management?
The way that when we started the company, we saw I've got marketable securities, I have real estate and alternative investments, but who's really managing all my stuff? And that's how we really started. That was a genesis in the idea for Estatespace.
You know, for me, when I think about managing my own sort of stuff, like I want somebody, a person that I can call focused on it. How do you get people to sort of trust this using soft, like to invest in software around this process versus someone, a wealth manager, for example?
Right. So it's an emerging space, right? In the last 10 years, family offices specifically have started getting into the fulfillment of the lifestyle of the individual that they're serving, whether it's a single or multifamily. And so we saw an opportunity to really help them with the things that they struggled on, like
uh finding the right person to do the thing that they're looking for the request being that they need to fulfill so um we've actually um had a lot of excitement around helping these families and family offices scale uh automatically through a state space so are they paying you directly versus versus individual consumers paying you directly to manage estates yeah so we're b to c to b so we so so it may be b to b to c
Chapter 4: How has the company's revenue model evolved from services to SaaS?
yes exactly yeah interesting so how many family offices pay you something today uh right now we've got about 65 family offices on the platform uh in the last when we launched uh what was it april 30th of this year and wait why do i have that your launch date was 2017. well that's when we started the company but we launched our commercial product um So we did an alpha to a beta.
We went through that process with our clients in order to get to a commercial ready product for both web and mobile this last April. You had, though, revenue before this year, right? Absolutely. Yeah. So we were, you know, it's part of my Thunder 500 story, right? We were doing services. So we were doing a lot of things. It was hard for me to break that service mindset.
Chapter 5: What strategies is the guest using to raise $3.2 million in funding?
And we were able to really pivot to complete SaaS here in the last 18 months. So we've now kind of sunset our services. And now we're changing all of our revenue over from what was non-subscriptions to all subscription-based.
I see. So yeah, when we spoke in 2021, you said you had about 50 customers and they were paying, I guess, services here as well. But you did about $2.2 million in total revenue that year. Is that accurate? That is accurate. Yes. I see.
Chapter 6: How does the guest manage the transition from service-based to subscription-based revenue?
But 0% of that was SaaS.
Yeah. It was like... No, not 0%, but maybe 5% of that revenue was SaaS revenue. And so now we're flipping the script. So we pivoted to pure SaaS. We do no services at this point in time.
Will revenue decline this year because you shut off all that service revenue while you're scaling your SaaS?
Yeah. We're actually doing a seed round funding right now. We're raising capital.
Chapter 7: What are the key features that attract family offices to Estatespace?
I put in more capital. We're still bootstrapped. We're doing this through friends, family, partners, our closed network, and our board. Then we'll We're scaling back up. So we're probably... We just crossed $250,000 in recurring revenue in ARR in the past 5 months since we launched.
So you're doing $20,000 a month in MRR, which is a $250,000 run rate. And that's your revenue for this year?
No. Our revenue by the end of the year should probably be somewhere around $600,000.
Chapter 8: What advice does the guest offer to entrepreneurs about raising capital?
Okay.
So you still have $400,000 of services or something. $400,000. Yeah.
Yep.
I see. I see. Okay.
Yep. So that's exactly. We've still got like annual legacy, just under a half a million dollars in ARR coming from services.
How do you manage that storyline, especially if you're raising now, even just with employees? I mean, imagine when you close books in 2021 and you do 2.2 million revenue, and then 2022, it's going to go down significantly, down to 600. But the story is, hey guys, we're moving to higher margin SaaS. That's a hard storyline to manage.
I mean, any employee looking at the books is going, oh my gosh, we just declined by a lot. How do you manage that storyline?
Yeah, so I'm transparent and honest, right? So I've just told every employee kind of what we're doing, right? The same story I'm telling you right now. So we're raising around 3.25 million. That'll take us to the end of next year. We'll be about $2 million in ARR by the end of next year, and it'll all be SaaS. And so actually, we have more excitement from our staff than we did. And we've also...
It wasn't like I had to sell that to all 17 people that work with us now. At that point in time, we were only about six people. So it was just me and a few other people at that time. So we tripled in size here in the last 18 months now that we made that transition overseas.
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