SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How to Clone Existing Company and Hit $10k MRR In Under 6 months
24 Feb 2023
Chapter 1: What strategies can help you clone a company successfully?
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. and, uh, and close them, bring them in. He's got a lot of experience in startup world. His first company inspired beats didn't go so well.
His second, another one tweet hunter was just acquired for Lemlist for a call it two and a half million bucks. He's now free bird travel in the world, building his new thing. We'll see what happens next. Hey folks, my guest today is Alex Berman. He's an entrepreneur and YouTuber with over 97,000 subscribers, also best-selling author of the Cold Email Manifesto.
Today, he specializes in cold email and SaaS growth with five SaaS exits to date, including a seven-figure exit in 2022. He now runs Omni.us, where he helps companies book more sales calls with cold emails automatically. Alex, ready to take us to the top? Of course.
Chapter 2: How does Alex Berman utilize cold emails for business growth?
Thanks for having me. Well, so before we fill in the backstory here, just to be clear, so is Omni an agency or is there technology here? Is it SaaS?
Omni is a SaaS. It's automated outbound. So basically it lets you send cold emails, lets you send cold texts, sooner to let you do LinkedIn messaging, Twitter messaging, like basically everything you need for automated outbound. And give us the teaser.
I mean, how do you stand out? This is such a jam-packed space. I mean, you have the Lemless crew, you've got all the duck soups of the world, you know, Stefan and Expandi on LinkedIn specific. Like, how do you stand out in the noise?
There's a couple of different ways. So for us, we really focus heavily on writing the scripts. So like you said, bestselling author of Cold Email Manifesto. We've seen a lot of cold email templates.
Chapter 3: What lessons did Alex learn from his previous startup failures?
We've seen a lot of scripts and we can automate a lot of that. So basically getting it going in one click. And then on pricing as well, like you look at Lemlist pricing, you're paying 49 per seat for very limited email sending. For us, it's one low price for unlimited accounts, unlimited sending. So you can just have so many different accounts sending at the same time. Interesting.
Trying to innovate on pricing, innovate on service as well.
So I guess what is pricing today? If someone listening right now and they want to sign up and use you, what's the cheapest they can get started at?
Right now it's 49. Soon, within a couple of weeks, we'll jump up to 97 a month.
And if you look at your current customers today, what's the average customer paying per month today?
So we have almost everyone's on the, we only have one plan. So almost everyone's on the $49 a month.
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Chapter 4: How does Omni differentiate itself in the competitive SaaS market?
We added a new plan this month where basically when you sign up for Omni, then you can book a sales call and our closers will close you. And then those plans are $1,500, $2,500, and $5,000.
So just to be clear, you've got folks full-time on staff at Omni, which if a company like a B2B SaaS company is a startup and doesn't want to hire their own SDRs, they'll teach your team how to sell their product and all the sales inbound calls your team will handle?
No, no, no. So we don't do the closing. But what we'll do is it's outbound. So let's say you wanted to add another 30 to 60 appointments per month per rep. We'll write the scripts for you or walk you through how you can write them yourself. We also have Omni leads, which will give you the leads. And then you're off to the races.
Omni channel, whether that's cold texting, cold email, whatever it is. That's wild. Yeah. Once that happens, all the inbound stuff you can handle in your Salesforce or your HubSpot or wherever you send them after that. And so how many customers paying today?
Chapter 5: What pricing strategies is Omni implementing for growth?
Right now we have 167. So we're still, we're only a couple months old. Well, I was going to say, when did you write the first line of code for the platform? So I'm not a coder, but our team, we've been working on this for maybe eight months, seven, eight months so far.
Okay. So talk me through this. You have a great idea as a marketer. You know how to do distribution. You can't get 97,000 YouTube subs and write a book without understanding distribution. How does a guy like you go convince an engineer to work with you without the engineer going, this guy's a skimmy sales guy. He's not a serious dude. What are we going to do here?
