SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Here's how I added $10m revenue over the last 18 months, HiFello CEO
31 Dec 2024
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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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My name is Stephen London.
Chapter 2: How did Fellow achieve $10 million in ARR in 18 months?
I am the co-founder of Fellow, and I am super, super excited to share how we went from zero to 10 million in ARR in 18 months. We can actually change that title in two weeks to zero to 15 million in 24 months, hopefully. So, first of all, who is Fellow? We are a marketing engagement platform, AI-powered. We're building more and more AI capabilities every day, so that's a huge emphasis for us.
We started in residential real estate and... Our heroes are real estate agents. However, we're gonna expand over the next couple of years, both products and capabilities in real estate, and then also to other verticals. So how did we do it?
Chapter 3: What is the significance of AI in Fellow's marketing engagement platform?
First of all, a shit ton of hard work and pain and ups and downs and a lot of luck, but here's our revenue growth. This is my personally, my favorite chart that we have. We went from zero, we launched in October 22, and then we're about to cross 15 million hopefully within the next two weeks. As I mentioned, we'll be at 20 million by the end of the year.
Wild, I mean it's crazy to see a chart that encompasses so much pain in one place and it looks so pretty and easy to understand but it definitely is not. So what is the story and what are the lessons and hacks that I can share with you guys and hopefully you can take a couple nuggets away from today and maybe apply them to your business.
So quick show of hands before we start, who is in the kind of zero to one stage of their company? One who's in one to 10. Okay. And who is in 10 plus? All right. So most in one to 10. Perfect. I think, uh, generally in terms of these three stages, which is pre-revenue kind of zero to one and then product market fit, uh, at some point in the one to tens and I call it dots, ants and rockets.
So I always think about it like, um, Dots are connecting the dots. These are the framework of your idea. It actually applies throughout the lifecycle of your business. But these are the things you need to nail up front. So first comes team. If you don't get this right, it's like a bad marriage. Your life is terrible. You've got conflicts. And so I think the key there is upfront.
You really have to know yourself and be honest. Because I think if you're not honest, it's very hard and you're a little delusional. And all of us in the room are entrepreneurs. We think we are smarter and can solve more problems than everybody else. And if you say no, you're lying, because you probably do.
So the more that you know yourself, I think it's easier to understand where you need to supplement and where your co-founders can help out. One other thing, the guy on the right, Ryan, is one of my childhood best friends. And for a long time, I was always, we were talking to VCs, always embarrassed and would hide that and all this stuff.
And what I've realized is that's actually one of the strongest assets we have as a company, is that both from a culture standpoint and from a resolving conflict standpoint, you have somebody that you understand how to work with. And once you figure that out, I think we've hit our stride.
It took us a couple years to really hit our stride as founders, but you start to let go, and you can start working with your team more and more, understanding who's doing what. I think that's critical. If somebody can do something 80% as good as you can, they should probably be doing it as you scale. So quick idea point here. Great ideas always sound crazy, so don't worry about sharing them.
Oftentimes as entrepreneurs, we have this idea, we wanna launch this product, and then we don't share it, and we don't want somebody to take the idea. The best ideas, when you say to somebody, here's a little trick, they will, go right over their head, or they'll think it's so crazy or weird that it doesn't resonate. That's how you know you may be onto a good idea. So stay fluid with the idea.
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Chapter 4: What strategies did Fellow use to grow their revenue rapidly?
These guys are psychopaths. They just are obsessed with the product and just keep working all day long. And the third hack, we had actually investors as users. So after the seed round, we pivoted ideas and had to raise a million dollars in safe kind of funding. And we made a conscious choice to not work with VCs, not work with um, other entities and raise from, uh, users of the product.
So top real estate teams. And that's been immensely helpful both from a feedback loop, probably a little less from feedback, more from just the social proof of it. Um, Here is a quick, something I'm personally really proud of. As you start being ants, you're running as many experiments as you can. We created a very flat organization.
I think I would recommend that for anybody that's certainly sub 10. As many people that can be empowered to do as many tests as possible wins. We spent, so in 2023, we went from 400,000 in ARR to 7 million in ARR, and we spent $80,000 on marketing, which is wild. And I'll talk a little bit about how we did that, but...
