SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How my $5k hobby project used 1 to many selling to reach $700k ARR in a year
11 Nov 2022
Chapter 1: What insights were shared from the Founder 500 event?
Hey folks, hope your Q3 and Q4 is off to a good start. We just wrapped up Founder 500 in Austin, Texas. Hundreds of bootstrap founders showed up. It was an amazing time. I loved meeting so many of you.
This interview today is a recording from that session, which you're gonna love because now we have visuals, we have the founder teaching, and I made every single speaker include their revenue graphs and real artifacts in their presentations. Without further ado, let's jump in.
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. Give it up for Robert Warner.
Hi, everybody. Thank you. So a couple of things. Number one, it says CEO on there. I'm not really a CEO of anything. CEO implies you have executives to be an officer over, and I don't have any executives. We have a team of eight people, and that's plenty for me.
So this session today is a bit of a weird one in as much as I kind of feel like we've broken about every rule of SaaS over the last year. We've followed almost nothing that everybody else does. We've not raised money. Not done so much when it comes to content marketing. Not done that. When it comes to paid traffic, not done that. Raised money, not done that. We've done very, very little.
But we've done a few things that I think are relatively smart. So quick intro to me. Sat in the room at the back is my business partner, Joe, and together we built a white-label digital marketing agency specializing in Google Ads. That was a worldwide agency with a team of 35 people.
It took about nine years to build that business, and we became what's called a Google Channel sales partner, which is, if you don't know, it's kind of like a hidden tier of partnership within Google. It's kind of like invite only. It's like going behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. You have to get ass back there.
And you get to hang out in Mountain View and do some cool stuff, and they give you some nice perks. Ultimately, I kind of got bored of running an agency. And then if we're looking last year, Joe and I were talking about next steps and next stages and what we might do in the future. And I went, this is interesting.
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Chapter 2: How did the guest transition from agency to SaaS?
And then we all move on and do our own things. It's not a long-term relationship, typically. But it allows us to sign up customers at scale. So a one-week promotion for us, on a bad one, we'll sign up 30 new paid users. So it's highly, highly time efficient for us. So here's our growth. And so for context. We didn't start developing anything until April last year. So April 2021, we started.
I get slightly weirded out by this slide, by the way. I've sat in the big room where I watch all the grown-ups, where they've got charts that are like multi-years. We start in 2014, and we've got 2017, and they've got these big time spans. Some of them have got years. We're in months. We're kind of baby steps at this.
We are really the new kids on the block trying to figure stuff out and breaking things as we go. So everything we see here is us just kind of winging it a bit. So June, we had no product. July, we did our first launch, and we got to 144k annualized, which was a really nice start on the first month of launch.
Fast forward over to where we are now, and in September, we'll hit about 1.25 million ARR, something up there or thereabouts. And in context, we went full-time on this in January. Until after we launched in July, most of the rest of 2021 was focused on selling our agency.
In fact, although I'm from the UK and Joe's from Ohio, we sold it to a guy in Austin who will probably catch up with this weekend. So that was our big focus the second half of the year, not building and growing our SaaS. So it largely got backburned until kind of January. So what do we do at PPC Ad Lab? PPC Ad Lab, essentially, it's Google advertiser data.
What we're interested in is who is advertising on what search terms, in what locations, with what ad copy, what devices are they targeting, what times of day do they run their ads, what days of the week do they run their ads, and providing this hyper level of detailed competitive intelligence so that you know at any one time what your competitor's doing. Are they bidding on your brand?
Are they breaking any franchise rules, which is an interesting use case we've come across? Are they lists of people you can prospect and target for your own outreach? People spending money on Google Ads is usually a really good indicator they're spending money in other marketing services. So it's a great qualifier.
So the people who've been are Google Ads managers, franchises, e-com stores, digital agencies. That's been typically our customer so far. So let's start with our beginning. What happened? So it was late March last year. Joe and I had built a product. It was an information product that we were selling to our agency customers.
And one of the commitments that we'd given was that we would give them a list of plumbers to prospect to. It was about the plumbing market, this thing. So we'd give you 1,000 plumbing leads, which was a great idea until we realized we couldn't get it. We tried just about every tool known to man to buy them. couldn't get it. Just nobody had that data.
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Chapter 3: What is a 'barely viable product' and how was it launched?
March 27th, I think it is, when that actually happened.
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So here's what we did. We had a list of agencies from our agency days. And we knew agencies would buy this kind of thing because it helps them build lists of prospects. It gives them a unique conversation to have. So this is our promotion sequence. Tuesday, we send out an email going, hey, we're running a webinar on Wednesday. On Thursday, do you want to come?
We send another one on Wednesday, another one on Thursday. And Thursday evening, we run the webinar. Friday, we do a live encore. And we were typically getting about 250, 300 people show up live to these webinars. So we get a good crowd. And we do replays over the weekend. And we close it out on the Monday.
And as you can see here, what we did was we created a page with what we call the founder's offer. And the big difference that we did that we do in all of our promotional activities is we have published prices on our website. Our agency plan on our website is $397 a month. And it was that price on day one, even though it was nothing like an agency-level product at that time.
Our webinar price is a bigger, better package for $197 a month. And it has deadlines. It has scarcity and urgency built into it. And you'll see there we also had an annual plan, which I'll talk about in a moment. That, for us, was a big win because it allowed us to create some scarcity and urgency. And here's what it did. This is a screenshot straight from our Stripe account from last year.
