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SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Quabbly Helps teams Build Internal Apps, Raises at $4m Valuation, First 10 Customers

27 Oct 2021

Transcription

Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

0.031 - 9.7 Nathan Latka

Got it. So five seats per 30 accounts, about 150 seats at 20 bucks a month. Yeah. Cool. Congrats. That's $3,000 a month in revenue, right?

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10.683 - 11.526 David Ernest

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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14.138 - 26.529 Nathan Latka

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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27.029 - 50.37 Nathan Latka

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 David Ernest.

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50.41 - 62.261 Nathan Latka

He is building a tool called Quably. It's a platform that teams and businesses use to create internal applications like CRMs, HRMs, etc. to manage and automate their processes without writing code. David, are you ready to take us to the top?

63.221 - 63.962 David Ernest

Yes, sure, Nathan.

64.643 - 70.808 Nathan Latka

All right. So tell us more about this thing. And now are people only using this to build internal applications or are they building external applications as well?

71.817 - 91.98 David Ernest

All right. So for external applications, that's part of our long roadmap, right? So we have an API that seems can pretty much use to build external applications on top of Krably. Yeah. But for now, our product allows you to build internal applications without writing code. We currently have a customer who is like piloting with our APIs and who's building like a SaaS platform on our APIs.

92 - 94.703 David Ernest

So Krably just set up its own database.

Chapter 2: What is Quabbly and how does it help teams build internal applications?

155.662 - 159.028 David Ernest

So we have an average customer per account.

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159.129 - 163.317 Nathan Latka

Got it. So five seats per 30 accounts, about 150 seats at 20 bucks a month.

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164.82 - 165.041 David Ernest

Yeah.

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Chapter 3: What types of applications can be built with Quabbly?

165.802 - 168.608 Nathan Latka

Cool. Congrats. That's $3,000 a month in revenue, right?

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169.57 - 170.131 David Ernest

Yeah.

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170.772 - 172.716 Nathan Latka

Where were you a year ago? Were you pre-revenue? No.

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174.13 - 192.967 David Ernest

Yeah, so we started building this around May 2020, during the height of COVID. So instead of building this. So we had some customers testing. Those customers have actually turned out at the moment. These are like early testers. They've actually turned out right now. But yeah, we had customers paying to test with us there.

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193.628 - 196.09 Nathan Latka

And David, is this your baby? Do you own 100% of the business?

197.692 - 199.974 David Ernest

Yeah, obviously. I want to scale this and take it to the top.

201.015 - 203.597 Nathan Latka

But do you own 100% of the business or have you raised capital?

204.607 - 212.16 David Ernest

Okay, yeah, so I've raised like a capital pre-seed round. Yes, currently like ongoing, yeah.

212.18 - 213.582 Nathan Latka

You're currently raising pre-seed?

Chapter 4: How many customers does Quabbly currently have and what are their use cases?

269.845 - 274.772 David Ernest

So we used that to upgrade our product. And right now, we're investing a lot on our goods market side of things.

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275.693 - 278.758 Nathan Latka

How are customers finding you today? What's your growth channels?

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279.667 - 291.266 David Ernest

Okay, so we have three major channels. We're using implementation partners. That's folks who use tools to build stuff for clients and direct sales and, of course, digital marketing.

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292.748 - 294.371 Nathan Latka

And so when you say digital marketing, what does that mean?

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296.294 - 306.771 David Ernest

Yeah, so we do run ads, but we're not really skilled at a particular channel. So we're really focused currently, of course, like I said, how are folks finding us right now? What about implementation partners?

307.915 - 315.642 Nathan Latka

Got it. So you're scaling up with digital marketing, you're spending some money on ads. Do you know what your CAC is? How much does it cost you to get a $20 a month new seat?

317.344 - 333.94 David Ernest

Okay. Like I said, we have three channels that we're looking at. So like I said, we've not really put on the engines on ads yet, but our main channels for now are Word of Mouth, and Word of Mouth has direct sales and implementation partners.

Chapter 5: What pricing strategy does Quabbly use for its services?

334.358 - 339.925 Nathan Latka

Yeah, but what does word of mouth mean, right? These people don't just magically find you. And if you can't define how they found you, then you can't repeat it.

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339.945 - 351.18 David Ernest

I call that direct sales. So we have sales folks like myself and my co-founders. And we talk to people about our product and about folks.

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351.2 - 356.147 Nathan Latka

And so who do you guys reach out to to talk to? What job titles are you targeting and what platforms?

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356.937 - 375.683 David Ernest

Okay, so I'm pretty much scaling with use cases because the product is kind of wide. So of course we have like a customer manufacturing and some customers manufacturing. So we're really targeting customers that we have like, like in use cases that, so our ideal customer profiles that we're targeting are from the use cases that we're already serving already, like the customers we already have.

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375.723 - 379.688 David Ernest

So we like just scaling use cases that we already have on board in our platform.

380.663 - 387.072 Nathan Latka

So when you're targeting manufacturing folks, who are you targeting? What's the job title at the manufacturing company of the person?

387.112 - 388.994 David Ernest

Okay, head of operations.

389.955 - 392.719 Nathan Latka

Okay, and how do you find those people? Is it on LinkedIn or somewhere else?

393.42 - 395.863 David Ernest

Yeah, LinkedIn, sales navigator.

Chapter 6: How did Quabbly's team and funding come together?

581.981 - 592.1 Nathan Latka

Wow. Okay. Got it. So, okay, good. So what your total headcount expenses per month right now are about how much? How much do you spend right now just on people every month, your headcount expenses?

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593.081 - 594.182 David Ernest

About $7,000.

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594.823 - 597.426 Nathan Latka

Oh, wow. Okay. So is there some people making less than $1,000 a month?

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598.307 - 603.653 David Ernest

Yeah. Spending power is completely different over here.

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603.673 - 617.608 Nathan Latka

Well, it's a beautiful UI. I mean, when I was preparing for the call, looking at the website, I'm going, wow, this looks beautiful. It's got a lot of functionality. This is incredible. I thought you were doing, based off just the website, I'm like, these guys must be doing 100, 200 grand a month in revenue. So that's good. You have a quality product.

618.533 - 624.238 David Ernest

Yeah. It's just time to scale it up right now and take it up to the top.

624.258 - 633.087 Nathan Latka

Yeah. Let's wrap up, David, with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book? Heart and About Heart by Ben Horowitz. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

634.948 - 639.413 David Ernest

I'd say Elon Musk.

640.053 - 648.321 Nathan Latka

Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business besides your own? Intercom. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

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