I think an important lesson from that is spending money on marketing does not make good marketing. You have to spend money on marketing when you have product market fit and you know what you're doing from a marketing perspective, otherwise you are spinning your wheels. So here are some experiments we ran. We gave away the product for free. We did free onboarding.
We hired people without an exercise, which is a terrible idea. We ruined our email domain. We hired demand gen agencies. Didn't work out. But some random fun things that worked. We threw a free party. kind of convince this other larger organization, hey, I want access to real estate agents. And we said, okay, great. Why don't you throw the party? We'll pretend like we're hosting it.
And then you guys and your team can attend. So we threw this party for 200 people. worked out great at a conference. We ran a 30-day challenge, so we gave away the software for free for a year to whoever won this 30-day challenge. It engaged our entire community. Text message, post, people text, oh man, this software is awesome, everywhere. So the social proof of that.
Get on as many podcasts and webinars as possible. It is one of the most, you know, easiest hacks, both from it helps you practice telling that story, but also it's just free. You can repurpose that, I think, Nathan talked about it, talked about it. And then building a community. That is the engine that can take you to a billion dollars in ARR, but you have to start building that early on.
So this slide, you know, the Madonna song, we live in a material world. I think if you're gonna take away one or two things, this is one of the slides I would encourage you to take away.
how many people get forwarded something on Instagram or see a YouTube short or listen to something on a podcast and three weeks later you remember it, you don't remember where you heard it from or where you saw it from. And these little cultural pieces of information, which is a meme, not the funny frog joke of what a meme is, but a meme in terms of sharing cultural information,
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Chapter 5: How important is team dynamics in startup success?
It's only bullshit because your real core values are what you are every day. It's a radiation of kind of the team. And to determine them, it's very simple. You just have to think through which employees didn't make it and why, and which employees made it and why. And those are your core values.
So as you think about this person didn't make it because they weren't gritty enough, or they got pissed when I asked them hard questions, At 4.30, they checked out every day, and that just made me so angry. Those are your core values as a company. And that reflects and radiates outwards into your external culture, which is so important. And this goes back to the community.
I would say overspend on your community. If you wanna get to build a massive company, you need a community. We have Facebook groups. I'll talk about that in a second. But every conference we go to, we get testimonials. We have the top right there, one of our clients we couldn't attend. We had him accept the awards for us.
We gave, this is again going back to the growth hacks, put on conferences to promote our ICPs as heroes. That's the listing challenge on the bottom right. We made a wrestling belt, which was really fun. So the culture of this vibrancy, especially if you're in dying or slow growth industries that haven't adapted and changed in a long time, you bring some life to that industry.
I think it's going to be so well received, and that can be your culture. Last slide. I heard a couple people talking about this yesterday. I think... Again, there's only one way to hyper growth, and that is leverage. So leverage can mean a lot of different things. Leverage content for marketing. Affiliates has been a huge angle for us. People love us. We want to reward them for sharing that.
Shared knowledge for CS. So we have bottom right is our Facebook leadership. We actually have two Facebook groups, one leadership and one for single agents. I think we have 2,000 in the leadership group now. We have had a community that really talks a lot about what we do, shares knowledge.
We have a fellow academy which we just launched a couple months ago where we're doing master classes and tips and webinars. So the goal there is just how do we leverage everything that a different user figures out or asks a question and just mass broadcast that. Last two quick plug for FounderPath. Early on we actually did a quick deal with them and was super easy.
I remember Nathan called me on a Friday and I was like, who is this? He just kind of went on and said, I want to make sure you're a real person. So debt is good if you have ROI behind it, and it's not great if you don't have ROI behind it. And last thing that's been a huge hack for us is leveraging the world for talent. So We are a COVID baby as a company. We had never had an office before.
My co-founders and I rarely see each other in person. And we have people working in five different countries. We have people all over the United States. If somebody's $120,000 in New York and they're $80,000 in Idaho, Idaho it is. So I think the ability to leverage the world at this point is a really undertapped resource for a lot of people.
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