SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
The Simple PR Template We Used to Bootstrap to $1m in ARR
21 Nov 2022
Chapter 1: What insights were shared from the Founder 500 event?
Hey folks, hope your Q3 and Q4 is off to a good start. We just wrapped up Founder 500 in Austin, Texas. Hundreds of bootstrap founders showed up. It was an amazing time. I loved meeting so many of you.
This interview today is a recording from that session, which you're gonna love because now we have visuals, we have the founder teaching, and I made every single speaker include their revenue graphs and real artifacts in their presentations. Without further ado, let's jump in.
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 these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Please welcome Ben Gabler to the stage.
Thank you. Hope everybody had a good lunch. Big shout out to Nathan and the FounderPath team. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. One of the things that really piqued Nathan's interest about me talking at this conference was my approach to product. And whenever I find myself building a product or a business, I start with a press release.
So back in 2013, I had worked at GoDaddy and one of the first things I did on day one was wrote a press release. And my boss comes up to me and he says, where'd you learn that? What do you mean? Like I just, school of hard knocks. I don't know. It just makes sense. I want to find my aha moments and what we're going to actually build and, and stick to it.
So, you know, when we think about like, what is rocket, you know, we've gone from zero to, you know, over a million in ARR, you know, we cleared 101,000 last month, just an absolutely incredibly Epic month. And one of the things, you know, a lot of the things that I want to talk about is, you know, patience, discipline, and strategy, right?
So when we think about, you know, who are we, you know, we were founded in 2020, um, largest customer, 110,000 ARR, pretty unheard of in the hosting world. It was a new one for me. I've never had a hosting customer spend that much money and I've been doing this for over 20 years. Uh, we're based out of South Florida. We do over 175 terabytes a month.
I think now we're at a and we have staff all over the world with some pretty nice logos that are on the platform. So what I want to talk about is our recipe for success and some of the things that weren't successful. You know, getting off the ground, making a big bet on our brand, and achieving that million in ARR. So how we got off the ground with less than $30,000. Sounds crazy.
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Chapter 2: How did the speaker use press releases to guide product development?
Who is it for? What problems does it solve? How is it different than what WP Engine is doing today? Who are you? Why should they buy your product? You're brand new. Why should I trust you with my business? Agencies have millions of dollars worth of business that they do. Why should they trust me? Why? And what are the benefits? Outline it. What is this going to actually do for you?
And when you have that written down and you rewrite it and rewrite it for a couple of days and you finally get to where you're happy, you come up with a blueprint and you stick to it. The next thing is don't ever use the word perfect. It doesn't exist. This is a SaaS, for the most part, based conference. Software has bugs, right? And I can't stress this enough.
Do you know how many bugs are in this iPhone? A lot. We all get mad at it. And what do we do? We reboot it, and then we buy the next version. Because we like iPhones, right? So you'd be crazy to think software doesn't have bugs. But what I did is I said, cool, how can I build this and not burn a hole in my account and have my wife eating ramen noodles, right?
I took things off the shelf and put them together behind the scenes, knowing my customers would never see it. And I presented a solution in a way that hasn't been done before in this industry. Back to the startup programs and partnerships. There's a secret. I highly recommend it. Zendesk, LiveChat, all the tools that your competitors or other big companies that are using, free.
Six months, 12 months, thousands of dollars in cloud credits. Stop paying for it. Go sign up at Secret. It sucks. Find the coupon, right? Reach out. Contact some of these phoenix naps of the world that are not Google Cloud or Amazon and say, hey, I want to build something. Can I get a startup credit? And they'll give it to you. Cloudflare. All of them. You can do it. That's what we did.
So we had a product. We were I was on brand bucket and I'm like, you know, what do we call this thing? Right. Naming a startup is hard, right? It's like naming your child. It's me and my wife. Lily, this kind of, Oh, okay. Well, we finally like we pick one. Then it turns out the next step that I'll go over is domain names matter. And then you have a great name. Now what?
So naming a startup, you know, it's a screenshot of our Slack conversation. I was on brand bucket. Here's some keywords fast. I know we're going to be at the edge. I know we're doing hosting. Let me see what comes up. went through a bunch of different names and, you know, LaunchShot, WorldSite, EdgeEasy, Cloud City, OnRocket. That makes sense. It's fast. Rocket.
