SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
We call 30k cold leads per month and land 5% as customers. Here's the playbook
17 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 Andrey Suyevich to the stage.
Thank you so much. Wow.
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Chapter 2: How did the guest's revenue evolve over time?
So first, let's give a round of applause for Nathan, guys. How many of you have incredible conversations here, outside on a coffee, right in the rooms? Let's give a big round of applause for Nathan. So revenue is now 3.8 million since they updated slide. So last month we did 355 freaking thousand dollars. I love it. I can't believe it.
Every day I'm looking at Stripe, I was like, is this real number? Like 10% better than last month? So just to give you a quick story, how many of you are doing cold calling now? One, two, three people. Holy smoke. Awesome. So how did we got forced... to do cold calling.
Chapter 3: What challenges did the guest face during early-stage cold calling?
Early stage, you know, there's a period of hell going in a startup. And that hell means like you're trying to figure out anything. Year later, I'm almost bankrupt. My creditors are calling me. I'm behind on the bills. My wife is paying my car. Like it's on the bottom line. And I heard a story, I listened to a story from Elon Musk when he got on the edge.
And when they were bankrupt, he is signing a deal with Google to take over Tesla, sign off everything to sell for $5 billion, right? And Larry Page is delaying the deal. He wants him to bankrupt. He is pissed off. Friday comes, Monday, there's no money on the bank account to pay the people, right? And he sends an email out to everybody in the company saying you're laid off and you're hired again.
And your new job is a sales job.
Chapter 4: How did the guest pivot their sales strategy during tough times?
So if you're an engineer, you're a salesman now. If you're a manufacturer on the floor, you're a salesman now. If you're a customer success, you're a salesperson. He immediately got a force of over 1,500 salespeople overnight. Says call your friends, call your parents, call your brothers, call your neighbors, call everybody, sell deposits for Tesla. In a day, they sold 15,000 cars, true story.
They pulled back from the deal, they get funding, and now the Tesla is where it is. Because of that story, I was like, holy smoke, I'm doing the same shit. Right? Literally, Friday night, I send an email to everybody who's like, stop everything you're doing, we gotta start calling. All my engineers that you're developing product, forget about that, we're now developing Salesforce.
Internal system for calling, getting things out. And my revenue was $5,000 a month before that. And I'm telling you that story because it went from almost nowhere. And by the way, that 104,000 in 2015 included a piece of that uptake in the last month.
Chapter 5: What are effective methods for hiring sales superstars?
And then we went, boom, to $140,000 in a month, guys, from 5,000 in like six, seven months. It was like a rollercoaster ride. Every month you're getting, like we were doubling every two months, every three months. And what happens, you see the flat between 2017-19 almost? I get relaxed. My CFO says, Andre, we're paying this call center salespeople a lot of money.
Like how much is your appointment center from Philippines making? It's like $45 an hour. I was like, holy shit. Can we do this in-house hiring full-time, hourly rate? And I was against it. I was like, yeah, maybe we could save some money. And I listened to advice and we flat it. You'll see we almost went down. So commissioned sales process is what works.
Chapter 6: How can businesses generate leads without spending on ads?
Just to prove my point is this is for July before August $314,000. What we did is see the expense on sales commission, $97,000. It's third of my money is going out on a salespeople. Everybody's super happy. But how much is costing you upfront to make a sale? Big ball zero, right? So how much could you grow the business if you pay zero to acquire a client? So this is what I want to teach you guys.
First starts with the hiring. How many of you watched the movie Wolf of the Wall Street? Right? Really cool movie. Do you know that movie is based on a true story? And the guy from the movie, not actor, but in the real story is the guy who's working with me now. Penny stockbroker who was selling deals of million dollars over the phone or the cold call.
Chapter 7: What systems did the guest implement for tracking sales performance?
He was the first one that I hired. But how I do it, I'm going to teach you about job ads, job placement, five minutes interview. And the thing is hire superstars only. You don't want to hire amateurs and start working with them, right? Hire superstars only. In this presentation, you guys can take screenshots. I hope this is on a PDF and you can download it. Where did I hire them? Craigslist.
Indeed blocked me seven times. I created seven different companies and they just wiped me out. We don't accept commission sales jobs there. Craigslist. Look at that simple ad. What I said there is superstars only in a headline.
Chapter 8: How did the guest structure interviews to find the right candidates?
My sales job position says, make $350,000 a year as a salesperson. I calculated what's the maximum amount somebody can make and I put that as a headline. You get people who wants to make 350,000. But in my job ad says, do not apply unless you're a superstar. You can perform it and you can prove it. And you can copy this.
I did this literally a month ago with some of the partners that says, hey, I want to do what you did. Says, don't invent. Don't change my ad. I change it 20 times and it works. Just keep doing same thing. She get 300 people apply for the job same day. So all of that's inside, take a screenshot.
And what I wanna show you guys is the process from A to Z. I know this is very short, 13 minutes on a minute. How we generate 100 demos a day, 355K now in MRR. I don't have digital ads budget. I wasted probably $20,000, got two clients on it. This is the only way we grow. And this is the calendar. Look at this, 300 spots I opened for a calendar, 289 application, people registered for the job.
Do you have time to interview 300 people? Who has the time to interview 300 people? I didn't, right? So what we did was like, okay, let's change the approach. Let's figure it out now. How are we gonna interview 300 people who wants this $300,000 job? We put them all into one orientation. We spoke about three things. So imagine all of you are looking for the job and you can choose any company.
So it says, let's turn the table. Let these guys interview me first. What about if they ask me questions instead of me asking them? But they'll all ask questions based on three categories. What's the company doing? What's the culture? What's the leadership? And I start presentation says, describe your dream job on the chat.
A hundred people start asking, telling like, oh, it's a salary, it's a challenge, it's opportunities, it's growth, it's people, it's leadership. I was like, it's all of that. So I want you guys today to look at this as you're interviewing me. Ask any questions, be direct and transparent. And they were totally confused. Like we never attended interview like this. They were shocked.
So we talked about three things. Company, first we told them, what's the product? What's our mission? Where are we going? We showed them a product. We showed them a culture. We showed them team buildings. We sell them on a company. Then we sell them, hey, company can be awesome. But if your job sucks, who cares?
So we show them exactly what their job look like on a daily basis, how many rejections they'll get, what products they need to use, what equipment, how they're going to talk, who's going to meet, who are the people in the company. They see immediately how the job look like. Real expectation. And then I says, all these two things are crap unless you can make money. Show me the money.
And then we show them a career path. you will get to 350,000. You're not gonna start there. So I don't wanna set expectations. I'm not taking money home first day. And we showed them career progression residual, how it's piling up and what's happening, including churn of the accounts and who is doing the same thing and showing the screenshots of the payroll. It was like, holy smoke, this is real.
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