SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Real Estate SaaS Did $2.2m Last Month, 140% Growth, Mostly Affiliate Sales
30 Mar 2021
Chapter 1: What is the revenue model for Batch Products?
Hold on, Ivo, you're surprising me here, which I love. You're doing $6.3 million a month in revenue. We're not doing exactly 6.3, but it's for sure in the same figures. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka. Now, if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed. To subscribe, go to getlatka.com. When you subscribe, you won't hear ads like this one.
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My guest today is Ivo Dragunov. He is co-founder of Batch Products, five SaaS platforms that provide data and lead generation tools for users in various industries. Ivo, you ready to take us to the top?
Sure.
All right, very good. So is this one company or it's five SaaS companies? So it's actually four consumer-facing companies and front-end-facing companies, and we have one back-end company that just provides API services to various industries. What do you mean by four consumer-facing companies? So it's basically four separate completely standalone platforms. But you're not selling to consumers.
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Chapter 2: What types of companies does Batch Products serve?
Hold on, Ivo, you're surprising me here, which I love. You're doing $6.3 million a month in revenue. We're not doing exactly 6.3, but it's for sure in seven figures. So a lot of the customers that are on a pay-as-you-go basis don't order every single month. And some orders may vary from anywhere literally from $20 a month all the way up to $10,000 a month. I see. Okay.
So what are you doing right now? Like last month, how much did you do? We last month, we did a little over two and a half million. Wow. This is impressive. And what does growth look like? So exactly a year ago, how much were you doing in that month? So 2020, we grew up about 140%. Wow. 2019. How did you do that? I mean, considering COVID.
Oh, I think COVID is kind of like a blessing in disguise, to be honest. A lot of people basically switched to just utilizing our data and our services and our phone numbers that we provide, even from their computers at home. And it just turned into a lot of people actually being more aggressive in trying to find deals and leads, which ended up benefiting us. And again, we were just focused on
providing a super quality product. And I think, you know, the initial months of COVID back in March, April, and May, we kind of took a really step back and tried to figure out how do we optimize everything that we have, everything from team structures and, you know, being able to exponentially grow the team size. So all of those things really just helped us, you know,
The, you know, the months following that with, you know, being able to scale and grow, we added about a hundred, we added about a hundred employees in about a six month timeframe. So that really just, um, how many total, how many total employees today? Uh, about 140, I think a little bit more. Got it. And what was total 2020 revenue? We had about 16.9, I believe. Million. Yep.
And that's up 140% since 2019. So you were doing about 6 million in 2019, something like that. Actually a little bit less than that, yeah. Wow. Less revenue, so about 5 million. Less revenue, yeah, right about 5.
A lot of you guys will ping me out of the blue asking for help selling your software companies, but I'm not a broker and I'm really focused on founder path right now, not helping folks sell their company. So I'm always looking for great tools to recommend for you guys to quickly figure out what you could potentially sell your company for and how much cash you could get.
That's where Flippa comes in. Now, here's my thing about brokerages, especially for selling your company. You guys should not have to pay a 10% brokerage fee when you put your blood, sweat, and tears into building your company for years out of a sale. All smart founders know, though, that the best way to maximize price is to have multiple options.
So how do you get multiple options, multiple bids on your company without paying a broker 10% or more? Well, I recommend Flippa because they have the largest list of buyers for these sorts of digital assets, which almost always guarantees a bidding war. I tell my founder friends all the time to try Flippa's valuation calculator to see what their company is worth.
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Chapter 3: What is the average monthly payment from Batch Products' customers?
Now we change this tune and say that's a little higher. Correct. Well, no, I, you know, like I think what somebody would probably, what the company's value today is not going to be what it's going to be value in the year. Um, and you know, we're, um, We're growing a billion-dollar company brand in the next five years, so that's kind of our potential exit strategy, if you want to say.
And are you making money? Were you profitable last year? Oh, yeah. How much? You did $17 million top line. How much at the bottom? We're about 57% in profit, so like nine points something. What do you do with all that money? Do you pay it out as dividends or what? No, I mean, we always get paid and we reinvest a lot heavily into other products. We started with one product in 2018.