Startups like to do get render, get whatever the name is, or on cloud, whatever the name might be. That's a great idea. Until you put it on a billboard and nobody knows how the hell to find you. And that's when we knew, okay, We got to do something about this. We've already invested in this name. We've got some customers, but how do we make it better?
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Chapter 3: What strategies did Rocket.net use to achieve $1 million in ARR?
So I called Michael at vpn.com. My opinion, the best domain broker I've been doing this for 20 years, worked at GoDaddy. I said, Hey, I want rocket.com. He laughed. I knew why he laughed. It's probably a $10 million domain name. It's owned by an aerospace company. So I said, OK, I get it. They're not returning calls. Well, what about .NET? We can do that.
And it turns out, now that I was able to say, hey, we're a rock at .NET, the benefits are just incredible. Somebody posts a review about us on Facebook. We're automatically a link. And it's nothing to do with SEO, but it's just when somebody says, oh, I love Rocket.net, they're a great company, that's a link. Nobody has to go Google us, they just click.
So there's a lot of benefits to having a very good domain name. Highly recommend taking a look at it. Brand bucket, you can usually get a pretty solid name for 3,000 or less, give or take.
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Again, both plural founder path.com forward slash products forward slash valuations.
But then it's like, okay, cool. We've got this $50,000 domain name and we're doing 13,000 a year in revenue. Are we, are we crazy? Absolutely. We're all crazy in this room. Otherwise we wouldn't be here. Um, But there was nothing. So what we did is we said, you know, people are trying to Google us and there's just nothing out there.
So we started doing some cold outreach to different review websites and influencers and these different places to say, hey, right after review, we'll give you free hosting. Try it out. If you like it, cool. Seven out of 10 became paying customers because they were just blown away by the product. And it truly was not our goal. Like we did not expect to actually get revenue out of that.
But one of our largest customer, actually came from that outreach. So one of the things is, somebody had mentioned in a talk earlier, why would you go spend that on Google? I agree. Google for WordPress hosting is $20 a click. I don't know about you, but I don't have money like that. I've had a pretty good career, but that's pretty crazy.
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Chapter 4: How can startups leverage relationships for growth?
And it's because everything we do in this company is focused on customer success, one way or another. So our OKR, our objective, is success for the customer. Whether it's a support ticket, whether it's a live chat, whether it's optimizing their website, whatever it is, whatever we do at Rocket, it's always for the customer.
And in the very beginning, one of the things I got a lot was, this is an amazing service. How are you going to do it yourself? And it's with these amazing people right here all over the world. And I'm in the trenches with them every single day. You know, we're helping customers and working together, gone such a long way.
And, you know, for me as a founder, we all get hung up on ARR and raising rounds and this, that, and the other. But for me is creating jobs was incredible, like, and happiness. That's what it's about. And I have a thing that I say at Rocket. It's we all win or nobody wins. And the talk I heard this morning that talks about profit sharing, I am implementing that at Rocket when I get home.
It is a phenomenal approach to taking care of your team because at the end of the day, that's the number one thing that matters the most. Because without your team, once you scale, you are nothing. The second big secret, customer-driven product development. I think it was, I don't know who said it. It slips my mind right now, but there's a famous quote.
If Henry Ford would have asked what you wanted as a customer, you would have said faster horses instead of a car. So I agree with that to some extent. People didn't know they needed Cloudflare Enterprise sitting in front of all of their WordPress sites, but they knew they needed fast and secure WordPress sites.
So once I solved that problem, I opened the door up for my customers to talk to us and tell us. our biggest customer had a huge problem with clients going in and breaking their websites and blaming them for it.
So I built an activity log feature and he literally sent me a wall of text last week thanking me because a customer jumped down his throat for losing $50,000 and he proved it was their marketing guy that did it and he was off the hook.
So, you know, when it comes to actually, you know, listening and having a customer driven roadmap to some extent, you obviously have to leave room for innovation, R and D, and your own things internally, but doing it with the right balance, you will set yourself apart from anybody.
I mean, a hosting company going from zero to a million in ARR with no marketing is just unheard of, but this is how we did it. listen to the customers, and we're able to move faster than any of our competitors. Activity logging feature at WP Engine, it'd take six to 12 months for them to even figure out what they want to build.
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