SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Norby Is SMS and Email all in One, Raises $4m at $20m Valuation
19 Nov 2021
Chapter 1: What is Norby and how does it serve creators?
now and starting to open it up to the world in Q1 next year.
So 200 customers at $5 a pop, you're doing something like $1,000 a month right now in revenue?
More than that, because we also have the $20 a month tier.
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 Nick Girard.
He's a lifelong creator and builder, as well as a former Microsoft software engineer and PM. He holds degrees in music, computer science, and electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, where he also launched his first startup while still a student.
Before founding his current company, Norby, he consulted for numerous early stage companies and helped launch a viral online community at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Chapter 2: What pricing tiers does Norby offer and who are its customers?
Again, now building Norby.live, a marketing platform for creators. Nick, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. Thanks for having me. You bet. Okay. So you sound like a triple threat. You have empathy for music.
Chapter 3: How did Norby evolve from a community tool to a marketing platform?
You can code from computer science. You're in the weeds because you ran an agency, launched side projects. So Norby is going to be big, huh?
That's the idea. The first startup I ever started actually was a music startup. That was the one I did in college. And we built it for DJs and it was about collaborating, like building collaborative playlists and playing music together in real time. And the goal for me has always been to figure out a way to marry those two things, to figure out a way to pair. is for people in creative worlds.
And that's really carried me through most of my 20s.
Very cool. Okay. So Norby.live is the tool today. Help me understand who's paying you and what they're paying on average per month if you have customers.
Yeah, so we have two tiers. We call the creator tier and the brand tier. The creator tier is a $5 a month tier and the brand tier is 20 bucks a month. And you can basically think of Norby as like if you took Linktree, MailChimp, Flowdesk, Leadpages and Community and smooshed them all together. All those things that people set up
super complicated Zapier flows to wire together to build their online presence.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Norby face during its early development?
Put all those in one place. You brand everything one time. It looks right in all the different places. Everything is built to work together. So you don't need to hook a bunch of different services together. Usually we can simplify people's stack, you know, take a lot of the daily tax out of their operations and also usually save the money.
I use a lot of those tools and I'm just thinking off the top of my head, my last bill from each of them altogether is probably somewhere around a thousand bucks a month.
I would never believe that you could do everything they do for five bucks a month to the point where I would never even sign up for your tool at five bucks a month because I wouldn't think it's possible that you actually can do that.
Yeah, well, I mean, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that, you know, our newsletter and email features does everything that MailChimp does. We are a company that is 11 months old. But what we actually found is most people don't use all the features that a tool like MailChimp offers. MailChimp is, you know, an email provider to end all email providers.
It's trying to be everything to everyone at the same time. And so if you look at the average spend, most people are spending $65, $70 a month on MailChimp, people who kind of fall into this category, and they're not getting most of that value from a tool like that. That's actually why tools like Flowdesk have started to crop up and take some of that market share away.
We learned all of this because we built a community ourselves. Like the genesis of Norby was myself and my two co-founders at the very beginning of the pandemic built an online community That went like semi-viral overnight.
We had tens of thousands of people engaging with this thing and all of a sudden we had to build a lot of stuff and coordinate a lot of things and we were hosting events on different platforms and we had email lists and we had SMS lists and we were spinning up landing pages and signups and all this stuff all the time.
And we experienced firsthand what it is like to try to build and manage this kind of operation day to day. And so we started out just building tools for ourselves, just solving for our own use cases. Like we need a link in bio. We want to be able to do text messages. Oh, we're doing an event collab with this other community over here. Let's build the ability to host events.
And so it just started very organically with our own needs, building for the use cases that we encountered. And then because we were working with other creators, other community builders, other brands, they started being like, hey, can we use those tools that you're building? Because we're doing exactly the same thing. And so it kind of just grew from there.
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Chapter 5: How did Norby manage to raise $4 million in funding?
I see. But I imagine there's probably only a handful though on that, right?
It's pretty evenly split, actually. I would say we have probably three distinct cohorts. We have individual creators and influencers who I would actually define separately. I think influencers probably make most of their money from brand partnerships and sponsored posts and sponsored content.
