SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Sole founder hits $1.1m run rate, profitable selling ESG data to 30 fund managers
07 Jan 2023
Chapter 1: What is SaaS Open and why is it significant?
Guys, SaaS Open is our next big event in New York City. March 16th and 17th, we'll have a thousand SaaS leaders all sharing how they built their companies. Our keynotes are Henry Shuck, Marie Martins from Tally.sao, Serby from Symbol, Christopher of DocHub, who had a big exit.
Again, hundreds of speakers, a thousand plus attendees, and we've got folks bringing their entire executive teams because we have stages for founders, heads of product, head of finance and BD, CMOs and CROs, and then people in HR stage. It's going to be special. Prices are increasing every week, so you don't want to wait.
Go to sasopen.com right now to see what the ticket price is and lock in your spot today. Again, that's sasopen.com, March 16th and 17th in New York City. Tickets are almost sold out. 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.
Guys, SustainablePlatform.com, he's selling his data to 30 fund managers that care about ESG data. He takes this out of 22,000 company reports like Tesla sells it to him for $4,000 a month on average, doing $95,000 a month today up from $70,000 a year ago, launched in 2017 when he did just $2,500 in total revenue. He's basically bootstrapped, raised $500K.
Last chunk of that was $100K out of $8 million post-money valuation. profitable, which is great, with a team of six as he looks to scale, hoping to double revenues from $1 million to $2 million in terms of AR this year. Hey, folks, my guest today is Mark Andrich.
He's the founder of Sustainable Platform, a SaaS data provider dedicated to providing the most important sustainability data and risk metrics to help fund managers invest sustainably. Mark has a PhD in engineering and previously worked as an analyst and trader at EWE World Fund in New York. Mark, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, let's go, Nathan.
Thanks. Is there big money in ESG data?
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Chapter 2: Who is Mark Andrich and what is Sustainable Platform?
I see.
Give us a taste of that. What are two metrics fund managers really care about when it comes to ESG?
Say fossil fuel exposure. So how much a company's spending or selling with fossil fuels. Another one is... say SDG contribution, their sustainable development goal contribution, because they want to see what type of sustainability impact they're making through the UN SDG lens. I see. All right. Yeah.
So how do you make money, right? So what are fund managers paying on average for this data on an annual basis?
Well, on average, they're paying about 4K a month.
Okay. Yeah. And what do they get for that? Is it number of data endpoints? Is it number of companies you're covering? Is it all 22,000 companies?
Yeah. So they get access to all 22,000 companies. They get access to risk metrics. They get access to our knowledge base. They get access to our SDG contribution. So our sustainability contribution charts that they can use in their reports. And they can also show their institutional investors or
know they're actually getting their own sustainability assessment done independently because what a lot of esg fund managers or people do is they'll say oh look we're sustainable or we we've got these esg credentials we're kind of like an independent uh i guess um umpire on are they or or are they not and we give them that data so they can test it themselves before they go to market with it and mark how many fund managers or how many customers do you have today so we've got about 30
30 fund managers directly. Indirectly, because we've got some partnerships, there's a few hundred.
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Chapter 3: How does Sustainable Platform provide ESG data to fund managers?
Um, Really, I tried to invest sustainably myself with the ESG data that was available and with what companies were reporting, and it was just impossible. So I actually built or helped, I got some software developers to build it, but I built the models and the methodology by trying to invest sustainably myself in a way that also enhanced performance.
How many full-time folks are on the team today?
Full-time, there's six.
Six of you guys. Okay. And are you the sole founder?
I'm the sole founder, yeah.
And bootstrapped or you've raised a little bit?
We raised a little bit. We bootstrapped initially, but we've raised $500,000 over the past three to four years from friends, family, and employees have put in a little bit as well.
When was the last round?
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What specific data endpoints does Sustainable Platform offer?
Where can they go to skip that?
Sustainableplatform.com.
All right. There you go, guys. If you're fund managers listening in, you want to understand ESG reports, sustainableplatform.com. Code is latka2023. Very cool. Mark, on that note, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.
The Prize by Daniel Yogan.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
No, not really.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the platform?
Well, I don't know if it's building it, but LinkedIn for finding customers.
That's fair. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
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