SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How To Make $30,000 Instantly off a Viral Linkedin Post
04 Jan 2024
Chapter 1: What led to the guest's successful exit from Elastic.io?
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Guys, he sold his first company, Elastic.io, and now is building RevOS.ai to help you do things like customer scoring. His template for customer scoring went viral.
Chapter 2: How did the customer health tracking template go viral on LinkedIn?
They got 1,000 leads from that, and that really springboarded them to their six first paying customers that pay on average $500 a month. They're doing 3,000 a month stay in revenue, totally bootstrapped, wrote their first line of code in November, and now plan to scale from here. We'll see what happens next. Hey, folks. My guest today is Renat Zubarov.
He's a serial founder and CEO with a successful exit now on a second venture building an AI revenue operations system at RevOS.ai. It's his second interview on the show and we're excited to jump in. First company was Elastic.io. Renat, you ready to take us to the top?
Oh, yes. Really happy to be here again.
Chapter 3: What inspired the creation of RevOS.ai?
I'm excited to have you. Close the book on Elastic because you've been on many times over the years. So did you sell the company? You shut it down? What happened?
Chapter 4: How did the guest acquire their first paying customers?
Yeah, we sold it. We sold it. To the strategic buyer, it's like a publicly traded company here in Germany. And they acquired it to really build up a product expertise as a product. Revenue is obviously more high quality or at least perceived as high quality on the public market. And that was basically the plan for that.
Yeah.
And this sale occurred, I believe, in 2021, right?
Yeah, it's quite a while ago. Two years ago, I think we completely exited it and we did a little bit of burnout at the end, but we stayed till the end and then also exited it successfully.
Did you keep any equity? Because the reporting said that Kogia AG acquired 51% of the shares.
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Chapter 5: What strategies are being used to scale RevOS.ai?
Did you guys keep the other 49% or what happened to those?
No, no. We're completely out. Me and my co-founder, Igor, we're completely out.
Oh, I see. Okay. Okay. Got it. And then the earn out was for what? A year, two years?
Chapter 6: How does the guest generate revenue beyond software sales?
Three years. Three years. Okay. Did you earn... A lot of founders, they sell their company. They say, Nathan, how should I think about the earn out? Am I actually going to make it or not? Well, you've done it. Did you actually make what you expected?
Yes, yes, yes. I mean, it wasn't easy. Earned also obviously some risks, right? And many things changed, right? The company also grew, but there's also different, you know, once you exited the company, right, you're no longer in a driver's seat. And this changed obviously the dynamics, right? It's no longer your company, it's not anymore your baby, right?
Chapter 7: What challenges have been faced with the Udemy course?
And there obviously sometimes you make decisions which are not It couldn't really affect in the new role, let's say so.
Yep. Well, you were... This wasn't a small company. I think you'd scaled it to 5 or 6 million bucks of revenue, right? So I guess... Is that right or no?
I don't think... No, I don't think the number is correct. We didn't publish or we didn't announce the official numbers on that. But it's smaller.
I thought we... Okay, so you were smaller than 5 million in ARR. Okay. All right. Let's move forward to RevOS. Did you learn anything at it? Did you learn about the idea or come up with the idea for RevOS while you were at Elastic?
Chapter 8: What insights does the guest have about customer success management?
Or how did you come up with the idea?
You know, me and my co-founder at Elastic, we were like engineers. And I think you also have a number of engineers here on your show who are like startup founders, entrepreneurs. And every entrepreneur believes like so that we just need to build a great product and then they will come, you know. But what we learned also is that sales is actually a very, very important part of the exercise.
But what we also got to learn that sales is actually, it's not an art, you know. Some people believe like, okay, you need to really hire a great salesperson and then he will go and sell everything you give to him or her. But the sales is just like a process. It's not an art. It's a science.
And this was like a part of what we now believe in Revos and what we actually bring as Revos to the market. Because we see this revenue operations and this revenue process building is essential for every company. And this is actually where we're going in with our new product.
Are you pre-revenue share? Do you have customers?
We do have customers. We actually wrote the first line of code in November last year. And right now we have, I think, total around about 6K in customers. Oh, great. We did this year around about 200,000 euros.
That's great. How much monthly recurring revenue are you doing today?
I think we are currently ARR on about 30K. So out of 200K we did this year, 30K is recurrent.
Okay, got it. So 30,000 USD per month across six. So these are large contracts with these six customers.
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