We signed up 76 paying customers in seven days, collected 22K in cash, And that cash came in part because nearly 10% of our buyers bought the annual plan. I mean, that's a big commitment. You're buying an annual plan from a product that's barely out of the box. I mean, this thing was clearly very, very rough.
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Chapter 4: How did the guest leverage their existing email list for marketing?
It was nice MRR at the time, but that's all it was. So what did we do? The first thing that we did was we ran weekly calls with our customers. Every Wednesday, noon Eastern, there'd be a call on a webinar with all our customers. We'd tell them about all the new features we were releasing, and they gave us some great use cases. Because they felt like they were invested in the product.
They got the deal. They got on the ground floor. They got the best pricing. They were winning. And we made them our heroes. Because people were going out and using this data. You know, saying, hey, I use your data. I sent a few videos out. And I got a client the next morning. It's worked like a gangbusters. Because they've never seen this. I'm like, brilliant. Bring it on. Record it.
And so we gathered all this feedback. We also learned that building a product for 5K is really good until you realize you haven't architected it very well, and your first server bill comes in for $8,000. That hurt. That wasn't a nice moment. It's like, oh, great. All our MRRs gone on Amazon. We need to probably redesign that fairly quickly.
Otherwise, we've just generated ourselves a huge problem. So we did. And we were using it every day to build new hooks and new marketing angles.
Chapter 5: What strategies were used for product-led growth?
And that's really where Joe comes into this in terms of capturing those thoughts, those ideas that people were creating. And those angles that came out of that, for example, were people going, hey, I work with franchises in multiple locations. We can see which franchisees are advertising outside of their designated zip codes and breaking the franchise rules.
We can now enforce compliance on something we could never enforce before. And we're going like... That's a cool idea. Yeah. Well done. Thank you. You've just done our marketing job for us because we didn't ever think that. You know, we were getting users sending in videos of their SOPs for how they were using it in marketing. It's like, great, we've now got another marketing angle.
We can go with this. We've got people using it to protect their brands. He was bidding against them and send cease and desist letters and things. All these things, we hadn't literally no idea that these were use cases. And to this day, people keep bringing us more use cases for the product.
But that sort of hiatus few months over the summer was brilliant in that it just gave us this time to just gather this thing, rebuild, re-architect, put a slightly more grown-up UI on it that looked a little bit better and not sort of 1980s Etch-a-Sketch. And you can see what we had. This was from one month alone. Or was it 12 weeks? 1,581 user comments just in our weekly live calls.
Now, I see people doing beta launches and free launches and trials and all that, and they're doing one-to-one demos and feedback. How long does that process take you to get over 1,500 pieces of individual feedback from real paying users who put their hand in the pocket? And you can see all the yellow stuff there. It's effective feature requests.
They were writing our roadmap for us just by showing up and talking to us. And yet they thought we were doing them the biggest favor in the world because we were engaging with them and supporting and listening. And it was very much a... a kind of two-way street.
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Chapter 6: How did the guest implement partner launches effectively?
So that's what we did over the summer. And then we get into the real fun stuff. And this is where it really gets to start properly, which was our partner launches. The way we do partner launches is we do joint ventures with them. And so what we will typically do, and how we start this off,
We'd got data from our internal launch in July as to how many people showed up at the webinar, how many purchased live on the call, what the average order value was. So that's our warm customer list. We wanted to test how well we can replicate that with other people's warm customer lists. So we made it really super easy for them. We gave them the webinar titles, the email swipes, the replays.
We promoted their offer to our audience. It was a typical webinar swap. There's nothing complicated about this. We were tracking all our key metrics. What were the total earnings? What was their total commission they were going to get from month one? What was the live conversion rate on the call? What was the earnings per attendee?
And then once we got one set of numbers, we could go again and again and again and again. Full disclosure, though, if you've worked with joint venture partners, you know it's like herding cats. These guys have damned hard work. Wonderful, brilliant, but damned hard work.
And you can see here, and by the way, our entire seven-day promotion sequence and partner sequence is in the artifacts on the drive that's in there. So literally every email, you need to rewrite the emails clearly, but the whole structure timeline, everything we do is all templated out there for you so you can just swipe and deploy it.
So we did everything, and we paid promptly, and we paid generously. This is our very first affiliate, our very first partner. In fact, his business partner's in the room, in the main room at the moment. And he walked away with, I think it was about seven grand in cash. Not bad for a week's worth of emails, showing up and doing an introduction to a webinar.
And then, from there, we've stacked to bigger and bigger partners using these stats. Right now, there's a launch about to go down in about seven days from now. And check this out. We're paying 100% of month one revenue as a commission. Now, that sounds big and scary. And most people are going, no, I can't pay one month worth of commission. That's just not going to happen.
And yet, I've seen people downstairs in meetings that I've had with people going, yeah, my CAC's about six months. I cax one month. But that's six months of acquiring customers one at a time. Here, we will acquire somewhere in the region of 300 to 700 new users in seven days. That's the best part of $100,000 of MRR a month.
Now, there's not many other ways I know where risk-free, I have no money down, I have no money out, I can go out and acquire, let's call it 500 new users in seven days. I'll happily give them 100% commission of month one revenue because they ain't going anywhere. People like the product. People stay. So when I heard somebody on stage yesterday say, we have a very generous affiliate program.
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