SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How Chaser hit $294K revenue and 3 person team in 2023
16 Oct 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of Chaser and its unique offering?
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 these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Try.chaseformery.com helps you send out to-dos on Slack.
They've got 100 companies signed up so far sending to-do lists again out to their audience. He's measuring retention over the past 16 weeks, coming in at 43% using some of his favorite tools like Segment and Mixpanel.
Chapter 2: How did the founders secure funding for Chaser?
The question is now, can they grow that user base from 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 to more? funding the company with $100,000 pre-seed round at a $7 million cap last year, then did a $20,000 round this year at a slightly higher cap to buy some extra runway for full-time today. Two co-founders. We'll see what they do next.
Chapter 3: What challenges did the guest face during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Hey folks, my guest today is Josh Martel. Before founding Chaser, he got an MBA from Berkeley and was employee number one at Thriver Technologies, which is a series B, 165 employees and broke 60 million in revenue.
He built and led the sales, product engineering, growth, and digital marketing and business intelligence practices at the organization, holding three different director roles throughout his tenure. That led him to identify the need for a tool like Chaser at try.chaseforme.com forward slash slack. Josh, you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. All right.
Well, I guess first thing, it sounds like you're on a rocket ship at Thriver.
Chapter 4: How does Chaser measure user retention and engagement?
How many years were you there? Five years. OK, so your one year cliff for your vest was completed, huh?
Yeah.
And the bonus top up round came a year later. Why? I mean, if you were killing it, which it sounds like you were, why didn't they try and keep you with an additional option grant?
The issue was that our revenue tanked 97% when COVID hit. We were a catering, a corporate catering company, kind of like Uber Eats for getting food to the office. And as you can imagine, not a lot of people going to the office after COVID was hitting.
Chapter 5: What marketing strategies is Chaser using to acquire customers?
Certainly not eating altogether. Our slogan was gather around, but at that point, we might as well have changed it to stay away.
That's so funny or zoom around or something. Okay. So what is Chaser? Maybe tell us what you guys do through the eyes of how a customer is using you today.
Totally. Yeah. So project management software is widely broken right now. And that's because most teams don't care enough to adapt their workflow around it.
Chapter 6: How does Chaser differentiate itself from competitors like Trello?
You know, you don't wake up in the morning and say, I'm going to go look up what I have on Asana today. And then at night, go and mark everything you did that day. And then the next morning, do it over and over again with whatever project management tool your team's using. And, you know, there's 172 million people working in desk jobs who have to use project management software.
A lot of them have to use it. But two of three are not satisfied with their tooling. And so we're trying to solve that problem. Chaser is the only project management software that only one user needs to use. And the way it works is you can delegate tasks to anybody on Chaser. Even if they're not a user, they don't need to know what Chaser is, frankly.
Chapter 7: What lessons did the guest learn from their previous role at Thriver?
Chaser will send them the task through Slack or email. And they'll be able to see like, okay, I've been assigned this thing. I can click here to market complete. I can click here to push back the deadline and Chaser will collect progress updates from them, send them reminders until it's complete.
And you'll be able to at all times track on your Chaser dashboard where the progress, where the status of this task is. And you can rest easy knowing Chaser is going to follow up with them to make sure that it happens. You don't have to handle that burden anymore and you never had to onboard them because again, they don't have to be a Chaser user for this to work with them.
Are you still testing the MVP or do you have paying customers already today?
We have a working MVP. It's on Slack.
Chapter 8: What are the future growth plans for Chaser?
That link you mentioned before, try.chaseforme.com forward slash Slack is where you can get the MVP 100% for free. We're not charging people today, but we have a whole bunch of companies. We've had 100 companies start using us. And a ton of them have been using us for many months now and keep coming back. And they're telling us it's changing the way they work.
Beta users can lie to you and tell you anything you want to hear. How do you actually look at the performance metrics, how they're actually using your app, the click flow through your app? What is the traction metric you're focused on every day?
Yeah, we use Mixpanel to track our customer behavior. Love that product. If anybody is looking for a behavior tracking tool. And the main thing we're looking at is retention. I mean, you know, not reinventing the wheel here. And what I can tell you is that for 16 weeks, of using our MVP, we still have 43% retention. And again, this is an MVP. It has been bare bones.
We've now actually just yesterday released a major update.
Josh, how do you define an active user? Because that's how you get to retention, right? Does retained mean they sent at least one task per day or per week, or they just logged in? I mean, what does that actually mean?
Sent one task per week. Yeah, no, great question.
Okay. Okay. So over the past, of 100% of the companies that signed over the past 16 weeks, last week, 43% of them, so about 43 of them sent at least one new task out.
Yes. Yeah. Well, we're only, the 43% is of the ones who've been with us for 16 weeks. Not all of the 100 who've used it have been with us for 16 weeks. So there's a little bit of caveat into that, but that's the gist of what I'm saying.
How do you know that the task being sent out is the dopamine hit that's going to get someone excited to pay for Chaser? In my head, my gut reaction, you know more than me, that would be the dopamine hit is actually when the task come back is completed.
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