He Used Community to Hit $7m Revenue, VC's chased him

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Top Founders 23 min 2 speakers 3 chapters transcribed

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What insights can be gained from the founders' in-person event?

Nathan Latka 0:00

Founders, what's going on? You guys know I love in-person events and they are back. The recording you're about to hear is from our most recent event where we had hundreds of founders come together, share intimate details, templates, KPIs, OKRs about their business, and it was something special. Something special. We'd love to meet you in person. If you want to see the next live events we have coming up via our schedule, the link will be down below in the description. If you're listening on iTunes, check this out on YouTube. You'll see the links in the description or you can just Google founder path or Latka next event. We'd love to see you in person. In the meantime, though, enjoy this recording. It's a good one.

Nathan Latka 0:38

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.

Mark Abbott 1:11

Our business is about helping people build great companies. And the reality is, is every single one of you out here has an operating system. The question is, what kind of operating system do you have? There are about five operating system types that are out there if you think about it. First of all, when you start a company, you've got this thing called an accidental operating system, right? So you've got papers and Excel and PowerPoints, and you're just trying to get your act together. And you're working like dogs, just trying to make things happen. And so a bunch of people are doing a bunch of different things, and you're probably not even using the same tools to figure it all out. And then all of a sudden, you're like, wait a second.

Mark Abbott 1:45

We can't have people's names in one document here and another document, another document here. Let's bring it all together. And that's called an intentional operating system. And then you're like, you know what? People have built businesses before. Someone's probably figured this out. Why are we sitting here creating all these tools when I'm sure someone's already done this? There's books on how to do this. There's tools out there. Has someone figured this out? And if you go out and you look, there are a bunch of books out there. There's E-Myth, right? There's Traction. There's The Great Game of Business. There's The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. I'm trying to think of some other names that are out there.

Mark Abbott 2:18

There is Rockefeller Habits, Scaling Up. There are a bunch of books that are out there, right? And they kind of lay out how people have been doing this for decades and decades. So that's called a designed operating system. And then after that, you come to a holistic operating system, because some of the systems don't have everything in it. So as an example, EOS, which I'm very close to, really doesn't have anything about figuring out how to build value. Because the reality is, in our industry, we're not focused, at least lots of us aren't, focused on EBITDA. We're focused on growing revenues. And so the value of the business is based upon the revenues, not the EBITDA. So get your arms around how you create value.

Mark Abbott 2:57

And then the last type of operating system is actually what we're doing. We're creating an integrated operating system which takes all this information, all these tools, all these disciplines, and puts it all together. So it's almost easy to build a great company.

Nathan Latka 3:10

Mark, before you go forward, go back one. I'm going to sell you for a second. Go back two slides just to the revenue growth graphs of people. They're more likely to pay attention to know, at least I am, the revenue success of the business, right? So you get going in 2017, small revenue. Where are you at today?

Mark Abbott 3:24

So ARR as of today is about $10.4 million.

Nathan Latka 3:29

Okay, so this graph is actually a little bit old, $10.4.