We added two products last year, which are, I mean, they're very in the early stages. One of them just crossed 100,000 MRR, just launched in December. What's the URL of that one? Badge dialer. That one just crossed 100,000 a month, and it's growing pretty rapidly. We had some little setbacks with just launching and development stuff, but that's behind us. That's great.
Would you ever set up profit sharing with employees since you have 50% of revenue going to the bottom line? That's a good question. We are in the process of giving some small percentages of ownership in case of like sales to certain key people, but we're keeping that to a very minimum at the moment.
Chapter 4: How did Batch Products acquire its first customers?
How many engineers are on the team of 140? Software engineers or? Software. Are you including like the quality assurance engineers and DevOps or anything? In total, about 50. Five zero. And do you have any quota carrying sales reps? Say that again? Do you have any sales reps that carry quarter? Oh, yeah. Yeah, we have sales reps. How many? Seven-ish. And what quarter do they have?
Honestly, it just varies on all the products. All the products are a little bit different. Even the price points are different. And, you know... One of them, for instance, has to do $100,000 a month in revenue on, let's say, the skip tracing side. On the other side, honestly, I don't have that number in front of me. Yeah, no, that's fine. Talk to me about getting new customers.
Do you think your channel to grow is going to be affiliates or is it going to be something else? Affiliates has been a big portion of our growth. We're missing a lot of key things at the moment with any kind of outbound sales, which we're currently not doing at all. And that's why we're trying to hire some of these key positions with present of operations too sometimes.
So we have the capacity to...
um start putting a strategy behind you know outbound sales and uh just being uh more proactive as far as generating leads we generate a lot of leads uh just a lot of inbound and affiliates but again there's a there's a lot of missing uh potential profits and not doing outbound what's the funnel right like right now across all products how many new leads per month uh just out there just um across all products i have so i don't think uh just let's say on on our batch lead side it's it's
I mean, actually, I know that. So for Batchly, it's 4,300 leads we had from March 1st through up until now. And how many convert to like a trial or paid? So about... 10% of them convert, 10 to 15% convert to a trial. And then out of 30, about 35 of those, 35% of those convert to an actual paying customer. Got it. So that's what, about 180 new customers per month on 4,300 new leads?
No, that doesn't actually sound right. And so the leads, I think it's, what do we classify as an actual lead? I think that's one of the, like, the missing pieces potentially, but we have about, so on the batch leads that we have about a thousand, about a thousand customers a month times I'd have to actually look at our marketing. It's okay.
You added about 1,000 new customers, though, just last month on batch leads. Yeah. On 4,300 top-of-funnel leads. Correct. And I'm just trying to think if those were actual trials or they were actually the leads. And I think you may have those numbers mixed. Yeah, that's okay. But no, generally speaking, 4,000 inbound leads, 1,000 new converting to pay. That's a 25% conversion rate.
I mean, that's pretty impressive. It's about, and again, it varies on the products, but I know one of the batch leads is about a 32% conversion rate. Would you ever consider raising outside capital? I don't see the reason for it, to be honest. Very cool, man. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book? Measure What Matters.
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Chapter 5: How many affiliates does Batch Products currently have?
Take me back to when you were 20. What's something you wish you knew? I wish I knew? Yep. Uh... I would have gotten to SAS quicker.
did you find dan martell out of curiosity uh i think uh youtube youtube that guy he's so good on youtube guys there we have it batch leads launched in 2018 past 5 million sales in 2019 17 million sales in 2020 30 million in sales on track to do this year they did 2.5 million dollars in revenue just last month across 18 000 customers they're selling and catering to the real estate space anything related to call dialing lead generation you name it they're on it
call it a valuation, somewhere between 60 and 90 million bucks, but they own 100% of the business outright across three co-founders, 30, 30, 30%, each 140 people on the team, 50 engineers is looking to continue to scale with new product lines. Ivo, thanks for taking us to the top. Thank you.