SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Professional Services Playbook: How we used services to bootstrap our way to $3m in SaaS revenue
26 Oct 2022
Chapter 1: What insights were shared from the Founder 500 event?
Hey folks, hope your Q3 and Q4 is off to a good start. We just wrapped up Founder 500 in Austin, Texas. Hundreds of bootstrap founders showed up. It was an amazing time. I loved meeting so many of you.
This interview today is a recording from that session, which you're gonna love because now we have visuals, we have the founder teaching, and I made every single speaker include their revenue graphs and real artifacts in their presentations. Without further ado, let's jump in.
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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check it out right now at getlatka.com join me in welcoming to the stage michael maximoff of folderly michael welcome all right i'll just okay Hey folks, it's been a long day, I know. So bear with me for another 20 minutes, okay? I'm trying to kind of shake things up and give a nice presentation, a lot of content, all right? So...
The reason why Nathan asked me to do the keynote today is the nature of the, or the reason why we started the SaaS company in the first place. So I started this agency called Balkans back in 2017. Now we are rated the number one agency according to Cludge, D2, and all other ratings.
We do this appointment setting, like lead generation appointment setting for businesses in 50 industries and businesses We already serviced hundreds of customers worldwide, right? And the Folderly product is the spin-off of the agency, but we didn't close the agency. So in a way, agency is the parent company that we currently operate and we grow that have their own team and their own KPI.
And the Folderly was the brainchild of the agency because we were not able to find the platform that could solve our problem, right? So... What Fall Delay is this platform that helps you to get your emails out of spam. So a lot of marketers and salespeople or who are in sales and marketing knew that whenever you run a campaign, you subsequently end up in spam.
And that's where we ran into when we were building the agency and we had to solve that. So we built the product, right? And now the way we grow is that we essentially are building like an ecosystem of products where every product is a complementary to what the agency is doing and all of them are servicing the same type of customers thus increasing the ltv and all of the things right so
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Chapter 2: How did the agency evolve into a SaaS product?
We know how much money they spend on marketing, et cetera, how big their sales teams are. We know that they are sending cold emails, right? And we know that they have a problem with spam. So the first thing we do is we go to them and say, hey guys, we can solve this problem to your sales team and this is how much money that's going to cost.
So in a way, they don't necessarily even need to have a product for this to solve, right? They just need the problem, they have a problem, they want the problem to be solved. So in a way, we start making the first money out of being able to solve the problem and not offer the product.
And that was a great sort of like experiment for us because then we knew who was ready to pay us for the problem and how much money they were able to pay us. And I will actually go back to this, but just want to show you, this is one of the first clients that we had, and this is the email that we sent.
So in a way, what we realized, we're like, okay, now we need to understand how we can package this. Defaultly as a product was grow from a service. So what we did, we sell this audit. So we came into a client and we say, hey, we wanted to understand what's your current sending reputation is and what the problems are. And there's an audit that's cost $2,000, which is obviously we just take it off.
It's not a real number, right? So we can spend $500 on that. But that was the cost that we thought is fair to get that problem fixed or at least to pinpoint the problem, right? So long story short, so you have the customer, they say sure. And then we determined that they had like eight mailboxes that they had problems with.
We market those mailboxes and then we made this first 10 or so, you know, 10 or ish.
thousand dollars from that customer and that's when we realized so the customers for example a marketing agency they're sending a lot of cold emails they had problems with spam and they are ready to pay us for this so this money went to financing our developer team right so it means that we already had some money to be able to without even taking off the money of the agency we're able to
essentially to take those money and to be able to invest them into our engineering team right so i think that the my point here is that very often the great thing about the agency is that you have these great clients that you already work with but very often the agencies they still focus on delivering the best service but they're not thinking about how they can actually
productize their services, how they can solve the problem that they're solving with the service with the product. And while they're already making money, how they can create products subsequently that these products will be marketed to the clients that don't necessarily use this agency services, right?
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Chapter 3: What strategies were used to test SaaS ideas with agency clients?
the sender reputation, the setup, the content. So for example, when you see the screen, the first line is whenever you send out an email, So the email, when you send the recipient, it automatically assigns your settings, like the Kim settings and some others. So it's very important for whenever you send a cold email, make sure that your DNS records are set up correctly.
And very often, because we are using so many tools, we are tool engineering them, and that's why a lot of time we see for our customers that their DNS records are not set up correctly, and that harms their domain reputation. The next, based on the process, what it does is that
The spam filters, they check in your policies, and then based on that, they check the IP reputation and the blacklist, and then they check your content, and then on the last third line, you see when they decide if all is good, then they bypass it. If something is wrong, then then quarantine it, and if something is really bad, then they reject it altogether.
But if it's quarantined or rejected, then it harms your reputation. So in a way, the more bounced emails you have, the more people marketing spam or the more spam words you have in the content, that affects your reputation and it stores in the databases of these spam filters.
So in a way, subsequently in the future, whenever you're going to be sending the same emails, but maybe to a different group of people, the reputation of your campaign will be much lower because of the result of your previous campaigns, right? So, which is important.
So, this is the link to this document where we, so we collected over 10 million emails that we are sending over the last four years on the behalf of thousands of customers. And we were able to get the average open rate and average reply rate of the cold emailing. So you're able to access this document through this link.
And you can see, for example, whenever you're planning your cold email campaign and you want to email e-learning, you can say, for example, where you need to be in terms of your email open rate and reply rate, right? And then the last one is 10 tips or 10 things you need to keep in mind whenever you run a campaign, all right? So first one, validate your prospect emails, right?
That's very important. So there are a lot of tools. We recommend using Zero Bounce as a tool to do that. So make sure that all the emails are valid. We even don't recommend using catch-all emails, just the valid emails, right? Reach out to the target audience to avoid spam flagging. So by target audience, I mean... It's better to be very targeted in terms of who you email to.
So don't just buy a database and just send a blast. Be very targeted in terms of who and how you send an email to. So it's better to spend more money on this very nice targeted 100 or 500 leads and get the result out of them than blasting 5,000 emails and getting a 0.5% open rate, right? As I mentioned, set up your DNS correctly, you can use our platform for that.
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