Creators are people who are directly monetizing their audience, selling subscriptions, selling content, tips, and that kind of thing. So we have those individual creators. They're very well suited to our $5 a month tier. Then we have what I would call community builders. They may be people with a business objective. Maybe they have a shop or something. Maybe they have a paid membership community.
They might be an activist. Maybe they have a Mighty Networks. Maybe they have a Facebook group set up. Maybe they have a Slack or something like that. And then we have brands. We have e-com operations that are D2C Instagram brands that are building text message lists and doing promos.
Chapter 6: What strategies does Norby use to convert customers?
And they have an email newsletter and they need a link in bio. And then they're doing collabs with other brands and they do it at Clubhouse and Twitter spaces and that kind of thing.
So 200, maybe multiply times like 10 or 15 a month on average, instead of five, you're doing a couple thousand bucks a month in revenue, right? Is sort of where you're at today. And where were you a year ago? Did you have any revenue a year ago or no?
We did not. So we started this, we went full time on this at the very tail end of 2020, myself and my two co-founders. And until this summer, it was just the three of us.
And we were just, you know, building these tools slowly, you know, starting to pick up our, because we had built our own community, we had a great network of kind of early people to test concepts with and get feedback from and give prototypes to.
Um, so we spent a lot of the spring doing that and kind of took the wraps off in the summer and, uh, unveiled our website and started doing events and activations, uh, with our own customers, uh, co-hosting things. Um, and then we, uh, we, we raised around a funding in July and we've been, you know, building out the team since then.
Uh, the three co-founders, you had just split everything evenly 33, 33, 33 at the start.
Not exactly. But ballpark, yeah.
And why not exactly? I mean, I asked this because it's the toughest conversation you'll have as you're launching a company. So share what you can. Why didn't you do it evenly?
Sure.
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Chapter 7: How does Norby differentiate itself from competitors?
I mean, we had a very candid conversation with each other about what all of our strengths were and what we brought to the table. And I think... The three of us have all known each other for several years. There's a lot of mutual respect and trust. And one of the things that I love about our partnership is how complimentary it is. We come from very different backgrounds.
I'm a tech and product person. I was a software engineer. I was a PM. I did all the things that go in it. I've built software. I've marketed software. I've done product design, all of those kinds of things.
So you own the most then of the three?
I am the CEO. Yes. As the CEO, I own the most of the three.
Well, those things aren't always correlated. Just because someone has the title CEO doesn't mean you own the most. So I'm just curious.
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Chapter 8: What are the future plans for Norby and its growth?
So you own the most because of the skill set you brought to the table. The others maybe own a little bit less. Yeah. Fair. Okay, cool. Talk to me about the round you raised. How much did you raise this year?
So we raised just under $4 million in July. And we basically set a cap for ourselves about how much of the company we wanted to give away and said, this and no further. What was that cap?
I mean, most people on the seed or pre-seed are selling 20% or so.
Yeah, basically that. And we kicked off, we took the wraps off of our product in May. We started doing, as I said, a whole bunch of events and activations with our own customers. That we have found is like, an incredible way to fill the top of our funnel. Every time we do an event, every time we do programming or anything of that kind, we get hundreds of signups. We have never lacked for signups.
We've, from before we even launched or had a product, we've had a wait list. Um, so we started doing that. It went super well. Uh, we were kind of feeling out how we wanted to structure the company from here and decided that we wanted to raise around.
And, uh, so we started fundraising in, um, at the very end of April, uh, or at the beginning of May, uh, it took us about, um, took us about four to five weeks to get, uh, uh, Offers that we were interested in on the table and then a couple weeks after that to get things closed What did you do?
That's not easy. What did you do in the first four to five weeks to generate that kind of demand?
yeah, um the first two weeks I talked mostly to people that Uh, I didn't really care if I won or lost because i'd never done this before And I just did like eight meetings a day for two weeks and just um, you know practiced and fell on my face a lot and got a lot of very quick no's and learned how to tell the story of what we were doing and why it was important and what the opportunity was.
We are obviously all true believers and think that there's a huge, huge market here and a massive opportunity over the next couple of years. But we're all first time founders. None of us have done this before. And so just learning structurally how to tell a story
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