SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Their Upsell Org is Hitting 150% Expansion Quotas on Way to $6m ARR
04 Apr 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're doing more than a million a month in revenue? No, we're not.
A little bit under.
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. Hey folks, my guest today is Daniel Melkerson.
He is building PinMe2, which offers a SaaS platform for managing business information and online conversations of large, multi-location organizations across thousands of online services, apps, and other directories. They do this to boost brand management, drive foot traffic, and increase sales. Daniel, you ready to take us to the top? Yes. All right.
So when we last spoke, actually, we spoke a couple of times, but you communicated your sort of last round of funding was back in December of 2020. I think a 2 million series A, correct? Yeah. And so we're going to bridge back to how you funded the business since then, if you raise any extra capital, if you're planning to.
But first, for people that missed our first episode together, who's paying for the Pin Me To platform?
Our end customers? That's the question?
No, I mean, obviously, Daniel, I know that. But who are the customers? Who's paying for your technology?
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Chapter 2: Who are the customers of the PinMe2 platform?
And how many quota carrying reps do you have today?
Quota carrying, I would say 25.
About 25. And what percent, I guess, of your total team do they make up? What's the total team size today? of the whole company or the sales team? Whole company. 85. 85. So teach us a little bit about sales. A lot of founders are trying to scale their sales teams. You have a large chunk of your team dedicated to sales. Did you make any mistakes in your first couple of sales hires? Yes.
Yes. A lot of them. I think that the biggest mistake or in the beginning, you're trying to do everything. You're the startup. You're the founder. You're the sales guy. And then you hire a few salespeople that can do the same. You can imitate yourself doing everything in sales. You book the meetings. You have the meetings. You close the deals. I would say if...
i'm gonna do this again i'm gonna make sure to to hire sales developers or uh to book the meetings and then uh sales managers to to handle the the caring parts so what's the ratio now how many sdrs per a It's something we should be better at. I would say it's one-to-one at the moment. So we have one SDR for one sales manager. We would like to see one SDR for two sales managers.
But still, it's quite big deals. It's not super small deals. So the SDR is doing quite complicated outreach and very, very, very qualitative outreach. So maybe the ratio is good. I don't know. Maybe your data can tell me something more about that. I don't know.
Well, so how many, like take me into the life of a pin me to account executive, right? In a given week, how many demo calls are they probably doing?
Anything between, I would say 12 and five.
I see. And then in a given month, what quota do you expect them to hit?
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Chapter 3: How does PinMe2 acquire new customers?
And do you still have money left from the Series A round to invest in growth?
Yeah, we have all the money left. So we did pretty much last year bootstrap.
So just to be clear, you have $2 million today. We're recording this on March 30th. You've got about $2 million in the bank. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so what do you plan to use that money on to drive growth?
More, more sales. And we're going to grow and build more. We call it hubs around Europe. We work very remotely, but we have hubs. We have one in Poland for the Eastern Europe and then Portugal for Southern Europe and moving more into UK and Germany as well now. So we're going to keep growing in Europe.
And where's your next hub going to be? Most probably Germany. Germany. Okay. Interesting. Where, I guess, tell me about funding, right? So do you plan to raise any additional capital here in the next, you know, six to 12 months? No. No additional capital needed. Do you regret, I mean, you raised what, how much have you raised to date? Around 5 million. Do you regret raising that money?
No. I mean, you haven't really used it, right? No, two of them we haven't used, but the rest we used before. So it's been, you know, we did a year bootstrap and then another year we used some money to grow faster. And then, I don't know, maybe it's very Swedish to be a little bit careful sometimes. You know, use the money well.
No, I think it's fine. Was the last round really dilutive?
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Chapter 4: What is the sales team structure at PinMe2?
No, no, it wasn't. It was only by external or internal investors and it wasn't much of a dilution for us.
What was the valuation that you raised the $2 million at?
I don't remember. I'm sorry.
Chapter 5: What challenges did the guest face in early sales hiring?
I don't really remember what the valuation is. I don't know if I'm allowed to say it.
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Check it out today at founderpath.com forward slash products. That's plural forward slash valuations. Again, both plural founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations. You told me on the last interview, it was 2 million on a 28 pre. So it was 30 posts. Is that accurate? Yeah, I already told you that. What do you mean you don't remember? How do you not remember that?
Equity is all that matters, and that's what takes equity from you is raising rounds.
Yeah, yeah. But it was back in 2020, and we're focusing on sales and growing the business since then. And we still have the money, so we're happy. Fair, fair, fair.
Yeah, yeah. So you basically did that round, and you only had to sell about 6% of the business. So you still own... I mean, you have three co-founders too, right? Yeah, yeah. So what altogether, how much equity do you guys plus employees, like internal people still own? Around 50. 50. Okay. That's actually less than I thought.
So investors own a pretty big, you must've had very dilutive early rounds of financing then.
Yes. We had one round earlier that was a little bit too dilutive.
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