SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
"Vested.io HR Tech Company Placed 100 Candidates, Doing $400k/yr "
28 Jul 2020
Chapter 1: What is Vested Technology and how does it operate?
I want to have five customers. They don't necessarily have to be paid. I would rather have a partner, a flagship account that someone's working with us in that relationship. I think where I want to get to, if you want numbers in five years, I want a million salespeople giving us $25 a month, which is $250 million a month.
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And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting. Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public. We got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years. Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise.
Or Looker CEO Frank Behan before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion.
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My guest today is Ankesh Kumar. He was born in India, educated in London, and now based in Silicon Valley, building a company called Let's Chat, which is trying to make chat pervasive in sales. He grew AT Systems from zero to 22 million bucks in four years and sold to TMP and Monster. He grew them Personic to zero to 25 million bucks in four years, raised 50 million and sold to Kronos.
He sold patents to Google for sharing as a page ranking mechanism prior to Facebook's like button. So he is in the mix. Ankesh, you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. All right. So what is Let's Chat and what's your revenue model? Are you pure SaaS?
Yes, we are pure SaaS. Let's Chat is basically a messaging platform and it's specifically based for business users. And if you want to take a subset of that salespeople, I think the problem that we find is chat is not very pervasively used within salespeople and their prospects.
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Chapter 2: What is the revenue model for Let's Chat?
You're saying you're just giving them the experience real time.
Exactly.
Interesting. OK, now what's your open rate on the 30 emails you send out?
We're up to a 50 percent.
Five zero percent. And what's your what's your percent of open to engage with your chat tool? Ten percent. OK, so is that good or bad?
If you take the industry average, it's really good. The actual engagement from what we're hearing is 1% to 2%. So if you've got organizations that are B2B, SaaS companies are sending them out, they might get somewhere between a 5% to 10% open rate and a 1% to 2% engagement.
Engagement in email for those folks would be defined as a reply? Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.
Or if there's a link or something like go to the website. So they track all that as well. So it could be a reply. It could also be an active link.
OK. Now, are you bootstrapping this company or have you raised?
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Chapter 3: How does Let's Chat differentiate from Intercom and Drift?
I am fully bootstrapping it. OK, that's good. Now, help me understand what burn looks like today. Pre-launch.
Five thousand dollars a month.
OK, so fair. I mean, this is great. This is nimble. What's the team? How many people? Two people, me and my developer. Yes, correct.
I don't pay myself, unfortunately.
That's good. So, I mean, let me ask you a question. In your bio, you talked about these exits. I mean, it sounds like you've made many millions of dollars. Why not put in more of your own capital, you know, get four engineers on this and move faster?
You know, one of the things I've learned is I think in Silicon Valley, as in everywhere, but we sort of come to drink our own Kool-Aid. I think if I was looking at this like a helicopter vision down as an investor, I'd say, you know, questions that you're asking, what is your actual customer acquisition cost? You know, what is the lifetime value, you know, going through the competition?
I think we need to just feel that out at a very low burn rate. With 5K burn rate month, you know, with two or three customers with cash flow positive, then use the positive cash. Then I'll have those answers. So the investor meetings go a lot quicker when you have those answers.
Yep. Yep. Okay. What other channels are you using? Is it just those outbound emails per day, 30 per day, or are there any other channels you're testing?
Yeah, well, we're looking for distribution partnerships. So as I mentioned, we're integrating with outreach.io and SalesLoft. And we also, there's potential, I think, we haven't sort of actually been, but like email signature companies like Sigstar. Y-Stamp. Y-Stamp, correct. Yeah, have a chat link, you know.
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Chapter 4: What strategies are being used to build a customer base pre-launch?
Audacious goals. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book?
Well, I like emotional fortitude books like Joyful Wisdom, Power of Now.
Yep. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Well, I really enjoyed meeting, I met with Tim West again from Pandora and the tenacity. And he just went through the struggle with Pandora. It was really impressive. And I mentioned MailChimp. I think, you know, Ben Chesnutt being able to take that company. That's sort of the aspirations that I would have.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your company?
Well, we use Asana, you know, Google Hangouts and Zoom, but I think my favorite one would probably be Loom. I love the fact to be able to take videos and then we share that, you know, like if there's a bug or, you know, a quick demo. So I think Loom's really good.
Number four, how many hours of sleep are you getting every night? Six to eight. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?
Married, two daughters, one at NYU, one going to UC Davis Saturday.
East coast and a west coast. You have a good diversity there, right?
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Chapter 5: What metrics are being tracked to measure success?
So not a JavaScript embed on a website, but actually an email send. Currently no customers, but launching pricing hopefully here soon, aiming to have five customers by the end of the year. They're burning about $5,000 per month here as they ramp up the development, the code base, all that jazz, and onboard their first users. Two people so far on the team as they look to scale.
Ankish, thank you for taking us to the top.
I appreciate it. Cheers, Nathan.