SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Proof you don't need a new idea, just better execution. Firm hits 160 customers, $25k MRR
23 Aug 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of the episode?
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. at about $140 per month with a team of three.
So scaling nicely, taking advantage of the AI trend.
Chapter 2: How does AI influence email marketing strategies?
The trick is, can they crack email and email reply rates, which he believes they generate an industry average above market response for right now, which is 4.57%. We'll see what happens. Hey folks, my guest today is Steven Nelmans.
Chapter 3: Who is Steven Nelmans and what is his background?
He's raised $20 million for his startups and built a $70 million startup at 19 that became one of the fastest growing Dutch tech startups. He's now working on Luna, building the best salesperson that anyone can hire. It's not just human, it's an AI. Steven, you ready to take us to the top? Sure am.
Okay, my audience is always skeptical about AI sales tools because they hate all the spam they get in their inbox every day. So help break through that.
Yeah, that's an interesting thing to let you say that, because that's also one of the reasons that we actually jumped on this. Because, of course, we get a lot of emails as well. There are about 300 billion emails sent a day right now, which is way too much, a lot of noise.
Chapter 4: What challenges are faced by Luna in the current market?
And that's because people are becoming so desperate that they actually want to connect to someone and find people and find new leads that they just start spamming on autopilot. And I think AI is the solution to that, because where many of the other companies in the market and everybody on social media is focused on the party trick, generating an email.
AI and especially generative AI can do much, much more than that. Because if I were to write the perfect email, send it to you, but it was actually meant for your co-founder or someone else within your team or maybe a completely different company. then it doesn't really matter, right?
So this is the reason that we really started, that we jumped on this as well, because we saw that AI can actually improve the quality so much that you do not have to send a thousand emails to get a reply, but in the end, maybe a hundred or maybe even 10 to get a reply. That's what we're going for.
So who are your customers, say? Is there a specific sector that's using you?
Chapter 5: How does Luna determine pricing and features for its services?
Two sectors, actually. It's digital agencies. That's a very big one. And the other one is SaaS companies. So the digital agencies, because they do not want to hire a sales team, that's too much of an investment for them. It's, of course, a lot of uncertainty in the ROI because someone needs to take six to nine months in order to become profitable if they will become profitable.
That's a huge leeway there. And the other one is companies, B2B SaaS companies that have a huge growth potential and growth ambition. And they want to scale up their sales and get in touch with the right people. And that's what we're helping them do now.
Chapter 6: What customer segments is Luna targeting and why?
And Steven, what are these customers paying you per month on average to use Luna?
On average, it's about $139. That's like the average sale price that we have right now. We have a tiered subscription pricing ranging from $100, which is the lowest one, up to $2,500, which is the highest one.
So you price based off a couple of interesting things, credits or monthly emails, $250,000, $500,000, $1,000. You also have feature-based upselling, like you don't get autonomous mode unless you're on plan X. Which of these are the most effective for you in terms of driving expansion revenue?
Expansion revenue, the most important one to get people to actually convert to being a paying customer is that we have a couple of premium features. We have a free trial, like a freemium model, but premium features that actually helps people to convert to the first stage. And then the second one is a number of emails.
And especially since we launched Autonomous Mode, which we did recently, where you do not have to, we take the human component out of doing sales outreach.
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Chapter 7: What are the key metrics for Luna's growth and customer retention?
And that's a very big one as well, because now everybody just stops at tier three. And then when they run out of credits before the end of the month, they expand to a higher package.
What's the paid feature that most free users say, I have to pay for Luna because I really want this one feature?
The most important thing, it actually depends a bit per sector. It's both the highly detailed geographical targeting, so that instead of targeting the US, you can actually target on zip code or city level. And the other one is, especially with B2B tech startups that are also fundraising, is to get in touch with VCs that did funding rounds and stuff like that.
So we also have timing-based targeting settings. And that's also a very interesting one where people will want to upsell in order to use it.
I see. And how many folks are paying for the platform today?
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Chapter 8: How does Steven plan to differentiate Luna from competitors like Apollo?
We have 163 customers right now.
Okay. And how many free plan users do you have?
About a thousand. So that's actually a lot.
That's a very good conversion.
Those are weekly active users currently. So they're not like downloads or signups or something like that. I think we have over 10K signups, but we have like a thousand weekly active users. And the thing is, we also did a bit of like the Dropbox PLG model where you get 25 free emails per month. But if you invite your colleagues and friends and stuff like that, you get more.
And that's also why 37% of our Sign-ups come from referrals at this moment.
How do you define a weekly active user? They send at least one email?
Exactly.
Interesting. Okay, so the fun of them there is 10K lifetime sign-ups, 1,600 you retained weekly active, and of the 1,600, 163 of them are actually paying about $140 a month to use the platform.
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