SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
InboxDone VC's Are Using This Company To Handle Their Inboxes
19 Nov 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's definitely not like your $5 a month sort of virtual assistant from overseas.
Yeah, this is insane.
This is an insane box. In pricing, it depends. What's the value of breaking free from email, you know?
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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 Bean 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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Chapter 2: What is InboxDone and how does it help manage emails?
So far, so good. Obviously, we haven't scaled to hundreds and thousands of customers. So that's a different question to answer at that point. But at this point, with myself, my co-founder, we've got about a team of eight at the moment or inbox managers, you know, one inbox manager for our own company. So, yeah, it's scaling well, but we're pouring all the profits back into growth at the moment.
So break even today. I would say, I mean, my co-founder takes a salary, but yes, break even today.
Yep, yep, yep. Well, you have to pay yourselves. Yeah, you want to include that in costs. So break even today. And so what do the margins look like, right? I mean, what does it cost you to pay an inbox manager? And then what do you mark that? I mean, essentially, you have to mark that time up to make a profit on that customer, right?
Yeah, I mean, this has been a learning experience for sure. I can safely say it's 30%, 40% in profit margin.
Chapter 3: How does InboxDone create context for email management?
It depends on the client. Some clients are going to go through peaks and troughs. So they're going to have maybe a week where they're doing a product launch or something happens in their life that's huge and we almost break even. And then the next week, their email drops and we're back to a normal profit margin. We have some clients who just
They're happy to give us even 50%, 60% profit margin just to keep that off their plate, never to go into the inbox again. But it varies on the client. It really does.
I guess my point is, though, if I'm paying you $1,000 a month, you are paying someone to manage my inbox to the tune of $600 or $700 a month. The margin that is left for you and the business is $200 or $300 per customer.
Yeah, I mean, most of our clients are more around the $1,500 mark, so $1,000 to $1,500. And then, yeah, we might keep anywhere from $800 to $900, depending on the client. Sometimes it's all the way down to $500. But like I said, that'll change throughout the month, depending on what's going on. And they might bump up a plan higher, they might drop down a plan lower.
But like I said, so far, the margins are holding, but I don't know what it's going to look like over time.
I mean, how do you how do you scale this business? So I mean, those are pretty thin margins, right? If you're doing 15,000 a month in revenue, and you have 15 customers, that means the average one is paying you 1000 bucks a month, you're paying 800, you know, 700 bucks for the VA. So again, there's only 200 300 bucks for all your other expenses to you for you to invest in growth and everything.
Yeah. I mean, like I said, it's, it can be as much as, you know, six, 700 on a 15,000 1500 a month client. Uh, when we started, we were priced at a thousand. We bumped up to 1500, uh, just again, learning about pricing, but some of our clients are on less. And I'll be honest with you. I mean, I don't have an answer for that as we scale more.
All I know is at the moment we can pay, you know, co-founders salary.
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Chapter 4: What revenue growth has InboxDone experienced so far?
It leaves some money for paying the team that's not inbox managers like, you know, the hiring manager, you know, a few ancillary staff. And then, you know, a couple of thousand bucks is spent on marketing at the moment, which I'm enjoying spending and testing different marketing campaigns. But tell me about that. What are you testing?
Well, for the early stages, it was all like podcast marketing, my own audience, that sort of thing. Then obviously that kind of tapped out. At the moment, I've been playing with Twitter ads. We've been getting some traction with the VC kind of world. So Twitter is where a lot of VCs hang out. So we've been playing with that. What do you mean a VC world?
Do you manage or one of your 15 customers is a VC? Yeah, we've got a couple of clients who come through like they're either founders who are now doing investing or they're actually VCs. I feel it's like a bit of a sweet spot for our service. You know, they're not huge companies. They're usually more boutique, a couple of founders.
And they have a lot of email, a lot of inbound email, a lot of communication flow. So, again, it's a test. It's way too early for me to say that's the sweet spot. But VCs, real estate agents, kind of a certain size company seems to work well.
Interesting. OK, now, have you done this all bootstrapped or be raised? Bootstrapped. Bootstrapped the company. OK. And any engineers on the team?
No, no, we don't really need them. I mean, we've got some tech help for the website, but it's not a tech heavy business.
That's what I'm saying. I was like, is there a way that you can build and invest in developing code here to make the margin improve so you can actually afford to bring this service to way more people?
Yeah, well, I've certainly thought about, you know, the AI assisted email management. And there's a few tools that have come out that I've had my eye on, like that can simply just reduce the cost of delivering the service. Like which tools? There's one called Tala, which I had my eye on for a while. It hasn't really surfaced as something we would apply, but we looked into it.
It basically kind of creates an AI-powered knowledge base for common emails, like common responses to emails. And the idea is, your inbox manager is in there. They've got Tala looking at the emails. It's building a knowledge base. T-A-L-L-A? Yeah, T-A-L-L-A, I think is the right one. You can find it there. But it just wasn't cost effective for us to apply something like that at this point.
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Chapter 5: What strategies does InboxDone use to acquire clients?
Well, as I said, I only just started doing the paid advertising. So to get an actual CAC, it's way too early for that. And everything before that has been very much a referral in my own network. So the cost of acquisition has pretty much been zero or my previous work, if you want to call it that.
You mentioned a couple thousand dollars per month you're spending on ads. I mean, it's a significant portion if you're only doing $15,000 a month in total revenue. Well, I'm not spending that yet.
I've actually spent $1,000 in the last two weeks just playing with it myself. So how many leads did you get? Sorry? How many leads came from that? Well, none. That's what I'm saying. It's literally week one. We've had a couple hundred clicks. So I'm still refining the targeting, the keywords, the ad groups, doing the split testing, everything.
and even seeing is LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or Google search, you know, the best platform for this. So a little too early to say. Interesting.
Very cool. Well, let's wrap up here. You are with the famous five, number one favorite business book.
Oh, so many. Um, you know, I'm a big fan of, I'm going to say, man, there's too many. I've listened to it recently.
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Chapter 6: How does InboxDone determine its pricing structure?
Um, I guess if I'm going to go back to the original richest man in Babylon would probably be one of my favorite, more of a money book than a business book, but that was really what got me started.
Um,
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? I mean, I want to say Elon Musk, but everyone says Elon Musk, right? Certainly following him. I do a bit of angel investing, so I follow a lot of the CEOs in some companies there that I find interesting, like Fitbod. There's a few there, but nothing too serious. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your company?
Ooh, I think Slack would have to always take that. It's just, it's how I stay in touch with everyone. We're completely digital. It's just fun to use it because you see progress there.
Yeah. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Well, I'm a big sleeper. I'm like an eight, nine, even 10 hours sometimes.
That's great. And what's your situation? Married, single, kiddos?
Girlfriend in the other room. No kids at the moment.
Okay. No kids. And how old are you?
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