So I was really addicted to Twitter, still really addicted to Twitter. And I reached out to this guy, Amit Mehta. who is, he runs a venture fund, but instead of investing money, they invest tech.
Chapter 6: How did Alex acquire his first customers for Omni?
And I've heard this a million times, but these guys are actually serious. Their SaaS portfolio makes about 6 million a year, you know, over a couple of companies. And so I wanted to interview him. So we went down to Bangalore in India, right now I'm in Delhi, went down to Bangalore and we're at his house on the golf course. And he was just talking about like how he wanted to be Sujan Patel.
And I'm like, you know what would make you Sujan Patel, bro? We had a cold email tool.
he was hyped as shit and then we made it happen what's his venture studio name uh first principles first principles so just to be clear you found him first on twitter on twitter twitter i sat down for an hour interview and that was that how'd you convince him to let you visit his house halfway across the war in bangalore
So everyone wants to meet. That's the thing. You know, when you have an audience, I think that makes everything a lot easier. I haven't had any issue. That's one reason why I love cold email and cold texting and cold DMs. Like, just reach out to people and then they meet with you.
That's interesting.
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Chapter 7: What role do social media and influencers play in Omni's marketing?
Yeah, he says Venture Studio, firstprinciple.co has built things like Catch with a K, the anti-calendar for successful busy people, RealWork, a mobile-first workplace management made simple. So he's a pure... Is it just him? Is it just one engineer? Yeah.
No, they have a whole, they might be a team of 100, 150 or something. It's very India. It's first principles, not first principle. Oh, I don't even know if they have an actual website. Basically, they run a real estate SaaS. They run something called Lantaria, which is basically for commercial real estate. They have another one called something for fundraising. I'm blanking on the name of it now.
But they have a fundraising SaaS and then they have a bunch of these other little tiny bets that they work on. First principles, plural.co.
It's a little P as the logo with a teal and a blue part.
Chapter 8: What future goals does Alex have for Omni's revenue growth?
There you go. Ah, amazing. Amazing. Okay. This is interesting. So you meet this guy, you meet this team and I assume, are you talking about Amit Mehta in Bangalore? Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Okay. So you visit him in Bangalore. So what does he say? Does he say, okay, pay me 10 grand to build the MVP or does he say, give me 5% equity? How does he work?
No, so we did a 50-50 partnership stake and then we're splitting the costs 50-50. And Amit was the first like agency guy that I met that showed me the true prices. And these are Indian prices. So like, you know, you talk to some agency guys and they're like, oh yeah, we'll build this for you and we'll do it at cost. And it's $50 an hour.
Amit's the first guy that was like, yeah, dude, we'll do it at cost. And it's $2.50 an hour. And I was like, oh, okay. I can actually trust you. Tell me what it's going to cost here in India.
That's wild. So you're able to find like junior, senior front end engineers for $2.50 an hour in India.
Yeah. Well, it's based on its salary. But average engineer salary here for somebody fresh out of college is $800, $1,000, $1,200. Interesting. Interesting.
Yeah. 77 people, according to LinkedIn. So he's building out. I mean, this is a big business. It's working. Very interesting. All right. So you split equity 50-50. And then you're off to the races. I guess, how did you get your first 10, 20 customers?
So it took a long time to build it. Um, but then luckily we've got the, it took months. It took so many, like six, seven months just to get the software into a good spot. And, you know, we're doing it at cost. It still costs probably 40, 50 grand of just, was that your fault?
Did you give him a bad spec? What advice would you give to someone else working with somebody like a meat in terms of getting an MVP life quickly?
I have no idea. Because even when we did Leadshark, it cost us 75, 80K. And by the time we launched, it barely worked. It finally is working now. And then the one time we did this successfully for cheap was with Tapleo, that seven-figure acquisition, Tapleo Tweet Hunter. And that was when the founder was a coder. So Tebow was a coder and we were able to do it. I don't think we had any dev costs.
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