SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How Shipmonk CEO Kept $5m of $10m Series A Round, Breaking $80m In Revenue 2019
12 Dec 2020
Chapter 1: What revenue milestone did Shipmonk achieve in 2019?
We're going to do about 80 million this year in revenue. So I would say probably 10%, maybe 15% of that is SaaS.
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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 Behan 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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Yeah, so take me back to day one. How'd you get your first 100 customers?
So it was challenging considering we were competing with a lot of much bigger companies and we didn't have the economies of scale like they did. So it was really me just going to different trade shows and kind of selling them on this concept of technology and fulfillment all in one.
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Chapter 2: How did Shipmonk acquire its first customers?
Um, cause before this, it was just me and, you know, some of the mentors I had from before, but nobody really like having that much experience working with bigger businesses and being in South Florida, there's not a huge startup community, you know, where you get access to a lot of people that have done this. So it's, uh, it's just been great.
So Jen, what's, what's your, what's your team size today? How many people?
Well, so we've got about 450 people, you know, different roles, different areas. Our engineering team is about 35 people. The rest is, you know, operations, customer service, HR, finance.
Do you have a lot of inside sales folks? How many like quarter carrying reps do you have?
Yeah, we actually don't have that many sales people. We have about seven now. So we've been able to build this business with a pretty good, like we're pretty efficient in the way we do sales. A lot of our leads are inbound, so we don't do a huge outbound, you know, calling to people.
Most of the people that come to us just find us online and then we can just kind of take them through the sales process and bring them up to bring them in to.
And how many, how many customers are you working with today?
A little over a thousand.
A little over a thousand. Okay. Now, so, okay. So some of these you put touch on, obviously a 30 million dealer, you're going to put a lot of touch on, um, you know, the average customer, are you happy? Like what are you paying to get them onboarded?
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Chapter 3: What factors influence the pricing model for Shipmonk's services?
You're someone that they could buy. Let's say Shopify offers you a billion dollars to sell the company. So more than 10 X, you're 80 million. Do you take the deal? I would probably take it. Yeah.
Chapter 4: How does Shipmonk balance small and large customer needs?
So say you're bored. We're probably, I see you're married. Your spouse would probably kill you if you said no to that.
Right. That's true. Yeah. And then, you know, depending on the company too, like the company would love to sell to them and work with them for, for, for a while to build this, um, into where we need to go. Right. So, um, yeah, I mean, it's, it's all about the circumstances, but I'm not saying I wouldn't do it.
Yep. All right. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.
Uh, favorite business, man. That's a tough one.
Uh, you can say none. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Well, I love Toby Luther from Shopify. He's a great guy. And Richard Branson is one of my favorite guys.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your company? Asana. And Slack. And Slack, yeah. How many hours of sleep do you get every night? Eight. Okay. And what's your situation? It would look like married, single. How many kids?
No kids. Married. Married.
No kids. Congratulations. How old are you?
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