SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Imagine doing $6.1m in revenue helping Loom, Dropbox, and G2 break $100m in ARR
24 Nov 2022
Chapter 1: What is the journey of Eli Rubel in the SaaS industry?
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. Guys, he had his first SaaS company a couple of years ago, raised $1.2 million and then sold for $3 million. Still managed to make a bunch on that because he was really the major shareholder there.
Then said, you know what? I'm going to use this money by an e-commerce brand. Failed miserably. Flash sold that. Then got into MatterMade, where now he works with some of the fastest growing brands you've heard of. Loom, G2, these kinds of fast growing SaaS companies, helping them decrease CAC or increase revenue and drive more pipeline.
Charges on average call at $30,000 to $40,000 a month in revenue. Currently working with 10 companies.
customers and they'll do about 3.6 this year up from or sorry down from 6.1 last year but last year was vc dollars flowing everywhere was the heydays uh now getting and now spinning off his design agency to do that hey folks my guest today is eli rubel he's been a marketing advisor to some of the most iconic technology companies of our generation including dropbox loom com product board and many others his agency mattermade.co helps early stage companies reduce cac and drive sustainable demand eli you ready to take us to the top let's go
All right.
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Chapter 2: How did MatterMade help companies like Loom and Dropbox?
Let's talk about Loom first. I had the folks on, I think it was Shahad. I forget which one it was. One of the co-founders on right like a week before they were launching the paywall. And he said, Nathan, we've been patient. We've got our bio coefficient built in. When you send a Loom and get two to sign up, it works. We've got 1.2 million on the wait list. We want to convert.
I think I'm going off memory. I think he said they wanted to convert 6,000 to a $10 a month plan. And they want to hit a million dollar run rate within like the first 24 hours. You worked with them early on. Were you working with them pre-revenue to build that wait list? Or was it post-revenue once they had a million, 2 million in ARR?
Chapter 3: What strategies does Eli use to reduce customer acquisition costs?
Yeah, this would be post-revenue. So this was essentially when I think they had raised a Series A at this point, and they were trying to figure out how to cast a wider net. Like, their goal was to increase work-user signups efficiently. And so we launched this hybrid campaign for them, helping them lean into high-intent channels, capture demand, and drive down their costs to acquire.
But I mean, at a high level, they brought us in when they basically didn't have a demand team. It was like maybe a demand team of one or two. We were brought in by an advisor of theirs, partnered directly with CEO Joe and his team. Is this typically how folks use you, right?
They have one or two internal folks, but they really need more strength before they hire 10 people on their internal demand gen team? Yeah. I mean, I'd say that's probably the most common use case is like Series A, Series B, real small demand team. And essentially, they need to get to key growth milestones to get to that next raise and prove some things out.
But it's kind of risky to go and hire like a very senior growth leader because they might not have the budget for the growth leader and the growth teams, like the arms and legs to execute plus strategy. And so we're able to come in and be that senior strategy layer that's helped grow 10 plus unicorns a year.
and also be their arms and legs, really help them figure out that initial foundational growth plan and program, what that looks like, help them establish baseline metrics such that they can go back to their board and say, we've built a demand engine.
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Chapter 4: What metrics are crucial for early-stage companies?
It works. Here's how much it costs to scale. And then they can go and build out their team. So we're frequently- What do you reverse engineer from? If you had to pick one metric that you say, it's this, and then everything else falls from this. What is it? Is it CAC payback? Is it CAC in general? What is it? Yeah.
I mean, the two metrics we focus on are reducing costs to acquire and scaling revenue. So it's like revenue or pipeline, depending on who we're talking to and depending how long their sales cycle is. Right. So we might come in for a six month engagement. And if it's an enterprise sales product, we're not going to be focused on revenue because their sales cycles might be six to nine months.
Chapter 5: How does Eli define demand efficiency in marketing?
We'll be focused on like quality pipe gen where the sales reps are saying, yes, these are really great conversations we're having. Whereas if it's a product led growth company like Loom or Hopin or Calm or any of these other companies we've worked with and helped grow. The feedback cycle is much more immediate.
