SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Local Marketing SaaS 2x Last 4 Months, Breaks $3m ARR and 1200 Customers
01 Sep 2021
Chapter 1: What were the revenue milestones achieved in the last four months?
So what does that put your revenue at today, MRR? $229,000. That's a big time just from four months ago. Four months ago, you were $146,000 a month. Now you're at $229,000. That's almost 100% growth. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, 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. Hey folks, my guest today is Andre Stizovic.
He's building a very cool tool called referizer.com. He's passionate about helping local businesses grow. He created four marketing companies and referizer is his current one. He's helping over 1200 local businesses get more clients, increase the number of referrals by four times and boost their retention by 36%, all while doubling their lead to client conversion.
Andre, you ready to take us to the top? I am ready, always born ready, Nathan. Great to be here. You've got like everything in one shot here. I have to ask you, I mean, COVID was really tough on SMBs. Did you see churn just go through the roof or what? Great question. So when COVID hit, I knew about COVID two months before it came to Italy and then before the US.
And I was really thinking about what's going to happen to the businesses. I mean, if you're forced to shut down, the first thing is save your money, right? Cut all your expenses, right? And we saw the first usage of our system is going down incredibly fast and then request for cancellations. So we made an executive decision. We're canceling the cancellation process. Totally out.
So when the client calls to cancel, says, listen, you failed. are not canceling your account, you have a moral obligation to serve your clients, you promised them, even if you cannot physically serve them, there's ways to keep in touch. We're asking how long it's going to take to go back into business. Everybody estimated two to three months at that time, right?
So what we did says you stop the payment fully 100% and go and use our system without limitations. Got it. So you, just to be clear, you didn't make them keep paying. You basically said, keep using it as if you were paying, but for free. Correct. They really appreciate that. We helped them transition the business to online.
We made integration possible for online streaming, teach businesses how to run the business online. Quite frankly, we didn't have any additional churn. We reduced the churn and the revenue came back to all that high four months later. That's amazing. So yeah, you came on earlier this year in April and talked about how many customers in your ACV. How many customers are you serving now today?
Currently, we just passed 1,200 paying clients. We have over 13,000 freemium clients that are using our system and free features. But about 1,240 paying clients. How many paying? 1,240. Oh, 1,240. Got it. So that's up almost 200 since four months ago. So you're seeing small businesses sign back up again? Absolutely, yes. And what are they paying on average per month?
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Chapter 2: How did COVID impact small businesses and what was the response?
How did you find all these new customers so quickly? What was the growth channel? So there's a couple of things we did. We first increased our monthly by 20 bucks. So that brought another $25,000 without any additional churn. Second, we added services, agency services. They're premium white gloves services that people are buying. And it's about $1,200 per customer instead of $200 per customer.
So we added about another $20,000 there. And then we reduced the churn.
uh we literally hired eight more people in customer support to make sure that we are available at the moment they need us without scheduling upfront so we are now available today for today's call and that that makes a made a big impact so andre how many folks are full-time on the team today in referizer we if we exclude the call center in dollars we have 46 people full-time four six four six and tell me about the call center in dallas
Uh, no call center is not in Dallas. It's outsource. It's outsource call center working from home. We have about 30 people now in it. What do they do? Uh, outbound cold calling, reaching out to businesses. Oh, these are, these are on you. This is not something you let your customers use. You use the call center and that's how you get new customers. Correct.
Oh, you have to tell me more about that. How do they know who to call? So we are really good in generating leads. So we call, let's say for example, all Mindbody customers. Mindbody here has 60 to 80,000 clients. So we call them and offer our services because our services really well integrate with Mindbody. We have revenue reporting, we have data sync on an instant basis.
It's a perfect fit for us. We call all MindBody clients knowing we can deliver results with guarantees. Are you only mining MindBody clients and you're just scraping the web to find them? How are you scraping web to find them? So it's a three-stage process. We scrape what's publicly available as a business name. Then we go second stage from the Google. We acquired a website.
And the third stage from the website, we acquired an email. So Google will give us a phone number and a website. But how do you know they're MindBody clients? It's a part of MindBody portal. MindBody doesn't hide it. MindBody has on their portfolio all the deals, all the offers, all the MindBody clients.
