SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Pay Potential Customers $2/minute To Talk to You, He Hits $7k/mo in Revenue
14 Mar 2023
Chapter 1: What is SaaS Open and why should I attend?
Guys, SaaS Open is our next big event in New York City. March 16th and 17th, we'll have 1,000 SaaS leaders all sharing how they built their companies. Our keynotes are Henry Shuck, Marie Martins from Tally.sao, Serby from Symbol, Christopher of DocHub, who had a big exit. Again, hundreds of speakers, 1,000 plus attendees.
And we've got folks bringing their entire executive teams because we have stages for founders, founders,
heads of product head of finance mbd cmos and cro's and then people in hr stage it's gonna be special prices are increasing every week so you don't want to wait go to sasopen.com right now to see what the ticket price is and lock in your spot today again that's sasopen.com march 16th and 17th in new york city tickets are almost sold out
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.
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It helps companies do research with their community-based user approach. They pay the users a dollar a minute. He keeps the other dollar a minute. They're doing $14,000 a month in volume today. He keeps, again, $7,000 a month on that, hoping to grow to about $150,000 by the end of the year today. Bootstrapped so far with a team of four. Hey folks, my guest today is Sal Avalar.
He leads Lightster, which helps companies connect with qualified users for input and reward users for sharing their opinions. Companies can create unlimited communities of qualified users and users who participate get rewarded with cash and perks. That is what co-creation is all about. That's what Lightster is all about. Sal, are you ready to take us to the top? There you go.
So when I read your bio, user testing comes to mind, right? You help me find people to test my product. Is that an accurate comparison?
Um, yeah, kind of like, uh, our proposition is slightly different. We try to, uh, uh, to implement that idea of like a co-creation, like an ongoing process, like, uh, you basically build your communities and you keep in touch with users to a point that you become customers and then friends and advocates and so on.
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Chapter 2: How does Lightster help companies gather user feedback?
Yeah, we got about 12 companies enrolling now in new projects, like Noble here from Toronto, a couple of other companies from the US, and some companies that are part of the PERC programs we have with the incubators.
And so when one of these 12 companies pays a budget to get user feedback through your community, what's the average budget? What's the average project size usually?
Yeah, it's about from 600 to 1200 bucks per project.
So let's just make the math easy. Let's say a company says, Sal, I want to spend $1,000 getting user feedback. Can you help me find the right community members? You're then paying up the community members a dollar per minute. Where do you make money?
Yeah, so we get a cut. So for the standard plan, we're talking about two bucks per minute. Users get a buck, and then we get the rest of it.
Okay, so if someone's going to pay you $1,000, right, divided by $2, that's 500 sort of minutes of time. Yeah. Right, and you're keeping 500 bucks of the 1,000. We get 500, yeah, exactly. I see. So what volume in projects did you do over the past 30 days, dollar-wise?
We've lately I think we had about seven grand over the last 30 days. Yeah, seven grand.
Well, okay. And help me understand growth. How much did you do exactly one year ago in March?
Oh my God. Growth was, yeah, it was fast paced. So we launched the app back in September last year. And then after that, it was just like trying to pick it up the pace. We were generating, I think, 900 bucks per month to this point now, about seven grand.
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Chapter 3: What revenue model does Lightster use for user sessions?
I've been hooked up with him. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Lightster?
Right now... A bit of everything, but we've been relying a lot on Canva, Lightster, sorry, ClickUp.
Sal, you're cutting in and out, so I'm going to wrap the interview up here, guys. Lightster.co, it helps companies do research with their community-based user approach. They pay the users a dollar a minute. He keeps the other dollar a minute. They're doing $14,000 a month in volume today. He keeps, again, $7,000 a month on that, hoping to grow to about $150,000.
by the end of the year today bootstrapped so far with a team of four sal thanks for taking us to the top