And so we're able to focus on, it might be PQLs that they're really focused on and that's the board metric that they care about. Usually the metric is driven by the board wants to see certain proof points and we reverse engineer from there.
yeah okay let me give you i prefer to talk about one of your customers but i'm sure you can't because of nda so let me make up an account that i think is maybe similar to who you help and then let's let's let's go through that so okay i'm gonna see i'm i don't want to use series x with a lot of bootstrap founders on who are actually bigger and revenue wise in terms of their series they competitors but let's say there's someone listening right now they've got five million revenue right whether they're series a or bootstrap whatever they have five million revenue
They're currently paying, I'm going to make this up, $100. Let's say they're paying $400 to get a $40 a month customer. So 10-month payback. They hire you. You come in. What's a good CAC? What target are you setting for a $40 a month plan? I mean, it's going to depend... There's so many factors.
Chapter 6: What challenges do early-stage companies face in scaling?
It's so hard to go like... Get me in your head. Think out loud. All right. Give me the metrics again. Yeah. So $400 to acquire a $40 a month customer, 10 month payback. Okay. And so your question is... Eli, I want to hire you. How much can you improve? Yeah. I honestly don't even know how to answer that. So let me give you an answer. Our process is we look at what I call demand efficiency.
So most people, when they're talking about this space, they'll talk about demand capture. They'll talk about demand creation.
Chapter 7: What role does technology play in marketing strategies?
And where we find the juice and what's different is we zoom out further and say, let's talk about demand efficiency, which is all of the different growth surfaces. And by surface, that could be something as common as actual channels and how effective we are on those channels. But it could be the soft tissue between touch points.
Like when a trial comes in, how is that handed off between sales and marketing? Or is there an upsell motion that is triggered by in-product behavior that then there's a certain handoff? So they're all of the life cycle nurtures, like all of these different spaces that where things can go wrong. And a lot of these companies, especially on the earlier side, ignore these surfaces.
They are focused on- Wait, name, Eli, that was really valuable. You just gave two, soft tissue between touch point, how is trial handed off? Is there an upsell motion triggered in on-product behavior? Give me a couple more of those questions. That was good. Yeah, I mean, so, okay, so like-
Chapter 8: What is the future vision for Eli's agency and potential SaaS product?
All of these services cross between how they approach TAM, customer focus, revenue orchestration, top of funnel, mid funnel, messaging, alignment, experimentation, and retention. Those are like the high level buckets that go into demand efficiency. And then within each of these, there are a number of qualifying questions that will tell you how well you're doing in demand efficiency.
I actually set up a a survey that scores companies and they can, like, fill this out on their own and then get benchmarked against the industry leaders and see, like, okay, if, you know, if Calm and Loom score a 93 in demand efficiency, like, you could see I'm a PLG company. Like how do I score in demand efficiency?
And then they would essentially give you like a recipe book for what to focus on as far as low hanging fruit. So you asked for more specifics. I gave you categories. Let me give you more specifics. So like in TAM, it could be A lot of early stage companies think of their TAM and they're like, yes, this is what I've been pitching my investors.
Or if I'm bootstrapped, this is our total addressable market. I'm excited. I'm going to go after everyone I can, get in front of everyone I can. But the reality is that if your budget is strapped, you need to focus on a specific segment of your TAM.
You can't just try to boil the ocean or you can, but it's going to be way less effective because you might only be able to get your impression in front of folks once or twice. Whereas if you're focused on 10% of your TAM, you might be able to get in front of them 15 times in a certain time period. So that's one little piece of it.
Simple things, automated lead routing, automated lead booking, SOP between sales and marketing. A lot of time, early stage companies will have a complex buyer journey that they've done a really good job. The marketers have done a great job teeing up this person to talk to sales and then sales will have no idea of all that historical context and they'll just treat them like they're a cold inbound.
And so then there's this disconnect in all the hard work marketing has done. This person thinks they're going to go into this really high quality conversation. Then you have an SCR saying like, oh, have you ever heard of us before? Kind of a thing. So there are a lot of different examples like this, but in aggregate, it could be the difference between cutting your cost to a part and a half.
it's huge yeah it's huge okay i imagine people are hearing you say this going oh i wonder what eat what tools eli is recommending for all this stuff automated lead routing all this kind of stuff right now what is like your your tech stack right now that you're just really bullish on To be honest, I think people overinvest in tech stacks generally.
I think that people generally think that tech is going to solve fundamental problems for them, that it won't. And so usually step one is, before I even answer that question, I would say step one is like get clarity on your buyer journeys. There should be multiple buyer journeys. They should be segmented appropriately. And then once you have just like...
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