Oh, so you can log into your MindBody account and see everyone else who uses MindBody and use that list to go build a list. Correct. MindBody publicly displays all the businesses that are out there. I see. Oh, interesting. And you know, if someone's using MindBody, they're also a great tool. They're potentially a great customer of yours. There's other ways to do it.
I mean, other businesses don't share the list of the clients like MindBody does. You know, you got to use... Almost like backlink tracking. You see all the backlinks. So if I'm integrated with Booker or any other booking system, they will usually give you to install your booking system on your website. And that leads backlink towards their system. So we can filter by backlinks.
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Chapter 3: What strategies helped in reducing churn during the pandemic?
And then once you know what data you want to get, you go how to find the data. Is there a site map? Is there a sequence? Is there a Google listing? Is there a directory listing? Is there a pattern that you can go through the iteration of the pages? So every platform is different and you just got to be creative with your developers and and a product team, how to find them.
How many developers are on your team? Full-time between product and development team, there's 16 people, 12 developers, four in product team. Okay, this is interesting. So part of that product team is building a scraping tool to help feed leads to the outsource call center. That's just one developer, part-time. One developer, part-time. Okay, so take me into this call center.
Is it a physical location with people sitting in desks or are they all remote? All remote, 100%, all across the globe. US, Canada, Serbia, Philippines, South Africa, Mexico, name it.
Chapter 4: How did the business grow its customer base to over 1,200 clients?
Many of you guys listening have built incredible SaaS tools to help other founders, specific industries really get value or make some system easier. The problem is you can't help your clients until they import some portion of their data. And you've considered on your Trello board and your Sprint timelines spending weeks building a CSV importer for certain data sets.
You're smiling right now because you know I'm right. And either you do it and you waste engineering time, or you don't do it and your customers have a horrible time getting onboarded. And listen, let's face the facts. Your ability to give value to your customers sometimes is very dependent on their ability to get you their data. Once you have the data, everything is really smooth.
Well, this exact problem probably explains why Flatfile is growing so quick. They've raised over $44 million and they do exactly this. The data onboarding platform for your marketing teams, your engineering teams, they enable you to get usable data faster so you can focus on what matters most to your business.
And the fastest growing companies like my friend ClickUp, Zeb, multi-billion dollar valuation, they all use Flatfile. Now flat file reached out. They wanted to sponsor. I said, do you got a good deal for us? And they do for anyone listening, any, anyone that's part of the top entrepreneurs community or get Latka.
You can get a deal now to get started today at Nathan Latka.com forward slash flat file. And they make it so easy by the way, their onboarding is beautiful. You don't have to commit to a bunch of stuff. You can actually see a demo live instantly right now. Check it out. Nathan Latka.com forward slash flat file. So they're all like in their houses all around the world.
How do you make sure like they all have the same like headphone and headset? So like when they're calling the audio is clear, how do you make sure like they speak English clearly? How do you manage all this? We have a very, very clear hiring process.
We start by offering incredible opportunity in the job ad but also very being selective about who we hire, people with previous experience, people that are superstars only, top 3% of the top performers. We set orientation. We don't accept resumes or forms. We just set company orientation once a week And 50, sometimes 200 people join that orientation.
That's 30 minutes orientation where we tell them about dream job. We want people who love what they're doing. And in order to qualify us, that orientation is for them to qualify us. Says, we want you to know about the company, what we do, who we stand for, what's our mission, vision, and so on. We want you to know what your job looks like right now. So you can see if this is for you or not.
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Chapter 5: What pricing strategies were implemented to increase revenue?
We want you to know how much money you can make. And we really offer incredible compensation. How much money can they make? They can make between $2,000 and $8,000 a month. Depends how long they are. Depends on the seniority level, performance level, and so on. And how much of that is guaranteed versus performance? There's no guarantee. So tell me how the performance works.
