SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
SaaS: North Dakota $400k+ MRR Helping You Manage Marketing Calendar
24 Nov 2017
Chapter 1: What is CoSchedule and how did it start?
Launched this company in 2013, co-schedule. It is the all-in-one marketing and content calendar. They are up around 65 folks on their team, $2.7 million raised, serving 8,000 customers, doing around $400,000 in monthly recurring revenue, healthy logo churn monthly, and obviously a super healthy Life Tonight at CAC ratio.
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark.
and i'm your host nathan latka many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every b2b sas ceo that i've interviewed if you want to get access to the database i've created with year-over-year growth rates customer accounts margins and many many other data metrics and data points you can go to getlatka.com here's the thing though this that database I keep it to myself.
It's so freaking valuable. And to preserve the quality of the data and make sure that the people that have access to it have a true advantage, I'm only letting 10 companies on each month. So we're full this month, but you can go to getlatka.com to get on the waiting list for next month. And look, there's big people on the waiting list. I mean, the biggest VCs you've ever heard of.
You've probably heard of them. They're big, private equity, billions and billions under management. So it's an impressive waiting list. Go get on now at getlatka.com. Hello, everybody. My guest today is Garrett Moon. He's the CEO and co-founder of CoSchedule, the web's most popular marketing calendar and the fastest growing startup in North Dakota.
As a thought leader, he's been blogging and speaking about content marketing, social media marketing, and startup business for more than seven years. Garrett, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, I can't wait. All right. Yeah. So, okay, you can't come on my show and say you're the fastest growing in Kansas without backing that up somehow. How do you know you're the fastest growing?
Well, Fast is growing in North Dakota and we have less than a million people in our state total. So we kind of know everybody. We know what's going on. So, you know, it's just by proxy and, you know, understand the area. But yeah, it's great to be on.
So we should rephrase that. You're the only software company in North Dakota.
That I wouldn't say. That I definitely wouldn't say. Actually, Fargo North Dakota has a great startup ecosystem, and it's growing every year.
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Chapter 2: What is the revenue model for CoSchedule?
So we're really excited about the entrepreneur economy in Bismarck and in North Dakota.
All right. So tell us what the company does, and what's your revenue model? How do you make money?
Yeah, so CoSchedule is your standard SaaS B2B company. So, you know, our model is pretty well understood out there. We build a marketing calendar and marketing management tool for companies that are managing marketing, for agencies that are managing a lot of different projects for different clients that goes to, you know, content, blog posts, social media, email marketing.
We really provide a tool where they can do it all in one place, save a ton of time, improve their team's communication and efficiency and all those sorts of things.
And what's the average customer paying you per month, would you say?
So our plans range, you know, about $40 a month up to about six, $700 a month, you know, and then past that and some higher plans. So, you know, it's, you know, average customer is probably gonna be between 50 and 150 bucks a month or so.
So we'll call it kind of maybe 75 ish range, but that helps us kind of get dialed in. Now, the obvious question listeners are gonna be going is, Nathan, why would I do this? I could just use my like Google calendar, right? So help us understand, tell us a story, a real story of a customer using you guys.
Yeah, so I think that's the exact problem, right? Is that you could use a Google Calendar, but you're also going to need some additional tools for actually content creation. So you're going to bring in word processors, you're going to need publishing tools, your website, your blog, or places where it's going, plus social media, plus email marketing.
There's a lot of moving pieces once you get into marketing, and there's more and more channels that we have to care about every single year. So our customers really come to us, and what they're looking for is saying, hey, we have all of these, we always call it the marketing stack, this broad marketing stack, And everything's disconnected. It's disorganized.
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Chapter 3: How does CoSchedule differentiate itself from Google Calendar?
We launched late 2013 and really got off the ground in 2014 after we took our first round of funding. And, you know, again, to a little bit of a backstory, my co-founder and I were running a marketing agency. We were doing website design and some custom development. And we were doing all of our own marketing, you know, our own blog posts, our own social.
And it was working really well for us to gain clients. But you started, you know, we were able to kind of get a firsthand look at some of the problems that were inherent in the workflow and in the industry.
So that was 2013. You said you really hit the ground running in 2014, but do you remember what first, do you remember what first year revenue was in 2013? How low was it?
Uh, gosh, uh, you know what? We probably closed the year with almost a hundred customers actually in just a couple of months. We launched towards the end of September and probably two or three months. You're probably just around 90 customers. Um, you know, so like, you know, thousand bucks, 1500 bucks in MRR or something like that.
