SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
"He Hit $1m in Revenue Helping SaaS Founders Build MVP's "
13 Jun 2020
Chapter 1: What inspired the guest to start a SaaS company?
Of that 85K in December, how much of it was one-time payments like to get the MVP out versus true recurring payments?
So we don't have any actually one times right now. Everything is on a recurring ongoing. So the contracts are, the statement of work is ongoing work until you tell us to stop. And that's how all of our contracts are arranged right now.
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And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting. Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public.
We got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Bean before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion.
We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that.
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Hello everyone, my guest today is John Steele. He's been coding since he was a teenager and had a career in IT before he went to law school and decided what he really wanted to be was the CEO of a SaaS company. Ceres Codes is his company. It was founded upon his passion for coding. He's married, has two kids, and cashed in on two World Series of Poker events.
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Chapter 2: How does Series Code help startups build their MVPs?
They want to put the least amount into the equity and pay as much cash as possible.
Well, the the so let me do the flip side of that as a smart founder who wants to preserve cash early on they're not actually selling you equity right safe is really a dead instrument with the expectation it's going to convert to equity so they could after a year and a half screw you because there's no interest rate pay you back that money and legally there's no recourse for you correct
Well, I don't think they can pay back the money. It's in that safe. If they have a financing round, we get to participate in it. But there is the possibility that it just goes nowhere. And like all safe holders, you get nothing. I mean, we really are banking on it going somewhere.
Got it, got it, got it. Okay, so you obviously can't extend this to everybody because you have to put on your VC hat a little bit and say, what's the likelihood they're going to do a funding round or not? So, I mean, how many times have you done this with a company and still today, a year, two, three years later, they still haven't raised any equity or had a liquidation event?
So our early clients are like that. The ones where John Steele was the salesperson, right? We have a couple that are still... In that, they haven't shut their doors, but they're still going. We're still providing work at a really great price. We are getting better and better at vetting clients who come out. We haven't had anybody go through a round yet because the series code.
as auxiliary teams, I was doing this, it was the wild West, whatever John could negotiate is what we went and got. We decided to put a product around it really. And that's where we got the lawyers involved and wrote up the contracts and made it a standard offering at the beginning of this year. So all of those clients who've come in this year, nobody's gone to financing yet.
It's a little too early. Um, but yeah, so we're still going through it.
Well, so give me some context in 2019, how many customers did you serve?
Um, so we had,
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Chapter 3: What is the pricing model for developing a SaaS product?
Oh, that's good. That's good. That's obviously a good place to be. Now, could you raise equity, you know, cash for what you're doing or no?
We probably could. It's funny, we sponsor a lot of these entrepreneurs events like the Rockies Venture Club. And when we have a booth there, we have a lot of investors come up to us. Oh, so you're raising money. What's it for? We say, oh, we're not. We're like, you should be. But we just right now aren't looking into it. We turn it down.
Yeah. I mean, how is there a way? I mean, you only want to raise capital if you can deploy it in a way that helps you grow your business, right? Your bottleneck is finding more engineers to take on more hours of development work. That's like a hard thing to grow, right? I mean, you're an agency.
Yeah. And so we actually are really good. I've been doing it for I mean, even before starting this up for five, six, seven years of finding developers themselves. We have a process that takes 40 applicants and funnels it down to one person who joins the team, including, you know, a programming test that is actually paid. And so we give everybody the same test.
And so we know where they fit in the in line and stuff. So we actually can get developers in pretty quick in a week or two, and we've been able to do this just routinely over and over. But we don't have that same kind of system for the team captain who is a bit more dynamic and has to have a higher level of skill.
And I just don't know the way to bring them in yet without working with them and kind of getting a good feel for them.
Where are you sourcing the 40 developers? I mean, are you using sites like TopTal, Upwork, and then basically bringing them onto your own platform and then hiring one full-time? Correct.
So yeah, we use those freelancing platforms that are out there because they have so many people around the globe connected to it.
Yeah. Do you put your current projects through Top Talent Upwork or do you actually hire these 28 people or full-time on your personal balance sheet in P&L?
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