How do I earn the full 8K? What do I have to do? So in order to do that, we have full structure. You'll make $50 per attended demo. If you become master appointment setter, you'll make, sorry, start for 40 and get to go to 50. And then when the sale happen, you'll start with $50 per sale, go to $100 per sale, right? So if you schedule eight to 10 appointments a day,
And you are on the master level where you make $50 per attended demo. So every day you can make 200 bucks if it's attended four demos. Plus if two of those buys, you make another 200. So you can even $400 on a daily basis. And how do you make sure that the $50 you're paying for attended demo, that they're not just doing demos with really bad leads? How do you make sure they're high quality?
Every call is recorded. There's a quality assurance team that goes after that. Every closer will get the notes. There's a real line between what they say, how they book, how they document booking, and the closer who's taking on is validating, saying it's not a legit demo or is it legit. They only pay for good, legit attended demos.
If an employee comes on board and attend only 10 minutes, that's not legit. That's not paid attended demo. So in three years, we polished the process truly that we get them to Really give them a script. We give them objections. We give them all the bottles and such a perfect dialing system where leads are just coming in for them, but they can keep the notes.
What's the tech stack you use for that? Like where do they write their notes? Where do you report calls? Do you use Gong or something like that? No, we made a hybrid system between Fenero. That's our outbound dialer, predictive dialer. It's Fenero. Now it's called Cubicle. And we love them because it's performance-based.
So they record the call and your people can write notes in Fenero and Cubicle? That dialer, that interface where users are seeing, where my agents are seeing, that has... company name, all the script, embedded the variables of the script, notes, comments, and everything is done by us.
The moment the dial is coming, our interface pops up and they have all the information in script that's dynamically populated based on that business. Then when they end the call, this position goes into database and reporting, and then the next dial is reached out. Wow.
It's very, very proficient system for us and for them because we want to make sure that our agents really can perform at their best, make good money, and as well give us good quality leads. So last month, how much total did you pay to your 30 employees working in a call center? Great. That's tough questions. I don't do payroll anymore, but I can give you a close estimate.
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Chapter 6: How does the company ensure high-quality leads through its call center?
Any plans to raise traditional capital or you want to stay bootstrapped? you know what, we're looking to raise money, but not as desperate as like, oh, we need the money now or so on. We're on this burn rate, we're good for next 20 months, probably. So if you do raise though, how much would you want to raise? Probably another half a million dollars now.
And how much equity do you think you'd have to give up? For that, probably about 4%. 4%. Yeah. Interesting. So what you're valuing the business at 500 times that you're at about 10, $11 million, something like that. Yeah. I think that's undervalued by a lot.
Oh, we know, and that's why we're not rushing because it has to be very smart money, has to be very good investor, has to come with the value beside the money. And there's another company that I'm looking into called Republic.co that might give us crowdfunding because our goal is to, my personal goal is to retire 100 people in the company, right?
100 employees to reach financial freedom in five years when you go public. So I even bought myself a little bully here as a stamp. I love that. with a date on it that's going to go public. So it's a little reminder of what we're doing. But in order to go public, you need to have over 1,000 investors. Think of less than 2,000.
And Republic is a kind of interesting way to reach that milestone to go next level. And our goal is for every one of our employees to reach enough equity in five years so they can sell equity, buy five properties, and live out of passive income for the rest of their life, but not leaving Referizer because they love what they do so passionately that they stay. The money is not a fact.
I love how deeply you've thought about supporting all of your employees, including these 30 folks around the world and these call centers are under. I think that's great. All right. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite book. Oh, The Secret. Changed my life. Totally. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? Yes. CEO is Elon Musk. Incredible person.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business besides your own? Good one. Still, Jira. Took my productivity to the next level. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? No compromise, eight and a half. That's good. And situation, married, single kids? Married, beautiful, have a beautiful wife and 16-year-old son. One kiddo. And how old are you? I'm 39.
39. Happy birthday. You had a birthday in the last three months. Yeah, July 4th. I'm blessed to be born on a day that all my friends get the day off and all America celebrates it. Last question, something you wish you knew when you were 20. I wish I knew I was 20.
That's another good question is trust the process and just, it's almost like believe that everything's destiny and that you have a little or no control to what's coming. You can push, force yourself, or you can just go with the flow and speed up down the line. So recognize what your destination is and just speed up in that direction. Don't fight it.
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