SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Million Dollar, No Sales Team Playbook: How he hit $720k in ARR as a 1 man team
25 Jul 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
For ARR, probably around three quarters of a million right now. It might even be a little bit more at the end of this year, but we're doing a little bit more than 60,000 per month right now.
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 Mike Hall.
He's a serial entrepreneur animating easy-to-use, highly effective marketing tools for local businesses at his company called Wombot.io. Mike, you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready. Let's go, Nathan. I know you joked. You said, Nathan, I was a little bit late because I was getting out of my McLaren and my audio wasn't connected. That's a slight flex, which we love, but it's working.
I love flex on the McLaren every day. And just to flex even more, two weeks ago, I was in New York City in Manhattan when they unveiled the new Artura supercar, McLaren. So McLaren invited me there. The president of McLaren was there. And I got to complain about the maintenance issues. You're a car guy then, huh? I love cars, man.
Absolutely. So that's why you do SaaS, profits to put into cars.
That's pretty much where it goes.
That's amazing. I love the honesty. All right. What is Wombat? What are people paying you for?
Okay, it's word of mouth bot, which basically is an automated system to get online reviews. But in the end of the day, the value that we're selling is business growth on autopilot for local businesses. But we have two types of users.
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Chapter 2: What is Wombat and how does it help local businesses?
It's a lot. Uh, but the thing is we were not concentrating on, um, salespeople, my marketing guy that does a great job, you know, getting free trials in for the partner side. It came from the MLM world. We had a lot of MLM people in there. They come with a lot of problems. And what that ended up happening is they were trying to sell it, to resell it, to resell it.
They weren't actually, but they ended up finding some terrific salespeople that really took off with it. So at this point, I'm just getting rid of the MLM stuff and I'm bringing in the salespeople and I'm trying to- Do you know, Mike, when you add up all the volume of all the revenue your bars make together, do you know what that is?
What they charge their customers?
No, I was talking to somebody yesterday about this. My guess is somewhere around a half million a month, maybe a little bit more that they are bringing in directly to themselves. But again, I have no way at this point, and we don't have enough time to tell you exactly why, but I used to be able to track it. Now I don't just make it easier on them.
Chapter 3: What are the different user types for Wombat?
Why not? Why not try and take like, I mean, can you not take 10% of that?
Okay. So I watched one of your shows the other day. I forget the app's name, but I have it on my phone. I contacted them. My next step is to have an integrated payment processing platform and to capture a percentage of its revenue. It does two things. It's going to make it easier for new partners. They don't have to go out and get their own Stripe or PayPal accounts to do reoccurring payments.
And we're going to capture more of that revenue. You nailed it. That plus sales enablement tools is the path forward.
Chapter 4: How does the reseller program work for Wombat?
Our current revenue, even if we didn't grow our user base and we had sales enablement tools to sell to these partners, I'm thinking would more than double the current ARR. Those are the things I'm trying to work on at this point in time, but it's still in its infancy, man. We have a couple of investors, some guys that did really well. One guy does 70 million a year in a software company.
Another guy sold his software for 84 million bucks.
How much have you raised?
None right now. So I'm just kind of at that point that they're doing due diligence. We'll see whether or not I want, or not I want, but we'll see whether or not it goes forward.
Mike, how much capital do you need?
I mean- If I had somewhere near a million dollars, I think I could do a lot with that.
Do you need that all right away? Or could you do like 200K today?
No, it wouldn't be right away. So there's holes in the boat. There's a few problems I'm trying to solve, development issues. I've had the same developers for seven, eight years. They're great guys.
How many full-time today?
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Chapter 5: What revenue model does Wombat use for its resellers?
And I have a number of things that are pretty much ready to go. And But content, content is a big hurdle. So that would be one place where the revenue would be spent. And just on getting the development up to par, really, I think, which the development process might take three, four months to get everything.
Who are you using? What's the dev shop you're using right now?
I don't want to say their name, but they're offshore.
Where? Which country?
It's in India. And they are like a larger organization. And actually, when I went to New York, I told you that the guy flew in that I've been dealing with for years.
Is it Cody Toss?
No, no. But if you have any recommendations, please let me know.
No, this is, this is the number one thing we help founders with. They use founder path and they take money from us. We help make sure they've got amazing engineers. And a lot of time it's an outsourced engineering from that. We've already vetted that we have other founders that are paying for. So we know it's good quality work. So we can chat about that offline, but this is great.
So $6,000 a month. Now, if you're doing call it 6,000 a month today, what were you doing exactly a year ago? Do you remember?
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Chapter 6: What challenges does Wombat face with its churn rate?
Just to start a software business. Because when I was 18, I went to one class for HTML. I should have just kept going with it and continue to learn how to code. And yeah, Because I love to build stuff. So with software, the building blocks are free. I'm building a house right now. It takes forever. But with software, If you know how to code, it's free.
Guys, Wombat.io helps small businesses grow. He doesn't want to deal with all the sales work. So he has over 300 value-added resellers that sell his product. He does not take a cut from them right now, but they make about 6 million bucks a year through his program. That's his estimate. He makes about $60,000 a month because each of ours pays about 200, 300 bucks a month for the software.
He's doing $60,000 a month right now, up from $25,000 a month just a year ago. Totally bootstrapped, which we love. And he's a one-man wrecking machine. All consultants building this tool, which we love. Mike, thanks for taking us to the top.
I appreciate it, and talk to you soon.