SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
No Code Agency Moves to SaaS, 1200 Customers, $2m+ ARR
21 Aug 2021
Chapter 1: What is the current revenue run rate of the company?
Yeah, we're well north of that.
Will you break 2 million run rate this year? Have you already broken it? We have.
Overall run rate? Absolutely.
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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: How is the transition from agency to SaaS being managed?
Will you break $2 million run rate this year? Have you already broken it?
We have. Overall run rate? Absolutely. So how aggressive are you trying to be this year? We're trying to do triple digits overall.
Wow. Okay. So, I mean, do you think you can break like a $5 million run rate this year? Is it doable? Maybe. Like, is that a comfortable goal or like a stress goal?
All right, fair enough. I told you we don't publish a number.
All right, but now we know. Now we know. Between two and five. So I won't push you harder. Between two and five, that's great. So tell me about the thing, because you're in this beautiful spot where you have an agency that's done very well. You're taking advantage of a no-code platform. You're building a platform now. Higher margin of revenue, no touch, et cetera.
There's a lot of people that get stuck, though, where they try and run both the agency and the platform at the same time, and neither one scales. Will you ever shut down the agency completely and go all in on the SaaS, even if revenue takes a hit?
Sure. We were never founded to be an agency. Although it sort of looks like that, what it really is is professional services to implement our platform. So if you look at the history of enterprise SaaS in general, that was always the case, right? So you needed help implementing products.
Even though our product is self-service, a lot of times we run across non-technical founders, et cetera, or even larger enterprises that can't find the talent to use it and want our help. And we do the services side at a world-class level. The idea is that over time, we will transition the services side to an ecosystem of providers, which we've begun to do. We've begun to do that.
We have a small ecosystem of them now. We have a product that's eight base for the agencies that's a little bit different than the core product that you see on the website.
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Chapter 3: What pricing models are being used for the low-code platform?
So if you look at where we start to where we end up with a client and revenue, you see a very significant increase in usage and upsell that happens.
What is that net dollar retention?
It's somewhere in the 135 to 140 range.
That's very good. And what's your team today? How many folks?
We're approaching onshore and offshore, we're approaching 50. 50.
Where do you like to offshore the most?
We have an office in St. Petersburg, Russia, and we also have some folks in Latin America.
How many engineers total, including offshore talent?
Engineers total is probably, it's above 30.
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Chapter 4: How many customers are currently using the self-serve model?
Um, shoot. Yeah. I'm going to say the MailChimp founder.
Yeah. Ben Chestnut. Number three, how many hours of sleep? Sorry. What's your favorite online tool for building a base besides your own.
Favorite online tool for building a base. It would definitely be eight base. Um, Man, I'm going to go with boring, you know, sort of envision.
At least he didn't say Gmail. Okay. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
I'm shooting. I'm shooting for seven. Sometimes it's six, sometimes it's eight. But I've learned that my performance and my sleep are very much directly correlated.
And Albert, married, single, kids?
Married.
Kids.
How many? Married for a long time. Four kids. Wow. Okay. How are you? I'm 53. I'll be 54 in a few days.
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Chapter 5: What marketing strategies are driving customer growth?
Hey, congrats. Happy early birthday.
Thank you. Thank you.
All right. Take us home here. What's the menu we should do when you were 20?
Oh, man, it's probably I'm probably going to give you the same answer I gave you the last time. But I'm going to say that it's like at the end of the day, like as a founder, we're always scared to death about risk and failure and so forth. And the truth is, at the end of the day, you just got to go for it. And life's too short. You know, at the end of your life, you're not going to care.
You're going to care about the risk you didn't take.
Guys, Aidbase founded in 2017. They raised about $4.8 million to date, serving over 1,200 sort of no-touch customers. They use the platform to build their no-code products and MVPs from scratch. And they also have an enterprise cohort as well. Call it north of a $1.52 million run right now.
Hoping to scale to $5 million here quickly as they look to scale their platform revenue faster than their pure agency revenue. They are doing that 135% net dollar retention to date as Albert continues to scale. Albert, thanks for taking us this hour.
Thank you, Nathan.
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