SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
She's Built a $500k/year Company in Bali Looking for $8m Pre-Money Valuation with Andrea Loubier of MailBird EP 205
14 Mar 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What inspired Andrea Loubier to build Mailbird in Bali?
Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks that I give away every Monday is Kim Dust. She's in the entertainment industry and is currently working a full-time day job and doing her side hustle on the side. Kim, congrats.
Chapter 3: How does Mailbird differentiate itself in the email market?
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Okay, Top Tribe, good morning. Our guest today is Andrea Lubier. She's a travel addict who's obsessed with spicy food, third culture, and she's really a third culture kid who has a crazy passion about improving the unification of online communication, all starting with email.
As the CEO of Mailbird and one of Southeast Asia's leading female thought leaders, Andrea is taking on Outlook from Silicon Bali, as she calls it. Andrea, are you ready to take us to the top?
Oh, hell yeah.
Okay.
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Chapter 4: What pricing models does Mailbird use and how do they impact revenue?
First off, tell me, how did you, so where are you right now?
I am in Bali, Indonesia. So tiny little tropical island in Southeast Asia.
So you're building the business there, right?
Correct, yeah.
I love that. Okay, so tell us what Mailbird does and how do you guys make money?
All right, so Mailbird, basically, you can think of it as like a Swiss army knife for all your online communication. Essentially, it's a productive information management and communication tool that's packaged in a beautiful, basically kick-ass email client called Mailbird. Okay.
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Chapter 5: What are the conversion rates for Mailbird's pricing strategies?
And we sell it. We have a freemium-based model, so you can get it for free, but it limits you to managing three email accounts from any email provider. However, we also have a subscription-based model, so you can actually get it for $12 a year or pay one time upfront $45. And then...
And you've won. I wanted to have you on because you've won all kinds of awards. PC Worlds, Best Free Stuff of 2013, IT Worlds, Best Windows Email Client of 2015. You must be growing very fast. Give us a sense of the size of the company. How many users do you guys have?
Chapter 6: How does Andrea Loubier manage high customer churn?
So we actually did a pretty big milestone for us. We actually just hit 1 million email accounts that are being managed from Mailbird. And so Mailbird not only is email, but we also provide messaging, calendars, chat, video meetings, and more. So yeah, we're actually over that now, but we just recently hit 1 million accounts that are managed from Mailbird.
And so now we're getting close to being over half a million dollar company since the end of 2015. and it continues to grow. What does that mean?
Does that mean half a million, you're doing about $500,000 each year?
Exactly, yes.
In annual recurring revenue?
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Chapter 7: What funding strategies has Mailbird pursued?
Correct, yeah. Do you think of it, is it really a SaaS business? I mean, is the revenue pretty predictable?
Um, we've been doing a lot of testing over the last few years, but like definitely now that we're, you know, three years and we've definitely kind of found a repeatable, uh, solution that, that basically is a really solid, uh, funnel for the business. So, um, yeah.
Well, I want to, I want to dive into that funnel a second before we do though. So I'm on the pricing page right now. You go from light, which is free pro, which is six bucks for the first year and pro lifetime, which is $22 and 50 cents, which people pay once for. So this is very interesting.
You have three very different kind of things that most other companies, they test one of these, they have a free plan and they have a monthly recurring plan and they have a pay once and get it, you know, forever kind of plan, which one of these is making you the most money.
Chapter 8: How does Andrea justify an $8 million pre-money valuation?
So definitely the pro lifetime one, though, the ones that you pay once a year. We do have people that like to try the software, so they'll go for the pro, which is, again, the twelve dollars per year. Oh, I misread this.
Hold on. Let me just clarify the twenty two dollars and fifty cents when it says pay once. That's pay once for the year.
Correct.
OK, OK, got it.
And you're probably looking at one of our little hacks that we have, too, where as a first time user to the website, you actually get a good deal on the actual software within the first few minutes after visiting. So I want to ask you about that.
So I see I see the little lightning bolt with the welcome flash sale for the next 57 seconds and 28, 27, 26. Oh, my gosh. I'm like panicking. I need to buy this very fast. Yeah. I'm half joking, but not really. Some people will have that reaction. How's this working for you in terms of conversions?
It's been really, really good. Actually, we actually saw a pretty significant increase in conversions to paying customers with that. So a couple of things that we're actually in the process of doing is actually looking at the pricing structure. So is it the fact that there is this like flash sale with a limited time, you know, offer for this deal where you can get the software done?
for half off or um is it a matter of like oh the the software just is more you know attractive at half price so we're doing a lot of testing there but ever since we put this this banner up it's been really really interesting to see how many more people actually convert well let's let's dive into that because listeners might be going i wonder if we should test this on our website so before the banner if 100 people visit your website how many convert into a pay plan
And to a paid plan, we have about 20% that will actually convert to paying.
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