So maybe four or five grand in total that first year. And then you said you raised in, in 2014, how much did you raise in 2014? And how much total have you raised to date?
We raised a half a million dollars in 2014 total raise to date has been about 2.7, 2.7 million.
And, and was that second round or third round that you did, was it priced or are you still doing convertible notes?
Uh, no, both, both our rounds actually were priced. Um, and you know, a lot of that just has to do with the, uh, investor community in our state, um, and, and angels that were here and what they were used to seeing and the types of deals that we could put together. So we never really did the convertible note round.
Uh, so most of them are priced rounds, um, and, and pretty simple, uh, clean, clean equity rounds.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did CoSchedule face in its early years?
We've had all of those things happen. And frequently, they bring a bump in traffic. Frequently, they don't result in a lot of MRR. And I think it'll be varied. I think if you're a consumer-based product, a B2C-based product, I think those types of things can do really well. For us, we're serving a really direct... we're looking at professional marketing teams.
So those things tend to be a blip in terms of traffic. A lot of times we don't even see them come through anymore, but not always our best places for conversions.
Okay, we're talking about negative stuff here. Let's flip the script here. What's the weirdest thing you've done to acquire good customers? Come on, you're in North Dakota. You have to be scrappy. Give me something besides paid traffic and inbound marketing.
We're really good at inbound marketing.
No, everyone does that though.
Give me something weird. They do. I don't have anything weird. We're too traditional.
That legacy account where the lead comes in and it says team size 300 and you're doing the math in your head and you go, oh my gosh, this is like a $50,000 ACV. You're like, I got to do whatever I got to do to close this. I mean, there must be some story, something weird you've done before.
Yeah.
Well, there's lots of customers like that, I think, where they came in through self-serve channels. And I think what's amazing is that they just kind of jumped into our app. We didn't necessarily know how they got there right away. And so, you know, you certainly want to try and close that account. But realistically, a lot of times, early days, you can't. You can only push the ACV so high.
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Chapter 5: How does CoSchedule manage customer acquisition and retention?
Headline Analyzer has brought in thousands to our email list, thousands of lead, thousands of customers. I mean, it's been a huge, huge win. Social message optimizer is the same type of thing, right? We're starting to look at the data, millions of messages that we've sent and try to understand what separates the good ones from the not so good ones.
And we have some more things in store for that as well. But those are definitely the types of things where they're weird in that they're a heavy upfront investment. And oftentimes they require you to take development resources away from product. I have to have engineers go up with stiff data and help me
kind of comb through some of those things i have to help have them help me build analyzers uh so i'm a product guy so it's always hard to take away from our product team uh but you know dedicating them to marketing pays off big time yeah but it is definitely like a high utilization kind of thing right it's kind of like it's kind of like the app that you install in movie theaters when you're watching the movie it tells you the best time to go take a bathroom break like in the moment when you're the perfect customer is looking for it boom it's right there and they find you
Yeah, absolutely. And they're highly targeted to our product niche.
Totally. What do you get today in terms of total employees?
Our headcount's around 65.
Okay, and what's the breakdown on that, like versus sales versus engineering?
Yeah, I mean, about 50% is going to be product for us. And then from there, about 10% each way in terms of success, sales, marketing, and admin.
Awesome. Makes good sense. Now, obviously with a lot of, uh, kind of social media marketing tools that I run into churn is a real issue because there's so many options. What is your logo churn? Or if you want to do a flip retention like annually.
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Chapter 6: What marketing strategies have proven successful for CoSchedule?
It'll appear in a little Gmail pop-up window. Send me an email and I'll apply immediately with the income report. And you can see how I'm buying and growing small B2B SaaS companies. That's www.thetopinbox.com. Totally free to try and use. www.thetopinbox.com. All right, Garrett, let's wrap up here with the famous five. These are one word answers. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
Let's go with High Output Management, Andy Grove.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
I'm going to go back to the Intel. I'm reading a book, the Intel Trinity. So Bob Nice would be, would be the one right now.
Bob noise. Yeah. Robert noise. Yeah. Number three. Yeah. Number three. Is there a, uh, this might be it. Is there a favorite online tool you have beside your own, like a QD scheduling?
Um, I would have to go to Evernote. I mean, I just use it all the time every day.
Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
I shoot for seven. Six and a half is maybe the best I do.
All right. And then what's your situation? Married, single? Do you have kiddos? Married, three kids. Wow. Okay. And how old are you? I'm 35. 35. All right. Last question. Take us back 15 years. What do you wish your 20-year-old self knew?
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